Referral Sources is Key to Measuring Success

For those of you who don’t know, I created this blog for my graduate class, Web Metrics and SEO. In my professional career, I have worked with several analytics platforms, ranging from Sysomos and CoreMetrics, to Radian 6 and other free tools. Google Analytics (GA) has been one of the strongest tools, however, in providing the right insights for measuring success and seeking out areas of improvement. Perhaps one of the biggest measurements GA provides is traffic sources. This area says a lot about how your site is doing and how its efforts are turning visitors into customers.

Why Traffic Sources Matters

A brand’s traffic source directly correlates with its health and position across a variety of channels. For starters, referral traffic (a traffic source from another site) and direct traffic (URLs typed or bookmarked which visitors use directly to your site) have are two indicators of how a specified campaign or how much organic reach a brand has.

As Kaushik puts it, “Direct traffic contains visitors that proactively seek you out, everyone else you have to ‘beg’ to show up on your site!” (Kaushik, 2010).  He makes a strong point in that people who directly visit your site are:

• People who are your existing customers or past customers and have bookmarked your site
• People who are familiar with your brand
• People driven by WOM (Word of Mouth)
• People driven by offline campaigns (TV ads, OOH ads, etc.) and typed the URL directly

In other words, we want direct traffic because these people make up some of the strongest brand influencers who were motivated to visit your site directly over other competitors.

But let’s not forget about referral traffic. This, too, is an important part analytics. Referral traffic is a measurement of how a brand’s efforts are being voiced across third party sites. Users will come across some form of content, click on it and visit a brand’s site.

According to B2C, Referral traffic accounts for almost 70% of all traffic for blogger Andrew Glasscock.  He goes onto say that each of your top referrers can potentially be tapped for better referrals and higher traffic counts. “If you receive a lot of traffic from Google, perhaps you should advertise with their services and boost those numbers.”

Where Search and Social Come Into Play

Search is still, and will probably always be, the number one reason why people interact with the Internet. Having the right mix of SEO techniques and paid advertising campaigns is important in creating a consistent flow of search traffic. None of this is possible without attaining high rankings on a mix of keywords. 

GA’s search traffic tool identifies what keywords people are using most to visit a brand’s website. This information can be helpful in identifying how best to increase reach on those keywords while identifying areas of opportunity on keywords a brand wants to be known for.

The goal of Google, and all search engines for that matter, has been to deliver the most helpful and relevant information to users. According to Martin Wong, “Google’s success came from taking an approach that was radical in those early days: to curate for content quality by measuring the number of links to a page” (Wong, 2012). In other words, the more inbound links a page received, the greater their authority. This leads to a page having stronger content. Social media, however, evolves that mindset by incorporating social media into the mix. Tweets, Facebook likes and +1 vote are factors of how a page will rank against its competitors. 

Considering this and the importance of social, GA has made social its own traffic source, tracking social interactions and which social media channels they are coming from. According to Google, “The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. Social analytics provides you with the tools to measure the impact of social.” In other words, there is a high probability that a brand that is socially active and engaging will generate greater amounts of traffic and rank higher, over its competitors.

Knowing which social channels your audience interacts with is key for producing socially-driven campaigns. For example, Pinterest has been growing in popularity accounting and is now among the top referral sites, beating out Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Linkedin (Crook, 2012).  

This drives brands to build a Pinterest campaign in order to drive traffic to their site.

Traffic Sources are Socially Impacts

Referral sources, simply put, are the culmination of all traffic visiting a brand’s site and knowing where they came from. This allows brands to identify and develop the right tactics that will lead to goals being met (lead acquisition, ecommerce transactions, etc.).

With social media having such a strong impact in how people search for information, Google has made great strides in taking into consideration the importance social media has. 

GA’s latest efforts to push Social into its own referral source is reason enough to pay attention to how social affects a brand’s reach. A brand’s social impact directly correlates with: (1) which pages and sources people engage with; (2) what information is being shared and leads to an ecommerce transaction, when applicable; (3) measuring what social engagements are occurring on your website (likes, shares, etc.); (4) and what kind of traffic patterns are directly related to social.

References:

Crook, J. (2012, March 8). Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/pinterest-now-generates-more-referral-traffic-than-twitter-study/

Glasscock. (2012, June 10). How to gauge your best referral traffic in google analytics. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/how-to-gauge-your-best-referral-traffic-in-google-analytics-0189880

Kaushik. (2010, September 20). Excellent analytics tip 18 make love to your direct traffic. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-web-analytics-tip-analyze-direct-traffic/

Wong, M. (2012, February 29). How social media drives search results. Retrieved from http://www.marketingsmartt.com/social_drives_search/

 

It’s a Growing Ad World Thanks to Google and Facebook

The ad world is growing, rapidly. According to mobiThinking, mobile ad spend worldwide is predicted to reach $20.6 billion by 2015, primarily driven by search ads and local ads. Google alone is the main recipient of mobile ad spend, accounting for $2.5 billion in annual mobile ad revenues ("Mobithinking," 2012).

Lest we forget about the growing beast that is Facebook. In 2011, Facebook ad spend grew 1600%, based on brands who utilize Nanigan’s software to manage their Facebook ad ecosystem (Eler, 2012).

eMarketer predicted that by the end of 2011, social network advertising will account for nearly 11% of all online ad spending in the U.S. When we think about it, social media advertising is distinct from other ad platforms in that they are highly targeted based on information its audience provides (demographic, psychographic, interests, likes, connections, etc.)

We all know that reach is key to advertising success. The greater the reach a site has, the greater the potential for turning an impression into a click. Facebook reaches 51 percent of all Internet users (one trillion pageviews per month), whereas Google reaches every Internet user at one point or another. Google’s display advertising network reaches over two million websites with 180 billion ad impressions per month (Flosi, 2011).

Given my experience with ad buys in Google and Facebook, both have their benefits and setbacks. Ultimately, it’s up to the marketer to make the right decision, based on their goals, to see where they should invest their ad spend.

Facebook Vs. Google within the Ad Realm

Both platforms offer a strong position with internet advertising; however, there are some key differences advertisers should consider before aiming their budgets one way or another.

• Overall Reach: While both companies maintain a strong reach, Google clearly dominates with its ability to reach more unique visitors around the world, whereas Facebook can only reach those 900 million or so users at any given time.
• Ad targeting: Facebook is still developing its mobile advertising platform and is only testing some basic newsfeed ads within its mobile platform. Google, however, offers all of these and more, including keyword-based targeting options for a mix of ad types.
• Ad formats: Facebook recently launched five new ad formats, which include: ads that appear in news feeds; ads that run on the right-hand side of the homepage; ads within the news feed of your mobile device (not available yet); ads that appear when you log out; and offers. The new ad formats are either text and image-based ads or video ads, which can also be larger than the standard size ads. Google, however, maintains a strong dominance with a variety of formats, including: text ads, image ads, flash-based image ads, drop-down ads, mobile ads and in-video ads.

Ultimately, Facebook advertising is the only form of advertising allowed on the social network giant, whereas Google’s Display Network allows advertisers to make strategic media buys across multiple sites. 

The following infographic shows a detailed breakdown of Facebook Ads versus Google Display Network.

References:

Eler, A. (2012, February 1). Report: Facebook ad spending grew 1600% in 2011. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_facebook_ad_spending_grows_1600.php

Flosi, S. (2011, November 28). comscore releases october 2011 u.s. online video rankings. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore-Releases_October_2011_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings

Mobithinking. (2012, June). Retrieved from http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats

Content Used to be King – Not Anymore

A voice. Every brand aims to have a voice. Ecommerce websites looks to sell products or services while trying to maintain a constant voice across their platforms. Greenberg, in his post on Content is King of Social Marketing said it best (Greenberg, 2009): 

Have something to say. Say it often. Be interesting. Sound familiar? This is essentially the content publishing model. By incorporating content development into your existing marketing calendar and production process, you can turn social marketing into an asset.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold true anymore. Brands can’t continue to push content without knowing what the audience wants to here. These days, what you say and what they say back to you is seen and resonated by millions across all social platforms.

Conversations Matter

At its core, social media has evolved to a world where brands converse with its audience. This is the social perspective.

David Armano of Edelman Digital developed an interesting infographic of how social engagement is about holding conversations with an audience, rather than pushing out content in hopes that it would stick. And all occur within platforms that are a breeding ground for engagement: communities, blogs, social networks and microblogs.

Jonathan Mariano or Triple Pundit wrote an interesting piece on social media being about conversations. He says that if we abstract away technologies from Facebook and Twitter, then all we are left with is a social media conversation ("Social media is," 2011). He adds:

It’s a way for folks to talk about anything in a public, ranging from current events, life’s successes and failures, or even about our passions like sustainability. It’s just another medium to have a conversation.

Social media is about ongoing conversations where content is merely the catalyst. And conversations are not just about words. It’s also about actions through our likes, shares, tweets, pins and more.

The Value of a Conversation

Considering all things marketing are driven by ROI, there is an obvious need to drive some type of ROI from conversations, right? Well BazaarVoice launched the Conversation Index earlier this year. The index has collected over 220 billion pieces of user-generated content (UGC) to calculate some rather “bazaar” stats ("The conversation index," 2012):

• Women contribute more UGC than men, and are generally more positive
• 1/3 of all Facebook reviews are collected on Fridays
• One in five reviews contains the word “love”

Conversations continue to increase, across a multitude of platforms and especially across several mobile devices, year over year. According to the study, keywords resonate among consumers, which directly correlate to where they are in the customer life cycle, specifically in the financial sector:

• We find that newer financial services customers (less than four years) tend to use “easy,” “helpful,” “awesome,” “happy,” and “experience” in their reviews.
• More tenured customers (10+ years with a firm) often use “courteous” and “convenient” in their reviews. Words that reverberate across all review content include “great” (highest, in about 18% of content), “friendly,” “quick,” and “simple.

It goes without saying that measuring conversations leads to the right business decisions in how content is tailored, which can help or hurt a brand’s bottom line.

You can find the full report in the SlideShare below.

The Conversation Index - Q3 Insights

View more presentations from Bazaarvoice

References:

Greenberg. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. Retrieved from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

The conversation index. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/research/conversation-index

Social media is a conversation. (2011, October 31). Retrieved from http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/10/social-media-conversation/