Posted on 9 January 2009 by Loch Rose
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ShopLocal has launched Circular Central, a distributable multi-retailer shopping site that contains the online circulars for many top retailers, on Yahoo! Deals and on the IndyStar.com newspaper site. The sites are still relatively new, but it is already clear that shoppers see value in finding all of the circulars in one place, and in the flash-based presentation that invites them to browse.
Some visitors to Circular Central see the first page and leave, which is not surprising in such a new product: it wasn’t what they were expecting, so they exit immediately. But about 50% of the time, the visitor goes on to view 2 or more pages, which then constitutes a “multi-page visit”. The chart below shows just how many pages the visitors have been viewing during these multi-page visits, and how it varies by the day of the week:
No, that’s not an error: multi-page visitors viewed an average of 55 circular pages apiece on the IndyStar.com site this past Sunday. Since January 1st, 7% of visitors have viewed 100 pages or more during their visit, and that increased to 15% of visitors on Sunday January 4th.
It’s also interesting to see that the number of pages per multi-page visit on IndyStar.com peaks on Sunday then drops over the course of the week. This is consistent with our past findings on The Purchase Funnel in Online Circulars: Sunday is the day on which traffic to the circulars is highest, and is also the day on which shoppers do most of their shopping across circulars. Circular Central is of course a big time-saver for shoppers who want to view multiple circulars as they plan their shopping for the upcoming week, so seeing the highest level of page views per visit on Sunday makes perfect sense. As the week continues, shoppers have already made most of their purchase decisions and no longer need to search across circulars, so the average number of page views per visit drops.
The average page views per visit in the Yahoo site is much lower – why is that? We believe that there are two main reasons. The first is shopper expectations: visitors to IndyStar.com are often newspaper readers who are accustomed to reading the circulars delivered in their newspaper on Sunday, so now they are simply doing the same thing online. However, a lower proportion of Yahoo visitors will be accustomed to doing the same, so we don’t see the same lift on Sundays on Yahoo. The other reason is that at present Yahoo is displaying only 4 retailer circulars, compared to 22 retailers on IndyStar.com, so there are many fewer pages to browse on Yahoo:
In fact, in the current week the Yahoo site contains just 66 circular pages from 4 retailers. The selection on IndyStar.com is much larger (22 retailers with 400 circular pages):
It is clear that shoppers are finding value in the Circular Central concept, and we expect that some will become loyal and frequent users. As shoppers become accustomed to Circular Central and the percentage of return visits increases, we should see average page views/visit increase as well. Traffic will increase, encouraging more retailers to participate, which in turn will increase Circular Central’s value to shoppers and thus their loyalty and engagement.
Sorry. I can’t help be excited. This dedicated article in the January 2009 issue of NRF Stores that covers my baby, PaperBoy – a localized rich media display ad product that pulls targeted in-store content – is exactly the the type of trade group / publication the team here has been diligently pursuing. It’s been a product that I’ve been creating / managing for nearly 3 years and its been so rewarding to see it grow in acceptance and market share. It’s always a great sign of confirmation that the product that you are offering is relevant and of high enough interest to catch the ears of such a top retail trade journal.
Here at ShopLocal, the technology team’s top line metric of choice for accessing the volume or load of much content is being presented to web visitors is the page view. Unlike all of the doom and gloom that has surrounded this measure being outdated in an age of web 2.0 technologies (such as Flash/Flex and AJAX), the ShopLocal team has instead made some innovative adjustments to what we consider to be a page view so that this important metric stays relevant and accurate.
The page view metric is NOT dead here at ShopLocal, it just needed to be re-tooled to keep up with the latest web technologies.
At the original core of the page view metric, the idea was simple. It was to be a measure of how involved web site visitors were. The more web pages they looked at, the more engaged they were. Nothing has changed in regards to what we are all trying to measure. The only that has changes is the web technologies used to build web pages.
With these new (web 2.0) technologies, the web pages themselves are getting more efficient and pulling in and refreshing data and displaying this new content to the user without requiring a page refresh. This is a great move forward, as it results in smoother and faster user interactions. But this causes some really tracking issues that must be dealt with.
So in order to create an apples to apples comparison of our older “web 1.0″ SmartCircular 2.0 site (static HTML web pages that would require a complete page reload to display new content) to our newer “web 2.0″ SmartCircular 4.1 sites (which utilize Flash/Flex technologies that only actual record one actual web page being loaded regardless of how much user activity, engagement or actions occur) the ShopLocal team now equates every user initiated click (or event in web analytic speak) or action taken that results in different data being displayed on the screen as a unique page view. In the older web 1.0 days, each of these clicks would have caused the complete web page to reload, so even though the actual web (HTML) page itself does not refresh, the principle and metrics recorded are the same within the newer web 2.0 application.
Yes, at the 50,000 foot level that comScore and other measurement firms looks at sites, the page view is (and has been) dead. If comScore is measuring the page views on a ShopLocal SmartCircular site like Target’s for example, I would fully expect them to register only one page view per visitor regardless of how much true activity the user performs within this Flash/Flex rich internet application (RIA) site.
But at the individual publisher level (which ShopLocal is), within web analytics systems (such as WebTrends or Omniture), page views can still be a very useful measure. One must however implement very specific, granular event based tracking into all of the various web 2.0 RIAs one’s site so as to capture all of the user initiated actions that happen during a person’s visit to the site. If this key and important step of tagging all of the intra-site activity is missed, then yes the page view metric for your organization is either dying or dead already.
So there are no dumb questions. I believe this fully. So here are some common misconceptions that keep coming up over and over again as ShopLocal engages clients around the widget | gadget space that I’d like to set straight.
- Web widgets can be downloaded. This is FALSE for the most part. By the very definition of what a web widget is, they are NOT downloadable, but rather snagable, grabbable or embeddable (all of these are synonyms in this context). Basically users just copy and place the widget onto or within another web page or site. No actual file is being downloaded from the internet and being installed on your local machine. This is the beauty of what makes a web widget’s unique and powerful. Whenever a user visits a web site or web application that they have placed (or embedded) a web widget, that exact web widget is available anywhere, regardless if they are accessing that specific web page from their own personal computer or not. It’s just like web email (eg Gmail, Hotmail, etc). The emails are not downloaded to your local machine. All of your messages remain within the email web site so that you can access your mail anywhere at anytime. Web widgets are no different.
- Web widgets require something to be downloaded first, like a platform or run time environment. This is FALSE for the most part. Again, the whole point to wrapping up a small micro-application or piece of content into a web widget is to avoid putting up any barriers of adoption or use. Out comes the web email example. To access Gmail or Hotmail, no user has to install anything. It’s as easy as logging in. Yes, some of the early platform specific widgets like Yahoo! Widgets required a base platform be installed, but these type of widgets are a dying breed that are not going to survive.
- Web widgets are able to be placed on one’s desktop (or WebTop as this blurred line is being called). This is FALSE for the most part. Web widgets live within or on web pages, not a single specific user’s desktop of their personal computer. To create something that does this, a specific desktop application needs to be created, typically within (or using) Adobe’s AIR platform (which is now being bundled with all Flash Player installations / upgrades). This is a very different and unique type of applications that in all honesty is much more powerful and immersive than a web widget, but does require a much more motivated and trusting user to download and install one’s desktop application.
- Web widgets are able to be placed or installed on one’s iPhone / iTouch. This is once again FALSE for the most part. What this describes is an iPhone application which is a very different than a web widget. iPhone applications are written in an Apple specific language (xCode) and are typically deployed through the iTunes App store. There is a very unique set of rules, interactions and set of possibilities that come along with creating and releasing an iPhone application. All of which are 180 degree different than a web widget.
Web widgets are their own unique type of applications that however many similar qualities they may share with other types of applications, they have their own standard of identity.
So let’s recap quickly:
- Web widgets are NOT downloadable or for that matter every downloaded
- Web widgets do NOT require that anything be installed on a user’s local machine
- Web widgets are NOT the same as desktop apps
- Web widgets are NOT the same as iPhone apps
Yes, there are exceptions to each of these rules (which is where most of the confusion stems) due to some 3rd party widget providers (such as Clearspring, Gigya and Widgetbox) offering some ‘out-of-the-box’ support for some of these type of non-standard options on a hit or miss basis. But in a general, pure academic sense of what is entailed within a web widget (or as I have referenced previously as an universal widget) these four conceptions and mis-use of terminology are just plain FALSE.
So a few weeks ago, I wrote about how ShopLocal is making a new push into the Canadian market. One very recent outcome of this new direction is evident in the latest release of the Canadian Tire weekly flyer site that ShopLocal hosts. In it, both English and French version of the site are available.
Now ShopLocal for a long time has supported multi-language sites, but it was never a truly scalable and never done in a very cost effective manner. With the launch of the latest code base that is powering the SmartCircular 4.1 platform (on which the Canadian Tire weekly flyer site sits), localizing (as it is called from a technical point of view) a site into many different languages is now a flexible and straight forward exercise.
By placing all the copy, images and all related resources needed for the front end presentation of a web site in an external configuration file, ShopLocal now can offer its clients a much easier and cheaper way to maintain and update each language version of their sites. But from a ShopLocal perspective, this key change sets up ShopLocal to truly go international. One site for example can now support 100s+ of languages. The goal here was to make site language 100% extensible. So running a site in Turkish or Arabic is now possible with very limited changes. So as we deploy more sites to Canada and Australia, this is only setting ShopLocal up to more easily launch into more distant international spaces as the technology barriers continue to fall. Who knows, maybe Finland is next?
The new and greatly improved Canadian Tire Weekly Flyer site
(4.50 out of 5)
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