Ghost clicks at the e-banquet

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EVERY tech player wants to change the rules of the game. But Microsoft needs to be taken seriously when it says that it’s all set to define new rules for the online advertising system. Sexily dubbed as Engagement Mapping, Microsoft’s new approach to measure the effectiveness of online ad campaigns came into force on March 1. With this move, the company intends to outmode the prevailing clicks-based standard of “last ad clicked” (promoted by Google), saying that it’s a flawed approach as it ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message. Engagement Mapping will overcome this flaw, it claims, as it’ll track all online touchpoints and interactions a consumer undergoes before buying a product. It’ll use something called Microsoft’s Atlas Media Console to measure a consumer’s online actions on a real-time basis, depending on recency, frequency, size and ad format. Sounds knotty. But that’s Microsoft.

This apparently iconoclastic initiative may be market driven, but Microsoft’s own interests are clear. It has to quickly justify its efforts in online advertising after its expensive buyout of online marketer, aQuantive, by shelling out a whopping $6 billion, or its bid to grab Yahoo for over $40 billion.

Everyone is agreed that the number of clicks by online surfers can’t be a true metric for advertisers to assess the impact of their ad campaigns. Online publishers have been using this measurement standard just to hoodwink advertisers. And click fraud is rampant. Click Forensics, a watchdog, says that the 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15% over the previous year. And in Q4 2007, the largest proportion of click fraud originating outside North America came from India (4.3%), Germany (3.9%) and South Korea (3.7%). Click fraud is perpetrated through automated computer programs and other tools that act like virtual consumers to falsely boost the click count on online ads. This is estimated to account for $1 billion in global online ad revenues. Few can tell. So much for the “information revolution”.

Is anything straight in cyberspace? Interactive advertising has been a disappointment, too. Last year, advertisers the world over spent just $30 billion on online properties, 6% of the total ad spend. While advertisers are mostly clueless, analysts have been shaky about the metrics to judge site popularity and online consumer behaviour. With over a billion Internet users exposed to millions of sites, it’s chaos out there.