NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Mechanical Clicks and Impressions
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Mechanical Clicks and Impressions
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff_at_tenagra.com)
Wed, 28 May 1997 18:40:23 -0600
Jim Waltz <jwaltz_at_dmn.com> writes:
>Has anyone seen or heard of a study on the effects of Search Engine
>Indexing/Robots/Offline browsers on banner click rates? Also, 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? Does a 3% rate really mean 1.5%, or even less?
Laura K. Mitrovich <LMitrovich_at_hhcc.com> writes:
>At the end of this panel discussion, I, of course, raised my hand and asked
>the following question. "Does anyone on the panel have any estimates of
>what percentage of a given online campaign's impressions are false? And
>how do you justify pricing on a CPM basis when it can safely be assumed
>that a significant percentage of impressions are false?" We all know about
>caching, browsing with graphics turned off, spiders, bots. I've seen
>estimates that anywhere from 5% to 40% of online impressions are false -
>they don't occur in front of active, seeing eyeballs.
These two posts examine both the separate issues of false impressions and
false click-throughs. These are topics we have looked at with some detail
to try to gauge the effects.
The bottom line is that we found that, except for very rare cases of an
errant robot or deliberate sabotage, false impressions are presently a
minor effect in the count of the total number of real impressions you will
get billed for. The contrary effect, namely, impressions you are receiving
but not getting billed for because of AOL caching and the like, is much
larger. If you are an ad buyer on an impression basis, the net effect is
very much in your favor. Don't lose any sleep over it.
But this is not true with click-throughs. The same personal downloader
that causes 8 false banner loads out of 1000 impressions (0.8%) may also
cause 8 false click-throughs out of the 20 click-throughs or so you might
expect based on 1000 impressions at a 2% click rate. This is 40%, and
quite significant. Just one more reason why it seems absolutely absurd to
pay for or sell online advertising based on click-through rate.
There are some things that can be done to reduce these effects. If your
banner ad graphic and the associated link or redirect is housed on a
different host than the host of your main site, then many personal
downloaders will not load the banner or explore the link. For example, an
automatic downloader configured to download the site www.xyz.com might not
download graphics served from ads.xyz.com.
See also my previous post that touched on this subject:
Counting impressions and click-throughs
http://www.o-a.com/archive/1997/February/0070.html
And the article in InteractiveWeek:
Agents: Artificial Inflation Of The Web Kind
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/print/970317/inwk0027.html
Best,
Cliff Kurtzman
President and CEO
The Tenagra Corporation
http://www.tenagra.com/
281/480-6300
