False Impressions

The company website has seen a drop in traffic in the last few weeks and a meeting to discuss possible traffic-boosting strategies was called.

Seeing as traffic equals page impressions and page impressions relate to revenue from advertisers; more content is needed, or better, well-written content, or maybe a viral marketing campaign. That should help attract the visitors.

But no; at every suggestion, the boss turned his nose up. That sneer that only bosses can do. They were all good, simple ideas and yet nothing seemed to offer him the "quick hit" he required to bolster flagging site traffic.

So, late on yesterday, the boss sat at his desk and was clicking his mouse button. With regularity. Alarmingly robotic regularity. Every 5 seconds he would click his mouse. This went on for 10 minutes so investigation was called for. The filing cabinet adjacent to his desk was good cover for a still-distant, yet better view.

It looked like he was clicking on the exact same "next" link on one of the site's dynamic pages. Neither his hand, nor the mouse moved, except to click the mouse button on the same link. Every 5 seconds.

This went on for nearly an hour.

The company website stats were checked and, hey-presto, there's traffic again. Same IP address, same dynamic page, one click, every 5 seconds - that's 12 an hour for over 55 minutes.

He gets paid far too much to do that - the boss is an idiot.

Lucky that's just impressions and not click-throughs. Yet.