How Brands And Advertisers Are Wasting Money In The Digital Business

One of the most interesting areas of the digital business is metrics, and more significantly, how few in the market know how to adequately and effectively read and understand website analytics. Second to this is the misunderstanding of size and scale within the market. The combination has created and driven a climate that has most ad-supported internet companies doing at least some part of effort to generate page views including those that are completely artificial, or fake. Under pressure to meet the combination of expectation from the market and volume to be able to generate enough revenue, a large portion of companies are making money on what is essentially fabricated.

It’s often talked about that banner ads aren’t effective. There are a combination of reasons for this, but you can bet one of them in a large way is that many sites simply don’t have anybody visiting them even though the numbers they provide indicate that they do. In reality, there’s nobody truly there.

That’s because page views and unique visitors can (and widely) are artificially generated and created. It is most commonly done by utilizing SEO to generate unique visitors and page views. Slideshows and creating multiple steps for users to reach various things they want online are also often used for driving up page view numbers as well. It gets a little more complicated than this but in general, most sites online are doing something to drive numbers where there aren’t exactly audience or users.

While SEO can drive some people to websites, its rare by the organic nature of search that they’ll return again, and many do not stick around long enough to being real traffic. One millon unique visitors that spend less than a minute on a site and never return is not a user. It’s more like a quick drive past a billboard that one may or may not notice is there as they pass it.

It’s not to say that some SEO traffic converts to longer time on a site when one does visit and stick around, but from there it’s fairly uncommon for the user to then return to the site. Sometimes, but likely not really. What this all means for brands and advertisers is that unless they’re casting a careful, experienced eye on website analytics — and know what to read/ask — they’re likely paying a lot of money for very little.

Because unique visitors and page views can be fabricated, it’s very important to look at the session times, pages visited, bounce rates, return visitors, referral and direct traffic. These are the real metrics that will let you know what is really happening on a site — and if it has real users or not, and how many. When looking at and analyzing sites for various business projects, after stripping off what was coming off SEO and not converting, what was referral traffic and not returning, and looking at who was really visiting the site, many sites with a million unique visitors or more actually had only about 30,000 or less real, regular visitors.

While that’s still an impressive enough number, it definitely puts things in a very different place in terms of size and ultimately, compensation.

We hear about companies in the space saying they’re pulling in upwards of 70 million unique visitors but rarely (if ever) do we hear anything about how much of that is real, sticky users. The only way to gauge are by the metrics provided above, but few share or ask for these. Granted, there is some money to be made off the drive-by and one-off person that might hit a site, but that’s not what really brings brands and advertisers real value. Particularly if that visitor might not be a real person.

In the past six years, I can’t recall a single media article that asked or provided more details about site traffic beyond page views and unique visitors. When in reality, neither of these metrics truly say much about a site. You’ve got to drill down further.

Before it seems that digital companies are to blame for the above climate and tactics used, it’s in reality due to a misunderstanding of size and scale within the market overall. This is improving, but to date it has put a lot of pressure on sites to perform at unrealistic levels and has driven the above in turn.