If conversions are happening on your site that aren’t easy to identify, measuring the interaction can be difficult. A new approach can help improve the quality of measurements and better understand the interaction on your site.
Measurement for sites without e-commerce
Usually, E-commerce sites are easier to measure and evaluate, at least compared to those who do not. In the case of e-commerce sites, revenue, data coming in, etc. can be measured.
But on sites that do not sell products or have an easily identifiable conversion full users, what can we measure? These types of sites are more common than you might think.
Global brands in industries like packaged food, energy, financial services and others have low conversions and they are not consecutive. You might be able to download a coupon, find a nearby location, watch a video, or do something that indicates engagement, but many organizations don’t consider these actions to be conversions.
Analysis in this type of environment is difficultWhat does success mean in this case? For example, brands like Chanel let you see photos of the products and read about them, but not buy them directly. On the site of Unilever’s famous Ax brand, there are good videos, the products can be reviewed and there is a Buy Now… button which leads to a list of retailers that carry the product.
on these sites large investments are made to maintain the brand image on the siteencourage users to share content on social media and that there is digital advertising of the product on the web, but not for a product to be purchased on an e-commerce site.
These brands often expect interaction and a long-term resultmaybe more brand affinity, offline selling, or something else.
Interaction, a difficult ‘metric’
These types of sites claim that an ill-defined engagement is not a realistic metric. And that can happen because they have no conversions on their site and find themselves overwhelmed with unclear data. The hypotheses to be optimized are based on ambiguous data.
In the absence of concrete conversions, how do you measure engagement in a meaningful way? To demonstrate the value of digital, organizations are challenged to get creative with the tools they use to measure success and the definition of success itself.
A special case
In one specific case, an analyst analyzed a global technology company site with hundreds of unique pagestargeting various audiences including individuals, IT managers, developers, job seekers and investors.
With so much content defining the interaction was difficult, especially thinking about the interaction that could be extended to the whole organization. The challenge was to help this business understand how the site added value to the business. To do this, they had to redefine what “success” meant to them.
Although at first they measured simple actions, such as when someone clicked on a link, scrolled down a page, watched a video, etc., this organization had to resort to a new measure.
The solution was to take the same actions, but analyze their value against each other., and then assign a weight to each action. For example, by aggregating page scrolls, video views, and other actions, each action was given a value, such as subscribing to a newsletter, higher than a page scroll.
With this approximation, not only pagesviews or pageviews would be seen, but what type of action occurred on each page view. There might also be stocks with more weight than others on that same page. Every action could be analyzed to see if what was desired is happening. Were people just scrolling down a page? Ignore the PDF files they wanted to download?
With this type of approach, it is possible to be more precise in measuring the interaction. This has led, in the specific case of the technology company, to more specific and targeted optimizations. And this type of measurement can be linked to more traditional KPIs and brand data.
Brands have significant analytics challenges, especially if they have a content-rich website that doesn’t have a lot of conversion activity. To measure, a key may be to make these measurements more sophisticated. Thus, better reports can be generated, having a better understanding of how, when and why the interaction occurs and applying measures accordingly.
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