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Posts Tagged ‘Unique Visitors’

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

As you know, I’ve partnered with Compendium Blogware, Debbie Weil and Jay Baer for a research project and some other extensions of that project this year. Part of that partnership gives me access to case studies of Compendium clients in addition to the external research we’re doing. One such case study caught my attention recently.

Aprilaire’s corporate blog has seen a 1,000 percent traffic growth in the last year. Yes, that’s 1,000 PERCENT, not people. Pretty strong. (For reference, Compete.com says their corporate site in total had 50,000 unique visitors last month, so we’re not talking 4 visitors to 4,000 either.) The social media purists will probably jump on that statistic and say, “See! Building community and engaging in conversation is what social media success is all about.”

Don’t jump to conclusions there, hippie.

Aprilaire approached corporate blogging with capturing leads through search engine optimization and winning keywords as their primary goal. Using Compendium’s system, which turns a blog into a keyword and search-driven model rather than a single-author, ego platform, the company began climbing the organic search rankings. Of their 1,000 percent traffic increase, 80 percent of it came from organic search results. Mission accomplished.

What Aprilaire did is approach corporate blogging with business metrics in mind. Community and conversation are part of the effort, sure. But even if they all but don’t exist — at this writing there was but a single comment on their last 10 blog posts combined — your corporate blog can (and should) drive your business. The Aprilaire blog features good content focused on targeted keywords and drives traffic. This traffic isn’t their “community” but rather web searchers trying to find content on the keywords Aprilaire is writing about. When they arrive on a blog post, there are clear calls to action on the page and links to action items (more information requests, landing pages, etc.). The blog converts more readers into customers.

Don’t get me wrong! Engaging in conversation, building community around your brand and bringing humanity (and human-ness) back to the marketing table are all vitally important to a company’s social media success. But please know this can be done in one or many channels and others, even a corporate blog, can focus on driving business.

Go look at your blog’s traffic. How many of your visitors are finding your content for the first time (through search or referral links)? How many are your, “community?” What does this tell you about your blogging approach? The comments are yours.

The social web has almost relegated website traffic to a shoulder shrug of a statistic for some. But the number of people of visit your website or blog is an important measure of your reach or exposure. However, many people make a mistake in analyzing or even determining a website’s traffic. And the social web is partially to blame.

RSS feeds change not only the metric, but the information you’re looking for. Here’s why:

Provided you are following the sage advice of social media and/or Internet marketing counsel, you’re publishing content on your website. Perhaps it’s a blog. Maybe it’s company news or other information run through your content management system. If your CMS was created in the last four or five years and isn’t called Cold Fusion (little developer’s joke for ya), it probably produces an RSS feed, or XML file of content updates. Hopefully, you’ve let visitors know the feed is available should they choose to subscribe to your website’s changes.

The shift in thinking then comes because those who access your website’s RSS feed often do so in a feed reader like Google Reader or Netvibes. These readers display the content from your website without a visitor ever being registered there. Someone read your blog post, but your web analytics package never registered any data.

RSS allows people to access your content, not your website. So the information you are looking for is no longer web traffic, but content traffic. And content traffic is measured both on and off your website.

So how do you determine your website’s traffic in the world of the social web? It’s not as simple as you may think.

First, you need to know your website’s unique visitors. Your analytics software will tell you that. Then you need to know your RSS analytics. To find this, you need to run your RSS feed through software packages like Google’s Feedburner, which is free, or a competitor like FeedBlitz, which is a paid service, but cheap and more reliable. These services not only help you manage your subscribers, but analyze and present you with metrics about how your RSS feed is used.

Now, you may think you take your unique visitors and add the number of RSS subscribers and there’s your content traffic. But it’s not that simple and that number is going to be unbelievably inflated. Not to mention, some people click through the feed to your website and are, thus, counted twice in that scenario. The thinking here is flawed because the total number of RSS subscribers is not representative of the number of people who do something with your feed.

According to Google/Feedburner, the RSS subscriber total represents the number of services (not people) that access your feed for distribution. While there are roughly 9,500 people who subscribe to Social Media Explorer’s RSS feed, if 100 of them abandoned Bloglines a year ago, but didn’t shut down their account, those 100 people never access the feed even though Bloglines still pulls the data for them.

Fortunately Feedburner has a metric in their analysis of your feed called Reach. This number represents the number of unique people who have either clicked on your feed (driving them to your website) or read your feed in a reader. However, I could not find a delineation between “click through” and “read.” By that rationale, unless Feedburner has some hidden metric, there’s no 100-percent, accurate way to know how many people consumed your content. You don’t know how many clicked through to subtract from your unique visitors.

To make matters more confusing, if you download your Feedburner statistics (Excel or CSV file) you can identify the number of “item click throughs.” However, this number is greater than that of the Reach metric on my reports, so you don’t know if that’s click throughs to your site or clicks on headlines to expand your feeds or something else. In fact, if it were either of the first two, the Reach metric should be the larger number.

Clear as mud?

My assumption is a better set of metrics can help you with FeedBlitz, but I’m testing it now and have not yet seen their full reporting. If you use it, please help us with a run down: Can you pull data that tells you how many people read your feed vs. how many people click through to the site?

For now, I would tell people that while my content traffic is an inexact number, I calculate it by adding my daily unique visitors to my Google Feedburner Reach number. There is some overlap, but using August 31 as an example, there were 981 absolute unique visitors to Social Media Explorer. Feedburner says 246 RSS subscribers did something with my feed. Thus, my content traffic was 981+246 or 1,227 people.

As inexact as it is, this is what we have.

Or is it?

Analytics folks, unleash your wisdom on us in the comments. Tell me if my math is wrong, I missed some metric feature. Or, even better … tell me there’s an easier way to do this. If I’m not seeing it, we all want and need to know.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• Understanding RSS Subscriber Numbers (Get More Sales)
• Understanding RSS/Feed Subscriber Stats (Squarespace)
• Understanding RSS and XML Feeds (eMarketing Talk Show w/Feedburner’s Rick Klau)
• On RSS Subscriber Counts and Feedburner Metrics (FeedBlitz Blog)
• Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing (regulargeek.com)

The return on investment for social media marketing is not an easy thing to determine. It’s not easy to measure. It’s not easy to argue. It’s not easy to prove.

I’ll pause while the Kool-Aid drinkers curse at the screen and jump to the comments to call me names before reading the rest of the post.

For more on my thoughts, please revisit this post and conversation with Katie Payne from PRSA International last year.

What is easier to determine, measure, argue and prove (or at least so we think) is the investment in traditional media. This is why we evangelists have such a hard time with the subject matter of ROI. The irony is that traditional media is impossible to accurately measure while social media is less so.

But brand managers and C-level executives won’t accept the less than two percent return rate on the average paid search or email marketing campaign because folks like Nielsen and Arbitron have been telling them for years they’ve been getting 25-30 percent return on million dollar TV buys or radio campaigns. Throw in soft dollar metrics we can advocate for social media (impressions/unique visitors, subscribers, comments, followers, friends, online sentiment and tone, net promoter score and the like) and executives laugh social media out of legitimate conversations.

Decision-makers want to know, “If I spend X amount of dollars on social media, what does it get me?” And Twitter followers doesn’t impress them. You can build a business case for building a community of engaged consumers, noting that the lifetime value of a consumer is worth more than one-off sales of your product. But to truly build a vast community of loyal customers that can impact your bottom line in “good ROI” ways takes an investment of both time and resources.

That’s right. Resources. Social media is not free. (The Kool-Aid drinkers left can now fast forward to the name-calling.)

Let’s look at the reality of the mediums at this point. (I do think this is changing, but not fast enough for us social media evangelists to win this argument.) Spend $100,000 on social media and, let’s say, you wind up with some content, engagement with your audience and online buzz and the foundation for cultivating relationships with a few thousand, even optimistically 100,000, interested fans moving forward. You see a slight up-tick in sales, but nothing that moves the needle any more than the weather does, and forecasts are strong. That’s a pretty strong ROI in my opinion.

Spend $1,000,000 on a television commercial/campaign with strong creative and targeted media placement and show a six percent increase in sales, better brand recognition and so on.

(I made up the numbers. I know national TV can’t be done for $1MM. Oh wait. The Kool-Aid peckerheads aren’t reading anymore anyway. Never mind.)

Daniel Wiggins of Bouvier Kelly asked me recently what I thought about spending money on traditional versus social media. I’m sure he’ll blog some of my answers soon. One thing I told him, though, stood out as I re-read the email:

“As much as we love social media, the audience there is opt in. Mass media isn’t. Even though the messages are force fed to consumers they still have better reach. We need to build communities of consumers through social media to the point mass media becomes less effective in driving people where we want them to go. Until then, we should use the traditional to help populate the non.”

This isn’t the state of the world and end of the story. It’s just where we are now. I’m hoping we can continue this discussion both now in the comments and six months from now at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. The brilliant Keith Burtis has put together a panel discussion called, “Prove it! Exploring Social Media ROI for Business.” He’s asked me to be on the panel along with this impressive list of social media and business thinkers: Amber Naslund of Radian6; Sue Murphy of Jester Creative; Alan Isfan, CEO of Favequest; Jay Berkowitz, CEO of 10 Golden Rules and Justin Levy of New Marketing Labs. In order for that panel to happen, we need some help with the voting. If you’d like to see that panel happen, click here to vote for it.

These folks are going to blog about this panel, too, in the coming days. I encourage you to subscribe to their blogs, hear what they have to say on the issue and comment. Add to our collective thoughts on this so the panel can be better informed and we can all begin to inch closer to better answers when people ask us how to measure the ROI of social media.

In the meantime, leap-frog through the Kool-Aid kids below and fire off some thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think.

Related articles by Jason Falls with Zemanta

• Social Media Planning & Measurement (SlideShare.net presentation from Beth Harte)
• Why Social Media Is More Measurable Than Traditional Media (Jacob Morgan)
• Social Media ROI: What do you measure? (Ruth White-Cabbell on the Cisco blog)
• On Demonstrating ROI (Gary Vaynerchuck on Radian6Video)
• Social Media ROI (Ann Handley on Radian6Video)

Yesterday, I had a call with a company that has only been around for about 9 months. I walked through a demo on how to use their search engine, in which they claim MSN stole their algorithm. I was surprisingly impressed with this search engine that I honestly had never used before. It’s called LeapFish. And no, they’re not paying me to blog about them.

I feel LeapFish is an up-and-coming search engine that may truly find itself competing with the big dogs. What’s cool about them is that you can search for a keyword in Google, and with a click of a mouse you can search in Yahoo and MSN for the same keyword. It’s fast, really fast and very user friendly.

If you type in a city name with a space, then the state, sometimes in the right hand navigation they’ll give you local results for real estate, or restaurants if you type in ‘pizza san Francisco CA’.

You can also click to see different kinds of results for your keyword search like information on the web, news, answers which are powered by Yahoo, videos, images, shopping and even blogs.

One other thing the rep told me, was that if you type in your company url into their search, again off to the right hand side it will give you domain information for that company including how much their domain is appraised at, how many unique visitors, traffic ranking and a graph that shows peaks and valleys of traffic. Very cool.

A different kind of PPC advertising:

Now, about their paid search program which I found to be of most important and very useful for advertisers. When the internet began to get popular, people started buying popular domain names of companies who could later sell those domains to the companies and make a large profit. The same thing could and is going on here at LeapFish. People are buying keywords off Leapfish now, and plan to sell them later when Leapfish gets bigger. As Leapfish gets bigger, and as the keywords become more competitive, the keywords will increase in value, and can sell for a much higher price than what you’ll be paying for now.

Their PPC advertising program is not like Google, Yahoo or MSN. You don’t pay for each click or pay any monthly fees. You buy keywords permanently. LeapFish offers 3 paid positions for each keyword search result. You can buy to be in position 1, 2 or 3 and each have a different price for that particular keyword. When you buy these keywords, they’re yours for life, at least until you sell them off to another company willing to pay you premium cash for them. You also maintain your number 1, 2 or 3 positions in the SERPs for that keyword for life. This will never go away until you sell your keyword. The paid ads are located at the top of each SERP and at the very bottom of each page.

I will say that some competitive keywords are not cheap. Looking up some keywords for a client of mine I found position 1 to charge around $5,000. But if you think about it, this is really all you have to pay for a paid ad in that keywords SERP. Sort of. In addition to the one-time purchase of the keyword, you are also charged a yearly 5% fee of your keyword spend. So if you buy just one keyword and pay $5,000 for it, you’ll be charged $250 annually. Not bad when you think about it long term. Just to give you an idea of their pricing structure I’ve typed in a few keywords to get estimates on. See screen shot below on the range you could be paying to have permanent placement on Leapfish.com

This brings me to my next point. This is a long-term strategy. This is not for small business’s wanting to teach themselves PPC advertising for a month to see how it works. As far as reporting, you can add in add tracking to your destination URLs and \ track Leapfish visits and leads via Google Analytics.

Another good thing LeapFish is doing to get the word out about themselves is sponsoring many national search engine strategy conferences. They’ve been featured in several high profile websites. Their CEO, who is only 29, by the way, and has been recognized as one in the top 40 Silicon Valley innovators.

I think this is something every company big or small should be looking into right now. Leapfish is still in Beta, but I believe it will be officially live in October 2009.

Is anyone currently buying keywords from Leapfish? If so, is it working for you? What are the positives and negatives?

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.