Re: ONLINE-ADS>> mechanical clicks

Brad Aronson (brad_at_i-frontier.com)
Wed, 4 Jun 1997 01:46:28 -0500

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>What about inadvertant clicks that are aborted before a site is fully
>>loaded? My thoughts are that these factors tend to inflate overall >click
>rates, but by how much?

We've been working with the sites on which we advertise to try to figure
this out.

According to one of the search engines on which we place advertising, there
is an average of a 5-7% difference in their reported click-throughs Vs. the
users who actually make it to their advertisers' sites. According to one of
the top producers of web site tracking software, there is up to a 10%
difference. (Sorry, but the search engine and tracking company asked that I
not disclose their names.) We check our clients' log files, and sometimes
see differences as high as 30-40%.

Two possible explanations:

1) Aborted clicks: inadvertent clicks as well as clicks from users who want
to go to the advertiser's site, but abort because of download delays caused
by traffic on the media site, their ISP or our the advertiser's site.

2) How sites are measuring "click-through." One of the top 25 web sites (in
terms of traffic) recently changed their reporting. There was one month for
which we were accidentally sent reports from both systems. The
click-through differed *considerably* depending upon which report we used.

This is why every advertiser needs their own methods for measuring response
to an ad and a campaign's success.

Brad

Bradley Aronson
i-frontier -- (215) 568-4179
http://i-frontier.com

Internet advertising and marketing

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