Polar Bear Plunge E-Commerce: Analytics Overview and Recommendations

For this exercise I have taken an in-depth look at how Special Olympics New Jersey’s e-commerce sites for the Seaside Polar Plunge have been using analytics to monitor and interpret customer (Plunger and Donor) traffic. The organization has really only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to using analytical data to guide decision making, so there are many tools that could improve analytic efforts. Currently, SONJ uses Google Analytics to assess analytical data. The objectives of the Polar Plunge event organizers are to recruit NEW Plungers, retain past Plungers, and bring in more donations than previous years. A secondary goal is to increase the average Plunger amount raised over the 2014 Plunge, which is a goal tied to generally increasing donations. 

E-Commerce Functionality and Funnels

Currently SONJ has GA set up in both the website’s homepage, which is hosted on Wordpress (www.njpolarplunge.org) and in the Seaside-specific registration page (http://seaside-pbp.kintera.org/), which is hosted on Kintera, a fundraising tool. The e-commerce functionality is two-fold (soon to be three-fold, with the addition of an online Plunge store): visitors can pay to register to participate in the event and donors can complete a transaction to give money to the cause. The current expected funnel for a registrant is to go to the njpolarplunge.org homepage, click the “Seaside Registration” button, be transitioned to the Kintera landing homepage, and then begin the registration process by agreeing to the Waiver (the first step in the registration process).  The funnel for a donor varies a bit more, but he or she would receive the personal fundraising link of the Plunger (via email or social media, typically), click over to the Plunger’s site, click the donate button and follow the check-out process. 

Current Analytics & Recommendations

            Registration for the 2015 Plunge opened in early October 2014, so GA has only been tracking data since that time.  SONJ has primarily been interested in visitor behavior in terms of which pages were viewed and exited from the most, which sites have referred the most traffic, and which pages have the highest bounce rates. Since visitors can only take a small amount of action on the njpolarplunge.org site (click “Register” or “Home” for one of the Plunge registration pages), for those GA, SONJ has only been interested in how visitors got to that page and whether or not they bounced. A high bounce rate on njpolarplunge.org could mean that visitors are confused about why the site doesn’t “look like Plunge” and aren’t bothering to click anywhere (and therefore not being redirected to the registration pages) before resorting to Google search to find what they are looking for.

As for the Kintera analytics, the top two landing pages are the home page (7% of traffic) and the “Join a Team” page (2% of traffic). These number opens up all kinds of potential analytics for SONJ to perform. Since Kintera allows individual Plungers to create their own pages, the site has amassed to 16,000 pages (!). Clearly a vast majority of traffic is bypassing the homepage ,“find a donor” page, and event info pages all together, since donors are directly accessing the “landing pages” of their Plunger friends. Additionally, registered Plungers aren’t going back to the homepage – they’re able to do most of their Plunge-related fundraising through their own mini-sites. Knowing this information can help SONJ determine the types of content that should really be up on the homepage. If Plungers aren’t accessing it, other communications strategies should be implemented.

            In terms of traffic to the Kintera registration homepage, direct traffic represents 31% of visits. Facebook brings in another 35%, 15% are coming in from njpolarplunge.org, and only 7% are making their way to the page from organic search. Other smaller sites make up the negligible difference. These data show SONJ that time and attention needs to be paid to organic search. Search engine optimization techniques are free, and yet they are only bringing in 7% of visitor traffic. SONJ should start digging a little deeper by setting up conversion goals to see how much direct, social and organic search traffic is actually converting. If all 7% of those organic searchers have converted, SONJ immediately needs to start investing time in better SEO. If only a small percentage of visitors from the social traffic are actually converting into Plungers or donors, SONJ needs to determine why. Are users confused by the process (analyze the pages with the highest exit rates) or are they not even starting the registration process after arriving at the homepage (analyze the initial bounce rate)? 

Other Recommendations

            The first recommendation for SONJ is to create goals within the GA system. Each registration is worth at least $100 (the fundraising minimum to Plunge), so it is an easy goal to understand and measure other analytics against. For example, SONJ could view new vs. returning visitors and see how many visitors are actually registering on their first visit to the site. From there, SONJ can assess how many sessions it takes for a visitor to actually achieve the registration goal. As for donors, SONJ can filter the donor-related traffic using a regular expression to see how many visits it takes a donor to actually donate. Knowing this information can help SONJ assess the donor user experience – is it cumbersome? Can they find the Plunger they want to donate to? Are they dropping out of the donation process for a particular reason?

            Another recommendation for SONJ is to turn on the e-commerce tracking functionality within GA. This is a great way for event organizers to test out registration codes and discounts to see if they are truly generating more revenue. The e-commerce functionality will also tell SONJ exactly how long it takes a registrant to actually sign up, or a donor to actually make a donation. All the revenue data will be available within the GA interface, allowing for more efficient data analysis.

            Finally, SONJ should set up some events within GA to help determine exactly what content is most relevant to visitors. While the site is primarily used for registration only, it would be interesting to see exactly how many visitors are downloading event information PDFs, clicking on photo albums, or viewing incentive items. Understanding these ancillary actions will help SONJ answer the BIG question about the user-friendliness of both njpolarplunge.org and the registration website: are visitors able to access the important logistical information and fundraising tools they need, and where should visitors be getting the event information they need to have the best Plunge experience possible and raise the most amount of dollars possible?

           

Google: What do they know about me?

I started my research on this week’s topic by attempting to see just what it is Google really “knows” about me. Personally, I think giving up a little privacy is completely worth the price I pay to use the many services Google provides, however I’ve never actually taken a careful look at exactly what Google “knows” about me.  The team behind Cloud Fender, an online file storage tool, recently wrote a blog post highlighting several different links you can use to see how Google sees you (2014). In the discussion below, I explore my own online identity through these links and evaluate several privacy and ethical concerns.

What Does Google Think of me?

            The first glimpse into Google’s knowledge of me is in my ad settings. This is an area of my Google profile that shows me basic information about myself based on my recent searches.

Google has identified 45 or so general interests for me based on my web activity and therefore will serve me ads that are most closely aligned with these things. I’ve never manually put in these interests and yet they are surprisingly accurate. Personally, I do not have a problem with Google knowing my general interests. I spend a lot of time online and if I have to see ads, they might as well be relevant to my actual interests. Additionally, it is easy to edit my interests or opt out of interest-based ads if I’m finding them to be a bit TOO accurate. I can even opt out of specific advertising campaigns if I’m seeing them just a bit too often.

While I may be comfortable with Google’s general picture of my interests, the same isn’t necessarily so for everyone. Earlier this year Google settled a lawsuit with students in California after it was discovered that the tech giant was scanning emails through their Google Apps for Education tool to help target ads. “Google Apps for Education, a free service used by more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators, offers Gmail email accounts, as well as calendars, cloud storage and document creation. Google didn’t place ads inside the apps, which it offered to educational institutions since 2006. However, the company continued to scan the contents of students’ Gmail accounts, gathering information that could potentially have been used to target ads to those students elsewhere online” (Barr, 2014). In this case students and educators felt Google was breaking wiretap laws and may have been violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which keeps educational records private. Since the lawsuit Google as removed all advertising from these student Gmail accounts.

 Does Google Know Where I am?

As nonchalant as I am about Google knowing my general interests to help tailor advertising, I’m finding it a bit more disturbing to learn that Google knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been, thanks to its location-based services and my iPhone. While I don’t really care that Google knows where I am and where I’ve been, I am weary that this information could be used for harm. Personally, I haven’t been the target of stalking or crime, but I can see how this location-based information could be used to hurt me should it fall into the wrong hands. Here’s a snapshot of my daily travels according to Google.

This information is readily accessible for me here: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory. As you can see I started my day in Florida and ended up back home in Pennsylvania. If I scroll over the time graph at the bottom I can see exactly where I traveled once I got in the car. Google knows where I am down to just a few feet! Personally I do not like having a daily history of my whereabouts available online simply because if the data got out a criminal could easily see my daily patterns down to the minute. To me this crosses the line just a little bit!

On the flip side, if I was into criminal activity myself (I’m not, I promise!), I would not particularly like this feature. Obviously this sort of information would be damning evidence in foul play. However, in a recent article with Forbes writer Amadou Diallo, a Google representative did confirm that they would require a search warrant from the police before giving out access to this data without consent from the user (2013).

I’ve decided to regularly delete my location history, but I do still plan on keeping my Google location services turned on. It’s helpful to me to know if I’m heading into heavy traffic, or if there’s a Starbucks nearby or if I need a shortcut home. These benefits are worth Google knowing my minute-by-minute move since I know I can control whether or not the data is stored for long periods of time.

What Data Does Google Store?

Another interesting side to my Google life is in my history. This includes all of my Google searches, a complete list of all the Google images I’ve ever looked at, a history of my YouTube video views, and every single Google AdWords ad I’ve ever clicked on. I can also see that my Google account is connected to several apps (Feedly and Amazon) and I also have one credit card on file.

I’m not too worried about all of this information being collected and stored since it’s helping Google create a better advertising experience for me. Furthermore, I’ve given Google permission to collect all this information and I can control quite a bit about what I allow them to collect right there from my dashboard. I would have a much bigger issue with them having access to information like my credit card number if I didn’t actually give them permission to store it.

Google came under fierce scrutiny in 2013 when they were accused of using their Google Maps vehicles (with all the cameras on top) for doing more than just taking street-view photos for Google Maps. “The Street View case arose out of Google’s deployment of special vehicles to photograph the houses and offices lining the world’s avenues and boulevards and lanes. For several years, the company also secretly collected personal information — e-mail, medical and financial records, passwords — as it cruised by. It was data-scooping from millions of unencrypted wireless networks” (Streitfeld, 2013). This is clearly crossing ethical boundaries since this information was not given with permission.

Overall I’m happy with the tools that Google offers me. They make my online experience simple and relevant and I feel like I have the world at my fingertips. While I’m a bit weary of the location tracking services I do ultimately trust Google to keep my data and information safe. I think as long as Google can retain the trust of its users, issues of privacy will be overlooked for the benefits this “god of the internet” can provide!

Google Analytics and ClickTale: A Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Data

Setting the Bar: Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is arguably one of the best website analytics tools on the market. For starters, it’s completely free and there are lots of training tools (also free!) available for even the least experienced marketers to learn the ins and outs of the system. Avinash Kaushik explains that GA is one of the only free, robust analytics tools available that also has “custom reporting and advanced segmentation built in,” and that companies really don’t need to pay for more advanced systems unless their needs are particularly complex (2010, p. 29). Furthermore, the tool generates enough useful data that other tools may not be necessary if users are looking for simple reports about traffic, user demographics, conversions and referrals. E-Nor.com, a California-based digital analytics and marketing optimization consulting firm recently analyzed the web analytics tool usage among Fortune 500 companies. As of 2013, more than 63% of these companies are using GA as their analytics tools (Farina, 2013).

So if GA can do so much for so many, what else could a company possibly need? What other tools offer alternatives or supplements to GA’s capabilities? While there are dozens and dozens (if not hundreds!) of analytics tools available, one that stands out is Clicktale, a tool devoted to analyzing the customer experience. While GA can tell a marketer where a customer came from, if they were a repeat visitor, if they made a purchase, and what their demographic profile might be, it cannot tell the marketer exactly what someone’s experience was with the website. GA does a great job of tracking the origination and termination of a user’s experience, but it cannot offer much dynamic insight into how the user experienced the site between arriving and leaving. Beyond the amount of time spent on the site and a general click stream, GA doesn’t paint much of a user experience picture. Here’s where a tool like ClickTale can supplement the GA data.

ClickTale: The User Experience Analyst

In a nutshell, ClickTale “enables businesses to maximize revenues by optimizing the way people experience the digital world” (ClickTale, 2014a). The basic products that ClickTale offers provide video session playbacks for individual customers, several types of heat maps to show customers view, scroll and click, and conversion funnels to show exactly what makes successful transactions happen. Digging a little deeper into these features will help explain why ClickTale is a great addition to any marketer’s web analytics toolbox.

Session Playback

This feature of ClickTale’s offerings allows marketers to watch recordings of a visitor’s entire session on a particular site. The tool explains, “see your site through the eyes of your visitors. Understand how they use your site, what they’re trying to achieve and where they encounter errors” (ClickTale, 2014e). A benefit of this tool is that it allows marketers to view complete sessions of people who bounced from the site, didn’t follow through with a purchase or decided to leave during a set process like filling out a form. Seeing exactly where a customer got frustrated, and identifying trends, can help marketers make the user experience better. Problem areas are easily, visually identified using this tool. GA does not have this sort of functionality; it would only report that a user bounced initially, did not convert, or didn’t spend a long time on a particular page.

Heat Maps

ClickTale offers several types of heat map data including mouse move heat maps, click heat maps, attention heat maps and scroll-reach heat maps. This comprehensive toolkit of heat maps, “lets you optimize your websites conversion rates and usability by visualizing your visitors’ every mouse move, click and scroll. Heat maps are aggregated reports that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by thousands of online visitors” (ClickTale,2014b). Knowing exactly where on a website users are spending time or clicking is incredibly valuable for a marketer. This allows for the adjustment and re-formatting of potential problem areas, and also allows marketers to see what is working well. GA does not have this sort of functionality; it does not report exactly where on a page users are spending time. GA would simply be able to show where a user clicked if there were links to click. It would not be able to show what buttons, content, images or forms a user spent a lot of time looking at.

Conversion Tools

ClickTale’s conversion tools are meant to help marketers understand why website visitors succeed or fail to complete each step of a particular conversion goal (ClickTale, 2014d). The conversion funnel functionality pinpoints exactly where potential customers are leaving the conversion process. This tool, combined with the video playback, gives marketers a unique set of quantitative and qualitative data for each step of the conversion process (ClickTale, 2014d). Addiontally, ClickTale offers a form analytics tool, which helps marketers see what parts of a form might be too lengthy, confusing or frustrating. Finally, link analytics give marketers the ability to see how quickly a user clicks a button or link, if he or she is hovering or hesitating, and which links are being ignored or missed entirely. GA is much more limited when it comes to conversions. The tool only reveals the number of conversions, and how they originated, but the experience of the user to get to that point is not revealed.

Conclusion

While the data the GA provides is incredibly valuable (and free!), it does not necessarily give marketers the whole picture of what it’s like for a visitor to actually experience a website. Beginning and ending data like how a visitor was referred and if he or she converted is certainly important to know, but without really understanding how a customer got from point A to point C, marketers can’t really analyze the user experience. As ClickTale explains, “Most web analytics solutions capture visitors landing on a web page and monitor their movement from page to page within a site. This is great for collecting quantitative information about your website traffic, but can’t tell you much about what visitors do once inside these pages” (ClickTale, 2014c). Using a tool like ClickTale in addition to GA can give a marketer a more robust picture of how visitors are experiencing their websites and processes. Analyzing all of this quantitative AND qualitative data can help guide decision-making processes about layout, design, and functionality that will ultimately help the user and increase profitability.

Social Media: One and Done or the More the Merrier?

Too many eggs in one social media basket? Not a good thing! With so many social possibilities out there, and so many different marketing and communications needs to be met (even within the same company!), there is simply no way adopting one platform as a sole means of social interaction with customers is the best option for a company or organization. In a recent article from Mashable.com, Brian Solis explains that organizations must lay the groundwork for proper social media engagement by first discovering their relevant communities by observing “the choices, challenges, impressions and wants of the people within each network” (2010). The means by which one segment of customers or potential customers interacts with a brand is not necessarily uniform across the entire customer base. Once an organization identifies a relevant consumer, the next step is identifying the best way to reach and converse with that audience – there’s simply no one easy way to do that. Additionally, not engaging on a variety of social networks could, figuratively speaking, leave money on the table, since pockets of target audiences may be found across dozens of digital and offline social networks.

So how does a company decide which social networks to engage with? Michael Greenberg explains that, “very few companies either have the scale to support social properly or the understanding to really make it work (2009). So if resources are tight and skills are lacking, why bother trying to engage on multiple networks? I think the answer boils down to conversations, and where a brand is most likely to have the most meaningful of them. While Greenberg is correct in his assumption that most organizations lac the time and skills to do every social thing well, he does offer an excellent solution: “Developing the content necessary to drive social and other content marketing initiatives is just an extension of that marketing calendar. If you establish a cadence, say, of two new content pieces per month, these can just get inserted into the calendar. It’s a little extra work, but I will bet that most e-commerce marketers, if they compare the time spent in a given month trying to figure out what to tweet or to post on their corporate Facebook page, will find the total time spent would likely be equivalent. And the quality of output and the quality of results would be much better” (2009). Basically, we’re all “doing marketing” anyway, so translating those materials into usable content across a variety of channels shouldn’t be as bad as we might think. So, step one in tackling more than one social media network well is to translate marketing into usable content.

The next vital piece of the social media puzzle then becomes taking the content and instigating conversation with it. What good is content if no one is talking about it? Catherine Novak explains, “Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising. It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor…and stops there. If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday. If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about. And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy. That happens because we humans like to communicate with each other” (2010). Here is where it is vital to have more than one outlet to start the conversation with potential customers, advocates and fans.

Take Special Olympics New Jersey as an example. The organization has hundreds of sports competition events year round, but they also provide free health screenings, leadership opportunities, and advocacy while simultaneously hosting fundraising events and campaigns to support it all. That’s a LOT of potential content and conversation. If SONJ relied completely on Facebook, for example, to carry on the conversations about all of these things all the time, the audience there would become diluted, annoyed and irrelevant: the people who care about the Polar Plunge aren’t necessarily the same people who care about the free medical screenings, who aren’t necessarily the same people who have a child in the program. Conversations with each of these audiences may have more impact and more relevance across very different social media channels.

Parents of SONJ athletes may have better interactions with the brand (and each other!) through SONJ’s private “locker room” portal, which allows them to share stories and concerns and receive quick feedback from SONJ leadership. 

Source: www.specialolympics.org/share

Polar Plungers, on the other hand, carry on conversations with event organizers right on the Facebook ads. Not only are the ads being served to a relevant audience, they allow SONJ to talk directly with the people who are planning to take the Plunge. An organic post on the SONJ page might reach a few thousand people at most, but the level of engagement is not nearly as prolific as when the ad is offered as a conversation piece to a more relevant audience. 

 

And what about runners of SONJ’s Lincoln Tunnel Challenge? They converse more readily with the brand on Instagram, where following hashtags and photos of the event is super simple. The #ltc5k hashtag got several hundred tags throughout the event weekend, and SONJ was able to congratulate participants directly, and remind them how important their fundraising dollars would become!

Source: Screenshot from http://iconosquare.com/tag/ltc5k

Finally, general “fans” of SONJ tend to prefer conversing with the brand over powerful images and moments of triumph, organically shared on Facebook and Twitter. The audiences there tend to use the SONJ Facebook page and Twitter feeds as places to see and comment on the core of what Special Olympics is all about. A lot of the “extras” SONJ provides (like the special events and programs) don’t do as well on the organic pages since the audiences tend to be much more general fans of the movement.

Source: www.facebook.com/SONewJersey

At the end of the day, SONJ only has one staff person completely dedicated to social media.  The communications department must therefore gather content from the organization as a whole and then translate it across multiple platforms in order to reach the most relevant audiences for each conversation. Like almost any company, SONJ would not be as successful with their social media strategy – and therefore sales, engagement, participation and registrations – if they were to rely on one network only.

Conversion Rates

Any company or organization with a product to sell, service to offer or event to grow knows that people can’t buy, receive or participate in something they know nothing about. That’s where marketing steps in. However, beyond a creative and strategic approach to marketing comes analyzing when and why a particular action was taken. This is where conversion rate comes in to play. The WebAnalytics Association explains that, “conversions usually represent important business outcomes, such as completing a purchase or requesting a quote. Sometimes they are chosen because they indicate potential for future behavior, such as clicking on an advertisement, registering for more information, or starting a checkout process” (2008).

Special Olympics New Jersey has recently begun tracking conversions through Facebook advertising for special event fundraisers. For the organization’s Battle the Beach 5k event a Facebook campaign was implemented for a period of several weeks. A piece of code generated by Facebook was placed into the check-out screen for the event, so Facebook could report the number of people who saw the ad who actually registered for the event after clicking the ad. The ads were retargeted to people who had visited the Battle the Beach website in the last week before seeing the Facebook ad. At the conclusion of the campaign, 104 people who saw the Facebook ad registered for the event after clicking the ad.

              This conversion metric is extremely valuable because it indicates that people are actually registering for the event after seeing the ad; they aren’t just “wasting” a paid click to find out more information.

              Despite the seemingly successful nature of the paid Facebook campaign for Battle the Beach (at least in the retarget), SONJ also noticed that the vast majority of visitors from the generally-targeted ad set were viewing the Battle the Beach site on their phones and then bouncing from the site immediately. The marketing was working, but the conversion was simply not happening. In fact, that ad set only generated a handful of conversions despite the huge number of clicks and impressions it received. So what was stopping people from the general ad set and what was making people from the retargeted set actually register?

              The culprit appears to be the user experience of the Battle the Beach registration site. People who visited the Battle the Beach site multiple times and were able to figure out the tricky navigation were seeing the Facebook ads a lot more frequently. Ultimately when someone from this ad set decided to actually participate in the run, there was a strong likelihood a Battle the Beach ad would be at the top of the newsfeed. However, for the general ad set targeted at people who very likely had never visited the Battle the Beach website, the initial experience trying to register was a bad one. In an article from Entrepreneur.com, Brett Relander explains that there are several factors related to web design and user experience that weigh heavily on an individual’s ultimate conversion: usability, conversion-centric design features, favorable aesthetics, and ease of navigation (2014).

              In the case of the Battle the Beach site, none of these criteria were actually met. Visitors made it to the website but then had to pinch and zoom on a phone (no responsive design), decipher a web of menu options and look at a rather blah design. The site certainly did not set itself up to foster an environment of conversions. The fact that the retargeted ads performed so much better indicates that visitors had to go back to the website multiple times before figuring out exactly how to register. 

 Retrieved from www.btb5k.org.

              

 Tracking conversions will ultimately help SONJ assess the entire user experience. Even with a creative and strategic marketing campaign, if the experience for a potential event participant is a negative or difficult one, the conversion rates will indicate the need for some serious adjustments.

Referral Sites

Consider the marketing process. A client approaches an ad agency to help them sell more products. The agency works for weeks coming up with an integrated marketing plan to achieve the client’s goals. Everyone agrees the creative elements of the campaign are brilliant; the ads are eye-catching, the slogans are spot on and the brand is well represented. Ads, promotional materials, social strategy and email marketing calendars are all in place across a wide variety of channels. The campaign launches and sales start soaring. Obviously the client is happy, but what happens next? Does the client shake the hands with the agency and just say, “see you next time?” No! Creating the campaign is only half the battle. Sure, the results may be obvious, but now the question becomes: why?

An integrated marketing campaign is really only as good as the analytics – and subsequent analysis - that comes out of it. A concept and strategy may seem brilliant, but the data simply don’t lie. Of all the strategic places an ad was placed, which worked the best? Why did one place generate more traffic than another? This is where referral analytics come into play.

The Web Analytics Association defines a referrer as “the source of traffic to a page or visit” (2008). Essentially, this is any digital source that compels someone to visit a particular site. This can be anything from a search engine, Facebook ad, email client, or miscellaneous hyperlink hosted on another website like a blog or review. The web of potential referral sites can be huge, so it’s important for advertisers to know what’s working so they can measure and evaluate ROI across all channels.

Special Olympics New Jersey has only recently started experimenting with Google Analytics to collect data for its fundraising event websites. Without a dedicated data person on staff this has been difficult to analyze to its fullest potential, but the results so far have been interesting. Most recently, Google Analytics were installed on the organization’s Dodgetoberfest dodgeball tournament site. Event organizers only had budget for a very limited online advertising – links on SONJ’s main website, a Facebook campaign, email blasts and listings on local event websites.  

A recent article from Mashable.com explains that online advertising must meet three criteria in order to have a chance at being successful: it must be clean and simple to use, offer a clear call to action and robust incentives and include attractive, click-ready creative (Stanley, 2013). In the case of Dodgetoberfest, the online marketing pieces varied in how successfully they met these criteria. According to the Google Analytics, other than direct visitors to the Dodgetoberfest site (hosted on Kintera.org), Facebook generated the most traffic, followed by the main Special Olympics New Jersey website and finally a local township website. 

   

These referral rates indicate that the Facebook campaign did indeed generate significantly more traffic than any other source, suggesting the ads were simple, had a clear call to action, were creatively eye-catching and were appropriate for the channel/target audience.  

 

Compare that ad to the information found on the Robbinsville Township website:  

Intuition says that the Facebook ad is easier to comprehend – the Robbinsville Township ad has a lot more going on with a less clear call to action. Of course the sources themselves vary in terms of potential traffic they could generate (Facebook obviously has much more sophisticated audience targeting than a local township website), but the bottom line is that the data supports intuition.

                So why does all of this matter? For next year’s Dodgetoberfest event SONJ can look back at the data and decide exactly what sorts of places are worth investing advertising dollars online. Facebook appears to be a clear winner, but what could paid search generate? Tracking referral traffic turns intuition into hard, measurable, interpretable data that ultimately helps guide decision-making. Not only can SONJ evaluate the best sites to place their advertising, they can also adjust the creative elements to suit each channel in the most appropriate way.