09.27.07
Shifting Sands of Media
I went to an interesting talk this morning around the Online Rules of Engagement.
There were two main discussion topics:
A match made in heaven – how online fits into the marketing mix – presented by Matthew Buckland of OPA / Mail & Guardian.
Rules of Online engagement – a look at new ways of measuring online engagement – presented by Andrew Falbert and Tom Accquaviva – Nielsen/Netratings in the UK.
I personally did not get as much information from the talk as I thought there would be. I’m not sure if the audience was perhaps just too familiar / advanced with the online world and the aim of the talk was probably more directed at convincing Agencies why they should consider online as part of their marketing mix.
There was however some interesting stats available such as:
- From a global audience of +-8 mill currently reading SA top sites, +-4 mill are local readers. Although we might not be the biggest online audience globally, we’re by far not the smallest. Online has definitely acquired a strong growth over the last few years.
- SA is Facebook’s 6th biggest user base. Think Advertising Potential. Especially in terms of Affiliate publishing & now more recently Facebook Flyers. The irony of this being of course that we’re advertising on a foreign site to target a local audience…
Keep in mind these are measurements of sites that are within the OPA only and not general stats from what I understand.
Andrew & Tom presented their reasoning for metrics moving to time based as apposed to visits. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this pitch. There are of course pro’s and con’s both ways:
- Time metric identifies Advertising opportunities on a website (more eyeballs)
- With Ajax gaining more popularity, page impressions go down due to the way pages are served through Ajax (although I’ve seen some people delve into overcoming this - very important to us SEOs!), therefore one will have to use a time metric to measure effectiveness
- Time metric is unfortunately not 100% accurate - multiple browser tabs is one reason for this (there are some measurements put in place to overcome this apparently, but still not 100% accurate)
Therefore the conclusion is that with time metrics we can somewhat measure user engagement, but it can not be the sole metric used, nor replace visitors at this point. We need to look at multiple metrics - which is what any good Online Marketing Consultant should be doing at this point anyway…
Time = Branding & User Engagement
Combination = Acquisition / Conversion / Opportunity