Prénatal Ecommerce Metrics

            A look at the web page for the success stories of Adobe’s analytical software suite Omniture is a veritable “who’s who” of organizations from the financial services, retail, media, entertainment, and life sciences industries.  Amongst this grouping of companies is Prénatal, a Milano, Italy-based online hub of information for mothers-to-be that prominently features a social exchange, localized support forums, and an ecommerce offering which specializes in the sales of products relevant to the expectant mother.  Likewise, Prénatal manages 437 brick and mortar retail locations throughout Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (14 countries, total) that are based upon an “open store” philosophy featuring spacious aisles and a friendly atmosphere in which a potential customer can approach any staff member for assistance.

            As with most companies, Prénatal recognized that in the “Web 2.0” world, an ecommerce solution’s success is often times predicated upon the community a company builds around their offering.  But the company’s efforts were managed entirely by an external interactive agency that provided no way for Prénatal representatives to manage content or oversee social collaboration.  Going forward with a multi-channel approach, Prénatal implemented Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite for Web Experience Management, an incredibly comprehensive ecommerce engine that allows marketing personnel to be agile in their efforts.

            The agility afforded to Prénatal comes in the form of easing the burden of web authoring and publishing by including easy to use templates that can be filled with many different content types including text and images, as well as SWF (Flash) files and promotional displays.  Likewise, the suite provided the company’s dedicated eBusiness department to manage entire sites and stores, as well as create their own web page types and structures to be populated with whatever content they chose.  This new “ownership” of company content freed the marketing division of the company from having to collaborate with an outside source, including their Information Technology department, and they are now free to implement workflows and monitor their publishing for multiple country-localized sites once.

            Prénatal’s efforts are based upon their use of Adobe CQ, a content management systems (CMS) that allows for the delivery of digital content across many channels at once.  According to Adobe’s website, “Adobe CQ is the foundation of the Adobe Experience Manager solution. It provides digital marketers with easy-to-use, web-based applications for creating, managing, and delivering personalized online experiences” (Adobe CQ).  In particular, Prénatal will rely on Adobe’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) to serve as a repository for access to digital assets like videos and images used in the creation of company marketing materials.

            Likewise, Prénatal engages in content targeting, a methodology whereby mothers-to-be are presented with very personalized content based upon demographic information gleaned from their user profile.  Prénatal provides a rich experience by allowing shoppers to customize their experience based upon three categories – Themes, Needs, and Time Period.  As mothers progress in their pregnancy, the website’s content will shift dynamically to reflect information pertinent to their experience including help and support articles, social content, and products recommendations.

            Included within their efforts to move away from the classic one-sided “Web 1.0” ethos and provide a more communal feel to the website as a whole, Prénatal also launched a company blog, a user discussion forum, and a rating system that lets customers rate product effectiveness by leaving post-purchase comments.  The community surrounding these new-age offerings allows the company to both passively observe customer commentary and to communicate directly with potential consumers.  Doing so provides the intimate setting the company so badly desired and provides Prénatal with an infinite source of feedback regarding an expectant mother’s needs and questions.

            Overall, Prénatal has benefited greatly in a number of different ways.  First is that their web development work is now able to be handled completely in-house with very little input from technically adept staff.  While a content management system like Adobe’s CQ undoubtedly costs money, its implementation has the potential to save Prénatal a great amount over an extended period of time by releasing their efforts from the grasp of the interactive agency they once worked with.  Likewise, with the myriad data collection tools built into the website (forums, product commentary, etc…), the company is able to gather extremely specific information on their target demographic just by these women’s participation.

            Yet for all of the company’s internal web efforts, Prénatal does not appear to effectively harness social media as it is today.  Granted the company maintains both Twitter and Facebook accounts, it does not maintain localized versions of those accounts in the same way that it does for their websites.  An example of this is that while the company has a following on Facebook 60,000 users strong, all of their postings are in Dutch.  Likewise, each tweet on Twitter is in Dutch – a strange notion considering the company’s headquarters is located in Italy.  The company could benefit greatly by creating these localized accounts for their different retail territories and building individualized social media experiences around the cultural norms their potential consumers embody.  While their forums exist as a medium with which mothers-to-be can share information with one another, differences in belief systems and values from one forum poster to another could understandably create a cacophony of noise that could leave visitors with a bad experience.  This, in turn, could affect their decision to shop with Prénatal.

            Similarly, as Prénatal is also using Google Analytics for their web metrics collection (UA-2449851-1), the company could benefit greatly from analyzing which of their overall traffic is derived from their social media efforts.  Identifying external networks where consumers are engaging with their content and comparing that to traffic volumes generated by direct visits can lend a great amount of insight into where their marketing efforts should be focused long-term.  As well, the company could get a better understanding of the communities that crop up around their products and services that they do not necessarily control.  Customer engagement beyond the confines of the company website is incredibly important.  According to Patricia Redsicker of socialmediaexaminer.com, “Invariably people who have engaged with you online become customers at higher rates, and they in turn tell their friends about you, revving up your marketing engine over and over again” (2012).

References                               

Adobe CQ (n.d.) Retrieved December 9, 2012 from http://www.adobe.com/products/cq.html

Redsicker, P. (2012, November 29) 3 Easy Steps to Engaging Your Customers. Retrieved December 9, 2012 from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/engagement-marketing-book-review/

Taking Action with GA Goals, Funnels, and Filter

            The fundamental notion behind the use of Google Analytics is that the suite provides statistical information designed to help an individual or an organization meter their website with the end goal of affecting a positive change in its overall web traffic.  Likewise, the service provides a wealth of insight into the many ways casual, first-time web visitors can be converted into returning visitors or long-term customers.  While understanding the myriad ways in which visitors can and do enter a website is paramount to increasing its visibility online, it is equally important to dissect that traffic once it has arrived in order to direct the flow to the most important content within.  This traffic can be better guided through the use of goals, an understanding of funnels, and the addition of filters to more accurately disseminate these visits.  The use of this trifecta of tools can provide content owners with the ability to advance their conversion efforts whether they operate an ecommerce store, a general interest blog, or any other type of web property.

            To begin, a conversion is a web visitor that has moved from one point to another within the website along an expected route and has performed some series of pre-determined actions to get them there.  While a classic ecommerce website might set the completion of an online sale as their primary conversion objective, other websites like personal blogs and corporate-owned entities can set their own unique goals based on their personal or business needs.  Such goals can include completing an online contact form and reaching a confirmation page, or a search for some information within the site itself ending in the display of a search results page.  In such cases, a visitor reaching a certain web page after they have performed some action can be considered a qualified goal.  While they differ in nature from one organization to another, conversions simply represent the attainment of those goals.  And with important information being spread throughout a typical website, it is often times important for the site’s owner to guide visitors to their goals via a funnel.  A funnel in GA is the literal representation of the path one must follow to get to a different point and complete a goal.  Yet all of the information GA collects is not equal, and some is even unnecessary.  For the purpose of generating reports, some visits deemed irrelevant to the goals can be left out.  One interesting feature of GA is the ability to create filters to remove this unwanted information before reporting.  These filters allow one to include or exclude traffic from certain domains, certain IP addresses, and certain subdirectories.

            From both a design and business perspective, each of these individual tools allows for a culling of clear data so desperately needed for making good decisions, and for implementing efficiencies needed to get a visitor from one point to another.  While it would be logical to assume that the majority of visitors arriving to a website do so via the site’s homepage, this is not always the case, especially considering the traffic that modern search engines provide.  This fact alone adds an unparalleled level of importance to creating and monitoring goal pages, visualizing exits and abandonment of a funnel, and separating that traffic into important categories.

Goals

            To assist in the realization of goals, it is important to include key elements in each page, possibly through a template, to entice visitors to look further into a website.  These elements, which might take the form of a site wide navigational menu or an always up to date news ticker, should lead to goal pages in order to track their success, and the goal pages should be part of the funnel that web traffic is expected to follow.  According to Google, these goals “…are a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your objectives” (Set up Goals).  Businesses can use these goals in order to determine the overall effectiveness of their website.  A very low conversion rate through these goal pages allows for a unique visualization of what “breakdowns” might exist in the system and the ways in which web managers can take action to increase the likelihood that goals will eventually be achieved.

Funnels

            Funnel visualizations can be helpful with a number of different types of websites, but are uniquely useful on ecommerce properties.  In particular, it is often times important to understand whether visitors are exiting the funnel and leaving a business’ website altogether, or are exiting but staying within the same domain.  As stated by Dave Sparks of sixrevisions.com, “You can then look and see where people are dropping out and this can easily highlight problematic or broken forms and links or long-winded pages that people simply give up on” (2010).  Armed with this information, a company can set out to increase their sales conversion rate by making the process as easy as possible for client to move through.

Filters

            As previously mentioned, some traffic to a website should not be counted as it does not accurately represent true visitors or customers.  A unique example of this is a corporation that refers to their own website on a daily basis to answer customer questions.  While employees get information from the site in much the same way that customers do, they don’t necessarily represent the company’s target market.  In fact, their visits to the website can cloud and skew the monthly data and provide a false positive to its meaning.  In a case like this, it is important to scrub that information from the results before they are presented.  As stated by Google, “Filters allow you to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a profile. For example, you can use filters to exclude traffic from particular IP addresses, focus on a specific subdomain or directory, or convert dynamic page URLs into readable text strings” (About profile filters).  Through the addition of filters, GA provides a quick and effective way of removing this information and is aimed at providing more accurate visitor statistics.

            The best way to make good decisions is to begin with clear data.  The information provided through these tools allow an organization to better visualize the way traffic moves within a website beyond the standard traffic flow report GA provides.  Taking action without this information can have a detrimental effect on one’s web offering.

References

About profile filters (n.d.) Retrieved December 2, 2012 from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033162

Set Up Goals (n.d.) Retrieved December 2, 2012 from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1032415

Sparks, D. (2010, March 14) Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels. Retrieved December 3, 2012 from http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-analytics-in-depth-goals-and-funnels/

Marketing for Non-Profits : Salvation Army

Since we can now officially say “’Tis the season”, and the red buckets are showing up outside the front doors of a lot of retailers, I’ve decided to write about an interesting campaign I came across a little while back involving the Salvation Army, a Portland, ME marketing firm, and a bit of guerilla marketing.

First started in San Francisco in 1891, the annual Red Kettle campaign has been the Salvation Army’s most prominent fundraising effort. In 2010, despite the economic recession, the group brought in a record-breaking $139 million, all of which was used in the communities where it was collected (Salvation Army Red Kettles Set New Record). But despite their honorable work during the holiday season, the Salvation Army’s marketing efforts have always been quite slim. As the group’s Development Director Craig Evans put it, “The Salvation Army has not invested heavily in marketing or advertising, we’ve prided ourselves on good stewardship…83 cents of every dollar going back to services.” (MacLean, 2009)

In 2009, with the intake of donations down 20-30 percent from previous years, the group turned to Portland, Maine-based marketing agency Via who agreed to help with their marketing needs at no cost. As Via copy editor Mike Irvine states, “We embraced the idea that we had no money–and so that’s where the idea started, let’s do a campaign that cost nothing.”

The campaign itself consisted of guerilla-style marketing incorporating the use of stamped messages on everything from pizza boxes to coffee cups, and used inspirational messages inscribed on glass surfaces in restrooms and on vehicles that would be driving around town. The effort took a great amount of coordination on the part of Via and included the help of 50 local businesses who agreed to help. As Evans further elaborated in the article “I look back at our origins, we started as a street ministry and sort of a guerrilla movement, why not use these guerrilla tactics…it’s a good fit.”

A campaign like this is effective for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, the Salvation Army enrolled local businesses into their efforts whose participation cost them nothing extra. Doing so meant that even though they maintained the collection buckets at larger stores like Wal-Mart, their campaign had greater reach through added exposure than in the past. Likewise, the target message was very clear, thought provoking, and relevant to the medium they chose. An example would be the stamps used on the products of local businesses. One such stamp read, “This ad cost nothing. The money we saved advertising on this hot cup helps us provide warm food for the homeless.”

For the IC statement, I would imagine it went something like this: “With your help, the Salvation Army provides for those in need each holiday season and throughout the year.”

Please check out the original news report video at this link to see the actual executions, and view the Salvation Army case study by Via Marketing at this link.

References

MacLean, M. (2009, May 14) Salvation Army’s edgy new marketing campaign. Retrieved December 24, 2011 from http://www.necn.com/Boston/Business/2009/05/14/Salvation-Armys-edgy-new/1242352124.html

Salvation Army Red Kettles Set New Record (2012, March 16) Retrieved November 25, 2012 from http://salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-dynamic-index/EC697EA3613F2070852576E8004C7DCB?Opendocument

Google Analytics Custom Reporting

While Google Analytics (GA) is a tool meant for recording and reporting statistical data as it relates to the visitors of just about any website, it proves particularly useful and insightful for blog curators.  As blogging is becoming more and more accepted as a form of journalism, and as a means for generating income, the implementation of a tool such as this can only serve to enhance the offering of such outlets.  And while this very adept software suite allows for the drill-down of myriad reports, some are of greater interest and use than others.

For starters, Google’s enhancement of its audience demographic makeup reporting is uniquely useful in understanding who visitors are, where they come from, and ascribing a level of loyalty over time.  The information collected within this report includes geographic location, language spoken, overall engagement, and the hardware and software combinations visitors use while viewing a website. 

Over time, that hardware has changed dramatically.  An experience that was at once caged within the confines of a personal computer has since been unleashed in the form of mobile web browsing.  Within the Audience category of GA, one finds the extremely useful Mobile report data subset which expands upon how many users have used a mobile device to visit a website, and the specific devices they used to do so.  This report, slim though it may be, provides a wealth of insight into the direction a website’s design should take.  In particular, this information provides the modern marketer or web designer with a deeper understanding of how visitors are engaging with their content, and proves useful with regard to highlighting the drawbacks and stumbling blocks that current web formatting may place in front of potential consumers.

For example, while the chart below from GA provides the standard fare of information related to monthly visits including important statistics like total visits, pages viewed per visit, and the website’s bounce rate, it also includes the total number of visitors browsing via a mobile device, as well as those that weren’t.  When digging deeper into the data, it can be seen that there are some slight contrasts in how these visitors interact with the site itself.  Namely the fact that visitors using a mobile device, which includes tablets, view on average less pages per visit, spend less time on the site per visit, and generally account for a higher bounce rate.

 

So how can this information be extrapolated out even further to guide design decisions?  For an answer to that question, the analytics professional must first understand GA’s Custom Reporting tab.  As part of this incredibly useful analytics packages, users can fine-tune the information they wish to receive and can visualize it in a number of different ways.  Sticking with the idea of understanding mobile users, a custom report can easily be created using one or many primary data points with secondary data points used to provide a greater level of detail.  In the picture below, using information from a different website than the one above, we that far and away, products from Apple, Inc. account for the majority of mobile visitors to the website.  These include the company’s flagship tablet (iPad), third and fourth generation iPhones, and their fifth generation iPhone in spots one, two, and three, respectively.  As the company’s devices further account for 40 percent of the top ten devices used to browse this website, it would be wise to make the viewing experience a pleasant one for those visitors.

Despite the uptick in web traffic as a byproduct of the proliferation of these devices, one simply cannot ignore the still-dominant desktop web browsing experience.  Through Custom Reporting, GA also provides unique insight into the software capabilities of the modern personal computer.  Most notably is the browser that visitors are using when perusing a website’s content.  How such information can be leveraged for the good of the marketer and designer is once again directly related to design decisions and understanding which browsers can handle various chunks of code.  While most web browsers ostensibly meet minimum requirements for rendering web data, requirements put in place by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the fact remains that some have trouble handling basic HTML and CSS formatting, as well as added effects for user engagement through advanced programming languages like JavaScript.  In the image below, it can be deduced that the majority of this particular website’s visitors will see the site rendered exactly as the developer has programmed it.  The majority of the visitors are using up-to-date browsers including Internet Explorer 8 and 9, as well as the latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari – three of which currently properly parse code from the as of yet released standards of HTML5 and CSS3.

And finally, understanding traffic sources to and from a website is vitally important to its long-term health and popularity.  Through GA’s Traffic Sources category, one can complete a very successful drill-down of information that relates to inbound traffic from not only search engines and paid advertising, but also other websites listed as referrals.  While web traffic that originates organically via searches through organizations like Google, Yahoo, and Bing seems to be the primary goal of many web developers, one cannot ignore this inbound referral traffic for two reasons.  First, the traffic may be coming from an outlet that is providing a positive view of the organization.  In such a case, logic would dictate that assigning someone the task of curating the community that crops up around this outlet could further reinforce the positive image of the company and allow them to grow their visitor base.  Conversely, the message within the referral traffic might be negative in nature.  An example would be a customer having had a bad example with a company and airing their grievances within online forums where someone might listen.  With this example, it also makes sense to have a company representative watch over the outlet for changing tides in customer sentiment and respond as necessary to quell the fears of any future customers.

 

All totaled, Google Analytics provides information that ranges from generic, to extremely in-depth.  Understanding its usefulness requires an open mind and a willingness to retrieve and interpret visitor information in a number of different ways.

Advertising with Facebook and Google

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Both Google and Facebook represent veritable behemoths in the age of social content sharing.  While Facebook started as a social network, the company as a whole appears to have grand ambitions of creating search functionality that leverages the social graph for dishing up relevant content to users.  Conversely, Google, classically a search provider, has stepped into the social arena by creating Google+, ostensibly to better their search features.

While both organizations appear to be edging ever closer to being outright competitors in overlapping industries, each has a unique advantage when it comes to their advertising arsenal.  On the one hand, Google recently passed the “one billion unique visitors per month” threshold (Young, 2011).  Each of these visitors represents advertising impressions on a massive scale with the potential to turn into click-throughs.  On the other hand, Facebook surpassed one billion total members in October 2012 (Key Facts) and recently introduced a way in which general users could pay a small fee to promote content that interests them to the top of their friend’s news feeds (Sreenivasan, 2012).

With both services, one overriding theme seems to be laying out a plan for what needs to be achieved before ever beginning the process of advertising.  Without a solid groundwork, money can be wasted and you risk alienating potential customers by authorizing these services to display irrelevant results to users.  Likewise, industry professionals recommend a form of A/B Testing where two versions of the same ad are created in order to see which one performs the strongest.  As stated by Leyl Master Black of mashable.com, “You can then create a new ad that is similar to your best-performing ad, but tweak it just a bit to see if you can beat the previous performance” (2011).

Between the two, Facebook appears to have an advantage in the way its advertisements are presented.  Not only are they prominently placed within the website itself, they also include images.  Including anything other than text within a Google Ad would undoubtedly break the digital and minimalistic fung shui the company has worked so hard to cultivate, but could conceivably appeal to the more kinesthetic browsers of the web.  Merry Morud of searchenginewatch.com has a few interesting recommendations when it comes to choosing images.  Namely, Morud suggests selecting images that contrast with Facebook’s typical blue theme, cropping the images so that they deliver the most amount of emotional appeal while fitting within the ad box, choose a blend of ethnicities if using photos of people and add other elements to the text images like logos and branding.

As many industry professionals will attest, there is no singular answer to choosing an advertising platform.  The end-goal is of course to try and target a particular demographic, but how that’s done varies from one company to another and each business has ways for an organization to test their services rather inexpensively to see what works and what doesn't.

References

Black, L. (2011, August 29) Facebook Ads: 5 Tips for Success. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://mashable.com/2011/08/29/facebook-ads-tips/

Key Facts (n.d.) Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts

Morud, M. (2012, April 19) Facebook Ad Images – Tips for Killer Creative. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2168805/Facebook-Ad-Images-Tips-for-Killer-Creative

Sreenivasan, S. (2012, May 29) Facebook's tempting 'Promote' button for business. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-33619_3-57443211-275/facebooks-tempting-promote-button-for-business/

Young, R. (2011, June 23) Google Hits the Billion Monthly Unique Visitors Mark. Retrieved November 11, 2012 from http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2081332/Google-Hits-the-Billion-Monthly-Unique-Visitors-Mark

Content Vs. Conversation

The focus on content versus conversation debate is one that has been raging for many years and will be a point of contention for many more, especially considering how it relates to web traffic.  From the broad perspective of the field of journalism, Joy Mayer of the Missouri School of Journalism states, “To enhance their ability to fairly report the news, journalists needed to stand apart from their community rather than be participants” (2011).  This presents an interesting viewpoint as it sometimes limits an original creator’s input with the community lest they seem biased, and could conceivably result in the stalling of a topic of conversation as a whole.

Yet at the very heart of the content/conversation dilemma, one finds the ultimate goal of viewer engagement and the unending search for the proper way to not only lure in potential readers and commenters, but to keep them engaged in the long-term.  Renowned user interface specialist Ginny Redish views the individual methodologies for attracting viewers as a two-step process beginning with content.  As Redish states in a post through uxmagazine.com, “Site visitors and app users come for the content. Of course, the information architecture (IA) and the site search must make that content easy to find. The design must be attractive and usable. The technology must work” (2012).

Similar to the logic put forward by Redish, Paul Pruneau of socialmediatoday.com has a checklist he recommends for content marketing.  Pruneau portends that the need for the proper usage of content marketing within a website is a byproduct of the shifting landscape in digital marketing and provides ten ways in which the modern marketer can enhance their offering.  These include:

1.     Avoid you, you, you!  The core strategy behind content creation and its usage to spark conversation is that the topic presented needs to be less about the author, more about the reader and provide a call to action for the reader to engage.

2.     Forget the message and logo police.  Content creation requires brushing off the ways of the past whereby a company’s marketing department was in place primarily for pushing messages onto the general public.  Instead, these employees should be generating new content for the business on a non-stop basis to attract customers.

3.     Reach for engagement.  Heralded as the panacea of the business world in how it eventually (supposedly) turns potential consumers into converts, this engagement happens in myriad ways, but companies and personalities interested in conversing with their viewership need to understand that it needs to be about more than general product marketing – there needs to be real content that can be passed around, dissected and discussed.

All totaled, it would appear that instead of adhering to the classic idiom of “content vs. conversation”, a better strategy would be “content AND conversation”.  Using the content of a website to attract visitors via organic or paid search, combined with engaging them once they’ve arrived and making it easy for them to further share your content, would be a winning strategy.

References

Mayer, J. (2011) Engaging Communities: Content and Conversation. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102625/Engaging-Communities-Content-and-Conversation.aspx

Pruneau, P. (2012, November 12) 10 Point Checklist for Content Marketing. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://socialmediatoday.com/pruneau/994091/10-point-checklist-content-marketing

Redish, G. (2012, May 4) Content as Conversation. Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://uxmag.com/articles/content-as-conversation

Important Digital Marketing Metrics

            As times change and content on the web becomes ever more participatory, the collection and importance of various metrics is likely to change as well.  According to Marc Poirier, Chief Marketing Officer of Acquisio, a company that specializes in assisting in media buying, the five most important metrics to follow presently include a website’s bounce rate, average page views per visit, average cost per page view, average time on site and rate of return visitors.  The reasons for which are many but include the following:

Bounce Rate

            A “bounce” from a website is equal to a visitor browsing over and then leaving without exploring other sections of the same domain.  This can be a byproduct of both direct and organic or paid search traffic, but a high bounce rate is often times a signal that an organization’s online content is not nearly as engaging as it could be, and that it fails to entice users over to other parts of the website.  How this affects decisions related to online advertising is in deducing which ads or keywords result in higher bounce rates.  While a high bounce rate might often result in changes to in-page content, Poirier recommends letting low-converting and low bounce rate pages live on as they signify an interaction with a consumer that could be “…more important than you may have first anticipated” (2012, Poirer).

Average Page Views Per Visit

            A metric such as average page views per visit provides a true estimate of visitor engagement.  The common understanding is that the more interesting the content is, the more likely a visitor is to traipse on within the same domain, or possibly through a related sister website.  While these page views may not yet equal a true conversion, they do provide an indication of your work’s influence.  As Poirer states, “When people find content that means something to them, they keep going deeper, and we know that the trend leans towards them sharing content they enjoy with their friends. These are people who may actually end up influencing more sales, and knowing what keywords are successful in this endeavor will help you to build an even larger customer base” (Poirer).

Average Cost Per Page View

            When engaging in the purchase of media for online advertising purposes, it’s extremely important to understand how much it costs to attract a page’s visitor so that it can be directly tied to your eventual ROI.  Buying media should eventually result in a positive profit margin and assigning a level of profit can be done by knowing how much it cost to bring in visitors versus what of those visitors resulted in a conversion.

Average Time on Site

            As another important measure of engagement, average time on site provides qualitative data including the trust your brand instills in consumers, as well as an overall level of curiosity about your product offering.  As Poirer states, “Use this metric in combination with bounce rate and page views per visit for a complete picture” (2012).

Rate of Return Visitors

            If a website hosts an engaging level of content, it is more likely to not only attract new visitors, but garners visits from previous visitors.  In terms of ecommerce, Poirer equates these revisits to consumers “browsing the aisles” of a classic retail store.  To enhance the level of return visits, Poirer recommends engaging in a necessary level of two-way conversations with visitors in order to show them that you are willing to invest as much in the customer as you want them to invest in your business.  This establishes trust with the consumer and can result in a greater level of returns.

References

Poirer, M. (2012, July 27) 5 Digital Marketing Metrics That Matter. Retrieved October 30, 2012 from http://mashable.com/2012/07/27/marketing-metrics/

“Dark Social” Affecting Web Traffic

            Web metrics are an interesting creature.  Suites like Google’s Analytics provide an absolute wealth of information about visitors to a website, but there are unfortunately some things such a package is not yet able to measure.  Even more unfortunate is that some can’t measure a traffic source that is spreading extremely quickly – inbound visitors from social sharing.

            Now, it should be noted that not all social media is created equal.  Generally speaking, you have large-scale services like Facebook and Twitter that rely heavily on social networking, and slightly smaller services like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon that operate as forum-type enterprises that exist heavily on user-generated and user-promoted content.  With any of these groups, when a visitor arrives to your website via a link posted to them, it is quite visible.  In fact, that traffic can often times be traced back to the very page in which it originated.  But there are often bits of traffic that defy common logic.  Almost always listed as the rather innocuous “direct traffic”, these visitors can at times account for a very large volume of all inbound visits.  Unable to be classified by origin, this traffic is referred to by The Atlantic’s Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal as “dark social.”

            Dark social is a form of linking to web content that Madrigal associates with being outside of the typical social arena, namely links and content being shared via email, texts and instant messaging.  While these links are by definition “shared”, when clicked, they bring a visitor directly to the content with no stops in between.  Because of this, a marketer or web developer has trouble determining the origin of the visit.  Having this bit of knowledge helps in establishing future marketing programs based on popular outlets that generated interest for an organization and can or should be pursued further.

            Matt Buchanan, a Buzzfeed.com tech writer disagrees ever so slightly.  As a rebuttal to Madrigal, Buchanan states, “It might be more accurate to call the universe of direct traffic the noumenal web— a big, messy bowl of stuff that we know is there but whose composition we can’t actually probe with any of our traditional senses (in this case, web analytics, or our nose)” (Rosales, 2012).  Buchanan goes on to emphasize that not all direct traffic is dark social, or can be classified as dark social.  It is merely a source of visitors that doesn’t report where it is coming from.  There is simply no referral data attached to the visit (Buchanan, 2012).

            The numbers fail in helping an organization fully understand their inbound traffic and where to direct resources for future endeavors.  Does that mean Google Analytics isn’t good for anything else?  Of course not.  Such a service, which can be had for free, still provides ample information related to overall web traffic.  No matter the nomenclature, this unverifiable type of traffic represents an inherent flaw in modern web analytics, but provides insight into social sharing before social media was a “thing”.  In fact, it has all outward appearances of an untraceable word-of-mouth type of marketing – something some marketers would agree is the most powerful type of marketing there is. 

References

Buchanan, M. (2012, October 22) There's Less “Dark Social” Than Meets The Eye. Retrieved October 29, 2012 from http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/theres-less-dark-social-than-meets-the-eye/

Rosales, L. (2012, October 22) Dark social: the website traffic data that we never see. Retrieved October 29, 2012 from http://agbeat.com/real-estate-technology-new-media/dark-social-the-website-traffic-data-that-we-never-see/