Posted 3. April 2009, 11:59 by Natalie Doyle
Category : Home   Learning & teaching developments

Back in January 2009, an event known as ‘HOMEGROWN: Battle of the DJs’ was held at the nightclub, 176 in Bournemouth in order to measure the success of online promotion and our ability to drive traffic to a website created especially for the event.

‘Part One’ of our assessment explains, ‘How interactive media can create brand relationships.’

Facebook acted as a basis to create a group and event page driving awareness throughout friendship networks gaining hype and interest for the event. A website was created as a base for information about the event and for individuals to contact us with their applications to participate. Once emails were received, applicants were instructed to upload content to the Facebook group in order to create an interactive community.

Social networks are a significant part of branding, offering brands to respond to consumer views about them and their competitors and revealing brand values to the audience is an opportunity that has been created by digital media (Marketing, 2008). As social beings we have a desire to share and be part of something, seeking community in media and consumer environments (Kozinets, 2002) and in a web 2.0 world customers are excited about the ability to engage (Smith, 2008). The use of Facebook created a “buzz�, a reference point of information among friends enabling us to emulate updated info about the event; providing a perfect location to experience this quickly and easily (James, 2008). In comparison the ease of updating the website was considerably less to Facebook.

The internet has revolutionised interaction with brands by changing the way consumers think and act (Unerman, 2008). Ko, Cho and Roberts ‘Uses and Gratifications Theory’ (2005) discovered that consumers with high information motivations are more likely to engage in human-message interaction on a website, whereas social interaction motivations are strongly related to human-human interaction; both of which lead to positive attitudes towards a brand. Therefore, for those interested in our event were more likely to seek information using online media than flyers and posters. E-word of mouth appears more effective than human-human word of mouth interaction. This is shown via an analysis of data collected on Google Analytics.

There is considerable debate surrounding the effectiveness of Google Analytics and its ability to measure unique visitors to a website. The following articles: Google Analytics, how useful is it really? and Can the effectiveness of online campaigns be accurately measured? address and discuss some key issues concerning Google Analytics use for advertising and marketing campaigns. In terms of our experiment it has served its purpose by showing how key dates of promotion reveal peaks in visitors to our website:

1. TRAFFIC SOURCES
Reaching consumers via online communities such as Facebook and Dontstayin drove people to the website, seen in Figure 1. Ko, Cho and Roberts (2005) found human-message interaction is higher than human-human interaction implying users are more likely to interact with content online, our Google Analytic data supports this.

Figure 1

58.63% of visitors were referred by other sites, as seen in figure 1, Facebook was the highest referring site due to our group page. “Trusted referrals� from ‘dontstayin.com’

and Facebook led to high unique visitor usage of the website on certain days where we purposely promoted aspects about the event. Figure 2 shows how a majority of visits were via referral traffic supporting the effectiveness of our promotion using online communities and social networks. However, as mentioned in ‘Stuck in an online traffic jam, is it time to de clutter?’ there are often difficulties with the use of Facebook groups as many people join if interested or not in the topic and therefore if the message is not relevant it is ignored. We do not know if the targeted messages to our group sent individuals to our website due to a general interest in applying or attending the event or if it was due to just curiosity.

Figure 2

When splitting up referral traffic from Dontstayin (Figure 3) and Facebook (Figure 4), engaging consumers over a long time period appears more effective using Dontstayin whereas those who joined the Facebook group only referred to the website when prompted by sending group inbox messages. Perhaps this is due to Dontstayin attracting consumers that are specifically interested in events in Bournemouth and therefore are more inclined to be actively searching information; whereas a majority of Facebook users are more inclined to avoid this information unless they are the specific target audience (this is also mentioned in a group members post).

Figure 3

Figure 4

The peaks highlighted in figures 3 and 4 relate to key dates when promotion was purposely posted on these websites.

2. SITE USAGE
The two most defined peaks in figure 5 show the initial “buzz� of individuals applying to play on the night and the second peak is building up to and on the day of the event.

Figure 5

Key dates highlighting peaks in visitors to the website

8th December – Start of Facebook promotion, driving traffic to the website to apply to play on the night

10th December – Start of Dontstayin promotion, driving traffic to the website to apply to play on the night

10th to the 15th December – Majority of applications received via the website

31st December – Deadline for applications

6th January – Finalists were contacted

18th January – Promotion of finalists photos uploaded, driving traffic to the website

21st January – Facebook group messaged about the interactive voting system for the night referring them to the website for details

A bounce rate of 45.31% and an average time spent on the site being just 1 minute 43 seconds suggest consumers purposely directed themselves to the page that was relevant, in terms of applying or finding out updated information before the event. Anderson (2004) mentions that for the ‘longtail’ to work online there must be an affective system of driving people down the tail, therefore if another event was to take place, increasing the consumer base; development of the website would involve interactive applications, such as a forum to increase consumer engagement.

When traffic reached the site a majority of individuals (32.37%) were directed straight to the homepage (see figure 6). 27.90% of the page views was the application page of which 21 individuals sent an application; this application was referred to our event email account. Google Analytics is limited in defining exactly what pages were viewed and on what date, however we can assume that the first peak shown in figure 6 is due to those viewing the apply page and the largest peak is due to those viewing the media page for voting details and looking at photos after the event.

Figure 6

As this blog suggests: Critically evaluate the development of online and social media, customisation is essential in building brand relationships. Via our creation of a logo and use of public relations, this built a positive image of a brand that was trusted and in-turn built reputation driving traffic to our website (Saffir, 1992). I believe online communities and social networks have provided an opportunity to create genuine, lasting dialogue which is priceless, gaining more valuable opinions about the event such as loyalty, trust and respect from consumers (Marketing, 2008). All applicants applied via online before human-human interaction and the quality of content was essential in order to reassure and develop relationships to create a successful event.

3. MAP OVERLAY

Figure 7

Our event was purposely set up to attract those that were based in Bournemouth or in close proximity and therefore we aimed our messages to those located within these areas. As expected a majority of hits on our website were based in Bournemouth, however an equal amount of visits were made by those in London which could be explained by random searches on Google or E-WOM by individuals within our Facebook group.

Interestingly enough as others have picked up in previous research a high proportion of visitors appear to be based in Wembley. As highlighted in this blog: See you next Tuesday Wembley it summarises that Google Analytics can only be a guide to the geographical regions of the visitors to the website instead of a main source of information.

An interesting feature on Google Analytics is being able to track those who have visited the website via their iphones, however this confuses the geographical data even more as the internet on a phone is accessible in any location. It appears that as new technology develops, measurement tools are not keeping up! Google Analytics uses a page tagging technique to collect data via a combination of Javascript and cookies, limiting tracking phones as only new phones (i.e. PDAs, iphones) can currently run Javascript.

Figure 8

As seen in figure 8, IP pools are a sequential range of IP addresses within a certain network, one IP address belongs to one and only one IP pool therefore we can not know where these visits were based. The second highest amounts of visits were from individuals based in Poole and a proportion of those from Bournemouth University network, therefore we know we reached our target audience to an extent.

In terms of network locations I feel this feature does not prove very useful in analysing what type of visitors were interested in our website. Many drawbacks with Google Analytics are due to privacy issues. Privacy networks can mask the users actual location and present inaccurate geographical data, but this only affects a small percentage of visits.

4. OVERVIEW
So how accurate is the collected data?

Google Analytics shows us how people found our site, how they explored it, how we can enhance their experience and by improving the website via solutions to increase the amount of traffic to our website creating a consumer base for the future and how to keep them engaged. As this was a niche target audience, we expected a low response, however we successfully managed to raise £150 for ‘The Stroke Association’ and filled the venue with approximately 600 people. However, Google Analytics uses cookies and therefore this depicts the argument of breaching people’s privacy. Many filtering programmes can block the ‘Google Analytics Tracking Code’ preventing some traffic and users to be tracked, leaving holes in our collected data. The largest potential impact on data accuracy is users deleting or blocking Google Analytics cookies, without this it can not collect data; but of course this relates to all web analytic tools.

E-media is revolutionising marketing communications and also influencing our behaviour, it allows new ways for business’ to interact with their customers (Pickton and Broderick, 2005). Marketers have a steep learning curve as potential consumers have more control over their environment, creativity and their ability to engage customers determines their success (Holzner, 2008). Marketing activities using e-media allows marketers to save money and help stretch their budget, saving time creates more direct access to customers; therefore it is extremely important to companies to use this form of communication to specially target their audience (Keeler, 1995 cited Pickton et al, 2005). But how can they ensure reliable and accurate measurement of the results? With a small scale experiment such as our event, Google Analytics has been helpful in providing an overview of our website visitors, however on a larger scale the collection of data could be deemed useless due to inaccuracies described.

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References

Holzner, S., 2008. Facebook marketing: leverage social media to grow your business. USA: Que Publishing.

James, L., 2008. Should you advertise on social networking websites? Warc Best Practice. Available from: http://www.warc.com [Accessed 18 February 2009].

Ko, H, Cho, C and Roberts, M., 2005. Internet uses and gratifications: a structural equation model of interactive advertising. Journal of advertising, 34 (2), p.57-71.

Marketing, 2008. Opinion. The marketing society forum. Can established brands work on social networking sites? Marketing, 19 November, p.26.

Pickton, D., and Broderick, A. 2005. Intergrated marketing communications. 2nd ed. England: Pearson Education Limited.

Saffir, L., 2000. Power Public Relations.2nd Ed. Chicago: NTC Business Books.

Smith, 2008. Letters. Build brand loyalty via virtual communities. Marketing, 25 June, p.24.

Unerman, 2008. Comment. Online metrics tend to exaggerate effect of web campaigns. Media Week, 18 November, p.15.