The Sticky Visit
Websites are getting stickier and stickier. What I mean is that the innovations associated with Web 2.0 have taken content items from subsidiary pages and placed them front and center. Want proof? There is a battle underway in the online space to redefine the standard for online activity. The most recent salvo was Nielsen//NetRatings' moving the time-spent metric ahead of page views as its prime indicator of online engagement. It's an eye-opening move, but with rich-media permitting so much content consumption within a fairly segregated ambit, it follows logically that time rather than frequency would begin to attain primacy.
Take a look at Yahoo.com. Visitors no longer have to navigate several clicks deep into the site to get to the content they want. It’s amazing what can be done from the home page. Real-time news headings are browsable from world, local, and financial feeds. Featured video content is front and center. Videos are embedded into the site, so if you absolutely need to see George Hotz half-grinning, unlocked iPhone in hand, you don’t have to go anywhere. Most impressively, dynamic scripting in the right-hand pane allows users to preview e-mails messages, stream tunes, and consult regional weather forecasts.
We’ve been preaching for a long time about the importance of measuring a visitor’s engagement with the website rather than simply logging the number of clicks effected. Thorough and personalized interaction with a page is more valuable than blind, directionless clicks. A worthwhile visit is a sticky one—the visitor literally being glued to the content presented and soaking up as much brand messaging as possible. This is why we gauge users’ perceptions of content detail, relevancy, and depth. Increasingly vibrant web design, coupled with more precise targeting through SEO, means that one well delivered landing page experience can stimulate a conversion event more effectively than ever before. Conversely, a visit comprised of cursory and inattentive page views is of no value to anybody.
There is still a long way to go (the most recent data I could find for average session duration put that metric at 3.6 minutes), but the proliferation of short, Youtube-style clips has forced marketers to become more inventive. The future branding implications are clear: with multiple video streams having prominence on websites, multi-pronged ad campaigns can be housed in one page. The sticky visit might one day render the deep visit irrelevant.
Update to my previous post: In my last post, I wrote about the challenges attendant to the online presences of the major print/newspaper brands. They certainly won’t benefit from Google’s decision to begin hosting AP and other news service content on its Google News site. There could also be the lurking issue of reduced ad revenue from financial firms, stung from the fallout of the subprime mortgage mess. Yet two more digital space hurdles to overcome for newspaper publishers.
While it is logical to move to time spent on a website rather than the page view as a measure of engagement, it still opens up more problems when trying to assess the individual's engaement with a site.
EdwardWith the way that online audiences are measured, someone who keeps a browser open on a page, perhaps on an interesting thread in a forum, or a sports match in progress, only checking it occasionally, isn't engaged in the true sense, even if the online meter on the panel member's PC is open on that page all day. You can combine various online audience metrics but even this requires a lot of assumptions to draw any qualitative conclusions as to why the visitor came to the site, did they enjoy it, and would they come back.
September 06, 2007