Return on Intention

The best thing about digital media is the worst thing about digital media. Data. Online its easy to track just about everythings, but often so much data is produced that its easy to get lost in it, especially if you new to the game.

Every business, organization and person has a slightly different idea of what success is. For some people, their primary reason online is to provide information and sway opinions. For others the goals is sell products or attract new sales leads. For each case, there is a different set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). You can spend hours digging through numbers and never find insight if you don’t know what to look for. So regardless of what your goals are, or if your new to the game are 3 metrics you can’t afford to ignore. These metrics are not the be-all-end-all, but they are a really good place to start and refer back to from time to time to monitor general health.

1. Is anybody listening?

No matter what your goals are, your website or online presence isn’t doing any good if no one hears it. Yep this means traffic, but before you go looking for your monthly “hits” report lets talk about your metrics options. Hits are about the worst option you have. A “hit” is a request sent the web server. This means when you type www.google.com into your web browser, a request is sent to Google’s server asking for the home page. That’s a hit. Then to load the Google logo on that page the web browser sends a request to Google’s server again asking for that image. That’s another hit. Suffice to say, Hits don’t measure people, it measures request to the server. If your home page has 20 images and two css (cascading style sheets) files, then one person loading your home page once will result in 23 hits. Not a good metric really.

The best metric to use for gauging traffic is unique visitors. Most web analytic programs have this metric built in, so it won’t take much to find the number, just look. Unique visitors will show you actual people, not server requests. It is a much more accurate number and one that is essential to keep track of. Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for a big number, your job is make that number grow. If you have 10 hits a month, then make it 20. This is about growth, not volume.

2. Does Anyone Care?

While traffic is good, its not the whole story. Not only do you need an audience to send your message to, you also need to know if that message is working and relevant to the audience. Engagement is what we are looking for.  Measuring engagement is hard and can be done in many ways, but the simple and quick way to start to find insight is by looking at time on site.  This metric can be substituted with time on page, but both get at the same point. Time on site (or page), as its name implies, is how long someone stayed on your site. The longer they were on your site, the more engaged they were with your content. If your website is boring or too hard to use, the user will give up and go away, so a long time on site usually means that your are doing a good job of engaging your visitors. Beware, sometimes a long time on site is the result of people going around in circles looking for content. This means that your website isn’t so frustrating that they give up right way, but the content they want to find is hard for them to get to.  Look at other metrics like returning visitors and click paths to try and get a better idea of what your time on site stats are telling you.

3. Is it doing anything for me?

The granddaddy of them all – conversion. If you have an action that you want a visitor on your website to perform, and they perform it, you have a conversion. If you are trying to sell online, then every sale is a conversion. If you want people to sign up for a newsletter, then when they do its a conversion. These are real tangible results we’re talking about here. Most web analytic programs have a way of setting goals to track conversion, but at its crudest level you can calculate a conversion rate by taking the number of people who took the specified action and divide it by the number of visitors you got in the same time period. If you had 3 people out of 200 sign up to your newsletter in a week, then your conversion rate would be 1.5%.

Wheres the insight?

The real insights you can gain from these metrics are what they tell you all together. Each one tells a fact, but together they can tell a story. If you have a low unique visitor number, then you have an awareness problem. Your solution is in marketing. If you have a high unique visitor number, but your time on site number is low that means either: A) people are finding what they want to know on your site right away, or B) people think that your website is not the one they want to deal with for this subject matter. If your conversion rate is high, then the most likely scenario from the previous sentence is A and your doing great. If your conversion rate is low, then the answer is more likely B, and you need to work on your website.

These three metrics can go a long way in helping you steer your online efforts in the right direction. The name of the game is continual improvement, so see where you are now, try some things and keep what brings up your numbers.

Its easy to think that the world of traditional media is going away. There is no shortage of people screaming from their soap boxes that the internet will render all of this antiquated technology useless. Revolution is sexy. Unfortunately change rarely happens this way. Its usually a process of evolution. While the internet may seem to be a drastic fast changing technology, it might be a good idea to remember that the internet and the web took quite a few years to become what it is today.  In this world of twitter and iPhones its hard to believe that there are still many people in America that have never been on the internet. So while it seems that the world is changing to make the television and the ad model that so many companies have become accustomed to using a thing of the past, its nice to stop and take a look at some data on the subject.

Its good to keep in mind that through all the innovation that have occurred in media, new media hasn’t killed old media. This seems to still hold true, at least according to the latest report on the 3 screens from Nielson. The report about the “3 screens” (1st screen – tv, 2nd screen – computer / internet, 3rd screen – mobile devices / phones) has a few nice tidbits of information that should have you stop and think before you call up your traditional media advertising agency and cancel your account.

While the report does show some growth for the digital channels (online video is up about 35%) and the new ( sort of ) time shifing technology (DVR usage is up about 21%) it also shows that 99% of video consumed in America was done on traditional TV.  The report also shows that the “older” demographics are increasing their consumption of all media types (I have a hard time classifying 35 year-olds as “older”). So basically you can reach nearly all demographics using online channels, but the kicker here is that you can still reach 99% of the video viewers on good old traditional un-time shifted TV.

Whats really going here is two trends that keep growing year over year: 1.) we are consuming more media, and 2.) we multi-task media. According to this report “Americans consume media at a record pace – 129 hrs of TV, 27 hrs of Internet, 3 hrs of mobile video each month”. According to these numbers, we spend just about as much time interacting with video content as we do sleeping every month. The growth numbers we see for the online and mobile channels are not coming out of people’s TV time, but are in addition too them. We are still a nation of TV watchers, but we also do it online and from our phones. This seems reasonable. When I got my iPhone I started to read my Google reader from it and checking my twitter feed resulting in my “usage” of those things to increase, but not at the expense of my other media habits.

The trend of multi-tasking media is not much of a surprise either. Working from home sometimes ( read  – all the time ) means digging through clients analytics looking for insight from the couch on my laptop while House is playing on TV. I just love his snarky humor. According to this report, its not just me.

Seth Goden called it out over a decade ago in “Permission Marketing” – while permission marketing is the goal, we will always have the need to interrupt people to get them to raise their hand to sign up.  The first part of any sales or marketing funnel is awareness, and that will always require the skills  we have learned over the years in traditional advertising. While the mediums may change, the ability to craft a relay a good story will always be needed. I predict that the future belongs to the agencies / groups / people who can add the skill sets of both the “old” and “new”. There may be a Revolution under foot… er, evolution.

This week in a meeting a client asked for us to take over their adwords accounts. Their fear is that their bounce rate from those campaigns are too high.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.

After yesterdays post on some simple SEO (search engine optimization) tools, I thought why not post about a few tools that every web person needs.

FireFox

OK, so you probably already have this one, and it’s not really tool, but for the web developer tool bar, you’ll need FireFox to run it. Besides, 3.5 just came out and its pretty nice.

1. Web Developer Tool Bar

This is a FireFox plugin, so get FireFox. The Web Developer Toolbar is extremely helpful because it allows you to disable or enable css and images, highlight elements and has quick links to the HTML and CSS validators built in. There are a ton more tools, so check it out. Very handy stuff.

2. XRay

XRay is a javascript bookmark that when clicked,  gives you a really cool floating box over the currently opened webpage. When you click on anything on the page you can see its id and class information, its element type, its borders, padding and margins. This is super helpful for finding those wacky display issues. It also shows the current element in the DOM tree so you can back out of that element one parent at a time to see where problems might be occuring.

3. FireBug

I hear there is more than on way to use firebug, but I just got the FireFox plugin. FireBug gives you some really great tools like a javascript console for the page you are on, information about the page loading, a full DOM tree with details and even an HTML outline so you can drill down through your content to get to a specific item to see its properties. It will even show you what CSS styles are applied to that element, what assigned it  and any other CSS declaration that were overwritten to product the final results.

Yesterday (July 2, 2009) I saw Chris Kenworthy give a presentation on SEO (search engine optimization) at Webuquerque. It was a great presentation and Chris really knows what hes talking about, but it prompted me to share a few tools that anyone can use to take care of the low hanging fruit of on-site SEO themselves.

1. Website Grader – This is a tool form hubspot that will go through your site and identify the seo problems you have. If you’re missing meta tags or headers the website grader will tell  you so you what to focus on.
2. W3C Validator – This tool is not really intended for SEO, but rather to validate your markup (the code that makes your site show up). This tool, like Website Grader only requires you to put in a url and it will chech it out and return a report. This can be helpful for on-site SEO, because if your site has bad markup, then the search engines might have a hard time reading it.

These tools will not get you the results that an SEO, or better yet an SEM (search engine marketing) professional can get you, but it will take care of the easy stuff you can do yourself to increase your search rankings.

There is quite a conversation going on right now in the marketing departments across America. There seems to be a new (well … sort of new) bright shiny object that seems to be causing some trouble. It’s called social media.
With Comcast and Zappos on Twitter and Nike on Facebook, social media is the place to be. Every day we hear about another traditional media source losing revenue or shutting down and more reports saying that advertising isn’t working the way it once did. From the other side of isle we hear the social media crowd saying that the new read/write web is the future. Social media or die, or so it goes.
Compounding the problem, there are rumblings that the top referring sites for many successful websites aren’t Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore. Now it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook. Something’s afoot. So, should all businesses rush to social media as a means to succeed, or is it all hype?
Given all this noise, it’s easy to see why so many marketers and business people are trying to figure out what a “FaceTube” is. How about advertising? We get that. Do it online? Get me some banner ads!
Social media is supposed to enable groups of people with similar interests to get together and … hang out. It seems to work great and brands want in on it. But even if the company manages to figure out the technology, then what? Well, they engage the group. Does that mean sell more stuff? Does that mean more “Top of Mind” awareness? It’s not clear, but people like it.
So it seems that customers want companies to get in on social media. Most companies seem to think they should, but they also don’t know why. The main reason is that while the internet is much more measurable than other marketing communication channels, it’s still hard to figure out if your Twitter account or YouTube video is closing sales. Many people have done amazing things for their business, brand recognition and bottom line using social media. So it stands to reason that it works and companies should do it. People like to do business with people like them, so getting involved and engaged with customers has to be a good thing, right?
Hold on a second. This conversation sounds familiar!
It seems that social media is widely regarded as “the right thing” for companies to do. There is some signs that it works but it’s hard to tie to direct sales. This sounds a lot like brand awareness advertising. We do it (or did it depending on who you are) because it was “the right thing” to do to be successful. It seemed to work, at least all the big successful companies did it, and it seemed to work. It’s just kind of hard to directly tie it to sales.
Is social media the “new” branding? Does it make a difference in this ROI driven world? What do you think?

Twitter is a very powerful, and as of late, popular tool for the online crowd. Twitter is really nothing more that a one-to-many message service that restricts posts to 140 characters, and has been called everything from the new billboard to micro-blogging.  Twitter is used a little differently by everyone; some use it as it was originally indented, to say what you are you doing now, while others use it to post their witty comments and still others to spread links. According to Joseph Jaffe, Twitter is a giant Ponzi Scheme (there’s a Twucker born every minute). If you ask me though, it’s the single greatest thing to happen to the blogosphere so far.

Blogging has been growing at a very steep upward rate for a few years now and there are millions of bloggers out on the web creating content. Some of it doesn’t interest me at all, like photos and a daily account of the family cat (unless its a lol cat), but there are many others out there creating content that is exactly what I am interested in. The problem is that there are so many blogs, it can be hard to find all the good stuff. Additionally, I don’t want to clog up my rss reader with a bunch of blogs that only have good content for me every blue moon while the rest of the time I have to read enough of the authors post in the stream just to find out I don’t care and move on. I prefer podcasting and audio formats over text formats, its easier for me to listen than to read to absorb content, so I want my rss reader only full of the stuff I really want. I still read a lot of posts from a lot of places, but I don’t subscribe to the feed until I see repeated good stories (for me).

Twitter isn’t much different. You find people who post about all sorts of things, some I’m interested in and some I’m not. I am much more likely to follow a person on twitter that I am to subscribe to their blog feed because on twitter each message can only be 140 characters. Its much faster for me to digest the information and decide if this person is adding value. It seems like less of a commitment, I suppose.

What I really like about twitter is that most of the posts I like, and therefor most of the people follow, tend to share what they find online that they find interesting. Most often its a blog post. Twitter is allowing me to find longer form content online that I normally wouldn’t, and becuase I follow people on Tiwtter that are interested in the same things I am, most of the time the posts they provide are interesting to me. It’s almost like the interent is prequalifing content just for me.

I also enjoy the witty remarks that people post to twitter, or quotes that my twitter “friends” have heard from other people, both funny and silly, but over all, twitter is a community based content finder and filter, and the best thing to happen to the blogsophere so far.

What do you use twitter for?

By the way, if your interested, you can follow me here: @reidgivens