Attribution is dying, clicks are dying

This is a topic near and dear to my heart.

First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters.

https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma...

That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik:

https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut...

That is also a must read.

The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for.

Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget.

There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.

Local business owners I've talk to who have splurged with an SEO marketing firm this decade regret it almost across the board. After spending many hours adding blog posts and videography to their website to impress the google bot (but which add ~0 value to real clients) their conversions didn't improve noticeably over the simple business card website they'd had before. And the clients they do get are much more trouble than the referrals they get through satisfied clients.

SEO is no longer influential over the kinds of clients you want.

It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages.

[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...

tragedy of your shitty website and the commons.

"we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements

because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies.

rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft.

if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.

I understand why advertising and marketing exists. What I wish for were people in that world who took an approach that was more respectful of users: both their privacy and experience as a user. I expect that most people (“regular” users, not tech savvy ones) use ad blockers to make the internet tolerable. Is it really that big of an ask to respect the people who you ultimately want to sell to? (Ok, that’s a dumb question: 30 years of watching the internet evolve, I think I know the answer sadly..)

> Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore.

Wow. I'm really happy to read this. I've been fighting marketeers with adblockers, third party cookie blockers and other methods for years but I thought it had little effect. I'm really glad that they are having a much harder time tracking us now. I thought we were being much less effective in this battle.

Clearly some of the reasons he cites, like the app ecosystems trying to keep you engaged on their own app, is one thing we as privacy-conscious users didn't cause. But some like the adblockers we surely did. Also, whenever I do get an ad in an app that does interest me, I never click on our directly, I will always search for it (using a privacy shield, SearXNG). Just to make sure they don't get this attribution. I guess I'm not the only one when I read that many people here don't ever click on ads as a rule.

I'm very happy to learn that their work has become a lot harder because that was what we needed to achieve. The only reason it was so easy was because we were tracked everywhere.

Advertising and SEO ruined the internet.

There is barely any content left of any value that isn't on walled garden platforms, because it was too profitable for folks to turn the open Internet channels into the lowest form of spam which is what everything degraded to.

Sucks for the industry, but most things mentioned as a cause so far sounds like it's great for actual users:

> Apple’s cookie changes absolutely had a big effect when they pulled back on third party cookies inside safari that took a huge hit. Anti tracking and privacy laws in California, Canada, New York, and the EU, and many of those cookie permissions and do-not-track protocols have rolled out globally.

> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well.

> Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices.

The part about Google just giving answers, instead of linking, and social networks penalizing links is probably bad for different reasons (AI summarizing things is certainly a problem, since it somewhat disincentivizes people from, you know, actually writing about things online), but overall... I can't gather up much sympathy for this industry.

If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry.

Curious what folks in marketing think here. The intuition makes sense, but the marketing teams see the leading indicators.

I'd expect there to be a rise in corp budget for partnerships, influencer marketing, etc.

To me what's really changed is all the screenshots. Especially with phones it is very easy to just zoom to how you want the image, then press the buttons to capture and press share.

How to attribute that?

Why are the colors swapped in the "Allow Outlinks in Content" column?

This is exactly what I felt for some time.

First thing I noticed is that YouTube does not display video description immediately. It hides it behind a user click. Some videos provide useful details there that most probably most users do not read. Like video sources.

If details "were working" people would write about sponsors there, and often description is entirely blank.

So that's that. Most users will not care to go to description to see links.

Then I noticed that if some sources were in video description, were using URL shorteners. I hate URL shortener services. Btly, and stuff. I hate clicking on one. You do not see where you will be transported to. I watch various videos on youtube, some more controversial than others. I really prefer to see where I am going to. I was suspecting, maybe incorrectly, that sometime those links were used to hide real destination from YouTube algorithm, to not be demonetized immediately.

That's the second thing. I rarely click on URL shorteners.

I do not see any YouTube comments leading outside of the platform. This seems weird. I know there are a lot of bots, and a lot of bad actors. This would certainly open some flood gates. I remember though that ThioJoe created a program some time ago, a cleaning script that was receiving some traction. One person can fix video comment section, what a big corporation can't. This is a proof for me that YouTube/Google does not care about comments. Maybe there could be a way to have a comment section, where you can post links to anywhere, and your comments will not be hidden from other users (HN proves it is possible).

Videos are YouTube power. They will not care about description, thumbs down, or comment section. Certainly they will not show you a way out of their ecosystem.

Clicks were also always a little bit broken. There were always farms that sold upvotes, view counts. Relying on IT system to count goats is always flaky.

I hope clicks will die. Maybe this will make space for personal web pages that do not try to monetize every your mouse move.

I think marketers will never admit that attribution is dying. There was always some mental gymnastics around grasping for attribution: "they clicked an ad last month once and made a purchase today, that counts!". Folks have careers and budgets based around attribution working as intended.

Yes, there are anecdotes about shutting off ad platform X and seeing Y revenue decline, but I highly doubt that decline == their calculated attribution amount.

IMO, attribution was always a pseudoscience used to grossly inflate the cost of online ad space.

Good riddance. Marketing was never meant to make customers better off. It was always a way for businesses to get better off by shoving useless products down peoples' throats. Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". But even that is not that effective anymore—look at Apple's failed V Pro product.

I open the page, and it prompts me to accept or decline cookies.

That’s what killed the clicks for me, not the request, but the attempt of most site operators to cram stuff into my browser I might not want, and the mental fatigue that goes along with caring about those things.

I logged in to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools this weekend for the first time in a decade because I wanted to figure out where some weird traffic peaks came from.

Since I front a static site on Azure Storage through Cloudflare I have very little useful analytics (I get 1 request hitting storage for each 1000, thanks to judicious caching settings), and all my referrer data is fake - just spam for Russian and Chinese sites, so yeah, web analytics is pretty much dead.

I’ve started adding UTM tags to my own outbound links just so that other people can find who is linking to them, but it all feels kludgy and broken.

Response: https://nailitandscaleit.substack.com/p/online-attribution-i...

The amount of sniffy disdain on HN for anything involving marketing, advertising, SEO or trying to promote a business digitally is laughable.

A very large percentage of you who comment and submit here regularly work directly with or in the worst offenders for building the technology behind today's surveillance tracking ad-driven internet. The salaries so many on this site's comment threads "subtly" brag about are directly paid as the fruits of these industries, but oh, how nasty anyone is for marketing their digital wares.

I completely understand disgust with the nature of the prying, spying, constantly tracking, click-baiting modern boom in churned SEO content and all that comes with it, but if you're working for the very companies largely responsible for creating that world, have a bit of humility before throwing shit on any smaller players doing what the system has pushed them into doing to pay their bills.

EDIT: Also, to those of you who say you just use chatGPT or some other major AI to get your content needs settled, congratulations, you're making the content siloing by parasitic ad/digital media companies even worse.

You're handing your eyeballs over to an even smaller group of would-be (or existing) megacorps that don't even at least create any of what they serve you. They snatch a copy of it from others without permission and regurgitate it for you with zero attribution and all the special filters they feel like passing it through for whatever bullshit reason takes their fancy. This will actively make the internet, for all its current flaws, even more centralized, even more controlled and generally even worse. If you thought Google search was getting shitty, just consider how internet search filtered through the prism of chatGPT and a couple others will be. No wonder those same companies are lobbying so fiercely for moat-like regulations in their favor for the sake of "safety"

"Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices."

1. Need to use fancy browser, and

2. Need to log in, and

3. Need to use same credentials

Too many requirements. I can never get to #3 because I fail to comply with #1, let alone #1 and #2

> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well.

Hell yeah. Death to all of this shit.

Or, to put it in marketer terms, “Attribution is dying, clicks are dying, and here's why that's a GOOD thing!”

I agree with the lost. Unfortunately interactions on the internet is dying. I would say the internet as it is is dying. Or maybe, being transformed into something so bad that you will need to pay for an AOL portal to be able to have something useful.

I have trouble trusting this author is really part of the ad industry when he talks about "all of the tracking that we do". The ad industry NEVER calls itself tracking, or spyware, or anything negative. But he's got data, so he must be.

I agree with the premise that attribution doesn't work. But it's not dying - it's been dead for a long time (maybe always). All the points of the article have been true since the inception of the WWW and before.

Corporations impose things like attribution due to their need for legibility[1]. Everything must be formulaic and calculable. Attribution is a simple concept, and nobody is checking it as long as it looks good - it's all theater, like the TSA, the story of spreadsheet bond yields[2], or the AI hype wave. Not even the free market checks it, since your competitors don't have an accurate model either. If anyone believes capitalism is efficient, here is a (or yet another) counter-example.

Coming from another angle, I notice that attribution-less marketing has been winning and losing political elections for at least a decade now. Somehow, political campaigns (overt and covert) don't seem to need it. Maybe the ad industry can find out how they operate and copy their model.

[1]: https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/the-il-logic-of-...

[2]: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet

i hope all you cookie tracking scumbags fail and never succeed in recapturing the audience you seem to feel entitled to. you do not own my time, my vision, my hearing, and marketing has been one of the largest problems in our society since before i was even born. hawk your wares in the market, stop invading my home like a door to door salesman.

Bye tracking advertising, don’t let the door kick you on your way out.

Oh, before you leave, can you take with you those billboards and gas station ads? No, I don’t need those, you can keep them.

I wonder if this will lead to greater emphasis on targeting. If you can't prove that they clicked the ad, at least you want to be in front of the right people.

The first thing I did when the article loaded was click, which I attribute to a ginormous cookie consent banner obscuring my view of the orbituary.

I prefer not to click anymore and instead ask AI to summarize a URL for me. The Brave Browser Leo AI is great for this.

An easier way to find out how to make risotto is to look it up in Marcella Hazan's book.

lol, is this just an elaborate ad for his brand of risotto rice?

> What’s Killing Clicks?

> “Tell me, Rand, what killed all these clicks?”

> I’m going to tell you every one of the major search, social, and content platforms has an incentive to keep you there. LinkedIn wants to keep you on LinkedIn. Twitter wants to keep you on Twitter.

Let me throw out another one. People have learned that they'll regret clicking. The incentive to get as many clicks as possible and no incentive to have anything there for them once they do click, except a bunch of in-your-face ads that make it impossible to read the "content", has perhaps made us all pause before clicking.

> The way forward is to go where your audience is being influenced.

This article made me feel dirty. My condolences to anyone who has to work in advertising or SEO to support themselves or their families. I think this whole industry is a net negative to the world.