Wednesday, August 20, 2008
August 2008 Report Published
This August 2008 issue of Public Media Metrics provides an important step forward in service to our participating stations. Under the leadership of Tim Davis and Bridget Hollenback, eight PMM stations "tried something" in this case, it was targeted promotion of a specific site feature. The eight stations included Public Radio Partnership in Louisville (WFPL in particular), Detroit Public Television, KJZZ in Phoenix, WDAV in Davidson, NC, Ideastream, in Cleveland, (WCPN-FM and WVIZ-TV,) KWMU in St. Louis and KPBS in San Diego. Overall, a nice mix of formats and regions, reasonably representative of the PMM subscriber base as a whole.
Over a two week period in July, each of these organizations ran a flight of spots (82 spots on average) encouraging listeners to go to the station website and engage: look at something, read something, listen to something, sign up for something.
The results are instructive and impressive: on average traffic doubled for the targeted feature; overall pageviews for the entire site increased by 20%.
This project clearly documents the importance and impact of promotion. Almost every day, we could look at the Google Analytics graphs and see the line move up as the stations implemented their promotional plans. Moreover, the gains in
traffic increased in the second week of the trial, suggesting, Tim Davis notes, that "messages (may) become better understood with increased frequency."
For all those who were hoping PMM would identify elements of "best practice," Tim has identified something that fits that description: Promote your site. Promote your features. Implement a campaign of continuous promotion clearly identifying user benefits.
Of all the things we can do to increase the impact of our online service this is one of the most powerful and, I should think, one of the easiest.
It‘s hard to create new, compelling web features. It is labor intensive to maintain sites so we can offer visitors a reason to return every day. Compared to that, it‘s easy to schedule and implement a promotional campaign that draws attention
and traffic to features you already have, including your streams and podcasts.
As Tim has been telling us in every one of his analytical features, you cannot expect that people will "just come" to your web site. You have to tell them to come. You need to give them reasons to visit. You have to remind them that they
can sign up for podcasts and newsletters.
If you don‘t, your traffic (and your revenues) will suffer.
Also in this report, Trac Media compares the use of opt-in samples versus random samples and looks at what kind of people are visiting your PTV site, analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, continues the theme of using your organization‘s broadcast arm in interesting ways to build, brand, and monetize your web presence, and Justin Cutroni, Senior Director of Analytics and Testing at Epik One, takes us through the steps of creating and understanding the role and findings of funnels using Google Analytics.
A full report indeed! Download it now and get all the details.
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