True Cause of CTR Rate Decline?

From: Johnny Ho <johnny_at_hyper-galaxy.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:55:48 -0500 (CDT)

Hey all,

I was just thinking about the decrease in ctr rate over the
pass few years. I think the true cause of the decrease in
ctr rate is partly due to the increase in content. Yeah, I
know it sounds bizzare thus I put the word partially, which
makes my post a littler "truer" Why increase in content?
Well, the normal measure of ctr has always been referred to
PAGEVIEWS to clicks. Of course, if you have a site full of
content, a single surfer with a unique ip address will look
at several pages, for instance 10. Thus, a thousand
impressions equates to only 100 actual surfers.

If you get a .5% CTR, then

1000 impressions with .5% ctr = 5 clicks
1 surfer = 10 impressions
100 surfers = 1000 impressions
5 clicks over 100 surfers = 5% ctr.

( Excuse the simple calculations, you all SHOULD know that
:-) In other words, your actual ctr rate is not really a
good determination of anything. I know, of course it
determines the real design smartness of the banner, the
creativity, the freshness of the banner and the position of
the banner as well as the targetting. There might be some
other factors that affects the ctr which I have not
mentioned.

So, what's my point? Well, I think measurements of ctr is
not that accurate anymore. The more content a site has, the
lower its ctr. This is not necessarily true of course, so
please don't reply with angry responses at me ;) My
suggestion to webmasters is that show ad banners only once
to unique ips, unless the advertiser request otherwise. You
could instead ask for an increase in payment, which would
bring the ad-community up once again. Unless repetitive
branding is wanted, some advertisers might only want one
banner impression per unique browser. It'll be quite hard to
figure this out because of all the proxy as well as other
factors.

I'd like to hear other's responses.

Johnny Ho
--
Hyper-Galaxy - The Ultimate Software Search Engine
http://www.hyper-galaxy.com - Add Your Site!


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Received on Wed Apr 14 1999 - 13:00:03 CDT