Why Zynga’s “Fat Fingers” Strategy Won’t Work

I’m a fan of Zynga’s ad platform and their games, but not in complete agreement with their latest change. It was recently announced that Zynga will be relying on “fat fingers” to help boost advertisement click-thrus, in a drastic measure (seen as it’s no secret that they’re struggling).

“Fat fingers” if you don’t already know, is a strategy where advertising vendors purposely encourage users to accidentally click on advertisements. Users have the ability to close advertisements by clicking the “x” button in the corner, so what Zynga has done is decreased the size of this “x” in hopes of more accidental clicks. The more gamers click on the ads, the more money Zynga earns, as the typical price model of these types of ads are “pay per-click”.

If you track the performance of your ad campaigns, it should be easy to see the effects of accidental clicks. One of the most important figures that I personally refer to in digital campaigns, isn’t the amount of clicks, but is the user engagement of the clicks. If you use Google Analytics, you should be familiar with both the ‘time on site’ and ‘bounce rate’ figures. It should be quite evident if accidental clicks are contributing heavily to your overall campaign if the ‘time on site’ is low, and the ‘bounce rates’ are high.

Overall the “fat fingers” strategy doesn’t pay off. It may help boost click-thru rates, but the quality will drastically decrease, and any decent advertiser should easily be able to pick up on this.