Impressions, Clicks, Visits and Views

A few weeks before I retired, a friend called me at work and asked what I knew about “impressions,” generally understood to mean the potential number of people who saw your ad on television, your Facebook post, your tweet on Twitter, and what-have-you.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“”Well,” he said, “our outside agency says we have 140 million impressions from our ad campaign, and a 29-percent click-through rate. Is that a good thing?”

I considered my answer before I responded. “It’s a next-to-impossible thing.”

“What?”

“You might get a 29-percent click-through rate if you’re Justin Bieber or Katy Perry, but not a corporate brand. Have you looked at traffic at your web site?”

“Yeah, that’s what doesn’t make any sense. It’s only very slightly above normal, like maybe two percent.”

“If your ads were having a click-through rate of 29 percent, you would be seeing web site traffic in the tens of millions.”

Silence.

“A more typical click-through rate,” I said, “would be less than 1 percent. Some companies have done more, like the consumer products companies running contests. Coke and Pepsi, for example. But for most of us, and especially business-to-business companies, it’s much less.”

“Then what’s an impression?” he asked.

“If you ad is running on television at 8 p.m. on, say, NBC or CBS, add up the number of viewers the network reports to have at that time. Or if you’re tweeting on Twitter, add the number of followers you have and multiply by the number of tweets.”

“Are you saying this is all hocus-pocus by witch doctors?”

Well, no, I’m not. But you do have to understand what the data is before you can decide if it’s meaningful or significant. In general, if you don’t understand it, you’re mightily impressed. 140 million impressions? And a 29-percent click-through rate? Wow!

It’s possible, of course. But unlikely. My friend needed to ask what that 29 percent was clicking through to. It wasn’t his web site, the object of the ad program.

Rob Eager at Wildfire Marketing publishes a newsletter every Monday. His marketing agency specializes in books and authors. This past Monday, he had four points to make about online advertising:

First, humans account for less than half of global web traffic. The majority comes from bots, roughly evenly divided between good bots and bad bots. (I’ve seen this happen for this blog – a sudden surge in traffic coming from places like Russia and China.)

Second, the average engagement between a brand’s Facebook post and the brand’s Facebook fans is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter, it’s 3 in 10,000. Instagram ranks highest, with a 4.21% engagement rate. The corporate social media channels I managed before I retired did considerably better than the average, but that was a result of (1) a lot of hard work and (2) knowing almost exactly who it was who followed or liked our channels. And we followed a 90/10 rule – 10 percent of what we did online was about us; 90 percent was about our industry, our customers, and news important to our customers. Advertising, on the other hand, is almost invariably about you (even when it appears that it’s not.) 

Third, the average click-through rate on an ad is less than one percent.

And fourth, 54 percent of display ads by advertisers are unviewable (the link here is to the Wall Street Journal – the story is behind the paywall).

Rob has solid insight and information about the general subject of publishing and marketing of books – visit him at Start a Wildfire. 

The book that influenced everything I've done on social media is Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, published by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It's not the fast way to bulk up your author's platform and get tens of thousands of adoring fans to impress your potential publisher, and it's written in a rather breezy style, but it's full of good information and wisdom. The book doesn't include a single reference to religion, faith, or Christianity, but it does resonate with Christians because it focuses on others, not self. 

Ultimately, you're only kidding yourself if you think social media and the online world is only about impressions, clicks, visits and views.

They're about relationships. And trust.

Illustration by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Hey, I Take Sabbaticals! I Sleep!

L.L. Barkat over at The High Calling posted a kind of challenge the other day. Actually, she didn’t exactly write it as a challenge, but more of question: do you give technology a rest?

I consider that a challenge. Not as in, I’ll take that one up. But more as in, whaddya mean take a sabbatical – that’s down right un-American. And I x-ed out of the blog post muttering something about finding communists everywhere.

Actually, it’s a good question. And it’s a good question for me to ponder, and deeply. Ask my wife. She thinks I’ve become a cyborg.

My work has everything to do with online media. My team is responsible for the corporate web site, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, some international sites, a few other web sites and some associated social media stuff that goes with those sites. And the corporate blog. Everything we do has to do with technology and online communications.

Then, there’s my personal life, which includes a blog, a Facebook page, two Twitter accounts (although I only use one), occasional writing for two online sites and guest posts every so often. And what I consider my own writing. I’m online a lot. (And I can hear this voice in the background: “And don’t forget Precious,” aka the BlackBerry.)

I can provide all kinds of rationales, but the fact is I spend too much time online.

My name is Glynn, and I’m a technoholic.

So, I’m going to take some small steps. Like weekends. I can reduce my online time on weekends. My target will be to start with being online once on Saturday and once on Sunday, no more than 30 minutes each time. That includes Precious, I mean the BlackBerry.

I’ll let you know how it goes, he says, as he breaks out in a cold sweat.


Photograph: Tree by Bobby Mikul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

You Are Real: on Letters, Spirit, and Canoes

By L.L. Barkat

(This is a first for Faith, Fiction Friends – a guest post. It’s by one of my favorite authors and poets, Laura Barkat – what an honor that is! She’s asked me to guest post at her blog, Seedlings in Stone, and you can find it there. We’re both addressing the same topic – is online life real?)

She was fourteen. He was eighteen. They fell in love by mail. When the war ended, they married. As far as the family stories tell it, no one ever questioned whether my great aunt and uncle had a relationship that was real from the start. In fact, their long correspondence was often painted as the sweetest part of the tale.

Fast forward to this July. I was interviewed, then challenged in a follow up email. The assertion? My online life isn’t real and probably, by extension, interferes with my “real life.”

I responded a bit straight up, wondering why Christians can believe in connection with an invisible Holy Spirit but not connection with real people over the wires. I mentioned that no one ever questioned the validity of my aunt and uncle’s correspondence, then added, “Maybe we don’t see the human in a uniform display font online. But the human is there. So is the correspondence.”

Sure, if I have the chance, I always reach for more dimensions. I’ve shared breakfast, held hands, paddle boated down the Frio River after first meeting online. It’s gone the other way too. I’ve briefly shared lunch and conference sessions in person, only to later solidify relationships online (I even hired one of my favorites. She’s a terrific writer and editor.)

At the end of September, if all goes as planned for HCB’s Fall Retreat, I will be blessed with the dimensional again. Glynn is already real to me, after more than a year of online correspondence and collaboration. But a canoe race down the Frio should prove this to the world.

For the record, I plan to let Bradley do the heavy paddling. I sincerely hope he is working out at a real gym in preparation.


Related: We Are Real by Ann Kroeker at The High Calling Blogs.

Photograph: Turning Dandy by Nancy Rosback. Used with Permission.