
Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing - ColinWright
http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/hey-yahoo-youre-optimizing-the-wrong-thing/
======
cbsmith
It's unfortunate that the person who wrote this article didn't consult with
someone more informed about the online advertising world.

As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, I'm going to try to
summarize the various ways that this article is getting it wrong.

* Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks.

* Where clicks _do_ matter, major ad platforms including Yahoo throw away a LOT of clicks as fraud, and accidental clicks tend to disproportionately get thrown out along with them.

* In general, random clicks are considered a real PITA for major ad networks, as they confuse the heck out of ad optimization. While small players do tend to soak up that revenue, the big players really, really hate the phenomenon because it makes them far less efficient.

* It turns out what _most_ impacts ad effectiveness online is whether people actually _see_ the ad. An incredibly number of ads are just never seen by the audience. As a consequence, a good publisher will try to find locations for their ads that are highly visible. Highly visible and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, highly correlated.

* Most advertisers who are paying per click are very performance driven. They look at ROI, which means they look at conversion rates. When you charge an accidental click, it's almost certainly not going to convert, so in the end you look worse and they pay less for your clicks.

* One unfortunate bit of truth: advertisers _do_ pay too much attention to clicks and CTR (click through rate). Even advertisers doing brand awareness campaigns, which are not looking for immediate response from their audience, tend to look at CTR.

* Yahoo has actually tried hard to establish other metrics that they should look at, like "Bounce Rate", which attempts to factor in whether visitors immediately exit after clicking. They use those metrics internally for optimizing ad performance, so accidental clicks are likely to discourage showing an ad more than encourage it.

~~~
mattj
I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article
knows much more about advertising than you think:
<http://www.hilarymason.com/about/>

~~~
batista
Really? Because nothing in that bio points to that. Actually the whole thing
is unbelievably vague and opaque.

And these kind of cutesy oneliner descriptions of one's skills make me cringe:
"Simply: I make beautiful things with data".

OK, she works as a "chief scientist" (that's not even a job, for us, old time
folks, but anyway) at bitly (a URL shortening service, i.e as far away from a
real business as you can get, that aspires to be a "bookmarking service" also.

~~~
geofft
"Chief scientist" is absolutely a real job. Why would you think it's not?

~~~
batista
Because it's a non descriptive BS title / buzzword?

Which is very common in modern business, but shouldn't happen when you have
"science" in there. Lives a bad taste.

Science is all about clarity and SPECIFIC fields of study. Nobody does
"science" in general.

~~~
geofft
At a small company with specific goals, there's no implication of doing
"'science' in general". I can buy that the idea of being chief scientist at,
say, IBM or Google or Microsoft is a little fluffy, but if you're a startup
focusing on one goal that is a little beyond what the scientific community
knows how to do in theory, it's entirely reasonable to have a position in
charge of guiding and directing (and performing) research to that goal and
keeping up with the state of the field.

It's largely equivalent to a PI role of a university research project, except
that there are things going on in the company other than pure research and so
there are chief officers of other things too. Nobody thinks that "primary
investigator" is a fluffy title on the grounds that people don't do
investigation in general; it's clear they're investigating specific things.

------
aresant
The ad is well placed to ensure most users will see it - check out the average
horizontal attention graph below to understand the necessity of that placement
in the UI vs further right or lower on the page:

[http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your-
horiz...](http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your-horizontal-
layout-to-maximize-conversion-rate-with-our-free-tool/)

That ad unit is available only through Yahoo's CPM program - not self serve
and I know for a fact that ad unit sells out months in advance with huge CPM
volume commitments.

Modern ad platforms optimize media with backend ROI tracking via pixel-fires /
cookies and Yahoo optimizes their inventory to that metric with their
advertisers

Pain for users in this units placement? Maybe yes. Could do better? Always.

But pressing first priority problem for a business that can't afford to screw
with their profit centers, no.

~~~
kreilly
I'm speculating here, but my guess is that part of the reason it sells out is
because the person buying it is measured on CTR. If this placement has a high
CTR it is going to lift the overall media campaign and make the buyer look
good.

------
mistercow
Can someone explain to me what the appeal is of tap-to-click on trackpads?
It's obviously terrible for usability for anyone with less-than-perfect motor
control, but even for someone with ordinary dexterity like myself, it can be
infuriating. I don't want to have to tread lightly around my trackpad just to
keep from accidentally clicking on stuff.

And it's not just me; I watch other people use laptops, and their usage is
generally littered with unintended taps; they just don't seem to care that
they keep randomly misplacing their keyboard focus or switching to other
applications.

I mean, I get that it's _slightly_ easier to tap on the trackpad than it is to
click with your thumb. But how can that possibly make up for all the time lost
to accidental input?

~~~
mike_esspe
I never have this problem with touchpad, did you change the sensitivity
threshold? Have you tried touchpad from another brand?

~~~
dllthomas
I think you're the odd one; I've had this problem and witnessed others having
it, on most computers I've encountered with the feature. I have tap-to-click
disabled on my laptop for precisely that reason.

~~~
yen223
He's not the odd one. I did not experience any issues whatsoever with tapping
on my trackpad. Not even with two-finger tapping for right clicks.

Then again, I'm using a Macbook Air, which has a highly-rated trackpad.

------
webwright
Things get tense when ad-supported companies have to make money. When I ask my
mom or dad to click the first Google search result, they click on an ad. When
I ask them if they realized that it was an ad, the response is "no". A good
portion of the ad business is confused clicks/taps (it's worse on mobile).

~~~
debacle
As someone who has worked on all three sides of the equation (selling ad
space, brokering ad space, and buying ad space), I can tell you wholeheartedly
that ad purchasing companies _do not want_ these clicks. They're paying for
something of no value.

I don't know how companies can be convinced to do ad placements like these, or
if they simply rely on getting enough conversions from accidental clicks from
unknowing users to make out in the end.

Either way, it's a bad practice and something I'd equate with a torrent site
or rapidshare.

~~~
mattmaroon
Ads like this are typically bid on on a CPC basis. Shaky grandpas who click
ads on accident and don't convert drive down the cost of the clicks. If you
assume shaky grandpas account for 50% of the clicks, and 0 convert, then
they'll make the CPC worth half what it would have been without shaky
grandpas. As a result advertisers will bid half as much and pay half as much
as CPCs. Just like click fraud, unless it's an orchestrated attack on one
specific company, it comes out in the wash.

In the end, the advertisers don't really care (at least if they understand the
math, which many don't). They care only about their ROI. If they pay 20 cents
a click and make 40 they're happy, if not they aren't. Sure you could perhaps
get rid of all the shaky grandpas, pay 40 cents a click, and make 80, but it's
the same ROI.

What you really end up with is a cottage industry of people making websites
that can convert shaky grandpas better than real advertisers because just like
spam, some non-zero percentage do convert. That's why you see some stupid ID
fraud ad there. Shaky grandpas are terrified of the evil hacker who wants to
steal their identity.

~~~
debacle
But then you get into the business conundrums - would you rather sell 10k
impressions at .40 cpc or 20k impressions at .20 cpc?

~~~
mattmaroon
Well, from yahoo's perspective it's 10k clicks at 40 cents cpc vs 20k clicks
at 20 cents on the same number of impressions. From the advertiser's it's
which do you buy, and the latter is almost certainly preferable since some
number of shaky grandpas will convert.

I think shaky grandpa should be the internet standard term for worthless
clicks.

------
ceslami
This piece confused me for several reasons.

First, if anything, this seems like an accessibility problem that would be
hard to solve. Shakiness affects many of us as we get older, but it is hard to
design a website around this constraint.

Second, there is an implication that this ad placement is somehow "surely
wrong," and a step further, is likely only successful due to pseudo-fraudulent
interactions. I want to rebut this, but she does not actually substantiate it.
The most I can say is that the top-left corner of the screen is the hottest
hotspot, so placing an ad there is savvy at worst.

I too have been reading her blog for a while, but this piece caught me off-
guard as awkwardly personal and lacking in substance.

~~~
smacktoward
_Shakiness affects many of us as we get older, but it is hard to design a
website around this constraint._

Is it? Large link targets surrounded by empty negative space seem like an easy
way to solve this problem. The issue is only an issue because Yahoo puts the
links in tinytext and crowds the ad link right up next to the "Inbox" link, so
a twitch can send the cursor scooting past the link you want to click on to
the ad you don't.

~~~
talmand
In the example provided the ad link has a decent amount of white space between
it and the inbox link. There's even an intended barrier between the two in the
form of a horizontal rule, granted one pixel. What more do you want?

Are we to ascertain the shakiness level of the user to determine the proper
amount of white space? A CSS media query maybe?

@media min-shakiness: 0.5 and max-shakiness: 1

But then, I'm just being rude here, sorry.

The other case seemingly ignored here is that the clicked link in no way
resembles the intended link. Assuming the user can read the link it seems he
did not read what he's clicking on. Granted, life puts limitations on us as we
get older but I don't understand how one can predict behaviors of people who
do not fully read what they are clicking on.

There's a great deal to be said about examples of bad design causing people to
do things they did not intend, I don't believe this is one of them.

~~~
smacktoward
_In the example provided the ad link has a decent amount of white space
between it and the inbox link_

"Decent" for whom? For you, maybe, because your motor skills are sharp. For
those whose aren't, maybe not so much.

 _Are we to ascertain the shakiness level of the user to determine the proper
amount of white space? A CSS media query maybe? ...But then, I'm just being
rude here, sorry._

Yes, you are. Degraded/impaired motor skills aren't just something older
people deal with, they come with a range of illnesses and disabilities too.
Snarking about a media query for "shakiness" is sort of like a retail store
owner snarking about whether he needs to put a camera on his store door to
check if people using the ramp are really in wheelchairs.

 _There's even an intended barrier between the two in the form of a horizontal
rule.. I don't understand how one can predict behaviors of people who do not
fully read what they are clicking on._

These comments indicate that you don't really understand the problem we're
talking about here. It's not that the user doesn't know the ad link is a
different link. It's that _she tries to click the link she wants but ends up
clicking the ad link accidentally_ because the close placement of the two
links makes it easy for a bump on a trackpad to send a click intended for link
A skidding over to link B instead.

~~~
talmand
Decent for whom is my point. How far down the path do we go before it's a
losing proposition? You cannot possibly please everyone and yet people are
advocating that we must or be labeled failures.

I admitted I was being rude. The point is that we cannot possibly account for
every kind of limitation that people may have. We do the best that we can
realizing that we cannot account for everything. The only answer to that
question is to remove the ad altogether, which is not a solution.

Ok, good point, the problem being seeing one spot to click on but clicking on
another by accident. Now explain to me exactly how one is supposed to predict
that and account for it? Accidental bump on a trackpad is not a problem
inherent with the design of the site, it's a problem of the hardware and its
usage. It's the same problem with the vertical row of links that belong to the
app in question, despite the ad placement. Are we suggesting that the menu
links on the left should be separated by at least fifty vertical pixels?

So, my original point, what's the optimum distance between two links to avoid
accidental clicking due to physical limitations and hardware problems? There
is no way to determine that.

The example given of Google using low contrast colors to separate search
results from ads is a good example of taking advantage. This Yahoo example is
not because the two links in question do have a noticeable separation and do
not bear any resemblance to each other. People clicking on spot fully
expecting that they are clicking on another is a completely different topic
and is not indicative that Yahoo is taking advantage of anyone. How can one
claim that Yahoo is somehow taking advantage of people by tricking them into
clicking on ads that are "close" to an intended link? What exactly do they
benefit from this?

------
dkarl
Sounds like her grandfather needs a nice heavy mouse. She could disassemble a
modern mouse and add lead weights to the inside until the weight and balance
were right.

~~~
mistercow
Or just, you know, turn off tap-to-click.

~~~
vadman
Touchpads are IMO less ergonomic and less intuitive than mice, sounds like her
grandfather could use an extra bit of both.

~~~
mistercow
A touchpad on a laptop is less ergonomic than a mouse on a properly arranged
desktop. But a touchpad on a laptop is _more_ ergonomic than a mouse on a
laptop _unless_ you set up your laptop like a desktop (place it on a stand on
a big, clear desk with an external keyboard in front and a mouse pad to the
side). Trying to use a mouse with a laptop that is sitting on your lap is, in
my experience, invariably awkward.

------
hooande
Hilary Mason is brilliant. But Yahoo knows what they're doing when it comes to
their advertising. YahooMail is one of the most valuable properties on the web
in terms of CPM. Their ad display makes for a crappy UI experience, but it
also makes them a lot of money.

~~~
wpietri
I'm amazed that you can look at the wreck Yahoo has become by blind
optimization and say they know what they're doing.

In the particular case of Yahoo Mail, their crappiness has driven off large
numbers of high-end users. They also lost a lot of great staff who were tired
of working on crappy things for managers who didn't give a shit about the
users or the workers as long as the numbers were good and their political
power increased.

Yahoo's a classic example of what happens when you know the price of
everything and the value of nothing.

------
j_s
Hey Hilary Mason's grandpa, pay $20/yr for Yahoo mail with no ads!

Yahoo has already solved this problem.

------
ernesth
In yhis case, trackpad clicking is at fault, not yahoo. Whenever I use someone
else's laptop, I find myself clicking things I didn't want to click. I
believe, that the default should be for trackpad to not interpret a tap as a
click.

------
dredmorbius
Yet another reason I:

\- Use a Thinkpad with a trackpoint.

\- Disable the touchpad.

\- Use ad-blocking.

\- Don't use Yahoo.

~~~
yen223
As a guy with tremors, the trackpoint is even worse than a touchpad.

~~~
dredmorbius
What is your preferred pointing device, if any?

Know a few folks who have to deal with Parkinsons, which a lot of computing
devices don't accommodate particularly well.

~~~
yen223
Get a mouse, preferably one with more mass in it. Helps to dampen some of the
shakiness.

My tremors are not that serious though, so I'm perfectly OK with a touchpad
(I'm a huge fan of Apple's glass touchpad). With trackpoints, it's hard to get
a good level of sensitivity.

------
mycodebreaks
All clicks by accidents are unfair to the advertisers. They pay for clicks
which were never intended.

~~~
mistercow
Inasmuch as clicks are a valid metric for advertising performance, it is only
because they prove that an ad is prominent on a page. So in that sense,
there's really nothing wrong with accidental clicks.

~~~
DataJunkie
Companies that I have worked for have developed models (approximate) to remove
accidental clicks to prevent charging the advertiser. Usually, these clicks
are "absorbed" into a CPM though, and detecting accidental clicks is very
difficult and requires many assumptions about user behavior.

------
wpietri
A great example of how user testing is a necessary complement to click data.

~~~
DataJunkie
People that work in "ad operations" usually do that work by performing A/B
tests etc. To me, it is a very unglamorous step child to a data scientist.

~~~
wpietri
In this context, i think A/B tests would generally be the opposite of user
tests.

Typically with an A/B test you'll test something like clicks. With a user test
you'll have people in to try it out to see things that you can't see in the
data. In this case, I think you could look at an A/B test and say, "Ad clicks
are up! Great!" But in the user test you might say, "Oh, these clicks are
accidental, so although it makes more money in the short term, it will
decrease the value of the click and the value of the property.

------
pkeane
Wise comments. If Yahoo was smart, they'd hire Hilary Mason.

------
recoiledsnake
Ads on download pages are far worse, and usually served by Google ads.
<http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Disguised_Ads>

