To Click or Not to Click?

I can honestly say that I have never clicked on an ad-banner or text-link with the intention of buying something. Very few times have I clicked an ad intentionally, and if I did it was simply out of curiosity to see what the ad was trying to sell. I’d have to imagine that such “curiosity traffic” is the equivalent to “garbage traffic” in the eyes of affiliate marketers, and the fact that so many sites are brimming with advertisements that either trick or literally force you onto a landing page raises a huge question. That is, who are the people that convert from affiliate ads and willingly make purchases through these marketing tactics?

This question was one of the first that came to mind when I entered the copywriting world and was introduced to Internet marketing. I became aware of the variety of sites making hundreds or thousands of dollars per day through affiliate revenue and was left puzzled. “Who actually clicks on these spammy-looking ads, let alone buys something from them?” To make a side-note here, I’m not talking so much about AdSense, as Google does a decent job of targeting their ads meanwhile also making them unobtrusive. Regardless, I didn’t understand how affiliate sites made money through flashy banners and text-links that weren’t trying to hide that they wanted you to buy something.

Conversely, I understood how content marketing worked. I understood writing quality content for an audience, providing that audience value, and ultimately inviting them to take part in whatever it is that you’re selling. Seth Godin refers to this as permission marketing, as you invite and appeal to an audience that’s actually interested in your product or service, willing to opt-in. It’s the opposite, the sort of “interruption marketing,” where a product is pushed in your face, that I did not understand.

Eventually I found that a lot of affiliate success comes from the law of averages. If a site is getting huge traffic, say, tens of thousands or visitors per day, they’re going to convert some fraction of that into click-throughs and sales. Average click-through rates have declined to a faction of a percent these days, with that fraction seemingly getting smaller and smaller over time. Why?

I can’t help but believe that it’s a combination of ad-blindness and an increasingly tech-savvy society. When I imagine banners converting customers, I imagine the stereotypical person that’s hardly ever used the Internet or the struggling grandparent with their first computer. I feel that these stereotypes, however, are becoming less and less common. We’ve come a long way in terms of more and more users getting online, with something like 70% of adults shopping online per year. The days of fearing e-commerce are over. Likewise, I feel that the modern ad-banner as we know it will continue to decline in performance.

We have become conditioned, thankfully. Conditioned not to click. Don’t put in your credit card or SSN without some sort of security verification. The user knows what’s going on. It’s not 1997 anymore.

I feel that my generation has truly become blind to ads. We simply don’t click on them. This leads me to believe that the upcoming generations will be the same way. If so, how will interruption marketers react?