Online marketing can sometimes seem like casting a fishing line into a deep lake. You feel you have the right bait, the right line and rod, the boat seems to be in a good position, but what lies deep beneath? Companies like Thirdi help you to see what’s in the lake, who’s nibbling on your tackle and tugging on your line, and where all the good catches are.

Let’s continue with the fishing analogy. Just like in fishing you might drop the line down into a school of fish, but if you don’t have the right bait they won’t go for it. Conversely, if you drop the right bait down for the kind of fish you want but it’s nowhere near enough to them you won’t catch anything either…maybe a boot. And just like you can feel nibbles on your line, clicks act in the same way. It may seem like a lot of people are seeing your ad, but nibbles don’t catch fish, and clicks don’t mean you’ve made customers. So how do we interpret click statistics and consumer behavior online?

If a lot of traffic is coming through your site via an ad then you know that it’s doing its job as far as getting eyes on your site. However, we have to look deeper than that. These numbers tell us a lot, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you buy ad space from another site make sure you are able to get the analytics too. Find out how long people are looking at the ad if it’s a pop up- if it’s one second it usually counts as a click to your ad space provider even if users closed the pop up right away. As far as the provider is concerned, someone saw your ad and that’s the name of the game.

Quality clicks are what you are looking for unless you just want to generate blind, rapid site traffic. Many sites do this, and generate impressive ad revenue from it. But if you own an actual product or service and want to connect with a consumer base you need more than ads, you need content. Potential customers need to be engaged. Attention spans have shrunk and we don’t notice traditional ad media anymore- not to the extent that we used to. Even banner click through rates have been declining. Being able to advertise without people knowing that they’re being advertised to is the trick today. Some may find this underhanded, but in the marketing biz it’s seen more as subtlety. Social media has created new terms of engagement that have helped consumers and companies connect in a more fluid and continuous manner, sticking has begun to replace clicking. This is really where understanding consumer behavior online happens, in the dialogue played out in words and actions online. But for a small business it’s hard to imagine the kind of social media presence that a major company with a large consumer base enjoys (or is conversely beholden too as Forrester researchers often stress) There are some basic and simple things that you can do though, to better understand how your web marketing is working.

Find out who is looking at your ads and who is looking at your site, not individual names and addresses and such, but where they are, how long they are staying, where they are going on your site, what they may be looking for if you can discern it. “How are these people behaving?” is the key question, not “how much are they clicking?” .

If you are able to understand these and other things you’ll see that the water is in fact clear, and not deep and dark as it may have looked before. And you’ll know where to put your line and what to put on it a whole lot easier than when you were when fishing in the dark.

Thirdi

One of the challenges of eCommerce is being able to attract people to your site in the first place; after that, many other challenges follow. You need engaging design and layout that is both user friendly and informative, it’s essential to have a responsive and lightening quick Shopping Cart platform that is easy to use and secure (remember the 3 second rule) and you have to be able to track consumer preferences and behavior on your site- aka analytics. So it’s a very ornate structure of interrelated parts that eventually work together to facilitate a very simple process- you sell and someone buys. But let’s get back to the first point again, because I think this is where the most amount of change in eCommerce is going to happen.

The challenge of bringing people to your product is circumnavigated by being able to bring your product directly to the people, where they congregate. Like the zocolo or  piazza of old, this is what social media platforms like Facebook in a sense have become. It’s a place to peddle your wares to the masses in the most efficient manner- it’s where the action is. The creation of eCommerce Kiosks for Facebook is likely the beginning of what may be a far more extensive commercialization of social media. This may answer the question that many small business owners have been asking, mainly, how does this social media stuff make me money? It’s been a theme in social media, eCommerce and online-marketing in blogs in Vancouver and elsewhere. A conundrum if you will, full of voices both praising and questioning the success of social media for small medium and large-sized businesses. New Facebook eCommerce kiosks developed by Tucson, AZ based Artfire present a major step forward for those who have both lauded social media as a viable tool in eCommerce and online marketing and for those who have wanted it to be.  This kiosk format was designed by a company that in its own words has “…a passion for handmade, art, and indie business” so I really hope Facebook has incorporated this for the benefit of small business and entrepreneurs, keeping that spirit of Artfire’s intentions alive. I think it has great potential for any home business owners and small to medium-business owners who like many fortune 500 CEOs have been reluctant to see s0cial media and eCommerce in the same basket. This saves them a lot of money and effort to join the eCommerce race but the only concern I see is that you are surrendering a lot of power to Facebook concerning your company when doing this. So like many things in business and economics there is a tradeoff.  

What information is gathered? What are the integrity or safety of their servers? How much is your own brand or image being affected by using Facebook for eCommerce and what are your own analytical abilities concerning your kiosk? (anyone who knows please feel free to comment) Because other than those concerns, which are pretty major, I think it’s a very interesting development. That being said, any company able to be in complete- as possible- control of their eCommerce activities (meaning able to afford their own quality eCommerce solutions) I recommend they still develop and explore their own storefront rather than rely on FB. You can still direct traffic through social media to your own storefont and benefit from having more control over your image and analytics. But for a small startup or home-business this might be just the thing to bring in some needed revenue with a mimimal amount of cost incurred. I can see this catching on in a city like Vancouver, which enjoys a robust and sizeable population of entrepreneurs.

The old adage “what gets measured gets managed” is always true and often forgotten. It is easy, and tempting, to use instinct and anecdote as a replacement for true measurement. Anecdotes feel like information, and knowledge, but they aren’t very practical for comparisons over time or making solid decisions.

Just try and answer this seemingly simple question:

How is your company’s online reputation doing, relative to three months ago?

For most marketers or entrepreneurs, this question must be answered in words and analogies. “We got some fantastic emails last week” or “I just did an interview with a local blogger” or “I just don’t know” are some typical answers.

The fine folks over at Webtrends know that there is a better way, and performed an experiment in Portland to show how online marketing should be done. It started with a simple ad in a train station asking: “Should cyclists pay a road tax?”. They then, methodically, analyzed the ensuing conversation. They didn’t just track who wrote about the subject, but also kept tabs on the number (and sentiment) of the comments. They picked up themes and key points, tracked the influence of different publications, and are still going through the data to find more conclusions. There are graphs, tag clouds, and funky charts. Webtrends has also released their raw data so that others can learn about consumer behaviour and surface new insights.

Webtrends is in the business of analyzing data, so this wasn’t a “for fun” experiment so much as a marketing campaign of its own. I’m sure they are tracking the comments on this very blog post for their own internal reporting. What’s interesting about this campaign, more than the merits of their particular product, are the principles that it embodies: that you can make sense out of noise and chatter.

There is a big difference between information and data, and there can be some big gains from relying on the latter of those two. When there is real money on the line, and customers to convert, there is no use in taking chances. The approach Webtrends took to a simple opinion poll should be a part of everything your company does online – especially sales. At Thirdi, we are obsessive about gathering data and using it to help our clients make the best possible decisions.