It is not uncommon to see News Media Publishers drive un-segmented page views as one of their primary Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - And one of the biggest page view drivers for online News Media today are the common use of Galleries (slideshows if you will). I would argue that those additional page views, however massive they are, don’t deliver the same value to the advertiser, as compared to the core product (the news article) - and ultimately isn’t really what the user/reader wants. I studied the usage patterns of one of the biggest News Media publishers in the US as part of an optimization dialogue and created the following four News Media content segments : Galleries News articles Front pages Other Giving me a much better understanding of where the bulk of the page views and thus the advertising inventory is generated.

It is not uncommon to see News Media Publishers drive un-segmented page views as one of their primary Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - And one of the biggest page view drivers for online News Media today are the common use of Galleries (slideshows if you will). I would argue that those additional page views, however massive they are, don’t deliver the same value to the advertiser, as compared to the core product (the news article) - and ultimately isn’t really what the user/reader wants.

I studied the usage patterns of one of the biggest News Media publishers in the US as part of an optimization dialogue and created the following four News Media content segments:

• Galleries
• News articles
• Front pages
• Other

Giving me a much better understanding of where the bulk of the page views and thus the advertising inventory is generated. There is no surprise in the below bar chart that visualize the total number of page views per news media content segment.

Galleries make up for almost 60% of all page views, which is a dramatic number. I believe it is dramatic, because you don’t have to conduct to many studies or interviews, to find that the value of a gallery page view, is probably not the same as news article page view. I was therefore interested in telling a different story with the same data.

I summed up the total time spent on each of the content segments using a simple time spent metric. Whether you believe that total time spent on news media content segments is identical to reader attention, probably doesn’t matter too much, as I am sure you would agree that, if not, it is at least a decent proxy metric.

There might be a positive surprise in the below visualization, which quite clearly shows that galleries might have the most page views in total, but that the core news media article product (and the front page it is promoted on) is where the reader spend most his time, and I would argue his attention.

It is therefore somewhat sad to see quality news articles getting thrown into ad exchanges and sold alongside galleries. I was therefore positively surprised and happy to see that Nick Denton and his Gawker Media announce their move away from measuring success on page-views. Starting 2010 they will measure and compensate success on Unique visitors. I’m no direct fan of one metric over the other and am not sure gawker has the ability to accurately calculate a true unique visitor. I am however a fan of not valuing every page view the same, simply because, any decent publisher knows how to increase page views without adding any real value to their publication (yes, I am talking about galleries).

- OR as Nick said it “An item which gets picked up and draws in new visitors is worth more than a catnip slideshow that our existing readers can’t help but click upon.”

There is some really good commentary on the subject on The Nieman Journalism Lab’s website as well.

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

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News Media that use Galleries to increase Page-views don’t increase Time-spent (Attention)

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A long post where I’ll work my way to my point as I go along. Was thinking about some of the things I heard and took in  at a Design Meetup with Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic that happened in Soho, tonight.

A long post where I’ll work my way to my point as I go along.

Was thinking about some of the things I heard and took in  at a Design Meetup with Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic that happened in Soho, tonight.  Rachel Ashwell spoke to  her relation with Target stores and having her own showroom chain being beneficial to Target because it’s the incubator for her customers to speak to her (so she gets the ideas that end up becoming part of the Shabby Chic product line at Target).

Rachel said there was a bit of experimentation involved to learn how to build furniture –  build her product line, and while it was hard work, it was also enjoyable and necessary, and she shared that enthusiasm, joy, with her employees.

It occurred to me that Google, where many employees get to spend 20% of their time working at a project of their choice (connected in some way to the business, of course) as one of the secrets of it’s success.  But it’s the same thing, in a way, that Rachel Ashwell does, and yet ….. when you try to do the same thing in normal business, including agencies, it falls flat.

No one wants to pay for experimentation, for the most part, they only want to pay for results, and they want to bill it by the hour, or half hour. Is it any wonder why analytics doesn’t get done that well by agencies (or in house corporate … we don’t want to leave them out, either)? It’s  no surprise to me that 66% of Enterprise Clients would abandon Paid tools for Google Analtyics – according to Forrester Research.

Since most corporations aren’t getting much out of their analytics, why would they want to pay for it (when they can get almost the same thing for free) and why would they want to pay anyone to play and experiment, in order to learn and come up with something creative, and perhaps, unforseen or expected?   They don’t.

I find that to be a big problem -that there’s no room for play and experimentation – everyone just wants results – but we don’t learn that well, that way.

For example, I learn a lot about Analytics and Social Media by writing about those things – often I don’t know exactly what I’m going to write (though I have a notion of what I want to communicate, beforehand) – the insights comes to me as I’m writing (bet you can tell this  post that was written like that) and my belief is the more we give (in ideas) the more that we get.

While writing about a Social Media Scorecard based on Digital Footprint Index I created one – just out of a sense of curiosity (had an idea I could build it using Radian6 and it, more or less, worked).  Because I did that, I was prepared to show people a tangible scorecard that could be further extended.  I would have never done that scorecard had I worried about doing only stuff I was paid for, and be billable by the hour, or every 15 minutes of time.

I understand where agencies are coming from, but also understand that we, as human beings, need to be able to play around with things until we find the right combinations that make any project work – and that takes time – perhaps it’s best to just build that into the projects, much as Google does in giving time to employees to experiment.

Recently I was asked about campaign reporting – in several contexts,  this always seems to take a lot of time – especially with Social Media – as the data you want to collect isn’t structured, is all over the place, and has to usually be manually tabulated – scorecards are usually custom built for each client and each campaign, when they exist at  all – and are extremely time consuming to construct.   Sure, once you do the first couple of reports, the time it takes can be cut down by 50% or more, but at the end of the day … a lot of reporting ends up becoming groping around for data to put into a report, and finding it take time, a lot of time.

Building a community around a business using Social Media is also extremely time consuming and Social Media Campaigns take time – 3 months – 1 year for results (though few businesses want to pay for people to experiment and learn what works – often, only a few forward thinking corporations do this now, or non-profits, that don’t have much to lose by investing in Social Media).

Another of my playful ideas came from Noah Brier, was to take Noah’s ideas from BrandTags and harness his concept to prove Social Media and Branding Campaigns work – no one could have paid me to come with that insight – Word Clouds could prove the success of campaigns – and BrandTags.net was sometimes used by Brand Managers to prove their branding worked, or not – but could it be used to prove Social Media worked?

Well … I wrote a post about that tonight, about how showing progress with Social Media campaigns was similar to Art, and put up to advanced topic word clouds generated by Alterian, focusing on a specific campaign I’m tracking for a friend, and seeing if my notion (or experiment, works, or not).

Before Social Media Campaign Started …………

…….. After Social Media Campaign has been underway for 2 months

The larger globes mean more conversations around a specific topic – the closer the globes are, the closer the topics are related, according to Alterian.

To my way of thinking, the second topic map shows progress in focusing the conversations and increasing the size of them – now … a simple thing like a Word Map, properly done, can show the success of Social Media and Branding Campaigns (often, they’re becoming the same thing, more and more) and yet, that insight, I came up with on my own, and no one would or could pay me for that – I did it because I wanted to .. it was the fun of experimenting and not knowing what you’ll come up with.

The idea I had to use Noah Brier’s Word Cloud concept and turn it into Social Media monitoring was reinforced by what I heard at the MIMA Summit last week, in Minneapolis, where I also spoke.  Lee Odden mentioned, in his presentation about the intersection of SEO and Social Media (it’s not posted yet on the MIMA Summit site or I’d link to it), that Word Clouds are the Keyword Analysis tools for Social Media.   In fact, an earlier TopRankBlog post from SES San Jose last year (when I spoke there) mirrors the same things that I said in a panel I moderated (with TopRank covered).

The picture that emerges is one where the community of creativity is feeding off experimentation and sharing information with one another – and that, unfortunately, hasn’t found it’s way into corporate culture, and certainly, not in the agency world.   Again, I understand why that is; but, still, we need to move past that and accept that people are going to be happier and far more productive, at the end of the day, if they are allowed to experiment and play on their own, for a portion of their paid time – and that corporations ought to encourage this.

Anyway, this is a long enough post that it’s safe to say, if I haven’t made my point by now, I probably will never be able to make it (in this post, anyway).

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Playfull Social Media and Web Analytics making it’s way in the agency world

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Thanks to a new research study from comScore, GroupM Search & M80 exploring how Social Media and Paid Search Interact we learn Social Media can improve Paid Search Performance for a brand by up to 300% (see the study, embedded below).

Thanks to a new research study from comScore, GroupM Search & M80 exploring how Social Media and Paid Search Interact we learn Social Media can improve Paid Search Performance for a brand by up to 300% (see the study, embedded below).
The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

I’ve been thinking, for a while, Social Media isn’t just a marketing channel – it’s a mode of communications, perhaps part of all the other marketing channels, much like a co-enzyme Q 10, that helps cellular respiration by supporting the rest of the body’s metabolic processes.   In fact, when I was a Board Director at the Web Analytics Association, who founded the Social Media Committee, it became clear, after the first year of the committee’s existence – Social Media supports Research, Advocacy, Marketing, Communications – often making them all work better.

And that’s what the ComScore-GroupM study shows -

Studies like this are great – they seem to reinforce common sense – and give us an idea of what we might expect when leveraging Search and Social Media, together.  Common Sense – the more a touchpoint is “nurtured” and fed with information relevent to the search query (by Social Media – especially social media that’s about the brand or term being searched for) the more likely a searcher is going to click through to the search campaign’s landing page – almost 50% more likely – once exposed to Social Media.

And, the searcher who is exposed to Social Media is also more likely to stay online longer – as the chart above, shows (72 minutes with Paid Search Alone vs 170 minutes with Paid Search AND Influenced Social Media).  However, I want to point out time spent online isn’t necessarily time spent on the Brand’s site – plus this study comes from ComScore – which mainly uses Panel Data and extrapolates it to a much larger population, and therefore isn’t 100% accurate.

The so-called  “co-enzyme” effect of Social Media is further amplified in that Consumers using social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to the average Internet user.

One other thing I’m reminded of while writing this post – that typical Paid Search operates as “interruption” media just as most other advertising still does.  The other day, I stood waiting for a bus and someone approached me, wanting to give me leaflet – I wasn’t interested – while another person, nearby, accepted the leaflet.

Now, most of the time I don’t like people just coming up to me and asking for my attention – the lady next to me, took the leaflet offered, and immediately went over to the nearby garbage can, and threw it out.    How many times is that repeated – probably 99% of the time – which explains why a paid search ad is clicked on less than 1% of the time, on average – not to mention other forms of media that fare even worse.   It’s almost as if, we, having become so exposed to media and brand messages, have tuned out – and don’t want to be interrupted – but we still want to be marketed to – just not in the same way.

Taking it another level – we often get to learn more, lower our barriors in social activity – talking and relating to one another, or a brand we’re considering buying from – it seems to me, we can’t ignore that we need to have a conversation -but that conversation needs to be about something – something interesting to us.

So the The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption tells us that……. we need to think of Social Media, not as a channel, by itself, but the fabric which connects all the other things we do – and amplifies them.   By having this level of communication Brands will have to improve their offerings and find out what people want, and respond, creating relevant conversations, but not doing so – means, missing the boat – and perhaps, cutting your sales by 200 of what they could be … and if that’s not a strong example of Social Media ROI, I don’t know what is.

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Social Media improves Paid Search Performance by up to 300%

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I was interviewed by Jennifer Lindsey on her A-List program yesterday and here’s the entire podcast embedded below – it’s an hour and full of interaction and good information which I hope my readers will listen to and enjoy, if they have the time. In the interview I was asked about the free tools vs. paid tools debate, sentiment analysis tools and their accuracy, implementation of Google Analytics and other analytics platforms and asked for my predictions on where we’re going in the next year or two (with analytics)

I was interviewed by Jennifer Lindsey on her A-List program yesterday and here’s the entire podcast embedded below – it’s an hour and full of interaction and good information which I hope my readers will listen to and enjoy, if they have the time.

In the interview I was asked about the free tools vs. paid tools debate, sentiment analysis tools and their accuracy, implementation of Google Analytics and other analytics platforms and asked for my predictions on where we’re going in the next year or two (with analytics).

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Interviewed on the A-List with Jennifer Lindsey

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I’m on a flight to Minneapolis to speak at MIMA Summit 09 right now and taking this time to reflect on the information I heard yesterday at day 1 of the Singularity Summit in NYC #ss09 . The 92 nd Street Y in New York was full of people I don’t often meet, several with long beards, many brilliant people, and some, a little over the edge. The first session I attended on Quantum Computing: What It Is, What It Is Not, What We Have Yet to learn, where Michael Nielsen described Quantum Computing in 10 minutes, gave me the impression Quantum Computing is Boolean Algebra and Logic gates taken to the 3 rd dimension.

I’m on a flight to Minneapolis to speak at MIMA Summit 09 right now and taking this time to reflect on the information I heard yesterday at day 1 of the Singularity Summit in NYC #ss09.
The 92^nd Street Y in New York was full of people I don’t often meet, several with long beards, many brilliant people, and some, a little over the edge.

The first session I attended on Quantum Computing: What It Is, What It Is Not, What We Have Yet to learn, where Michael Nielsen described Quantum Computing in 10 minutes, gave me the impression Quantum Computing is Boolean Algebra and Logic gates taken to the 3^rd dimension. Michael Nielsen pointed that he can describe what Quantum Computing is and does, how it works, but can’t tell you why it works, nor can anyone else.  He went on to describe simple AND, OR, NOT gates portray 2 conditions, the simplest Quantum gate can encompass 8 conditions.  I can imagine a situation in life where the answer isn’t “yes” or “no” or something is “happening” or “not happening”.  The big question is how does Michel Nielsen’s talk about Quantum Computing tie into The Singularity?

The answer is, of course, scientists want to develop artificial intelligence that can think for itself (this is one aspect of The Singularity) – and do that – Quantum Computing is needed – but my sense is, that today, Quantum Computing is still far from realizing AI as the logic gates that are able to be constructed, and the software that runs on them are not yet capable of mimicking human intelligence (though a prediction of 2029 is being heralded by Ray Kurzweil, of Kurzweil Technologies (and the spiritual founder of The Singularity Movement).   On the other hand, in a later session, not directly related to this one, AI is already present in certain applications that we commonly use, but aren’t sentient, yet.

The next session, DNA: Not Merely the Secret of Life, by Ned Seeman of New York University, showed some fascinating work being done now to build synthetic DNA (PX DNA) that mimics structures we have within our own DNA.  In many cases, the way this is done, is to cut DNA strands at certain angles – precisely, and then match up another strand of DNA with the same angle cut – this reminds me of carpentry, and perhaps, architecture.  It also reminds me that life, and I take this out of the DNA realm, is often determined by the “connections” we make, but in life, as in DNA, it’s all in the “angle” cut.  In other cases, building synthetic DNA strands requires a bit of “scaffolding” or other strands that can be constructed to hold what you want to bind together, and Nanorobotics has emerged to help build and activate synthetic strands of DNA.  The popular consensus is programming Nanotechnology that would repair human beings – or extend their lives, is still 20-40 years ahead despite any hype to the contrary.

I suppose if we merged Quantum Computing with DNA we get the idea of a 2-Dimentional DNA structure becoming 3 Dimensional and having the intelligence and sentience to rebuild itself – which, again, is part of the Singularity.

Next, Jurgen Schmidhuber from IDSIA, gave a fascinating presentation on Compression Progress: The Algorithmic Principle behind Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music and Jokes.  I liked Jurgen’s presentation because it gave me ideas about why information is interesting or valued, and when it’s not valued as much (a commodity).   According to Schmidhuber – it’s about compressing information – we, as human beings, take in information all the time, but unless we can compress and encode it in way that saves data (that makes that information, or vision) it’s not viewed as interesting to most people.  I imagined that my favorite painter, Paul Cezanne, found his own way to encode nature, and the landscape he so loved, in the south of France – but if another person copies that approach, there’s no additional “encoding” that goes on – and it’s not valued as much, or at all, even if the work is technically as good or superior to what Cezanne did.  You can find a million other examples of that same thing – and it all comes down to Compressing information, creating some new version, and adding value to society, and the world – that makes something “memorable”.  In a way, you can view Art in Museums as a reflection, or history of “novel compressions” of data that society values and learns from, today.

I didn’t care for Stephen Wolfram’s Conversation on the Singularity – maybe I’m more familiar with Wolfram Alpha and didn’t find anything Wolfram said to be interesting (or to put it another way, he had not compressed what he had to say to the audience in a way that I found novel or new – but that’s just me).

David Chalmers, or was it Marcus Hutter, from the Australian National University spoke about Simulation and the Singularity and I thought, made a good point that once society is able to “compress” information it becomes usable in a wide variety of ways and that it’s important in the evolution of human artificial intelligence to what he calls “superintelligence”.   To be honest, there was so much good information that was being discussed; I find it now, hard to remember exactly who said, what, in certain instances.

I thought William Dickens, from Northwestern University, who spoke on Cognitive Ability: Past and Future Enhancement and Implications – gave a great review of what we’ve learnt from IQ tests over the last 50 years.  William explained how scores in Math haven’t changed much, but those tests that measure the ability to do “spot” thinking and “improvising” have, by as much as 20%.  Why didn’t our skills, as a world society, independent of what country was being examined, change much for Math?  The answer seems to be, it didn’t need to – we have pocket calculators, we now have Google to help us figure out things – so we don’t really “need” to develop our intelligence, perhaps, in ways that we might ideally, want to.

William Dickens goes on to explain positive feedback loops that impact how we perform – initial experiences that are reinforced by additional positive experiences that then become a dynamic, may be a way to explain growth in certain intelligences and success of one individual over another.  Another point he made was that intelligence is largely a function of the environment in conjunction with genes, that you can take a person with lower intelligence, put them in better family, and there will be IQ gains – but he also pointed out – the gains are usually lost quickly, once the child leaves the supportive situation –and that led me to some profound thoughts about what society ought to provide, or what we ought to provide, that we don’t, that supports positive feedback loops and allows gains we make to be retained throughout our lives.

The last speaker of the day, Ray Kurzweil, didn’t actually inspire me – though he’s the founder of the Singularity movement by the books he’s written – though he predicted “inflexion points” where progress accelerates rapidly, giving several examples, and that 2029, will heard true AI Intelligence – and he doesn’t think he’s too far off.

What do you think?

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Singularity Summit Recap – Day 1 October 3rd 2009 NYC

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