OK, so maybe conversations are not REPLACING content, but it is clear that interaction and the discussion of ideas ARE changing the dynamic of the web. Just as static pages that you visit on websites are giving way to Social Distribution Streams of content you can consume anywhere, people no longer need to “publish” to communicate on the Web.
For some time now, I have found the most interesting nuggets or ideas in the comments of blog posts. Sometimes they are made by the readers and often they are made by the author in response to a question or challenge. You see this behavior on Twitter as well. People will link to, or retweet, an interesting post, article, or video and will add their own commentary as they pass the meme along.
In many ways, this behavior is a modern day letters-to-the-editor writ large and in real time. No more waiting for the next issue of your local paper so you can read the local liberal wit bitch-slap the local conservative curmudgeon, who happened to complain about an older article in the previous edition. The debate happens all over the web stream in a real-time, multi-platform discussion.
And the online discussion isn’t limited to reacting to online content. It has become harder to avoid spoilers about TV shows, etc., if you don’t watch certain shows when originally broadcast (and you didn’t avoid Facebook, Twitter, etc. until you catch up). More interesting has been the way that Twitter in particular has been inserted to create real time commentary and discussion to live events. Sometimes this is planned and productive and other times it is spontaneous and possibly disruptive (as in the recent set of cases where the audience has hijacked some conference keynotes). God help you today if you are not a good presenter or you misjudge the match between your material and your audience.
This all connects back to the themes of transparency and feedback. We are living in a world where the audience increasingly expects to participate and they will do so with or without your help or permission. Companies that choose to close comments on posts, for example, lose the ability to host and perhaps frame and influence the discussion. They don’t stop the discussion. It will happen with or without them. With Google Sidewiki it may even happen “on” their own site without their permission.
All this is actually GOOD news for the businesses and brands that learn to use the conversation to create relationships and develop communities. Messages are no longer one way communications that are distributed through a channel and controlled. Companies that recognize this and embrace this concept will flourish.
The social distribution system is a key aspect of why the web is becoming more about people and ideas and less about content and its static-object, connected-to-places (pages/sites) form…
I have had this post floating around in my head for literally about a year, but it hasn’t come out in written form until today. When it started, in my head, it was all about the fact that content wants to be independent of place or platform. Or, more specifically, that content should be “consumable” where and how the consumer wants to consume it. But, today the concept bouncing around in my head has gotten deeper and more complex. And, it keeps morphing…hence, perhaps, why it has taken me so long to write this.
The idea that we should not have to go to a web site to consume content seems somewhat obvious today, but it was a very short time ago that we needed to do exactly that. The advent of RSS and widgets that could pull content or functionality into any site or any online medium (e.g. start pages like iGoogle or social apps on Facebook, Myspace, or Open Social, etc.), however, meant that people could consume out at the periphery, without making them come to your site. This also meant that when your “stuff” was placed somewhere on the periphery, you could reach more people through serendipity. If someone liked your stuff enough to embed it in their “place”, their people could discover it and you. This was a big reason why social apps first took off, because their very use was a viral engine that connected to their social graph.
As this trend coincided with the advent of social sharing mechanisms like Del.icio.us, Digg, etc., and the attendant “share this” buttons, the isolated act of serendipitous discovery on the web became an ongoing flow of stuff. The web of places and destinations became the web of the stream.The nature of how we discovered or found stuff and gave it our attention had changed again.
The early web was all about browsing and hence about NAVIGATION. In this phase, the big players were the portals, like Yahoo, Lycos, etc., because they provided the navigation to get to the rest of the web. The next stage was about self-driven discovery and hence was all about SEARCH. Google figured out how to organize the content of the web by creating a proxy for the recommendations of the wide community via links to pages and their algorithm for assigning contextual authority to content. This stage, however, was still fundamentally about the location web and organizing pages and places.
Once we entered the content distribution and syndication phase, the construct changed again from BROWSE and SEARCH to DISCOVER and SUBSCRIBE. The acts of top down syndication and bottom up sharing fundamentally shifted us from LOCATIONS to STREAMS. We were no longer the ones moving from place to place to consume the content. It was now the content itself that was moving in a stream that could flow over or around us as we liked. If we wanted to ensure that a stream flowed past our island, we SUBSCRIBED to that feed.
At the same time that we began to subscribe to feeds, social networks started cranking up and created a whole new type of feed — the ever-changing STATUS of those on our “social graph.” What was previously a flow of articles or artifacts became a flow of comments, ideas, and links to other pieces of content.
This powered the disconnection of CONTENT from LOCATIONS even more and created a further meta layer for the exchange of ideas. No longer did you need to PUBLISH your thoughts, you could simply declare them out loud in a variety of ways. And, as people declared their thoughts, other people began to talk back and respond, in comments and social responses, and to pass ideas along by re-tweeting statements on Twitter and re-posting them in other spaces. This most recent shift completed a move from SUBSCRIBING to the acts of FOLLOWING and DISCUSSING. This last step is key.
John Borthwick wrote a pivotal piece on his blog last Spring which highlighted this shift in the flow of content called “The Rise of Social Distribution Networks.” The key word in the title is SOCIAL. The key take away (for me anyway) in that article and across my thinking on these concepts this year is that PEOPLE DRIVE THIS THING. What started as a digital printing press (hence “Movable Type”) focused on THE STUFF, has really progressed to be about ideas and the people who express them, respond to them, curate them, and pass them along. The most profound (or interesting, funny, etc.) of them get passed the furthest along the graph and have the greatest impact. This highlights what Mike Troiano of Holland-Mark talks about when he says that “the brand is the response, not the stimulus.” Ideas with the best response spread the most and gain the most currency. Producers of content, or products or services, all need to heed that concept within the framework of the web.
People who don’t “get” Twitter think of it as a communication platform or as “micro-publishing.” It is even generically referred to as “micro-blogging.” But that misses the point. Even the social platforms themselves have seen the need to go “location independent” via APIs, aggregators, etc. Once you move beyond thinking of the web and its tools as a set of PLACES and a way to COMMUNICATE, you can see it more clearly for what it has become: a stream of ideas that flows via social connections.
The implications of that reality for businesses and marketers we’ll get to another time…
You don’t need to yell your sales pitch through a bullhorn.
Social Media is not simply another platform for interrupting people with your sales pitch. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with selling stuff, and to do so takes a pitch of some kind. But, even I, the sales and marketing guy, get turned off by the direct, no pleasant introductory conversation, dive right in and get it on type of sales come-on, whether it is face to face, online, or in any other medium. Social Media extends that rule and even amplifies it.
I like people. I like getting to know people and I like learning what makes them tick and hearing what it is they have to say. This is at the heart of the concept that many refer to as AUTHENTICITY. We all have a bit of the voyeur in us (in a good way…). This is why we see our news filled with personal interest stories. This is also why many of us like when people add tweets about their personal life or what they are currently doing to their supposedly business focused online persona. Sure it is a bit like a soap opera, but it makes us feel connected to those people with whom we have a mainly one way relationship of listening.
So your voice – how you blog, tweet, post, update – has a big effect on how people will perceive you and how they will place value on your stream. As I start to follow more and more people on my personal twitter account, this is being driven home very clearly to me.
I pay closer attention to those who tweet in an authentic voice like a real person. This is even true with those tweeters who represent a company or brand as opposed to an individual, especially those who mix personal remarks and commentary with the content of their tweets to go beyond business announcements and attempts to get people to click on a bit.ly link. As my stream gets more cluttered, some people will get a larger piece of my attention…the authentic ones.
So, be a real person. Write in a real person’s voice, not in marketing copy. Be a helpful netizen. Don’t just focus on your company’s content or products. Join the conversation. Post things that are relevant but have no benefit to you. That way, when you do post a “pitch” or a product message it will be resonate and have a much greater effect with people who actually want to listen to what you have to say.
Presenting a product for purchase – moving your prospects from visitor mode to buyer mode.
For those sites that monetize by selling products this is often the most important step of the funnel. It is all well and good to have people read your helpful content and even to continue to engage with your site or newsletters on a regular basis. But while you want to grow an audience, you need at least a chunk of them to eventually convert or else the exercise is not commercial. Likewise, if you are ad supported, you need some level of demonstrable ROI to show your advertisers, unless they are just concerned with brand impressions, which is less and less common. So someone needs to click on something.
How do you get visitors to consider buying something and how do you measure it?
Some people will measure the conversion from relationships to customers as one big step. I prefer to break it down further to two steps (or even three): purchase consideration and store check out process. Each of these steps is measurable and is effected by different drivers. If optimization and revenue maximization is your goal, it helps to attack each step separately.
The first step is to get your relationship or visitor into the store or into the mode to think about buying your product. The key metric here is the visit to the store or product page, though some tactics skip this step all together and drive clicks directly to the shopping cart itself. The key tactic is to present the target with an offer. This can either be in reaction to users, such as displaying a special offer callout on a content page they are visiting, or can be proactive, such as sending the user an offer specific email.
In future posts, we will go into much greater detail on the strategy and tactics behind specific emails and broader communications approaches. There are a wide number of inputs that drive their success, from the frequency of touch, to the mix of content and commerce, to the specific types of offers you present and the creative you use to do so.
For today’s post, we will stay at a macro level and note the fact that the key aspect of conversion analysis here is to measure the effectiveness of tactics based on both the click through rate (CTR) they achieve, as well as the downstream metrics of orders/click and dollars/click. As we have said before, too keen a focus on the immediate metric (CTR) can lose the forrest for the trees. At the end of the day, it is all about the dollars that come from the activity. So do not stop your analysis between approaches at the one that produces the best CTR.
You can actually logically connect certain creative approaches to higher click through rates that have lower sales rates. Pitching something for free that actually has a cost is the clearest example. In so called “direct PPC” campaigns that focus on selling something immediately to those who click, driving down CTR can actually have a highly positive effect by focusing on those who are serious about buying something vs. those who never intended to buy, but were “just looking” or seeking a freebie. When you are paying for that click, you want a high ratio of buyers within clickers.
So if the key metric is visits to the store, which in turn is driven by CTR of site visitors or email readers, etc., what are the core drivers to effect that number? The main variables are within the offer or the pitch itself. What product are you offering? Do your prospects know the product? Where is the price point? Is it discounted? Are there special aspects beyond price, like free shipping? How are you describing the offer? What benefits are you presenting? What copy or visual creative are you using? Each of these elements can be tweaked and tested to optimize results.
Outside of the offer, what other factors drive success? How relevant is the offer to its context? In other words, does it match the content it sat next to? Displaying call-out ads on a site that relate to the content pages themselves will tend to have a much higher rate of engagement. If you run a home improvement site, ads for painting gear will generally drive better results sitting in the painting how-to section than generic home-improvement ads in their same spot. This sounds obvious, but it is amazing how many sites take a one size fits all approach.
In the next installment, we will finally examine the final step of the online conversion analysis funnel, the shopping cart and driving higher close ratios.
Photo by SumitBranding effect on direct campaigns Brands are still important! They drive an indirect ROI that should not be forgotten.
In an age where so much of what we do as online marketers has a measurable direct response, it is easy to forget the importance of building a brand. Even for those who do not expend any resources specifically dedicated to brand building activities, there is a branding effect in all programs and campaigns that can and should be measured and should be included when analyzing the value of a given activity.
In the traffic driving post in the online conversion analysis series, we looked at how marketers should try to measure the ultimate value of the activity by following that segment of site visits all the way through to monetization. When assigning a value though, there is an indirect (branding) effect that should be included in determining the ROI of the program or segment.
Let’s take paid search. Suppose you sell a product and you run a paid campaign whose immediate purpose is to drive users to a free trial and capture their email and permission to talk to them. The direct effect is measured by tracking the eventual revenue that comes from those measurable conversions. The indirect effect though is harder to measure but does convey value. Just because someone does not click on your ad, does not mean they don’t see and internalize your brand. This not only helps increase the effectiveness of the paid search campaign (because that surfer might click on your ad down the road if they have seen your ad a number of times and start to recognize the brand), but it also helps the response rate of other programs and ultimately can create traffic to your site that is initiated by the visitor directly.
This is often difficult to measure and it is especially difficult to apply the value back to specific programs. If you are doing a lot of different things to increase brand awareness, even if they are nominally all direct campaigns, it is hard to tell how much each program is contributing to this increase in people seeming to just walk through the door of their own accord. Often the only way to measure this on a program level is to turn the program off for a period of time while keeping everything else the same. For most people, this is not a real option unless the program is a failure and you are going to turn it off anyway.
How can you track the overall growth in brand driven traffic? There are a number of indicators that you can measure and will give you some insight into the growth of your brand value.
Number one is the volume of traffic your site receives from search engine referrals that are driven by your branded keywords. The more often someone is searching for ABC widgets and then visiting the ABC site, the more your brand is resonating in the conscience of those seeking widgets. It is actually amazing to use a competitive search analysis tool like Compete or Hitwise and see the top driving search keywords for companies that spend a lot on traditional branding and media. Often their top 20 keywords will all be brand related and they are really using search and the web as a fulfillment and navigation vehicle rather than a product discovery one.
Number two is the volume of “direct” visits to your website, which presumably shows the volume of people who know your brand and website and are typing your address directly into their browser or have bookmarked your site. Isolating first time visitors who come “direct” to your site and tracking their growth can often be a good indicator of the growth in your brand as well. Now, there are numerous caveats to consider when you are tracking these figures. First off, any non-browser application that lets users click a link and launch their browser is measured by most analytics packages as if the user were directly typing the address. So, clicking a link in a corporate email client like Outlook or clicking a link in a Twitter client app will both appear as direct visits as opposed to referrals from links on sites.
Quick aside – this is making it very hard to track the increasing importance of Twitter in driving traffic to your site. More on that in a future post…
The other problem with tracking growth in direct visit volume as a proxy for brand growth is that returning visitors who are really engaged with you will often bookmark your site and come there directly. This can be partially overcome by filtering your tracking to direct visits from first time visitors, but with users clearing or not allowing cookies, this is not perfect either.
In future posts we will discuss how branding helps programs to reinforce each other and drives up overall program effectiveness and also how search engines (particularly Google) have begun to assign value to strong brands that enables them to improve their rankings in the SERPs.
Leading website visitors down the path to conversion. They are on your site, now what?
At this point in online conversion analysis, the objectives and their corresponding metrics start to diverge based on what the site does. There are at least as many different conversion goals for site visitors as there are business models or probably many times more. Some product or commerce businesses are immediately focused on a sale. Their intent is to convert that site visitor into a paying customer during that visit or at least during the visitor’s current web session. Others have a long sales cycle and their focus is some indication of interest, like downloading a whitepaper. Still others rely on a longer communication stream to make a sale, so their principal goal is to drive a registration with an email address and permission to talk to the visitor.
Whatever your objective, there is a common need is to create the landing page to serve that goal. It is amazing to me that so many people and businesses still point their paid traffic to their site’s home page. The index page needs to serve a variety of audiences, first time visitors, returning visitors, current customers, press, partners, etc. By definition, there will be a whole bunch of “stuff” on an index page that is of no use to first time users, and often confuses and distracts them from your conversion goal. That does not mean, by the way, that you shouldn’t optimize your index page to convert first time visitors, or even dynamically display different content to first time and return visitors. But a focused landing page will often outperform a more generalist page.
Of course, as we saw in funnel post II, driving traffic to your website comes from a huge variety of sources and programs and each has its own characteristics, objectives, and different types of conversion. Affiliate traffic, for example, might be highly sale focused so it’s primary conversion metric might be adding a product to cart.
Natural search traffic, which often comes from ranking for content within your site, presents multiple challenges and objectives. First, the content needs to serve the reason the user was searching for it. If a user was searching for content on how to sand house clapboards and landed on a product page for a sander, while s/he might be more apt to be interested in the sander than any random web surfer, s/he is likely to move on quickly (or “bounce”) from the page and site if the content doesn’t deliver to the intent. Once the content serves the intent of the visitor, THEN the marketer gets to try and convert the visitor to the next step in the funnel. That goal could be to get the user to click on an ad for a sander or it could be to get the visitor to subscribe to the site newsletter or rss feed.
Other models or other businesses early in a “build a userbase” phase might have very different objectives with first time visitors when compared with commerce focused businesses. Ad-supported content sites might want to convert by tempting the visitor into reading multiple articles. Community based sites might be focused on getting the visitor to create a profile. Unless your business is highly focused on single commerce transactions, focusing on converting a “visitor” into a “relationship” usually pays the greatest return.
Usually focusing a page on one type of conversion is best, but, as in everything in online marketing, you should test your approach for the best overall results. If removing ads from a page and simply focusing on email signup gives the best results of attributable revenue over time per visit, then do that. Again, as with analyzing your traffic driving metrics, you need to be able to follow conversions all the way through the funnel to be able to assign a value to each type of action. How much is a newsletter subscriber worth to you in future revenues? More precisely, how much is a newsletter subscriber who came from a natural search visit to a deep content page worth? How often can you get the visitor to convert to a subscriber? How often can you get someone to click on an ad for a product that aims down a purchase path?
The more precisely you try to measure these things the more difficult it is to achieve with standard analytics packages. We will look at more precisely measuring values over time in a later post, but the core concepts are that you need to measure the value of different segments defined by their SOURCE as well as the value of segments defined by the ACTION that prompted their purchase or otherwise drove their value. Many systems only measure the later, but in determining which programs are profitable and how to approach converting that traffic, tracking the original source of the customer all the way through to deferred revenue is important.
Once you have your measurements properly in place, testing different approaches to conversion is a fun creative exercise. This is what I always refer to as needing both left and right brain skills. You need to be creative enough to visualize and communicate value AND you need to be analytical enough to hear what your customers tell you and weed through the data to see what works. The only sure thing in testing different approaches to conversion is that many of your hypotheses will be wrong and many will not match best practices. What works for most people will not always work for your site visitors. Short bulleted copy works best for most? Yours might very well react better to long narrative copy. The most important thing is to TEST as many variants as you can come up with.
Assuming your model is one that does not do best when jumping right to a sales pitch, the next step in the conversion funnel (and the next post in this series) will take us past converting the first time visitors into a multi-touch relationships and gets into moving relationships into “purchase consideration” mode.
