The Pontiflex CPL Blog

So says the New York Times. and they have data from Comscore to back this up. The worst (or best) culprits (do-gooders) are Yah00!, Google, Microsoft, Time Warner & AOL. Companies like Disney are also focused on increasing the number of touch points for collecting consumer information.

These web companies collect  information about consumer surfing at different touchpoints, which understandably has privacy groups up in arms. The Internet giants justify their actions by saying that they collect all this data in order to serve the consumer with more relevant ads. They are also no doubt catering to the demands of increasingly ROI minded advertisers that don’t want to pay for wasteful impressions and clicks. A noble intent, I say. This blog has always maintained that enabling a more relevant consumer experience (as Netflix and Amazon do) will be key to both increasing consumer buy-in and advertiser ROI.

However, even with all this data collection, are the web companies doing a good enough job for consumers and advertisers? The data does not seem to suggest so.  Industry click-through rates drop every year and now measure a lowly 0.05%. The fanciest microsites and landing pages cannot put a stop to the falling conversion rates. Even in the world of search advertising, clicks are getting more expensive to buy at a time when the industry click-fraud rates have to soared to an excess of 16% – surely rubbing salts in the wounds of increasingly ROI minded advertisers.

A large portion of advertising that is served using behavioral targeting is deployed for the express purpose of online lead generation. The ideal solution would be to enable CPL advertising with explicit buy in from the consumer. The advertiser would only pay for a lead from a truly interested consumer.