7 ms·

It's unfortunate that the person who wrote this article didn't consult with someone more informed about the online advertising world. As someone who has been i

by cbsmith 14y ago

It's unfortunate that the person who wrote this article didn't consult with someone more informed about the online advertising world. As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, I'm going to try to summarize the various ways that this article is getting it wrong. * Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks. * Where clicks do matter, major ad platforms including Yahoo throw away a LOT of clicks as fraud, and accidental clicks tend to disproportionately get thrown out along with them. * In general, random clicks are considered a real PITA for major ad networks, as they confuse the heck out of ad optimization. While small players do tend to soak up that revenue, the big players really, really hate the phenomenon because it makes them far less efficient. * It turns out what most impacts ad effectiveness online is whether people actually see the ad. An incredibly number of ads are just never seen by the audience. As a consequence, a good publisher will try to find locations for their ads that are highly visible. Highly visible and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, highly correlated. * Most advertisers who are paying per click are very performance driven. They look at ROI, which means they look at conversion rates. When you charge an accidental click, it's almost certainly not going to convert, so in the end you look worse and they pay less for your clicks. * One unfortunate bit of truth: advertisers do pay too much attention to clicks and CTR (click through rate). Even advertisers doing brand awareness campaigns, which are not looking for immediate response from their audience, tend to look at CTR. * Yahoo has actually tried hard to establish other metrics that they should look at, like "Bounce Rate", which attempts to factor in whether visitors immediately exit after clicking. They use those metrics internally for optimizing ad performance, so accidental clicks are likely to discourage showing an ad more than encourage it.

mattj 14y ago
I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: http://www.hilarymason.com/about/ http://www.hilarymason.com/about/
- levesque 14y ago
  She's a data geek. How does that make her an expert about advertising?
  - Evbn 14y ago
    She also had a blog and a Google Plus page. What more credentials does one need?
  - bootload 14y ago
    "... She's a data geek ..." 'She' has a name, Hilary Mason or @hmason.
    - cbsmith 14y ago
      Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive... because, you know, being a woman isn't some kind of insult. If it had read, "He's a data geek..." it would have only have been offensive because they got the gender wrong.
      - bootload 14y ago
        "... Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive. ..." I understand the line of reasoning, however the tone of the comments about the article are negative and not up to standard. [1] It is not a question of gender but how to discuss, acknowledge & discuss an authors work in a civil manner. [1] cf https://twitter.com/hmason/status/248262821924720640 https://twitter.com/hmason/status/248262821924720640
        cbsmith 14y ago
        I agree the tone of many of the comments are not up to standard. I think both mine, and and the one you chose to go after were. Neither of us questioned her professional skills, talents, intelligence, awesomeness etc., just her domain expertise (in a domain which I'd think no one would expect expertise), which seems eminently reasonable given that the only indicators were a lack of said expertise. It seems even more reasonable because she acknowledged that she does not. You are criticizing the people who are behaving in a civil manner for the behaviour of those behaving uncivilly. Try to focus on the jerks, there's an off chance they might get it.
wicknicks 14y ago
I'm not sure if I understand your criticism. The article seemed to be commenting about the placement of ads (which she believes to be optimized by analytics), not about the economics of ads or how they are processed behind-the-scenes. I come from a data understanding background, and the cool thing I liked about this article was the following statement: "...experiences like this are great reminders that data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions..." This might be very basic knowledge for everyone, but many researchers in machine learning & data mining community do not think like this. They believe that data tells the entire story.
- napierzaza 14y ago
  The OP's argument is that they think Yahoo thinks it's a good placement because they must get a lot of clicks from that ad, because her grandpa clicked that ad a lot by accident. The title being that "yahoo you're optimizing the wrong thing" meaning that they MUST be optimizing the ad placement based on the mis-clicks. cbsmith's argument is that sort of click is actually not desired and not optimized for. That nobody wants those clicks and they are generally easy to identify via different metrics (see his detailed examples for details).
- cbsmith 14y ago
  I come from a data understanding background, and the cool thing I liked about this article was the following statement: "...experiences like this are great reminders that data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions..." I think in principle the statement was a good one, but unfortunately the case study doesn't fit it. The location of the ad isn't influenced by optimizing click through rates, as she presumed. It also, isn't really bad design, because there isn't a much more harmless thing to do with a misclick than to show an ad. Most importantly though: the way to mitigate the damage from misclicks actually is to use the data.
alttag 14y ago
> * It turns out what most impacts ad effectiveness online > is whether people actually see the ad. ... Highly visible > and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, > highly correlated. A good summary of the OP's point, I think. I'm not sure what your end point here is, as it's all over the map, but you seems to simultaneously be arguing against the author's point and for it as well.
- cbsmith 14y ago
  > I'm not sure what your end point here is, as it's all over the map, but you seems to simultaneously be arguing against the author's point and for it as well. Sometimes the truth doesn't entirely support or undermine someone's argument. It's one of the sure signs that it is the truth. ;-) I wasn't trying to make a specific point, but rather to inform everyone, since the article didn't. I don't mean to be coy, so I'll share my opinion: The article presents this as a bug, which implies it is clearly wrong. It isn't. Misclicks are always going to create undesired outcomes. If you didn't have an ad there, the misclick would trigger some other action. Showing an ad landing page is probably one of the least harmful things you could reasonably do with a click in that location, so I question the notion that this leads to a "terrible experience". It might not be a great experience, but unless Yahoo Mail is expected to fix mice and operating systems, it's probably one of the better experiences they could provide in response to a misclick. Ms. Mason seems to believe that the false clicks are driving Yahoo to think that they are getting superior ad performance. That isn't the case, as the data itself does indeed provide some clues as to the relative likelihood that an ad received a misclick. The notion that this is evidence of "the data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions" isn't well supported by this problem. In reality, clear thinking about the data itself has indeed lead to about as good a solution as Yahoo Mail could provide.
cclark20 14y ago
In the screenshot the ad blends into the rest of the UI instead of being clear that its an ad...And its prominent placement in the UI makes it very clickable. Following your logic shouldn't it remain in the same place but be more clear that its an ad so that people are not confused that its part of the product? This would have the result of being seen but not accidentally clicked.
- cbsmith 14y ago
  First: it may not be quite so apparent from the screen shot, but the ad is framed to make it distinct form the rest of the app. Going further might well do more harm than good, as it could disrupt sight lines and make the UI garish regardless of ad content. The ad itself also draws distinction with the surrounding widgets by employing a different font, a different icon style, a different background, and a different icon size. As the article describes, people aren't misclicking because they've looked closely at the ad and mistaken it for an application function. Misclicks are predominantly people who really aren't sure what they are clicking on, don't know they are clicking, and/or didn't intend to click at all. Either way, in practice Yahoo's optimization efforts if anything create incentive to minimize misclicks, not the other way around.
nullsub 14y ago
"Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks" perhaps not, but surely if I was to buy such an ad and pay per impression, I'd probably like to know what the impression/click ratio was. no doubt Yahoo advertises a low one to potential buyers...

by cbsmith 14y ago

mattj 14y ago

I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: http://www.hilarymason.com/about/ http://www.hilarymason.com/about/

levesque 14y ago
She's a data geek. How does that make her an expert about advertising?
- Evbn 14y ago
  She also had a blog and a Google Plus page. What more credentials does one need?
- bootload 14y ago
  "... She's a data geek ..." 'She' has a name, Hilary Mason or @hmason.
  - cbsmith 14y ago
    Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive... because, you know, being a woman isn't some kind of insult. If it had read, "He's a data geek..." it would have only have been offensive because they got the gender wrong.
    - bootload 14y ago
      "... Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive. ..." I understand the line of reasoning, however the tone of the comments about the article are negative and not up to standard. [1] It is not a question of gender but how to discuss, acknowledge & discuss an authors work in a civil manner. [1] cf https://twitter.com/hmason/status/248262821924720640 https://twitter.com/hmason/status/248262821924720640
      - cbsmith 14y ago
        I agree the tone of many of the comments are not up to standard. I think both mine, and and the one you chose to go after were. Neither of us questioned her professional skills, talents, intelligence, awesomeness etc., just her domain expertise (in a domain which I'd think no one would expect expertise), which seems eminently reasonable given that the only indicators were a lack of said expertise. It seems even more reasonable because she acknowledged that she does not. You are criticizing the people who are behaving in a civil manner for the behaviour of those behaving uncivilly. Try to focus on the jerks, there's an off chance they might get it.

wicknicks 14y ago

I'm not sure if I understand your criticism. The article seemed to be commenting about the placement of ads (which she believes to be optimized by analytics), not about the economics of ads or how they are processed behind-the-scenes. I come from a data understanding background, and the cool thing I liked about this article was the following statement: "...experiences like this are great reminders that data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions..." This might be very basic knowledge for everyone, but many researchers in machine learning & data mining community do not think like this. They believe that data tells the entire story.

napierzaza 14y ago
The OP's argument is that they think Yahoo thinks it's a good placement because they must get a lot of clicks from that ad, because her grandpa clicked that ad a lot by accident. The title being that "yahoo you're optimizing the wrong thing" meaning that they MUST be optimizing the ad placement based on the mis-clicks. cbsmith's argument is that sort of click is actually not desired and not optimized for. That nobody wants those clicks and they are generally easy to identify via different metrics (see his detailed examples for details).
cbsmith 14y ago
I come from a data understanding background, and the cool thing I liked about this article was the following statement: "...experiences like this are great reminders that data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions..." I think in principle the statement was a good one, but unfortunately the case study doesn't fit it. The location of the ad isn't influenced by optimizing click through rates, as she presumed. It also, isn't really bad design, because there isn't a much more harmless thing to do with a misclick than to show an ad. Most importantly though: the way to mitigate the damage from misclicks actually is to use the data.

alttag 14y ago

> * It turns out what most impacts ad effectiveness online > is whether people actually see the ad. ... Highly visible > and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, > highly correlated. A good summary of the OP's point, I think. I'm not sure what your end point here is, as it's all over the map, but you seems to simultaneously be arguing against the author's point and for it as well.

cbsmith 14y ago
> I'm not sure what your end point here is, as it's all over the map, but you seems to simultaneously be arguing against the author's point and for it as well. Sometimes the truth doesn't entirely support or undermine someone's argument. It's one of the sure signs that it is the truth. ;-) I wasn't trying to make a specific point, but rather to inform everyone, since the article didn't. I don't mean to be coy, so I'll share my opinion: The article presents this as a bug, which implies it is clearly wrong. It isn't. Misclicks are always going to create undesired outcomes. If you didn't have an ad there, the misclick would trigger some other action. Showing an ad landing page is probably one of the least harmful things you could reasonably do with a click in that location, so I question the notion that this leads to a "terrible experience". It might not be a great experience, but unless Yahoo Mail is expected to fix mice and operating systems, it's probably one of the better experiences they could provide in response to a misclick. Ms. Mason seems to believe that the false clicks are driving Yahoo to think that they are getting superior ad performance. That isn't the case, as the data itself does indeed provide some clues as to the relative likelihood that an ad received a misclick. The notion that this is evidence of "the data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions" isn't well supported by this problem. In reality, clear thinking about the data itself has indeed lead to about as good a solution as Yahoo Mail could provide.

cclark20 14y ago

In the screenshot the ad blends into the rest of the UI instead of being clear that its an ad...And its prominent placement in the UI makes it very clickable. Following your logic shouldn't it remain in the same place but be more clear that its an ad so that people are not confused that its part of the product? This would have the result of being seen but not accidentally clicked.

cbsmith 14y ago
First: it may not be quite so apparent from the screen shot, but the ad is framed to make it distinct form the rest of the app. Going further might well do more harm than good, as it could disrupt sight lines and make the UI garish regardless of ad content. The ad itself also draws distinction with the surrounding widgets by employing a different font, a different icon style, a different background, and a different icon size. As the article describes, people aren't misclicking because they've looked closely at the ad and mistaken it for an application function. Misclicks are predominantly people who really aren't sure what they are clicking on, don't know they are clicking, and/or didn't intend to click at all. Either way, in practice Yahoo's optimization efforts if anything create incentive to minimize misclicks, not the other way around.

nullsub 14y ago

"Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks" perhaps not, but surely if I was to buy such an ad and pay per impression, I'd probably like to know what the impression/click ratio was. no doubt Yahoo advertises a low one to potential buyers...