Know Thy Visitor - Understanding Social Media Visitors
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Slides from our Leeds Digital Festival 2018 talk, where we talk about the importance of understanding the mindset of your social media visitors. Find out more at http://www.thisisbeacon.com
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Know Thy Visitor - Understanding Social Media Visitors
- 1. Know Thy Visitor Understanding the Mindset of your Social Visitors www.thisisbeacon.com @this_is_beacon #LDF2018 WIFI: Sheaf St Free WiFi
- 2. Stewart Boutcher Technology Director at Beaconsoft
- 3. Our totally scientific talk Here’s what we wanted to find out… ● Are search and social visitors different? ● How different social post effect website engagement? ● Do paid posts actually do anything? 14 minutes - 5 takeaways ...and free drinkies for 2 lucky people at the end
- 4. of us struggle to measure the effectiveness of our social marketing 60% source: https://www.trustradius.com/ The struggle is real
- 7. Vanity metrics are not enough!
- 8. Using data with integrity and honesty?
- 9. The battle between search and social
- 10. Our totally scientific experiment 1. Snapshot of social & web activity through our platform. 1. Select a range of brands we work with. 1. Post organically to their Facebook and Twitter. 2. Promote the most effective posts. 3. Analyse the results.
- 13. ● Look beyond likes and shares ● Even the small numbers count ● Pay for traffic, but value your organic visitors ● You can't buy love ● Good content is good content Five Takeaways
- 15. Now, we drink!
Editor's Notes
- This slide will be on screen as people walk in.
- Hello - thanks for coming on such a sunny day - fear not only 15 minutes. I am technology director and head of data analytics at Beacon I’ve worked in digital and data science for over 25 years, including within a number of digital agencies. Our development hub is here in Leeds and it’s a privilege to be here at Leeds Digital Festival. Reminder about live streaming tonight!!!
- Tonights talk is all about understanding if and how visitors behave differently if they come from different channels - specifically organic search based traffic (Google) versus 2 social media channels (Facebook & Twitter). We wanted to find out Do visitors from social posts behave differently than visitors from search? How does the type of social post affect the level of engagement when they visit a website? Is there any difference in visitor behaviour between organic and paid social posts? Tonight, I am going to confirm the scale of the task we all face, run through how you told us you use social media, explain the experiment we carried out, the results we found and end with 5 takeaways, the prize draw and then we can all have a drink in the sunshine. I expect to be talking for about 15 minutes, any questions, come and find me afterwards, please,
- THE STRUGGLE IS REAL We all struggle to collect and centralise data. A Harvard Business Review suggested that half of firms surveyed haven’t been able to demonstrate any useful impact from social media. Yet, the same survey indicated that (unlike Tim Martin’s recent hissy fit) most believe that social media is very important to them. I ran a digital agency here in Leeds for 5 years and I learnt that Tools like Google Analytics are not really at really telling us what part of our social media marketing is driving traffic and the social networks themselves don’t offer many useful metrics - and perhaps not that many you fully trust. They only tell us what suits them.
- DESPITE ALL THIS: Online spend in 2016 was a record breaking £10bn in the UK! Google’s ad revenue was a whopping $73.8 billion Facebook’s ad revenue was a $36.3 billion Twitter’s ad revenue was *only* $3.26 billion They’re getting a lot of money of us and our clients... What do you think?
- Three key takeaways from a survey we ran to everyone attending this event - thank you - you may not be able to see the detail here, so I’ll pick out the key findings. Over 60% of you use social media just for building brand awareness and increasing followers 44% don’t measure very much, 27% The top challenge respondents indicated was analysing & reporting on all this data, across disparate platforms - and many just didn’t bother. Interesting that so many focus on reporting and setting goals around the things where the social networks make it easy for us to do so. During the past 18 months, I’ve spoken with hundreds of agency owners and staff across the UK, the US and in Europe and consistently am told of the challenges of reporting to clients, the time spent, cobbling together data into reports from various different software platforms, or the rigour required to get only some of the way there. It’s the same story for marketing people and teams within organisations. Our contention - and something many clients and agency owners have told me over the past 24 months is that VANITY METRICS ARE NOT ENOUGH…
- Knowing the number of likes, shares and clicks are great, but if your goal is to drive traffic to your site you’ll need more about your social visitors journey from the social post to your website and beyond. We want and need to know what happens after somebody clicks on a link in your social post. Social platforms don’t readily measure or report on what happens when visitors click through to your site, not at all for organic posts - and when they do report, you have to trust them. Measuring website visitor activity on Google Analytics alone doesn’t reveal how engaged your social media visitors are - it doesn’t even tell you which post they came from!
- (STEWART - don’t look at slide yet!) Data science and big data does not have to be about deception - if used well, it results in a richer more useful and usable experience for customers and suppliers alike. This is not about appropriating data and using it to make yourself rich at the expense of those who own the data. (STEWART - now look at the slide) Obviously, that statement is nothing to do with the picture on display….allegedly We are interested and we believe you should be interested, in using anonymous, aggregated information drawn from large lakes of data to fine tune your messaging and your website content to suit the different personas that engage with your brand - whether B2B, B2C, B2B2C etc. A quick work on where your visitors are coming from?
- I confess that when we saw this data ourselves, we were sceptical - but it seems to map out. The blue line is website traffic from web search- the blue line is traffic from social posting. The source of this graph is shareaholic; a site with a Google domain authority of 71 - which pretty much means they are regarded as very credible. Shared on Word Stream (DA 79) and backed up by Forbes. Perhaps you will have similar but less pronounced results, nonetheless, broadly speaking: The chart shows monthly share of website traffic from the top social networks and search engines In late 12-13 social actually overtook search as the overall driver of website traffic! But search has clawed it back. Credibility, trustworthiness, snake oil, … mention j d Wetherspoon - a real case of shooting the messenger, but understandable. Search still remains king, but don’t underestimate socials potential to drive website traffic! Source of article citing graph https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/02/28/facebook-advertising-benchmarks Source of graph https://blog.shareaholic.com/search-engine-social-media-traffic-trends-report-2017/
- We carried out this experiment using our Beacon platform. Beacon is built to allow our clients to measure the success of any post, paid or unpaid, across multiple channels and website within one easy to use platform. Here’s how we did it we took a snapshot to capture social media activity We organically posted a range of social posts across twitter and Facebook, from a number of brands who we work with. Post types - we wanted to experiment with posts - and a number of our clients were happy to allow us to do so with their traffic: Bad post = An imperfect post, a bit vague, and content is not very relevant to the link provided Good post = A well-crafted post, relevant imagery, content is relevant to the link provided with a clear CTA Hashtag post = The 'good' post, but with added relevant hashtags to increase reach and findability We boosted/promoted the most successful post to analyse the difference between Then analysed the results
- A word on how we measured engagement - We all measure social media by metrics such as likes, shares, post interactions, reach and clicks -”vanity” or “brand analytics. We want to know what happens after social media visitors click a link on the post and land on your site. How engaged are they and what do they do? Measuring visitor actions from a social post Real clicks vs “bot”/IOT clicks Number of pages visited per session Bounce rates (soft and hard) Average time on site Returning visitors Scroll depth per page On-page clicks and actions Conversions (sales, form submissions etc) Entire customer journey And now on with the results -
- Here are some of the outputs from Beacon we used to analyse our results. You are unlikely to be able to read all of this - we will be putting all these slides linked to a blog post to be published next Friday - keep an eye on our Twitter account. I’ll pick out the key findings from the questions we were looking at: Do visitors from social posts behave differently than visitors from search? Yes - they do! Search sends more traffic visitors than social. Social has shown to send traffic that is more engaged - longer time on site and more likely to click onto other pages. Social visitors are less likely to hard bounce; but search visitors that stay are more likely to spend time looking around the site. Returning visitors are more likely to come from social. Not a HUGE amount of difference between the behaviors of visitors social and search, but subtle differences can add up over time and impact your budget. How does the type of social post affect the level of engagement when they visit a website? Website visitors from our ‘good’ posts were overall more engaged, they had a higher average time on site. We found that shorter posts fared better than more verbose ones. Hashtags definitely improved reach and clicks, but not necessarily website engagement. Is there any difference in visitor behaviour between organic and paid social posts? Promoted posts generally result in more traffic but lower engagement, less time on site and few pages visited Organic visitors (though often fewer in number) appeared to be more engaged with the website content Promoted posts will give a lot more “social value” but that won’t equate to anything like in website traffic Other comments: Lots of likes do not = lots of website visits - a post with zero social engagement (vanity metrics) can often be a very successful post in sending traffic. Some of our ‘bad’ posts were actually more successful than we expected - don’t be afraid to experiment and don’t assume what is “good”.
- Five takeaways Look beyond likes and shares - it might be good to tell your client/boss, but if your social visitors are not engaged with your site, you will struggle. Even for brand accounts, website traffic and engagement has value. Even the small numbers count - you or your clients may not have huge numbers of followers, but if you can increase visitors & engagement by just 5% - that could be a significant difference to your social success. You can pay for traffic, but you should value your organic social visitors - your organic visitors are your groupies, your supporters, and you will always get the most out of them. So nurture them! You can't buy love - know the limits of promoted social posts, driving spikes in transient traffic is a short term tactic that doesn’t guarantee sustainable results. Good content is good content - however your visitors find you, good quality content will always perform better, so focus on the quality of your content first, and how to drive traffic to it second.
- All this was possible because of Beacon - our product. Here’s the plug: Beacon is built to allow our clients to measure the success of any post, paid or unpaid, across multiple channels and website within one easy to use platform. We believe in giving our clients rapid time to value - know what’s working quickly and do more of it, and do less of what doesn’t work. Now to the drinks prize draw. The sorting hat please!