Mar 30 2008
Traffic Clicks and Conversion
The question of a reliable way to authenticate traffic, capture, clicks, and conversion may be answered in a variety of ways. To simplify the complexity of pattern recognition and proprietary software filters the average webmaster and contextual advertiser has access to one of the most reliable tools for authentication called a double opt in list.
Internet marketers are right when they drill in the fact that “the money is in the list”. However, the value of a list is determined by what compelled the visitor to sign up and how the list is managed. A list of free info seekers is a lot different from a list of product buyers. So let’s take a closer look at the process.
Working back from conversion, the choice to act is made by a visitor and based on the quality of the advertiser’s sales page. The idea then is to pay the lowest price for the best chance of conversion. Contextual advertising emerged as a popular solution that soon overcame its competitors like banner ads in both quantity and quality of advertising and clicks.
Visitors continue to arrive from qualified and unqualified sources. Contextual advertising continues to rely on publishers to provide some kind of qualification for filtering visitors. Ad placement and traffic source is usually associated with content and keyword relevance. The scenario in theory is workable but in practice now includes so called click fraud, hit bots, and other forms of technical and human acts that skew the natural filter process with clicks not likely to convert.
Popular thought now suggests that publishers be more discrete and assertive in filtering traffic otherwise they get penalties like lower paying ads or suspension of service without appropriate means for correction. Traffic filtering is further complicated by demand for original and not duplicated keyword relevant content.
The bar for contextual advertising continues to rise in an effort to automatically filter both traffic and publisher out of the advertising loop using technology. While this may serve advertisers and publishers with deep pockets in the short run, millions of good leads continue to pass through less popular or less filtered sites. The technical solution for traffic and click filters is starting to look like Google et al is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In the case for technology filters, the human character of free choice is reduced to a binary machine interface based on the probability of conversion. The more technology is used to filter unwanted patterns constructed by machines and humans, or some other combination of less discriminate sources of traffic, disregard for organic ways to allow humans to stumble upon and choose for themselves in effect digitizes human behavior to propagate a machine culture.
Advertisers benefit when the expense of traffic and capture is qualified before click through to a sales page. The use of latent semantic analysis and pattern recognition to lower payouts and increase the operating costs of publishers indicates a trend likely to devalue contextual advertising in way similar to what happened to banner advertising.
In the end, the smaller less technical approach of list building, list use, and visitor differentiation will emerge as the premium filter for traffic, clicks and conversion data collected by humans, for humans, using the minimum technology for maximum competitive advantage. Next week I’ll be discussing some aspects of list building, list use, and data differentiation.
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