The death of the click

Illustration Lazaro Gamio / Axios



How did we get here? When AT&T created the first banner ad in 1994, the ad had about a 44% CTR, according to a report by AdRoll. That's around 40x higher than the average banner CTR today. Two factors have led to the decline in clicking:

  1. New web formats, used by apps like Facebook and Twitter, that replace clicking navigation with passive scrolling navigation.
  2. A saturated digital ecosystem that makes users feel lost if they click out of the window or app that they're in (Hence the introduction of in-platform news formats, like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover).

Who's to blame? Using click referrals as the most successful marketing metric was largely influenced by a free click referral measuring tool created in 2005 called Google Analytics. The tool was built to attribute successful marketing campaigns around referral clicks because referral clicks often come from Google Search, which Google monetizes.

What's next? "Clicks look like a high-performing tactic, but a lot of work is done to get you to type something into a search bar to begin with," AdRoll President Adam Berke tells Axios. Marketers are starting to attribute marketing success towards content exposure that drives you to click something, instead of the click itself. Two key formats increase content exposure: video and passive scrolling. Google and Facebook are investing heavily in products that embody these formats: YouTube and Instagram.