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By Andrew Goodman, 7/25/2005
(Page 2 of 4)
God Speaks
In 21 Grams, Sean Penn made for a fairly unconvincing
math professor, except for the part about sleeping with his
students. But his rambling to a new girlfriend about numbers
and fractals, in the style of a once-precocious, now randy
and tenured, slacker, did get the point across: there are
powerful meanings in some numbers, and we’d be wise
not to ignore them. My third-year stats professor, Joe F.,
stressed that the most simply-expressed correlations often
explained the most about the human behavior they were trying
to represent… or to quote Joe directly: “God
speaks to you in Crosstabs.”
So what is it about clickthrough rates on online advertising?
Google built AdWords around rewarding advertisers for achieving
high CTR’s. Is it just because Google makes more money
when people click on the ads? No, it’s not just that.
Simply put, clickthrough rates measure user response. If
a link can be interpreted as “hey, go look at this,
it’s useful and relevant,” as the famous PageRank
algorithm more or less postulates, isn’t it fair enough
to assume that when someone actually clicks on a link when
given a choice between dozens of links, that means, “hey,
I’m interested, and I want to go look at this”?
Now juxtapose this dynamic – and the ability of an
advertiser to gauge that sentiment broken down by keyword,
and as expressed in relation to differently-worded ads –
with the whole history of advertising and marketing, and we
can begin to appreciate fully the respectful approach to targeting
represented by search advertising. People don’t click
on links for the novelty of it, except at first. We know that
clickthrough rates on run-of-site, irrelevant ads tend to
drop to 0.1% or worse fairly quickly. The fact that someone
is willing to not only look at your link but click on it,
as opposed to being inherently blind to it, ignoring it, etc.,
is a wonderful gift not to be taken lightly.
To be sure, not all clicks are trustworthy measures of interest.
Some people, apparently, click indiscriminately. There are
also clicks of the suspicious variety (competitors committing
blatant click fraud, for example), or just weird behavior,
like someone trying to change windows by hitting what appears
to be a blank spot on a page and instead triggering an unwanted
hyperlink.
Bouts of poor CTR performance can also be artificial, created
by impression spam (competitors deliberately generating a
lot of search queries to drive down your CTR’s, or bots
that send automated queries to Google) or spikes in interest
in certain phrases based on pop culture (such as the word
“implant” being searched by fans of the thriller
The
Manchurian Candidate, which could lower the CTR’s
of advertisers trying to target customers seeking dental or
breast implants using broad-matched terms).
An advanced
course in AdWords campaign testing would also tell you
that you’d better be careful of certain powerful triggers
that cause people to be just a bit too responsive to your
ad. Dynamic keyword insertion, an advanced ad copywriting
tactic, will sometimes jack your CTR’s sky high, and
hurt your return on investment by bringing you lots of overexcited
(non-buying) clicks. Matching your ad title with the user’s
query is cool, but if they typed in “find
artichokes,” they might click on your ad if the
title reads Find Artichokes
even if the body copy reads “Hard-to-find vintage GM
parts. Shocks, bumpers, and more.”
But the main thing going on out there – constantly,
on a staggering scale – is that real users, be it a
fly fisherman wanting to order a new lure or a CEO wanting
to hire a new accounting firm, are clicking on what is interesting
or relevant to them, and not clicking on what they decide
doesn’t interest them. Listen to that response!
Why is it that so many of us don’t take no for an answer?
Clickthrough rates tell you more about your marketplace than
you might think. When they’re high, it truly is a gift.
I have no problem with CTR’s in the 0.5-2% range. On
broad, popular keywords, unless you’re in the top couple
spots, that’s what you’re often going to get.
But I marvel at CTR’s above 8%. Sometimes you see the
odd 15- or 20-percenter. In those cases, what you’re
most often witnessing is the fact that you’ve communicated
your offer so well to people typing such a specific keyphrase
that they are confident that they’ll find what they
need if they come to your site. (Tip: sometimes, what works
best is not a sales pitch, but an offer to help them do further
research.) In such cases, your ad might be significantly more
relevant to that user than any of the organic results on the
left-hand side of the page.
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