Engagement is very crucial to the overall strategy of attracting consumers/users to a particular website. For example, bounce rate can be a positive or negative metric, depending on the marketer’s intentions. A bounce rate typically means that a user did not find what they were looking for on a site and decided to leave. This is not always a good thing. However, your website may have a high bounce rate if you are driving traffic to your site for a sweepstakes/contest.
Many sites will run contests that drive users to a specific site to enter their information for a chance to win. Therefore, the single bounce rate is tends to be higher but the goal was accomplished by the people driving the contest. The website attracted the consumer to the site and that was the result they wanted for the end game. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I do not want high bounce rates when I am distributing my monthly e-newsletter at work. Every lost visitor is a lost opportunity, so you’ll want to figure out why people are leaving and try to add the right content or navigation on your site to keep users around (Parsons). My January e-newsletter report showed one of my five waves only had a bounce rate of 46 consumers (see chart below). We sent to a little more than 5,000 consumers. The open rate was pretty solid (for us) at 20 percent, and the unique visitors was 920.
Page views per visit
Finding unique ways to attract new customers to a website is important, but just as important, is keeping a user interested enough to browse through the various content (pages) on the website. The longer the customer stays on the page, the increased chance of closing out a purchase or an intended result. Many website owners want to find ways to monetize their site offerings. One of the biggest ways to generate a stream of revenue is to place advertising on the site.
One of the ways to garner more page views is to have superior content on the site. It’s not enough to have great content. You’ll want to focus your efforts on the most profitable topics, and then make sure your content is indexed correctly by the search engines for these profitable keywords (Wilson). The better the keywords are for the site owner, the higher ranking it will achieve – and thus improve page views.
Engagement rates cannot be overstated in the world of web metrics. Businesses are constantly trying to engage consumers to see what motivates them to buy and search for their products and services. In the world of retail, the consumer has a great amount of power in what he or she chooses to buy. This fact should motivate businesses to rethink how they strategically touch their customers via social media and other forms of online media. One way conversations do not endear a business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) relationship. The average time on a site is perhaps the most common web analytics metric on earth and it plays a role in engagement. But if two people visit your website, one for 1 minute and the other for 100 minutes, the average is useless (Kaushik).
Consumers want to know exactly what is going on with a company and their products. Social media has played a big role in this movement of wanting more data. It’s up to the business owner to be there to answer questions and maintain a productive and profitable relationship. I think Amazon, Apple and other companies do a very good job of engagement on their social media platforms and websites.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Foundational Tactics of Measurement
Terms such as page, page view, visits and unique visitors make up the key metrics when discussing foundational Web measurement. As the category says, these terms are at the foundation of the beginning steps to find out if marketing efforts are working and can be measured for success. Unique visitors are crucial to the success of any business that is working to increase traffic and experience return on investment. Measuring how many individual users visit a site within a given period, usually a month – is used by businesses to determine activity and interaction on a website. This information is very useful to reveal trends that can help a company craft messaging and website improvements for a business.
Sportsman Channel I work for Sportsman Channel and we are one of the smallest national cable networks in the country, but we play ‘above our weight’ when it comes to engagement with our online audience. Our digital department is only made up of three people, but they consistently find new ways of increasing their unique visitors, sessions and page views. One of their tactics for engagement is through social media and finding innovative ways to attract ‘fans’ to the company Facebook and Twitter sites.
Near the end of 2013, we did a story about how Sportsman’s social engagement has soared in the outdoor industry. We surpassed the 500,000th ‘Like’ mark on Facebook, but the network also reached nearly 2 million people in a single post. Brian Moyer, Sr. Director of Digital Services at Sportsman Channel says, “We have put a focus on building and engaging communities across several key social platforms and that strategy has resulted in not only more social users but – more importantly – increasingly higher engagement rates on Facebook and Twitter (Caraccioli).”
The success of the social media has increased the page views and unique visitors to www.theSportsmanChannel.com. The social media success helps Sportsman Channel attract visitors to the home page where the network runs several events during the year. Despite what people may or may not think of Sarah Palin (former governor of Alaska), she attracts a crowd. Sportsman Channel recently started running a sweepstakes where visitors can enter to win a pair of the same boots Palin wears in during her promotional spots.
Mobile
The fastest growing platform is arguably mobile. By the end of 2014, mobile commerce in the U.S. will grow and estimated 63 percent to around $34.2 billion, up from $21 billion in 2012, according to the Internet Retailer 2014 Mobile 500 list (Brehme). One of the biggest reasons the mobile platform is growing is because of the rise of smartphones in United States. It is not difficult to see most (if not all) consumers carry a cellular device.
If small and large companies want to grow their unique visitors and page views, they must make the user experience very easy and engaging. It has been well documented that Apple’s iphone has moved to the Apple Pay system. I personally own an iPhone and it makes the checkout/purchase experience very smooth and easy.
Small business operators need to rethink the way they view the mobile experience if they want to take greater numbers of mobile consumers through the sales process all the way to the final purchase. “Mobile actually has advantages in some cases (Knudson),” Abbott says. From a personal experience, my wife and I do much of our online banking and some shopping from our mobile devices. The process does tend to be faster and more user friendly. This is what company’s like Wells Fargo and Amazon hope for in the end game. It is no secret that most businesses are updating and catering their sites to gain more unique visitors, sessions and page views.
Sportsman Channel I work for Sportsman Channel and we are one of the smallest national cable networks in the country, but we play ‘above our weight’ when it comes to engagement with our online audience. Our digital department is only made up of three people, but they consistently find new ways of increasing their unique visitors, sessions and page views. One of their tactics for engagement is through social media and finding innovative ways to attract ‘fans’ to the company Facebook and Twitter sites.
Near the end of 2013, we did a story about how Sportsman’s social engagement has soared in the outdoor industry. We surpassed the 500,000th ‘Like’ mark on Facebook, but the network also reached nearly 2 million people in a single post. Brian Moyer, Sr. Director of Digital Services at Sportsman Channel says, “We have put a focus on building and engaging communities across several key social platforms and that strategy has resulted in not only more social users but – more importantly – increasingly higher engagement rates on Facebook and Twitter (Caraccioli).”
The success of the social media has increased the page views and unique visitors to www.theSportsmanChannel.com. The social media success helps Sportsman Channel attract visitors to the home page where the network runs several events during the year. Despite what people may or may not think of Sarah Palin (former governor of Alaska), she attracts a crowd. Sportsman Channel recently started running a sweepstakes where visitors can enter to win a pair of the same boots Palin wears in during her promotional spots.
Mobile
The fastest growing platform is arguably mobile. By the end of 2014, mobile commerce in the U.S. will grow and estimated 63 percent to around $34.2 billion, up from $21 billion in 2012, according to the Internet Retailer 2014 Mobile 500 list (Brehme). One of the biggest reasons the mobile platform is growing is because of the rise of smartphones in United States. It is not difficult to see most (if not all) consumers carry a cellular device.
If small and large companies want to grow their unique visitors and page views, they must make the user experience very easy and engaging. It has been well documented that Apple’s iphone has moved to the Apple Pay system. I personally own an iPhone and it makes the checkout/purchase experience very smooth and easy.
Small business operators need to rethink the way they view the mobile experience if they want to take greater numbers of mobile consumers through the sales process all the way to the final purchase. “Mobile actually has advantages in some cases (Knudson),” Abbott says. From a personal experience, my wife and I do much of our online banking and some shopping from our mobile devices. The process does tend to be faster and more user friendly. This is what company’s like Wells Fargo and Amazon hope for in the end game. It is no secret that most businesses are updating and catering their sites to gain more unique visitors, sessions and page views.
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