Kim Kardashian in Wardrobe Malfunction! And lots of other sensational things that will make you read this blog.

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