I guess that all of you gave a lot of attention this week to the free fall of the Google stock, after a report showed a big decline in the number of people clicking on their text ads.
There were a lot of speculation running around about if this is a sign of recession or does the cute little text ads simply lost their magic to the public.
But today, Duncan Riely from Techcrunch came with a very interesting (and quite frankly amazing) twist on the story.
Last November Google has made a small change to their text ads. Instead of counting every click on the surface of the ad, the started to count just clicks on the text itself. The idea was of course to stop counting clicks the users have done by mistake.
Duncan bring testimonies from Adsense users that say that since that change their CTR plumbed into the toilet. Markus Friend, the guy behind the successful dating site plenty of fish claims a drop of %60 in CTR rate!
All I can say is - WOW!
Don’t get me wrong, Google done just the right thing when they made this change. The digital advertising industry should be much more transparent and affective in order to continue getting the advertisers to pour their money in.
But I do think this tells a very grim story about our little industry…
Just think about it - Just last week we all saw a new report claiming that the rate of click fraud on near search results ads is %28.3. That’s almost one of every 3 clicks that the advertiser pays on for nothing.
Now add to that the number of clicks that we were counting by mistake and there is not too much left.
Does advertisers really understand the ROI they get from their digital campaigns?
I guess this is a question that we will all need to answer in the next year. If more stories like that will come out, advertisers will start to lose trust on today ways of advertising.
Maybe it is really about time to go beyond of the click model of measuring value of a customer (anyone said engagement? :)) or maybe we simply need to find a better way to make people engage with the brands campaigns.
About a hour ago one of the Internet backbones suffered a hit and taken with it a lot of the data centers in the US. This also affected our data center in the US and some regions of the world lost access to our platform for about half a hour. It seems that the network is now running again at full speed, and our servers can be accesses from any place around the world.
I wanted to personally apologize to customers who suffered from this. We put a lot of effort in choosing some of the best data centers in the world to host our servers in order to provide the best service we can. We will explore the cause of today hit and will work hard to find better solutions that will ensure our 100% availability to all of you around the world.
Please feel free to contact me directly at any time with any questions, suggestions or complaints through this blog or at shahar at nuconomy dot com.
Computerworld published yesterday a comprehensive article about the discussion in the analytics community around the measurement of engagement. If you read this blog on regular basis you already know what I think and if this is your first time here, you can read my quotes in the article itself.
I won’t get here to the full discussion, but I did wanted to talk about another metric that is mentioned in the article - attention.
During 2007 Nielsen and Comscore came up with their own engagement metric. For them engagement is the measurement of the time users spends on a web site or a page. This is not engagement. This is attention. What’s the difference? There is a thin line there but I believe that attention is passive evolvement while engagement is active interactions (such as comment, posts, purchases, sharing, etc). But put definitions aside, I also think that measuring time spent on a page, although important, can also be on of the more misleading metrics out there. I’ll give you an example: A few weeks ago I had to change the date of one of my flights with Delta. I went to Delta.com and it took me more than three minutes of staring on the page before I figured out how to change my flight. If all we measured was the amount of time I spent on the page, we will probably conclude that this is a very engaging page/site with a great user experience. In reality it was exactly the opposite. It was one of the worse user interface possible, a confusing one that just made me don’t really like the Delta brand.
Don’t get me wrong, it is still important to measure the attention metric (and we also do that at NuConomy), but you just need to be careful when you get to conclusions based on that metric alone.
For example, a video site will be able to enhance the results linking to its sites by adding a preview thumbnail of the video. LinkedIn could use this to display the photo or short summery of the person in the search results.
The big hope here for Yahoo is to give web sites an incentives to send users to the Yahoo Search experience instead to Google.
I think this is a great idea from Yahoo that can give them attention and an edge in the search market. But if they really want to be innovative and take Google down, they need to find a way to let developers to actually enhance their search algorithms. In theory an open source search engine could enjoy the minds of thousands of developers around the world. The big problem of course is how to deal with spammers and SEO experts if you open up your algorithm to the public.
Microsoft announced today an important new tool that will help advertisers to measure an engagement metric for their online ads. This is a great step forward for the industry when a giant like Microsoft (that owns aQuantive and Atlas) admits that the old way of measuring impressions and clicks is just not good enough.
The new "Engagement Mapping" tool will allow you to measure the different interactions consumers had with an ad as a way to understand its effect on the buying decision. Basically it will take into account how may times an ad was shown across sites, and hopefully also the different interaction the users had with it, when deciding on whether it contributed to the final sale.
This is a great step forward, but you probably would not be surprised if I say MS didn’t went all the way with that. What they are missing is also the ability to tie the different interactions, across sessions, the users had inside the advertiser site to the final decision process about the ad ROI. Even going further, the goal of an advertisers is not always a one time sale. You actually want to measure the user interaction with your brand across time. For example: for Amazon "Acquiring" a user that will buy one item is not as valuable as a user that will register to Amazon prime and buy at least two items every week on the course of a few months. Also, some advertisers goal is not a sale on their online shop. A social network want to get users that will not just register to the site, but will also use it as much as possible, will have many friends in their list and upload as many photos as possible.
Still, this is a welcome step forward for the Analytics and advertising industries, and it will probably start to move other companies in the same way.
People tend to say that in the web business traffic is the king. I always add, that if traffic is the king, so ROI is god. People sometime looks at advertising as a way to drive millions of users to your web site. True, brand awareness is very important, but I will argue that in today competitive market, what you actually want is not just a lot of traffic but the right traffic.
I’ll give you an example from our life as a company. In the recent week we got great press coverage. From famous tech blogs such as Techcrunch and Read/Write web to the mainstream news sites like cnn, forbes and others. We got huge amount of traffic and more than 4000 beta requests in less than two days. We use our own platform, NuConomy Studio, to track the different activities on our site. One of my favorites reports in the system is the one that shows you not just how much traffic you got from any referrer to your site, but which referrer contributes the most value to you. In our case, we actually saw that the users that comes from Techcrunch were almost 5 times more value to us than the users that got to our site from the traditional media sites (which is fascinating fact when you consider that most people who register to our beta are in CXX or VP position in their companies).
Of course the big question is how do you define value? In our case it was the combination of number of registration, request for information and actual acceptance into our beta program. But every business has a very different kind of definition for value. If you are a blogging platform the most valuable users are probably the ones that wrote the posts that generated the highest number of views, comments, rating, shared and clicks on ads. If you are an e-commerce site, value is probably the users that bought the most items, spend the most money, reviewed the most products, etc…
If you an advertiser, would you rather get (and pay) a million users click on your ad, or just two hundred thousands - but the right two hundred thousands? If you are bidding for keywords on Google ads do you want to buy the ones that generated the most clicks or the ones that brought you the most valuable users?
I personally believe that the measurement of mare traffic is something that will slowly die. Advertisers will not be satisfied with the numbers of how much hits and uniques you have. They will want to know exactly what kind of audience are engaged in your site. They will want to know exactly what kind of ROI to expect when advertising in your site.
Since declaring on another wave of beta applications, we were overwhelmed with the demand and the number of requests to our beta program. I wanted to take the chance and personally thank everyone who took the time to register at our site. We appreciate your will to test our platform. We are working hard on going through all the requests and get back to each of you as soon as possible. I also wanted to thank all the people who sent us such kind words about our vision and our ideas behind the product. It’s really important for us to hear what you think. If you don’t agree with our roadmap and where we see the industry is going to, please also talk to us. We would love to hear your thoughts and learn from that.
Again I wanted to apologize for the fact that it takes us more time to get back to you and hope you will bare with us.
"Working hard to keep up with all the beta requests"
We just announced that our A round with the WPP group. WPP is one of the two largest advertising groups in the world. All of us at NuConomy are happy to welcome our new partner.
A lot of people asked me in the last day why WPP and I thought I will share some our thoughts behind the deal. At the DLD conference last month Mr Burda said that we are all work in the economy of attention. We really believe in that. Advertisers are constantly fighting on the attention of the consumers. Publishers are fighting on bringing users to their web site instead of their competitors. In this economy the power the winners will be the organizations that will not just have the most accurate information about their users but the ones that will know how to translate this information into better user experience in the most efficient way. This is our vision in NuConomy and we were happy to see that WPP shares our vision. Like oil was the fuel behind the factories, web analytics is the fuel that powers this digital economy. We just started to scratch the surface of the potential of using insights from web analytics to create new experiences. Web advertising still a long way to go to. We expect to see a lot of innovation in both those places and NuConomy will take a major role there. We know that the combination of our platform with the offerings of many of WPP companies, will give customers a much more full and innovative solution.
If you have any questions I invite you to contact me here at the comments or directly at shahar at nuconomy dot com.
I guess that all of you gave a lot of attention this week to the free fall of the Google stock, after a report showed a big decline in the number of people clicking on their text ads.
Computerworld published yesterday a 
Well… not exactly, but they do going to 
Microsoft 
