Does A Pic Now Equal A Click?..The New Web Analytics Model

Does a Pic now equal a Click?… The New Web Analytics Model

The shift is changing for Internet advertising. Brands buy keywords to get top ranking search engine results. The website remains dormant until someone clicks on through a search engine. Buying the “right” keywords will help drive traffic to their website.

When brands “turn on” their barcodes, get 2d spot-codes, or register a code for SMS messaging, there will be many ways to connect both electronically and physically to the website.

Until now, there is only one way to get to a website, use a browser on a PC or mobile. There has been only one way to value Internet traffic.

That is about to change

An OCR (optical character recognition) device will resolve these identifiers, just like a web browser resolves a web address. When the camera phone acts like a browser in the mobile world will pictures replace hits for Internet traffic analysis?

The physical world objects that have these identifiers are in a sense, keywords. They represent more visibility for a company’s website than keywords that are determined by algorithms.

No longer will brands be saying “for more information go to our website www.xyz.cm”.

Brands will say “click on any can of Coke, send a text to COKE” for more info. So that leads to a new metric model for Internet traffic.

Again, will pictures replace clicks?

Think of what kind of data gets created from a search. A search engine knows the number of queries for a specific word.. ie “nike tennis shoes”. Every time a word, number, phrase is typed into a search engine, data is created. Search engines have become the Arbitron/Nielsen service for Internet advertising. They then analyze this data to determine value for certain keywords. An industry has been created just to analyze this.

When an SMS gets sent, or a barcode gets scanned, data also gets created. It’s the same result (website traffic), but HOW the user got there is completely different. How do you measure HOW the user got to the site?

Sending a text or scanning a picture is different than surfing with a regular browser. The browser on the PC understands what www.xyz.com means and directs to the specific site.

When a barcode is scanned, a registered code is texted, or when an RFID tag is eventually scanned, a different type of browser will be required. It’s a unique browser and all of these actions will have to go through this unique browser to get resolved.


There won’t be many companies that offer this browser. It will be unique. Microsoft won’t be fighting Netscape, or Google for this type of browser. It will not matter if the targeted destination is a (.org,.com,.net,.mobi).

This will have to be resolved by one type of browser.

But the big question that advertisers want to know, how did the user get to my site?

When that gets answered, the advertiser can determine how to advertise to them. This also resolves some of the pay-per-click fraud that is occurring with search engines.

Coke won’t know if their website was via hit via search engine query, or if a can of Coke was scanned by a camera phone. This is a big piece to be missing. Without this information, Coke will not know if a certain campaign is effective.

There will be a server that will differentiate these lookups. That server(s) will be an advertising gold mine.

Would Google like have the data that gets created from EVERY search engine query, from EVERY search engine? Could they create more advertising opportunities?

What do you think?

Who will be the mobile analytics company?

Who wants to oversee all of the Internet traffic that comes from clicking on every physical world hyperlink?

Thoughts comments?