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.