The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs 烂点击率定律

Dear readers, I have moved to Substack and I will be writing here from now on:
亲爱的读者,我已搬迁至 Substack,今后我将在这里进行写作:
andrewchen.substack.com
In the meantime, I will leave andrewchen.com up for posterity. Enjoy!
与此同时,我将保留 andrewchen.com 以供后世参考。请尽情阅读!

The first banner ad ever, on HotWired in 1994, debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78% (thanks @ottotimmons)
1994 年在 HotWired 上投放的第一条横幅广告,其首秀点击率高达 78%(感谢 @ottotimmons)

First it works, and then it doesn’t
起初奏效,随后失效
After months of iterating on different marketing strategies, you finally find something that works. However, the moment you start to scale it, the effectiveness of your marketing grinds to a halt. Sound familiar?
在对不同的营销策略进行了数月的迭代之后,你终于找到了行之有效的方法。然而,就在你开始扩大规模的那一刻,营销效果却戛然而止。听起来很耳熟吗?

Welcome to the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs:
欢迎了解“烂点击率法则”(Law of Shitty Clickthroughs):

Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.
随着时间的推移,所有的营销策略最终都会导致糟糕的点击率。

Here’s a real example – let’s compare the average clickthrough rates of banner ads when debuted on HotWired in 1994 versus Facebook in 2011:
这里有一个真实的例子——让我们对比一下横幅广告(banner ads)在 1994 年于 HotWired 首次亮相时与 2011 年在 Facebook 上的平均点击率:

That’s a 1500X difference. While there are many factors that influence this difference, the basic premise is sound – the clickthrough rates of banner ads, email invites, and many other marketing channels on the web have decayed every year since they were invented.
这是 1500 倍的差距。尽管影响这一差异的因素有很多,但基本前提是成立的——自发明以来,横幅广告、电子邮件邀请以及互联网上许多其他营销渠道的点击率逐年下降。

Here’s another channel, which is email open rates over time, according to eMarketer:
这是另一个渠道的情况,根据 eMarketer 的数据,这是电子邮件打开率随时间变化的情况:

While this graph shows a decline, the other graph (which I don’t have handy) is that the number of emails sent out has increased up to 30+ billion per day.
虽然这张图表显示了下滑趋势,但另一张图表(我手头没有现成的)则显示,每天发出的电子邮件数量已增加到 300 多亿封。

All these channels are decaying over time, and what’s saving us is the new marketing channels are constantly getting unveiled, too. These new channels offer high performance, because of a lack of competition, big opportunities for novel marketing techniques, and these days, the cutting edge is about optimizing your mobile notifications, not your banner placements.
所有这些渠道都在随时间推移而衰减,而拯救我们的是新的营销渠道也在不断涌现。这些新渠道之所以表现优异,是因为缺乏竞争,且存在尝试新颖营销技术的巨大机会。在当下,最前沿的技术是优化移动端通知,而非横幅广告的投放。

There are a few drivers for the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, and here’s a summary of the top ones:
导致“糟糕点击率法则”的原因有几个,以下是主要原因的总结:

• Customers respond to novelty, which inevitably fades
  用户会对新鲜感做出反应,而新鲜感不可避免地会消退
• First-to-market never lasts
  率先进入市场的优势永远不会持久
• More scale means less qualified customers
  规模越大意味着客户质量越低

Let’s examine each in more detail, and then discuss the options for combatting this force of gravity in marketing.
让我们更详细地审视每一项,然后讨论应对这种营销“引力”的方法。

Novelty新颖性
Without a doubt, one of the key drivers of engagement for marketing is that customers respond to novelty. When HotWired showed banner ads for the first time in history, people clicked just to check out the experience. Same for being the first web product to email people invites to a website – it works for a while, until your customers get used to the effect, and start ignoring it.
毫无疑问,营销参与度的关键驱动因素之一是客户对新鲜感的反应。当 HotWired 在历史上首次展示横幅广告时,人们点击仅仅是为了体验一下。作为第一个通过电子邮件邀请人们访问网站的网络产品也是如此——它在一段时间内有效,直到你的客户习惯了这种效果并开始忽略它。

One of the most important tools you have at your disposal is the creative and calls to action that you use in your marketing – this might be like “X has invited you to Y” or it might be the headline you use in your banner ads. Recently, Retargeter posted an interesting analysis on the Importance of Rotating Creatives, which showed how keeping the same ad creative led to declining CTRs over time:
你所拥有的最重要的工具之一,就是你在营销中使用的创意和行动号召(CTA)——这可能是像“X 邀请你加入 Y”这样的文案,也可能是你横幅广告中使用的标题。最近,Retargeter 发布了一篇关于“轮换创意重要性”的有趣分析,展示了长期保持相同的广告创意是如何导致点击率(CTR)随时间下降的:

Publishers often have a similar problem in consumers ignoring the advertising on their site, which drives down clickthrough rates for both of them (bad for CPMs). This problem is often described as banner blindness, and you can see it clearly here in an eye-tracking study by Jakob Nielsen:
发布商通常也面临类似的问题,即消费者会无视其网站上的广告,这导致双方的点击率双双下降(这对千次展示费用 CPM 不利)。这种问题通常被称为“横幅广告盲区”,在雅各布·尼尔森(Jakob Nielsen)的一项眼动追踪研究中,你可以清晰地看到这一点:

You can see here how users, almost comically, avoid looking at any banners.
你可以从这里看到,用户几乎是滑稽地避开了对任何横幅广告的注视。

The point is, humans seek novelty yet are pattern-recognition machines. Your initial marketing strategy will work quite well as your users try it for the first time, but afterwards, they learn to filter your marketing efforts out unless they are genuinely useful (more on that later).
关键在于,人类既追求新奇,又是模式识别机器。你的初始营销策略在用户第一次尝试时会非常有效,但随后,除非这些内容真正有用(稍后会详细说明),否则他们会学会过滤掉你的营销努力。

First-to-market never lasts
先发优势从不持久
It’s bad enough that your own marketing efforts drive down channel performance, but usually once your marketing efforts are working, your competitors quickly follow. There’s a whole cottage industry of companies that provide competitive research in the area of how their competitors are advertising and give you the information needed to fast-follow their marketing efforts.
更糟糕的是,不仅你自身的营销活动会降低渠道效果,通常一旦你的营销初见成效,竞争对手就会迅速跟进。现在已经形成了一个完整的配套产业,专门提供竞争对手如何投放广告的研究,并为你提供快速模仿其营销策略所需的信息。

For example, with a quick query, I know how much Airbnb is spending on search marketing (turns out, millions per year) what keywords they are buying ads on, and who their competitors are. And this is just a free service! There are much more sophisticated products for every established marketing channel:
例如,通过简单的查询,我就能知道 Airbnb 在搜索营销上投入了多少(结果显示每年高达数百万美元)、他们购买了哪些关键词广告,以及他们的竞争对手是谁。而这仅仅是一项免费服务!针对每一个成熟的营销渠道,都有更为先进的专业产品可供使用:

Airbnb Search Engine Marketing
Airbnb 搜索引擎营销

• Example ad: Find Affordable Rooms Starting From $20/Day. Browse & Book Online Now!
  广告示例:寻找起价低至 $20/天的实惠房间。立即在线浏览并预订!
• Main competitors: Expedia.com, booking.com, hotels.com, Marriott.com
  主要竞争对手:Expedia.com、booking.com、hotels.com、Marriott.com

Any clone of their business can quickly fast-follow their marketing efforts and use the same ads in the same marketing channels. This quickly degrades the performance of the marketing channel as the novelty wears off and clickthroughs plummet.
任何对其业务的模仿者都可以迅速跟进其营销手段,并在相同的营销渠道中使用相同的广告。随着新鲜感消失,点击率骤降,这会导致该营销渠道的效果迅速恶化。

Any product that is first to market has a limited window where they will enjoy unnaturally high marketing performance, until the competition enters, in which case everyone’s marketing efforts will degrade.
任何率先进入市场的产品都有一段有限的窗口期,在此期间可以享受到异常出色的营销表现,直到竞争对手入场,届时每个人的营销效果都会出现下滑。

More scale means less qualified customers
规模越大意味着客户质量越低
Another important way to think about the available market for your product is in terms of the popular Technology Adoption Lifecycle, in which early adopters actively seek out your product, while the rest of the mainstream market needs a lot of convincing. The quant marketing way to look at this is that early adopters respond better to marketing efforts across any given metric (signup %, CTR, CPA) than the later customer segments. In the TAL framework, the early market seeks out novelty, whereas the mainstream market just cares if you solve a problem for them.
思考产品可用市场的另一个重要方式是参考广为人知的“技术采用生命周期”(Technology Adoption Lifecycle)。在该理论中,早期采用者会主动寻求你的产品,而主流市场的其他受众则需要大量的说服工作。从定量营销的角度来看,早期采用者在任何给定指标(注册率、点击率、获客成本)上的响应程度都优于后期的客户群体。在技术采用生命周期框架下,早期市场追求的是新颖性,而主流市场只关心你是否能为他们解决问题。

As a result, a marketing strategy focused on early adopters is bound to look better than what you get later. You can get some limited traffic from PR and targeted advertising from niche communities and media properties. However once you get past this group, the CTRs can drop substantially.
因此,针对早期采用者的营销策略,其效果注定会比后期阶段看起来更好。你可以通过公关活动以及针对小众社区和媒体资产的定向广告获得一些有限的流量。然而,一旦你跨越了这个群体,点击率(CTR)可能会大幅下降。

If you’re a SaaS or ecommerce company that’s road-tested your marketing strategy by acquiring limited batches of customers, the problem is that whatever assumptions and projections you make off of this base end up fundamentally skewed positive. If your model indicates that you can acquire customers at $10 and break even within 6 months, it’s not hard for a 30% increase in CAC and 30% decrease in LTV to double the time it takes to get to profitability. This could be the difference between life and death for a company.
如果你是一家 SaaS 或电子商务公司,通过获取有限批次的客户来测试你的营销策略,那么问题在于,你基于这一基础所做的任何假设和预测,最终都会从根本上偏向乐观。如果你的模型显示你可以以 10 美元的成本获取客户,并在 6 个月内实现盈亏平衡,那么一旦获客成本(CAC)增加 30% 且客户终身价值(LTV)减少 30%,实现盈利所需的时间就很容易翻倍。对于一家公司来说,这可能就是生与死的区别。

Lesson to investors is: Beware marketing metrics done at a small scale, and beware marketing tech companies that facilitate momentary marketing opportunities without a bigger vision. These are arbitrage opportunities that will disappear over time.
给投资者的教训是:要警惕小规模下的营销指标,也要警惕那些只提供瞬时营销机会而缺乏宏大愿景的营销技术公司。这些都是套利机会,会随着时间的推移而消失。

How to fight the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
如何对抗“糟糕点击率法则”
I call it a Law, of course, because I really believe it’s a strong gravitational pull on all marketing on the web. You can’t avoid it, and in many ways, it’s counter productive to try.
我称之为“法则”,当然是因为我坚信它是互联网上所有营销活动都面临的一种强大引力。你无法回避它,而且在很多方面,试图回避它是适得其反的。

You can always get incrementally better performance out of your marketing by taking a nomad strategy – always keep developing new creative, testing new publishers, and so on. That’s all easy, but is mostly about maintaining some base level of performance. This can push the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs to act over years rather than degrading your marketing efforts over months.
通过采取“游牧式策略”——不断开发新的创意、测试新的发布渠道等,你总能让营销表现获得增量提升。这些操作并不难,但其核心作用主要在于维持某种基础水平的表现。这可以让“糟糕点击率法则”的作用周期延长至数年,而不是在短短几个月内就让你的营销努力付诸东流。

Similarly, this law provides a litmus test as to the difference between advertising and information. When you are marketing with useful information, then CTRs stay high. Advertising that’s just novelty and noise wrapped in a new marketing channel has a limited shelf life.
同样,这一法则也为区分“广告”与“信息”提供了一块试金石。当你利用有用的信息进行营销时,点击率(CTR)会保持在高位。而那些仅仅包裹在新型营销渠道外壳下的、充满新奇感和噪音的广告,其保质期是非常有限的。

The real solution: Discover the next untapped marketing channel
真正的解决方案:发现下一个尚未被开发的营销渠道
The 10X solution to solving the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, even momentarily, is to discover the next untapped marketing channel. In addition to doubling down on traditional forms of online advertising like banners, search, and email, it’s important to work hard to get to the next marketing channel while it’s uncontested.
即便只是暂时性地解决“糟糕点击率法则”的 10 倍效能方案,就是去发掘下一个尚未被开发的营销渠道。除了在横幅广告、搜索和电子邮件等传统在线广告形式上加倍投入外,努力在下一个营销渠道尚未进入竞争红海时抢占先机也至关重要。

Sometimes I get asked “have you ever seen someone do XYZ to acquire customers?” Turns out, the highest vote of confidence I can give is, “No I haven’t, and that’s good – that means there’s a higher chance of it working. You should try it.”
有时会有人问我:“你见过有人用 XYZ 这种方式来获取客户吗?”事实证明,我能给出的最高肯定就是:“没见过,这很好——这意味着它成功的机会更高。你应该试一试。”

Today, these (relatively) uncontested marketing channels are Open Graph, mobile notifications, etc. If you can make these channels work with a strong product behind it, then great. Chances are, you’ll enjoy a few months if not a few years of strong marketing performance before they too, slowly succumb.
如今,这些(相对)竞争尚不激烈的营销渠道包括 Open Graph、移动端推送通知等。如果你能凭借强大的产品力让这些渠道发挥作用,那就太棒了。在这些渠道也慢慢沦陷之前,你很可能会享受到几个月甚至几年的强劲营销表现。

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Andrew Chen is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he invests in games, AR/VR, metaverse, and consumer tech startups. He is the author of The Cold Start Problem, a book on starting and growing new startups via network effects. He resides in Venice, California (more)
Andrew Chen 是 Andreessen Horowitz 的合伙人,专注于游戏、AR/VR、元宇宙及消费科技初创公司的投资。他是《冷启动问题》(The Cold Start Problem)一书的作者,该书探讨了如何通过网络效应启动和发展初创公司。他现居加利福尼亚州威尼斯(更多)

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