Back in the early days of online advertising, pop-up ads
played a dominant and disruptive role. Their sole purpose was to drive
click-traffic to websites, and albeit irritating, they were initially a very
effective format for generating clicks!
Now almost 15 years later, many sites still base their webpage
success solely on traffic levels, and there are still plenty of ads which cater
to this type of KPI. In fact, we’ve seen a huge number of them pop up in recent
times on across the web and social media, with headlines and written copy
tactically designed to elicit clicks – even at the cost of credibility.
Do any of the below look familiar?
Known as ‘clickbait’, these types of ads are the new
pop-up – their eye-catching headlines serve simply to get people to click
through, without any regard for whether or not there is anything actually worth
seeing at the destination site. Of course, this also means that clickbaiting is
now starting to become reviled just as much as the pop-up ever was…
In the world of advertising, there is always an ongoing
clamp-down on bad ads. Aside from the fact that audiences have been bombarded
with such ads now to the point that they are starting to avoid them
instinctually… these types of ads actually don’t achieve very much. CTR has
very much become an outmoded metric.
This is the reason that so many prominent platforms on
the web are moving away from using click-through as a measurement of success.
The best example of this is Google’s quality score
metrics; whereas this used to be based largely on CTR, ad relevance has become
a major factor in search page rankings. Facebook has recently taken a similar
route too, introducing an Ad Relevance Score which serves to influence
advertising prices.
The higher the relevance of an ad, the cheaper it is to
serve; conversely, the less relevant an ad is to its target audience, the more
it will cost to deliver it.
Given how many advertising pounds and dollars are spent
through search and social already, the actions of these two giants alone spells
serious trouble for clickbait-type ads; and of course, where Facebook and
Google lead, other brands tend to follow.
In the face of such changes, our advice to advertisers
remains the same as ever – focus on your content and relevant proposition! The
better your content, the more people will interact and engage, and the further
your advertising will travel – all whilst helping to make sure that you’ve got
the right type of audience in the first place.
#PurePoint
