Hitwise data is absolutely fantastic for a whole host of applications, ranging from understanding competitor marketing behaviour, doing keyword research, finding decent affiliates and many other things.
One of those other things is understanding how competitors may be inflating their figures.
For many marketers still marching to the drumbeat of the TV Industrial Complex, “visits” and “reach” are the be all and end all of metrics, when, as I’ve argued before, these metrics are merely proxies for the one metric, Return on Investment. By focusing on this metric, you alleviate any kind of misnomers in calculating proxy metrics like visits.
How can visits be inflated?
Well, it comes down to definitions and representation of data. For all practical purposes, visits are intended to measure people accessing a website. The intent of the marketer measuring this is to understand how many times people came to look at the website. However, this can get confused in situations when people are providing hosted software as a service without rewriting URLs.
For example;
Briscoes in New Zealand host their catalogue on with Ceros Media. When people on the www.briscoes.co.nz website click from http://briscoes.co.nz/catalogue.aspx to http://cde.cerosmedia.com/Briscoes-homeware-specials/1F499d62edbb8b0012.cde, then all of those visits to Briscoes’s catalogue, on the Briscoes website would count as visits to Ceros Media.
Metaphor: If I visit one house and see another house through the window, to which house should the visit count?
Now, for the most part this doesn’t really matter, somebody saw the brand, whether it is on your site or not is largely irrelevant. However, it does matter for reporting purposes because the definition of the metric is entirely counter to its intent – which is to see how many people came to visit your site. From Ceros’ point of view their traffic would consist of everybody who they are hosting catalogue for, when in reality, the only real visitors to www.ceros.com are B2B visitors looking for a flash based interactive magazine solution.
This type of a domain strategy would cause Ceros to inflate their statistics and report a significantly higher visit number, which would allow them to charge more for advertising to any TV Industrial Complex marketer – if they were running an aggregated magazine website. This practice would even stack up when viewing it from third party competitive Intelligence tools like Hitwise.
The other disadvantages to a domain naming strategy like this is that for the customers that do notice the change in URL, they may question and feel uneasy about what is going on. Also, when people link into these pages, the all important “link juice” that Google relies on for relevance ranking, will not flow to your domain.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many visitors a particular website gets; yours or your advertising supplier - what matters is how many of the right visitors did your message get?
By now, the bricks-and-mortar retailers who are performing the best online have moved past the idea of the company website as the sole indicator of a successful Internet presence. Just like having a giant billboard at your store isn’t enough to bring shoppers in store, neither is having an amazing website (Hence catalogue distribution in the real life).
Five years ago, it may have been enough to have a heavily trafficked brand website in order to be considered a successful online advertiser. However in the light of multi-channel shopping – which we can safely accept as the norm in Australian retail today – having one point of contact with your consumer is no longer enough.
Making product and offer information available through third-party sources and websites has the added bonus of giving the appearance of review and verification, which can help attract those consumers who give more weight to information provided independently rather than via traditional advertising channels.
The bottom line is that reducing all the barriers to purchase for a potential customer is name of the game, and these barriers consist of time, money, effort. By leaving your home turf and playing “away” you can reduce the time and effort for consumers, the only real necessity to having an onsite visit is if you are performing trusted e-commerce transactions, otherwise, save the hassle to your users and inform them where they are, when they want and drive them in-store. The only issue with this is that you need to stop using website visits as a KPI and focus on measuring unique eyeballs and sales.
I might be grandstanding on the shoulders of giants here, but it seems to me that there may be one very important thing missing from Kevin Kelly’s very good observation that things in the digital world attain value from being better than free.
Kevin’s list looks something like this – value is created with
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Immediacy
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Personalisation
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Interpretation
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Authenticity
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Accessibility
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Embodiment
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Patronage
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Findability
Seth Godin, also noticed that this was a profound observation and went on to recently make some profound observations of his own about how managing a tribe is much better than marketing a brand.
From this, it seems apparent that there is some “Better than Free” value to be had in “Belonging”. I think it is some sort of altruistic fulfilment we get from belonging to a tribe, contributing to a tribe, and then having that contribution valued, or recognised in some way. For some people this will be ego stroking, for others it will be the joy of giving.
As Denis Leary said,
“Folks, Id like to sing a song about the American Dream
About me, about you
About the way our American hearts beat way down in the bottom of our chests
About that special feeling we get in the cockles of our hearts
Maybe below the cockles,
Maybe in the sub cockle area,
Maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys,
Maybe even in the colon, we don’t know”
The truth is, we don’t know where we get that feeling, but I’m lead to believe that we all get it from time to time, and it may even be called love – but, at risk of sounding like a boardroom marketer pushing some jargon, I’ll cover all my bases by calling it Altruistic Fulfilment under the broad heading of “Belonging”.
If there is one missing from Kevin’s list, I’m guessing we are likely to discover more as the web unfolds,
Another two valuable things under this heading could also be Significance/Influence which are obviously very valuable things.
