• by July 10, 2001

CBS MarketWatch, one of many struggling Internet content sites, is fighting back against the growing perception that online ads do not work.

On Monday the finance Web site will stop providing "click through" rates to its advertising clients and will urge them to consider other ways of measuring the effectiveness of their online ads.

In shifting the focus away from click-throughs, MarketWatch is trying to convince companies that their online ads work by building general brand awareness even when the consumer does not actually click the ad to get more information.

"The click-through rate is the metric that everyone has relied upon, but it has become meaningless," said a representative for San Francisco-based MarketWatch.

Click-throughs have been the standard way to measure online ad performance since the birth of the consumer Internet. Click-through rates have steadily declined over time, as Internet users apparently became more adept at ignoring them. As a result, many companies have cut back on online advertising.

However, some people in the industry argue that click-throughs are not the right metric to watch. Robin Webster, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said she came up with a list of 28 reasons for companies to advertise online and only one mentioned that online ads let people click through to get more information.

Other reasons she listed included increasing general brand awareness, cross-selling other brands from the same company, and testing different pricing models.

Still, by distancing themselves from click-through rates, Internet companies are distancing themselves from some of the same technology their businesses were built upon. Before click-through rates plummeted, Internet advertising was held up as a superior way to reach people, precisely because it was possible to count how many people responded.

By suggesting that consumers may notice the ad, even when they don't click, MarketWatch is embracing some of the same offline advertising principles that were once dismissed as low-tech and inaccurate.

Webster said she would welcome a return to some of those offline advertising principles.

"My theory is that the (Internet) industry was started in large part by technologists rather than media people," she said. "The stage we are in right now is what I call back to basics. We need to go back to the kinds of metrics that are used for any other kind of media."

- Reuters