His preconceived notions concerning the heavy weight of the spacecraft were what ultimately caused him to fail. While I do feel that Internet advertising needs to take its rightful place next to television, print, radio, and other media as a valuable component of a marketer's media mix, I don't think it's wise to try to force its measurement into a model that is many years older than the Internet itself. What we didn't understand is that there is a fundamental difference between online ads and traditional direct mail. We began to see that CTR could measure only a prospect's immediate interest in a product or service, noting its weakness as a success metric. Since that realization, we have heard several different methods proposed as the successor to CTR and have been somewhat successful at weaning advertisers off CTR as the ultimate determination of success.
Some media buyers advocate using online surveys to measure success.
Others want to use tools to gauge the makeup of a site's audience and make audience-based assumptions about who they're reaching with their advertising. Yet others want to employ reach and frequency metrics to their online advertising and treat online advertising like just another medium in their mix. When I planned and bought traditional media early in my career, I remember being given a reach curve for network radio by my supervisor. It looked like a 20th-generation photocopy that had been originally taken from an advertising textbook many years earlier. The curve allowed a planner to make some assumptions about reach and frequency based on the number of rating points purchased and the number of radio networks used to reach the audience.