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Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute has put together a concise cheat-sheet for CMOs looking to understand how to leverage social media platforms in support of their brands. Color-coded for easy reading: Green represents opportunity and red equals waste of time.
I’m thrilled that the IAB and 4As have rolled out Version 3.0 of the standard terms and conditions for online advertising. The two sections I love the most: One, that v3.0 addresses auction-based ad platforms such as Google’s AdWords and Digg’s Digg Ads. Two, indemnity for publishers and platforms — like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo — where some of the content is links to other publishers’ content.
Make the move, agency friends!
TechCrunch reported its traffic numbers for 2009. Google is still the #1 source of traffic to the site, bigger than direct traffic. Digg, Twitter and Google Reader round out the top 5 sources:
“Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.”
It’s interesting to see that Facebook doesn’t make the top 5. I’m also surprised that Twitter represents such a small percentage of total traffic, given TechCrunch has more than 1.3 million followers in Twitter. But, hey, I’m not complaining: I love to see that Digg remains TechCrunch’s biggest source of traffic after Google.
More stats on where big sites get their traffic.
If you weren’t already hooked on the Golden Globes by the red carpet and drunken celebrities, now there’s an angle for geeks. From Geek Sugar:
“Since yesterday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC have been gearing up for the big show by streaming events on Facebook and Ustream to bring you retrospective recaps of all the award-show goodness you can handle, and have also partnered with Digg and Mashable for daily updates and countdowns. “
Digg’s daily videos and other Golden Globes stories here.
“For the first time in its history, Facebook was the number one most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today,” reported Read/Write Web on December 29.
And they did it again on January 1.
The search era officially makes room for the social-media era.
From a summary of a recent PostRank study published at Read/Write Web:
“The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows.”
In other words, more people are doing something with the content they read (commenting, sharing, voting), but they’re doing it on the large social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Digg rather than in the comments fields on the sites where the content originates.
From the LA Times piece on Digg’s Digg Ads platform, as well as ad systems on Reddit, Facebook and others that allow readers to voice real-time feedback on the advertising.
“The Internet has long provided a measurement of how effective an ad is — that is how many times it was clicked versus how often it was shown, a metric called click-through rate. But that’s based simply on how loud and flashy a banner can be in order to attract a reader’s attention.
“A click doesn’t necessarily convert to a purchase, or ‘conversion’ as they call it, nor are visitors guaranteed to associate the product positively. If an ad mimics a virus alert, it might get clicked out of fear or urgency but won’t elicit a pleasant reaction once users realize they were duped.”
Exactly. Click-through rate is a blunt instrument and neglects the quality of those clicks. A dozen clicks by high-value customers who want to engage with your brand, product offers or retail partners are much more valuable than a hundred clicks by individuals who came to win a free Harley and forgot who’s offering that Harley.
“Conversion rate” (for retail advertisers), “time spent” and “share volume” are a few other metrics that are at least as important as CTR. “Quality score” should be another, since low quality will affect all the others. Advertisers running Digg Ads here at Digg, for example, get more exposure and lower rates based not only on CTR but by the ratio of Diggs (positive feedback) to buries (negative feedback). While CTR rewards the urgency of the offer and the relevance of the advertising copy, Diggs and buries — votes which tend be submitted after a Digg reader clicks on an ad — measure the totality of the experience. Did the landing page deliver what the ad promised? Was the experience on the advertiser’s site a good one? Was it good enough that you’d share it with a friend or a few thousand followers in Twitter?
Get your customers to click, but remember that the click is only the first date.
From eMarketer.
“Visitors are good, but loyal visitors are even better. Where can you find them?
“According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.
“More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.”
The vast majority of traffic still comes from search engines, but this data suggests that while we use search to find a particular nugget of information, we’re more likely to use social media to discover new sites.
Mashable reports on Chitika’s new study of the media consumption habits of 33 million web users in September 2009. One finding: Traffic that comes to your site from Facebook, Digg or Yahoo is more likely to become loyal traffic than traffic from Google, Bing or Twitter.
According to Google Ad Planner numbers turned into an infographic at Information is Beautiful, YouTube and LinkedIn have equal numbers of male and female visitors. Twitter, Facebook and most other social networking sites skew female. Except for Digg, which still does better with the boys.
