Number-crunching
If you create content, you might get excited about a growing number of pageviews. But do those views matter? It’s important to know your real audience, and even more importantly, what audience analytics matter most to your site’s business goals.
Here, we dive in to “the problem with pageviews” and talk about how to set an audience analytics strategy that fits your business monetization model.
Analytics are both a blessing and a curse. Free services like Google Analytics are powerful tools that can be wielded on the side of good, or be raised in celebration of evil.
Well, mostly they can either be “useful” or not, but you can guess which of those options falls closer to the “evil” category.
Everyone likes to see numbers go up. This is especially true in the news industry, which has had its share of downturns. Both Kait and Joan worked on newspaper websites for several years (more than a decade, in Joan’s case), and both saw a constant problem of people not knowing what their analytics were actually saying.
“Look, we got more pageviews!” executives would cheer. (“Oh, but wait, they’re from Lower Slombovia, and our ads are for local pizza shops,” said no one in management ever, but they should have.)
Analytics are great – when they’re the right analytics.
Starting in the early to mid-2000s, the business model for most newspaper websites was based on ads: More pageviews = more ad views. The people in charge of content thus thought that their mission was to drive up pageviews. After all, the financial challenges can’t be their fault if they’re pulling in more views, right? This actually birthed the idea of clickbait — a headline or piece of content crafted entirely to get more people to click on it, thus adding to the page (and ad) view total.
There were (and still are) several problems with this approach, and all of them became apparent fairly quickly.
1. Angering readers devalues your brand
Congrats! You hoodwinked an extra 10,000 people into reading your content with a misleading headline. 5,000 of those will never read your site again because they think everything on it is misleading. You’ve sacrificed long-term gain for short-term gain, and not much gain at that.
2. You’re only as valuable as your last post
In a very condensed nutshell, print newspapers were viable economically because people were constantly giving them money via subscriptions. A slow news day or two wasn’t going to hurt anything, because tomorrow’s paper was coming. In this business model, you’re not allowed to have two slow news days. Half of a slow news day means your higher-ups are going to be on you, pressuring you to jazz up whatever you’ve got. This only accelerates Point 1. However, all of these were relatively minor compared to the last point
3. The ads weren’t getting sold
The secret that no news organization ever bothered to face up to (or ask their ad sales department about) was that nobody was paying for all the potential ad space they generated.
On a very simple level, online ad exchanges have two prices: The first is the guaranteed price, which looks more like a traditional ad sale (and is the only method you can actually make enough money to live on). This is where someone knows they want to get in front of your audience (either because they know your brand, or because your analytics describe a key audience to the ad buyers), and pays accordingly.
The other type of ad sale is called remnant, and it literally means that whatever space is left over gets thrown up for prices so low they’re not accurately measured in cents, but rather in thousandths of cents.
Thus, even if clickbait was bringing in 1,000,000 extra pageviews a month, it wasn’t materially impacting the bottom line. The more snakelike members of our ads sales team suggested that we could start charging higher rates if we brought in more traffic, but this ignores two important facts:
We couldn’t rely on that audience to come back, because of points 1 and 2.We couldn’t sell what we generated at current prices (point 3); why on earth would anyone pay us more?
The only sales we did make in this model were to unsophisticated ad buyers who were essentially duped, and then later angry to find out that a larger investment did not equal a larger return (because, again, same disconnected audience, just more of them).
This is not to say that pageviews are a meaningless statistic, but rather that they can’t be the end-all, be-all. Want to know what analytics to keep your eye on instead? Read on for some of our tips!
The key aspect of analytics is the "analyzing" part - you can't just sit back and watch number go up and hope it all works out. We're digital strategists and digital transformation experts - we can help you find the right indicators that your business is on track.
How are you making money? This, more than anything else, needs to drive your audience analytics, because your audience is defined as the people who actually give you money. Your potential audience is people who realistically might give you money someday. No matter how great it feels to know that 8.7 bajillion people liked your latest video, everyone not in those two previous groups, from a business perspective, doesn’t count. This is a tough thing to realize, but’s true.
One of the hardest concepts for people who create content to understand is that people who don’t pay them aren’t their audience. This is especially difficult because the non-paying people tend to be the most vocal when changes are made (because something that used to be free or easy now isn’t). In the newspaper example above, it was absolutely true that one internet subscriber per month – even if that person only read three articles – was worth tens of thousands of “pageviews” from non-paying users.
When we worked at the newspaper, one of the things that handicapped our ad sales team was that the editorial side made little to no distinction as to where our pageviews were coming from. Our local ad sales team sold ads to businesses in central Pennsylvania (where the newspaper was distributed). Those businesses gave not a whit if we got 30,000 people from Florida read the latest clickbait, because those Floridians were unlikely to buy a pizza from them.
You’ll notice this in effect on this website. Our case studies are designed to give prospective customers knowledge and insight on how we think about projects and how we do things (and to prove that we do actually get things done). Our white papers are designed to provide value to our members. That’s it. Literally two views from our members to this page are worth more to us than a thousand from random internet browsers, because it means that our members are finding value. We’d obviously like more than two views, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Viewing or reading content is a passive act. Anyone can do it, and it requires almost zero effort. People who comment, post on social media, etc., are going to be more engaged with your brand, and those are the people who will help you expand your reach. You should take care not to put all your effort into increasing social analytics (because nobody ever paid the rent with Instagram likes or Facebook shares), but it’s a good field to tap into.
You can also use your social reach to branch into nontraditional revenue streams, like reviews and brand championing, which tend to want content creators with a well-rounded and engaged audience.
If you have an e-commerce store, the number of pageviews matters less than the number of sales.
However, if you’re finding a ton of pageviews to a particular item and very few sales from that item, you may want to take a second look. It’s apparently an item people may want to buy (hence the pageviews), so what’s stopping them? It might be the price, but take time to look at other things. How many times is it added to the cart but people abandon the cart before checkout? How many times do they get to checkout but not finish the transaction? This is called your conversion funnel, and finding where people “fall out” matters.
If your primary source of revenue comes from consulting, you can do the same types of analysis. Are you getting a lot of pageviews but very few contact requests? Some advanced analytics and A/B testing can help you figure out the best method for converting those lost sales.
Remember, your audience is all about people who give you money (or cause you to get money). Potential and current customers or clients are the people you need to focus on.
