Dopamine Dashboard

Online advertising as gamified consumerism

Overview

Whether you are a marketing professional, a small business owner, or just trying to promote your side hustle, you likely have experimented with online advertising in one form or another. You may have boosted a post on Instagram, run ads on Facebook, paid to get to the top of Google search results, or utilized some other paid online channel. Regardless of whether you found success in this spending or found it to be a waste of money, you surely felt the rush of seeing your impressions, likes, clicks, and conversions on the analytics dashboard.

As a culture, we are increasingly trained to seek the digital rewards of the view, the like, the share, and the click. The positive feedback feels good. When you post a picture of your family or hobby on social media, you appreciate the response. When you check your phone, you feel the reward of a heart floating from the corner. When you hear the familiar pavlovian ding, you feel the excitement of the promise of another fix.

These same psychological tendencies are now translating into our relationship with online advertising. The “click” is a paid “like” and provides a similar emotional reward.

The free market tells us that if a business provides value to the user, then the user will happily buy, and that’s good business. I agree. I am not against online advertising. On the contrary, my digital marketing agency manages online advertising campaigns for a wide range of clients.

But, to use online advertising effectively, you must understand that your objectives do not align with those of the platforms selling you the ads. The online advertising giants spend billions of dollars to ignite and develop our craving for the shiny click, whether it has any real-world value to us or not, because that’s what they sell: clicks.

As a user of their platforms, you must stay vigilant in guarding against their barrage of self-serving tactics and psychological manipulation meant to drive you to buy more clicks and stay focused on using their incredibly sophisticated tools wisely for your own business objectives.

If you, instead, succumb to the casino of dings and the AI prophets pushing recommendations that treat clicks as achievements, then you will find yourself simply spending your money fiending for the digital fix.

Psychology

The behavioral addictiveness of social media is all over the news. Online giants such as Google, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn have spent billions of dollars to capitalize on the human need for positive feedback.

Current high-profile court cases seek to limit social media access for young people and to expose some unethical strategies by the executives of online giants meant to create addictive behavior in their users. It’s like the Big Tobacco settlements all over again, but with a much larger audience and many times the revenue.

It’s no secret that these platforms are fighting for your attention. Why? Because that’s what they sell: Your attention. They sell it to advertisers in the form of clicks.

We use social media and search engines daily. We go on Facebook or Instagram to connect with friends. We watch TikTok to see personalized content. We use LinkedIn to advance our careers. And we use Google to find anything we need. But, in each case, the platform itself is so stimulating and rewarding that we can lose sight of our actual motivations and get caught up in the kinesthetic rewards, like lotus-eaters at a carnival of lights.

We have learned to love the numbers that these platforms give us. We post pictures. Then, we check back on them. How many people saw them? How many liked them? The numbers themselves have become social rewards. The like is a quantifiable form of social endorsement, and people seek it out daily, hourly, even minute by minute.

What happens, though, when the person looking at the numbers isn’t posting a picture of their vacation, but instead is spending their company’s marketing budget on social posts and search advertising? Now, instead of views and likes, they’re seeing numbers of impressions, clicks, and conversions. And it feels good. It feels like winning. It feels satisfying to the same sensory reward system in our brains that lights up for every like.

But what is the value of those clicks and conversions beyond the personal psychological rush we get from seeing them on a screen? Are they valuable to our business objectives in the physical world? Is there a monetary return on the investment?

The answer is yes, as long as these numbers are seen simply as metrics that must be interpreted in the context of how they contributed to some future strategic value. In other words, did the clicks eventually bring actual customers? If so, then they are valuable data points in a larger process.

The danger lies in when we start to see clicks as products themselves, as things of inherent value, as Reece’s Pieces lain along a wooded path, as happy little dopamine triggers, then they become distractingly hypnotic and ultimately hollow.

Incentives

Over the same decade in which the social media platforms perfected the art of keeping consumers engaged with likes, views, notifications, and other measurable rewards, the companies behind those platforms built an enormous advertising industry by giving advertisers their own set of numbers to watch: impressions, clicks, views, and conversions.

Online advertising spending in the United States reached nearly $300 billion in 2025, an increase of almost 400% over the last ten years. According to their SEC filings covering the past decade, Google’s advertising revenue grew by 340% and Meta’s by over 1,000%. That is astonishing.

This extraordinary growth means that advertisers are choosing to spend their money on these platforms. So, they must be adding value to the advertisers, right? Well… yes. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

A consumer chooses to search with Google.
A business wants to be in Google results in order to be seen by the searcher.
Google sells to the business the ability to be present in the results.
If a searcher clicks a result, then it demonstrates that Google served the searcher well (they must have liked the result enough to click it).
The advertiser is happy that an interested person clicked their ad to their website.
Google gets paid for the click by the advertiser (pay-per-click).
The searcher is happy. The advertiser is happy. Google gets paid. Everyone wins.

This model is ingenious. It is a stellar example of radical innovation in good clean market economics.
The searcher is getting the value they want (by getting good results to their searches).

Google is getting real-time feedback on whether a result is good for the searcher based on whether they click it or not.
The advertiser gets exposed to the searcher in a context that is relevant to the searcher and matches what they are looking for in that very moment.

The advertiser doesn’t pay unless the searcher clicks to see their offering.
And Google doesn’t get paid unless the searcher clicks the result, which means Google provided value to both the searcher and the advertiser.

It’s freakin’ brilliant. All motivations and agendas are perfectly aligned. Again, everyone wins. That is how it all started. Where it gets tricky, though, is with the nature of incentives.

Google ultimately gets paid when there is a click. Therefore, Google sells clicks. They don’t necessarily need to provide value. They just need to sell clicks, and it is definitely possible to sell clicks without providing value.

As long as the advertisers want the clicks, they will buy them. There are two ways to make advertisers want the clicks regardless of whether they ultimately lead to any real-world business value for the advertiser:

Make the experience of receiving the click psychologically rewarding.
Establish and measure the value of the click with an internal metric (conversions).

Then, the advertisers lust for the click and justify its value with the tools and metrics provided in the very interface that is selling it to them.

Conversions

A conversion is a desired trackable action. That’s all it is. Technically, you can make any trackable action be a conversion (a view, a like, a click, or whatever). But we usually reserve conversions for tracking the actions that we are most trying to achieve.

For example, an ecommerce business that is selling products online would choose the online sale (the payment transaction) as their conversion. So, when these advertisers buy a click and that click leads to a conversion, then the advertiser is getting monetary return right there on the spot (from the online transaction). When a conversion equals revenue, you can use conversions to justify the value of the paid clicks that generated those conversions. You paid for 100 clicks. It generated 10 online sales. How much did the clicks cost? How much did you make on the sales?

A service business, on the other hand, would track contacts as the conversion (when someone calls, emails, or fills out a web form). This conversion does not represent monetary return. In this case, we don’t know yet if the conversion will lead to revenue or not. Is the contact an actual person or just more spam? If it is a person, are they a qualified buyer? Do they end up buying or just shopping? A service business has a lot of unknowns even after a conversion is generated, and they definitely aren’t collecting revenue yet.

In this context, using the conversion to justify the value of the click doesn’t work. They are both just data points in the middle of the funnel. They are both costs. They are both made valuable based on future events, if they are legitimate contacts, if they are qualified prospects, if they eventually become customers.

While clicks and conversions are both invaluable data points when running a successful marketing funnel, neither of them represent the end of the funnel. Neither of them provide monetary return for the service business, and one is definitely not proof of the other’s value. That is a logical fallacy.

As a service business, you do need to advance people down the funnel. Getting clicks means that your impressions are working. Getting conversions means that your clicks are working. But, those conversions may bring you contacts that are worthless. They may bring only cost (in dealing with the contacts) and no opportunity. Or they may bring great value, we don’t know until further down the funnel.

Gamification

In the same ways that Meta has gamified social and emotional feedback for Facebook and Instagram users, Google has gamified online advertising for businesses.

When you advertise with Google, you set up your own campaign. You choose your geographic focus areas and the keywords that you want to trigger your result. You choose objectives, spending limits, pace of spending, and more.

After you set up your campaign, Google assigns the campaign an Optimization Score from 0–100%. This score lets you know the quality of your campaign. Psychologically, it’s a judgement of how well you set up your campaign. If you get a low score, you feel like you did not do a very good job.

Google then gives you recommendations for how to improve your score, and it’s like playing a video game to try and make all of the recommended changes to keep improving your score. You’re glued to the screen and trying to level up.

What most people don’t realize, though, is that Google’s recommendations are not ultimately based on what’s good for your business. They are specifically designed to help you get more clicks (which means increase your spending with Google).

Each recommendation may or may not be good for your business, but it is definitely about getting more clicks. Why? Because Google sells clicks. Thus, they design the experience of running an ad campaign around getting more clicks.
The work you do to implement Google’s recommendations makes you feel like you are not just buying the clicks but “achieving” more clicks. It’s challenging and psychologically rewarding to do so. Imagine if Walmart made you get out of an escape room in order to give them $100 for groceries.

This gamification blurs the perceived value of the tool and the objectives of the user. Are you there to play the game, to level up? Or, are you there to use this incredible, self-service, online advertising platform as part of a larger effort to achieve a real-world outcome (like new prospects and customers for your business)?

Increasingly, we buy online advertising because the advertising platforms give us satisfying evidence that something is happening on the screen. We buy reach, views, and clicks because it feels good when we get them, a rush, a fix.

Social media taught us to crave the quantified social reaction. Advertising platforms then turned that same psychological device into a business model to sell clicks.

Conclusion

Google and Meta are selling us the market’s attention. They provide sophisticated tools that give us access to people just when they are looking for exactly what we sell. The offering is incredible. But whether we get return from our investment is up to us.

If you represent a service business that is trying to get customers (or any organization not primarily concerned with selling products online), then you should use the following funnel as the framework of your online advertising.

Impressions show the people in your marketplace that you exist.
Engagement nurtures relationships with those who engage.
Clicks send people to your website who may be genuinely interested to buy.
Conversions are contacts from interested parties.
Leads give you the people to follow up with.
Prospects are qualified and can be nurtured to become your buyers.
Customers are your business.

Every step in the funnel has value. Every data point is a necessary measurement for a strategic online advertising campaign. But there is no revenue until you get to #7 (customers).

So, be aware that Google is selling you clicks, not customers. And beware of digital advertising platforms turning marketing results into a type of gamified consumerism that is as addictive to us marketers as social media is to the general population.

Increasingly, the discipline required of a good online marketer is the ability to ignore what feels rewarding and to focus on what creates real-world value. Otherwise, you may spend a fortune meandering through the glitzy maze of clicks, so proud of achieving your spend.

If you found this article helpful, learn more about Jason’s consulting work in Strategic Digital Marketing Consulting.