The Yahoo! homepage. One of the very most visited web pages in the world. This last Sunday and for many to come, Target will be one of the predominant advertisers that will be featured on the Yahoo! homepage and make use of the powerful Smart Ad platform that ShopLocal has been a part of since the very beginning. These Target Y! Homepage ads are 100% powered by ShopLocal weekly ad content which is a big milestone around ShopLocal, as this has been in the works for over 9 months.
Here is a screen shot of the Yahoo! Homepage on Sunday July, 26 2009 that featured a Target Smart Ad that pulled in ShopLocal weekly ad content.
Getting this whole setup to work has had its own challenges since no 3rd party rich media ads are allowed on the Yahoo! homepage (unlike the other major portals of MSN and AOL) due to Yahoo!’s own internal concerns around security, speed, performance and ability to support the huge traffic volumes. So to meet this core “Yahoo! must serve the ads” requirement, the ad was constructed by an internal team at Yahoo! and utilizes an innovative integration into the Teracent near-real time optimization and learning engine that picks the best ShopLocal weekly ad content for each individual ad impression served. This really is the holy grail of one:one marketing at some serious scale.
The ShopLocal team also had to work through some content publishing timing issues and creating some custom product selection logic to deal with the fact that the Yahoo! homepage can not support geographical versioned content / ads currently with wisdom of the crowds popularity ranking data layered in as well. In the end however, a very solid solution was found to every challenge and this monster campaign launched exactly on time. It really is fun to know that what you work is on is seen by billions of people. Not many folks can say that about their products.
Loch Rose, head of ShopLocal analytics, pulled the below report a while back when trying to access the effectiveness of CircularCentral, from a user engagement perspective. There are a few core assumptions that are need to be laid out for this analysis to make sense. They are:
- Site engagement is best measured by looking at the number of page views that a user generates within a given site visit. So the more content they consume, they more engaged they are
- The below chart is only for multi-page visitors, who are those visitors that do NOT leave the CircularCentral site after only one (1) single page view. So these are users that looked at least two pages
- Most new circular content from retailers is released on Sunday. So this is when the content is freshest and the consumer demand for this time sensitive information is highest
With all of that preamble, the results are in. The below chart is real data from one representative live CircularCentral site. Typically, when a site generates 20 pages views per visits, that is an amazing feat. Below, 20 page views per visit is the low point each week, with a Sunday spike of over 70 page views per (multi-page) visit occurring. I have never seen any other digital medium generate this sort of engagement (and corresponding display ad inventory). Truly remarkable performance.
With over 70 page views per multi-page visitor within CircularCentral on Sundays, this level of site engagement is amazing
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.
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