“The click is a poor measure of audience, applying the same value to an attentive reader and a drive-by visitor. They’re also easy to fake. At one point, corrupt marketers hired armies of humans to increase impressions with their mouse, but now the process has been outsourced to robots. These ‘fraudulent bots’ are responsible for about 36% of online traffic, according to data cited by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
“Yet, since the advent of digital advertising, CPMs, a measure of cost per thousand impressions, has been the industry standard for selling digital advertising, which sets the measure of web traffic. Which means that, like it or not, analytics companies like Chartbeat have to measure impressions.
Can Tony Haile Save Journalism by Changing the Metric?
Showing posts with label Measurement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Measurement. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2015
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
The New Way to Measure Web Traffic
Myles Tanzer:
This week the Financial Times announced it would begin exclusively selling display ads off of a new metric: time spent. Medium recently reported it has started paying certain writers based on total time readers spend on articles. Upworthy made waves back in February ditching page views altogether to focus on what they call “attention minutes.” And back in May the traffic analytics company Chartbeat launched its “Attention Web” campaign, in an attempt to move beyond the click.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
4 Case Studies to Get Your Client on Board With Social Media
A while ago, I wrote an article for Mashable titled, “15 Case Studies to Get Your Client on Board With Social Media.” Apparently, the web agency, Huge, picked up where I left off: that the best way to illustrate the value of social media is not by mere reference to channels like Facebook and Twitter, but to how those channels enable you to conduct your existing business better.
Four examples:
Four examples:
- Zappos has used Twitter to conduct market research for new lines of business.
- Comcast has a dedicated customer service Twitter account (@ComcastCares) in addition to its main Twitter handle (@Comcast) used for branding and company news.
- DKNY deftly avoided a PR crisis by addressing a potential threat involving copyrighted images used in a storefront by quickly posting an explanation and remedies on its Facebook account.
- Dell has found success with its @DellOutlet account in driving sales for refurbished computers, building to nearly 1.5 million followers and $6.5 million in revenue less than two years after launching the account in 2007.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Thursday, May 8, 2014
When Social Media Numbers Only Tell Part of the Story
Robert Moore:
Todd Post:
Our video ... was a flop. The millions of views we had dreamed about never came. A week after its uploading, despite our best promotional efforts, the video had been seen by only a few hundred people. But then, miraculously, new leads started coming in from that tiny audience.
As it turned out, our video was tailored to such a specific viewer that anyone who got the joke was an ideal prospect for us and would share it with like-minded friends. Within a few weeks, one of those rap video leads became our biggest customer to date, doubling our monthly revenue.
Todd Post:
There’s only one way ... to measure any communications effort, regardless of tactic: results. Social media is no different. Here is an example from a LA-based animal-rescue group that illustrates my point perfectly:
They put out a call for donations and one Facebook post generated “630 likes, 150 shares, and 14,000 clicks,” but only one $20 donation. If measurements is about likes, shares, clicks, fans, or followers, those numbers wouldn’t be so bad, but the goal was to raise money. So in this instance, the metric should be dollars raised, not social media numbers.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Hey, Artsy: Show Me the Names
When the website, Artsy, went live in 2012, it rated a glowing New York Times profile. The paper observed, “The site aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education.” Cool!
Yet, years later, what I remembered about the budding business was not what it did, but its top-flight list of partners, investors, and advisers: Wendi Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey, among others. These are the kind of people who don’t lend their time and names to something unless it’s worthwhile.
To wit: instead of emphasizing your bells and whistles, focus on your biggest, boldest names. They’ll do your job for you.
Related: Show Me the Stories: How to Measure and Market Social Media
Addendum (8/4/2014): Two more examples:
1. While writing the script for The Wolf of Wall Street, Terence Winter said he was forever trying to explain even limited Wall Street terms, like “IPO.” Ultimately, he concluded it didn’t matter. “The techno-speak goes in one ear and out the other,” he recalled. “What [people will] remember is that in the Madden deal, [Jordan] Belfort made $23 million in two hours.”
2. Entrepreneur Suhail Doshi proposes something called the “OKM.” He explains: “Companies should start by tracking a single actionable metric that they can literally bet the company on. I call this their One Key Metric (OKM). Companies choosing their OKM realize they must pick an actionable metric because pageviews or sign ups aren’t harsh enough and don’t correlate highly enough with the success of their business.”
Yet, years later, what I remembered about the budding business was not what it did, but its top-flight list of partners, investors, and advisers: Wendi Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey, among others. These are the kind of people who don’t lend their time and names to something unless it’s worthwhile.
To wit: instead of emphasizing your bells and whistles, focus on your biggest, boldest names. They’ll do your job for you.
Related: Show Me the Stories: How to Measure and Market Social Media
Addendum (8/4/2014): Two more examples:
1. While writing the script for The Wolf of Wall Street, Terence Winter said he was forever trying to explain even limited Wall Street terms, like “IPO.” Ultimately, he concluded it didn’t matter. “The techno-speak goes in one ear and out the other,” he recalled. “What [people will] remember is that in the Madden deal, [Jordan] Belfort made $23 million in two hours.”
2. Entrepreneur Suhail Doshi proposes something called the “OKM.” He explains: “Companies should start by tracking a single actionable metric that they can literally bet the company on. I call this their One Key Metric (OKM). Companies choosing their OKM realize they must pick an actionable metric because pageviews or sign ups aren’t harsh enough and don’t correlate highly enough with the success of their business.”
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Do You Run Ads in Online Videos?
Then you’re no doubt aware of the rampant fraud in the field, right? The Times’s David Segal has you covered:
Until recently, viewability wasn’t a big part of the conversation about online video ads. But that’s changing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, an association and sort of nongovernmental referee in this area, has announced that starting at the end of June, a video ad will be considered a viewable impression if 50% of the player containing it can be seen for at least two seconds.
In other words, if you visit a website and scroll down and the top half of a video player is in your view for two seconds, ka-ching. That counts as an impression, even if you didn’t watch the ad.
The coming I.A.B. standard, which sets a baseline for negotiations between buyers and sellers, is a marginal improvement over the current standard, which doesn’t require the ad to be “viewed” at all. But it was as far as the group was going to go.
Friday, March 14, 2014
How Social Media ROI Is Easily Manipuldated
What a dud!
Major success!
Related: Show Me the Stories: How to Measure and Market Social Media.
0.6333% of people who watched Obama's Between Two Ferns clicked on the Obamacare link -- https://t.co/KTDbh1tjmu
— BuzzFeed Benny (@bennyjohnson) March 11, 2014
Major success!
http://t.co/FrO24hdvcA is the #1 source of referrals to http://t.co/0r93BavlrV right now.
— Tara McGuinness (@HealthCareTara) March 11, 2014
Related: Show Me the Stories: How to Measure and Market Social Media.
Friday, January 31, 2014
How BuzzFeed Measures Everything
“If there is a science to BuzzFeed’s content strategy, it is built on obsessive measurement. The data-science team uses machine learning to predict which stories might spread; the design team keeps iterating the user interface through A/B testing and analytics. Every item of content has its own dashboard that shows how it spreads from ‘seed views’ on the site to the scalable ‘social views.’”
—David Rowan
—David Rowan
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Why Social Media Stats Are Specious
• 158,000 mentions on Twitter
• 115,000 outbound tweets and direct messages
This is exactly how not to cite social media stats. This is like saying, If you Google [Delta Airlines], you'll get 80.2 million webpages. That's nice, but what does this mean?
Instead of throwing around impressive-sounding stats, cite numbers that have real-world value. For example, did Twitter serve as an early warning system to identify problems before they spiraled? How many issues did tweeting help you resolve in real time? How many corporate testimonials—i.e., happy customers—did your tweets give rise to?
Note: PR Daily references a third statistic, "28,000 additional customers," but it's unclear what this means.
Related: Show Me the Numbers and Facebook and Hiding Posts
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