Steve Rubel has been having some great posts lately. Here’s one that got me thinking about how we view online traffic.
Online publishers and online advertisers still seem to view traffic as the most important measure for media buying decisions. Often with good reason. The nature of today’s publishing models makes it that there is no alternative that could become the predominant metric for developing ad rates for publishers and selecting media buys for advertisers.
We’ve got news sites and blogs that people want to read. We’ve got social networks that involve people wanting to interact with one another. We’ve got ecommerce sites that people want to buy things from. We’ve got sites filled with CGM that people want to experience and share. And we’ve got search engines that have been primarily used for inquiries. There are other content models out there, each having their own unique relationship model with visitors.
Content models affect the purpose of the traffic and the purpose of the traffic affects user experience which in turn affect ad models. Or something like that. I’d also argue that, on many sites, content models bypass user experience and directly affect ad models. Think MySpace and all those ringtone ads. Ridiculous.
Each of these have an effect as to how an advertiser views the quality of the audience. Which means that there are many factors a media buyer must weigh before making a purchase. And those factors will of course vary from site to site.
Then when one takes into account HOW someone gets to a site and their actual point of entry, it becomes that much more of a mess to figure out.
I’d say that the importance of traffic is on a sliding scale, depending on all of the above factors and more.
This is why I think that the combination of behaviorial and contextual advertising is all the more important. That’s because, if you are an advertiser, you are buying something that is both topical (contextual) and reflective of a mindset and the actions that come from that mindset (behavioral). It makes sense both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Just like the alternative, search engine marketing.
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I’m helping my 7 year old son, get his new blog about legos out there. We just put up his blog a few weeks ago. (He’d been bugging me to help him start a business, and I thought that maybe doing an online business would be the easiest thing for him to do).
I still have a lot to learn, and have been implementing a lot of great advise. I can’t help but wonder however, with all the new blogs out there, do you think there is still a good chance for a brand new blog to get known?
Cream always rises to the surface. Only bad bloggers think that there is no longer any opportunities to become a top-500 blogger. Also, there has been a lot of abandonment of blogs. Really, safe promotion, consistency, and quality are the most important thing, in order.
Thanks for the advise. Can you elaborate on what ’safe promotion’ is?
Sorry, I meant to say, “self promotion.”
Thanks for the clarification. :-)