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
One of the stumbling points that has really keep main site builders from fully embracing using rich internet technologies (like Flash/Flex or Silverlight) has been that these newer technologies don’t play so well with some older, core technologies such as ad servers. Making money via display advertising is such a core part of many site monetization strategies. The ShopLocal team has found a way to bring peace to the (online) world so that both really engaging Flash sites CAN be monetized via display ads.
The ShopLocal team has figured out a way to allow all key user initiated actions (or events in ‘flash-speak’) that happen within a SmartCircular site that is built in Adobe Flex/Flash to “talk to” and “trigger” an ad server to reload the display ads that are wrapped around the site – WITHOUT having to reload the entire site or Flash movie. The first live example that uses this asynchronous ad serving is the Albertson’s SmartCircular 4.1 GroceryCentric site.
So as a user goes about their browsing of the online weekly ad content, the display ads are constantly refreshing. As a publisher, this allows one to fully maximize all the “page views” (eg display ad inventory) that users generate. The beautiful thing is that rich internet technologies DO help create more “page views” per user (or visit), so it’s great to finally cash in on these higher “page view” generating technologies and serve a display ad every single possible opportunity.
One other good example of how asynchronous ad serving has been done within a Flex application is Pandora Radio. The main ‘radio player’ is all deployed in flash, but off to the side typical display ads are rotated whenever a new song starts to play.
So here is a Flex RIA site that has been fully wired into the Doubleclick For Publishers (DFP) ad server so that ever single user generated event causes the ads to reload and refresh
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 if you do nothing else, just click this link: http://yahoocircularcentral.shoplocal.com/ Having me ‘tell‘ you about this innovative new approach to multi-retailer local shopping is much less effective than me ‘showing‘ you. Feel free to leave any comments and feedback as this is a work in progress. Also note that you can get to this by going to http://deals.yahoo.com/ and clicking the tab labeled “Weekly Ads“
So here are a few screen grabs of what the Circular Central version 1.0 release contains. There is much planned and already in development for building out the feature set within this web experience. So stayed tuned as the ShopLocal team attempts to re-define what aggregated local shopping looks like in a Web 2.0 context.
- Here is the initial entry view that all users hit where the user has to select a retailer of interest
- Here is a retailer centric view where all of a specific retailer’s ads are shown
- Here is a new browse result view we came up with inspired by Apple’s iTunes cover flow
- Here is the browse by weekly ad page view (where most users always gravitate to)
Most importantly however, hats off to the three ShopLocal Flash / Flex Ninja’s that pulled this off in under two months total development time. Building a scalable and load bearing rich internet application is no easy feat. 
Quick update: Local media analyst Greg Sterling also did a concise write up of the new Circular Central on his blog Screenwerk. Worth a quick read for an outside perspective on the topic.
Here is one more review from AppScout on CircularCentral
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(3.75 out of 5)
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