Click To Hit

I've been meaning to post this for almost a week, but wow…

I've really been trying to wrap my mind around the science of Direct Navigation as of late, and I had a bit of an epiphony recently that most of you thinking about this space have probably already thought of but few may be willing to admit… and that's the Internet industry's renewed vigor in the “eyeball” hunt.

That's right, I said it… Eyeballs… it's not a dot boom relic like my last entrepreneurial effort, but a confirmation that most of the predictions around online advertising and site “visitors” were correct albeit definitely a little ahead of their time.

Ok, so the market's matured, most surfers are on broadband, most are comfortable with shopping online… so what does this mean for Internet Traffic and why is it important to think of all of these coveted valuable and monetizable streams as “eyeballs” and not just a faceless term that removes the humanity from the gold almost every search and media company online is striving to compete for?

My realization started when I was sitting at the airport waiting for a flight to Los Angeles last week… the flight I was on was packed, there was no room to breathe and I was wedged into a middle seat between two big guys with 17″ laptops watching Soprano's and Lost episodes respectively. If you've ever been on a United Airlines mid-jumper you'd know exactly what I mean since I swear that airline has the smallest amount of legroom in the industry.

Being trapped in that claustrophibic position without the ability to breathe let alone grab my laptop or a magazine to take my mind off the grueling 3 hour flight, I couldn't help but find my mind wandering back to when I was standing in line and watching the cram of people bumping and shoving there way to check-in as if being first in line would speed up the trip itself. I remembered looking around the room noticing everyone almost stepping over each other trying to get into position when it hit me… Although they were from all different walks of life, had different  reasoning behind why they were there, where they were coming from, and where they were going… they all shared one very important commonality…

They were all following the same instinctual human process to achieve a shared intent, arriving at their destination expeditiously by aggressively jockeying into position to check in even though they all knew it wouldn't necessarily speed up the trip itself.

Why is this a very important realization you may ask? Of course traffic is comprised of people you may say. Well, one of the things I think most hunters of online traffic forget is the catalyst, the intent or the reasoning behind the origin of the traffic which results in a transaction that fuels the e-commerce food chain. IMHO, we focus too much on conversions, traditional search versus direct navigation, click through rates and all of the demographics and labels for the process that we use to describe how people find and acquire what they want online.

I realized that without understanding the psychology behind the motive from a sometimes flawed human perspective, you will never understand the true underlying science behind Direct Navigation traffic, it's dominance, logevity, or market share in the online search space. It's like trying to figure out the meaning of the existence of the universe without understanding the intent or logic behind the big bang, it all becomes hit and miss conjecture or theory no matter how much we understand of what has happened since.

I'll expand on my attempted discovery of this “intent” and how that fits within the different search methodologies popular today in future posts, but if I may leave you with one message with this article its: Eyeballs are good, Traffic is bad, which may be a little contradictory to what everyone's comfortable opinion of this space is today.