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What The Clicks Don't Say
By Mike Johnson
Numbers have been the single greatest obsessions of many marketers. Number of clicks, number of visitor traffic, page views, comment trail and membership information are all the rage. The case is solid and when you are presented with something as precise and measureable, there is hardly anything you can contest. It has turned the internet to a cultural sensation and an advertising paradise. It is the very first medium that provided companies with information so precise, prediction of results are as scientific as any other mathematical problem. It has hoist Google into heights never been seen by men before. Google's total advertising revenues were USD$28 billion in 2010 and the story is, they haven’t even reached their peak. However, with every piece of information the number communicates, there are pieces of information left unsaid. The same technology that's smart enough to determine who goes where at what time and does what a certain number times can also be engineered to churn out false clicks by the millions. Many measures have been taken to churn out these destructive practices but Google or any other tech companies don’t have exclusivity to brilliant programmers who can launch programs that can outsmart any counter measure that these companies. The Real Formula You are most likely not a stranger to the different ways different people earn money through the internet. There are sites that rely on Google Adwords, others who sell online, and a whole lot of other ways. Any which way you go, the way for you to earn is by getting visitors and for you to get visitors, there are different ways too but two are known to be the most effective: Banner Ads and Search. Naturally, the fastest-growing side has been search, led by Google. This industry has zoomed from zero to an estimated $28 billion in less than ten years. Not even TV advertising grew that fast and I have a feeling there will be no other industry in the foreseeable future that will also grow that fast. The name of the game is to go higher on Google search. Sites who get the top 3 spots are the absolute winners. What the clicks will not tell you is how you will really go up the ranks. Sure there are keywords, keyword density guides, analytics , and a host of other factors that you must fulfil to rank higher on search results but no one has the exact algorithm, except maybe from Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Truth is “Clicks” is not the only thing that will push you up and no matter the data the analytics pushes to you, no one will ever figure it out. Why? The race to find ways to understand with absolute accuracy consumer behaviour continues. Internet media publishers are finding ways to come up with new measure to reveal more insights and the algorithms are developing so fast that every single click can transport five different information such as source, specific page destination, time on site, region of origin and other activities within the site. As a result, people are tagged hundred different ways age, Zip Code, gender, country, reading habits, etc. With all these charts and figures, we still don’t know the reason people go to a certain site and why they go there. Facebook has been revered for being a tool for people to keep in touch with each other. Really? People go there because they care what happens to other people? Can anyone come up with a ratio on how many activities each person makes for themselves as oppose to the activities they do for other people? Is there any figure or graph out there that will accurately show how many of these connections are real connections? Real Unique Users There is still this big confusion on the use of IP addresses. Real computers can still be used by different people and a computer’s IP address may change. So when you see the “unique users” stat on your report, all you actually see are the number of IP addresses that could belong to different people or one person. There is also the possibility of several people using one IP address making your unique users not so unique. The General Picture Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the world’s largest index of the Internet, estimated the size at roughly 5 million terabytes of data. That’s over 5 billion gigabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes. Schmidt further noted that in its seven years of operations, Google has indexed roughly 200 terabytes of that, or .004% of the total size. There are thought to be some 155 million websites on the Internet, but this number fluctuates wildly from month to month, and one runs into a problem of what exactly constitutes a website. Is a person’s individual Facebook page its own website? How about their LiveJournal or blog? What if the blog is hosted by a blog service? With the enormous size of the internet, it seems almost impossible to track exactly who goes where and why which is essentially what we all need to fully understand consumer behaviour. The clicks seem better in tracking and understanding human behaviour but certainly far from giving us an accurate picture.
Mike Johnson is a small business advertising expert. In his site he shares tips and advice about how to advertise your small business in the right way so that you don't waste time and money.
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It is weird how the second to last result gets less that the bottom. Surly the bottom one would get the least?
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