Online marketing measurement: Understanding the vocabulary

Do you have a process for analyzing your online marketing tactics? This year, make an effort to boost the time spent on your online marketing measurement–blogs, websites, downloadable content and social media–in order to drive business growth.

Not sure where to start? I’ve compiled a short list of online marketing measurement terms defined in a way to help get you started (and motivated) to stay on track. The list is not meant to be comprehensive, but instead, a starting point to get you headed in the right direction. As you monitor these elements, throw the information into an Excel spreadsheet to track trends over time, monitor growth and generate ideas for change.

Bounce rate

A visitor “bounces” from a website when he or she only views one page before leaving. The bounce rate is the percentage of visits to a webpage where this occurs over a named period of time. Higher bounce rates can indicate lack of visitor engagement.

What’s a good bounce rate? (researched by RocketFuel in February 2014)

26 – 40% Excellent
41 – 55% Average
56-70% Higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm, depending on the site (anything higher than 70% other than blogs/news is too high)

Click

Each time a user follows a hyperlink from one page to another. The more clicks, the better (it likely means that you have engaged your audience and they are choosing to stay on your site/blog in order to look around at other areas). In terms of social media, clicks also mean that your reader is doing something with the information. You caught their attention long enough for them to want to click and read more. Clicks can be tracked at various levels and rate (ie: click through rates) depending on the type of platform from which you’re gathering stats.

Earned Media

Third-party media coverage secured through a relationship or newsworthy event; can include print, broadcast or online media. One tool for securing earned media is through public relations, though this is not the only method for obtaining earned media. Earned media is not paid.

Engage (Engagement)

To engage is to attract interest or attention from an online user, involving the user in a topic, conversation or discussion. Engagement on social media or online communication requires an action from your audience—a response, a like, a share, a comment or discussion.

Engagement Percentage (or Engagement Rate)

Used to measure a brand’s effectiveness at engaging its audience, the engagement rate compares a brand’s engagement performance of its posts while also comparing to posts from other brands on the same platform. In short, engagement rates measure what share of a brand’s audience engaged with its content.

Frequency

Many times used in conjunction with reach, frequency is the average amount of time that an individual event occurs or the average amount of times each person has been exposed to content.

Impressions

In terms of web content, one impression is counted each time that piece of content is loaded into a browser. Impressions are the aggregated published or acknowledged readership numbers for any piece of content.

Influence

In the social media space, influence is not the ability to change someone’s way of thinking, but rather, the likelihood that your content will be shared/talked about combined with the potential reach of those shared pieces of content. For this reason, some use the phrase social capital instead of influence, which defines only the frequency of a someone/a brand’s social media shared contributions and the reach of the shared content. Note: Higher social capital can also be skewed by content that is shared as a joke or in disgust; it does not account for sentiment.

KPI

Stands for Key Performance Indicator. KPIs are essential for setting goals and strategy. According to the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), quantitative KPIs are often:

• Quantitative indicators that can be presented as a number
• Practical indicators that interface with existing company processes
• Directional indicators specifying whether brand/business/organization performance is improving or not
• Actionable indicators sufficiently in an organization’s control to effect change
• Financial indicators used in performance measurement and when looking at an operating index

Mentions (or Tags)

Depending on the social media platform, when another person or social media account is brought in to the conversation, they can be done so by a mention or a tagged post. Both of these are metrics that can be measured. Users will get a notification when they are mentioned or tagged using the handle, vanity URL or page name they are associated with.

Owned Media vs. Paid Media

Owned media: Media channels that you, as a brand, have ownership of. Examples include: company websites or blogs, newsletters and company social media accounts. Paid media: Advertising is a form of paid media—content that appears/has been generated because it has been paid for/purchased.

Reach

Reach is disaggregated (counts the actual number rather than opportunities or data combined from several measurements). Reach is the actual number of people (or the percentage of the audience as a whole) that have been exposed to content.

Referral Source (Referral Traffic)

In terms of a website, referrals refer to which domains or websites in aggregate are sending visitors to your site. Identifying your referral traffic is key; it helps you determine where your audience is hanging out and can lead you to create more content in those spaces.

>> Looking for help? Contact us to set up a consultation or for guidance on getting started with your online content strategy.