Understanding the value of a very good piece of digital brand activity should not be that hard. We have all seen cracking ones and we have all seen examples that are just not right.
If 600,000 people spend more than eight minutes exploring a bespoke site that lets them find out about themselves while it tells engaging, inspiring stories about a brand, it is pretty obvious that this has enormous value. But what if there are 150,000 people spending four minutes on a site and the message is not so positive or useful? What if the project cost twice as much to build and you've additionally paid for usability research with a brand facelift? How does it compare in value to the 400,000 people a month who come through to your corporate site?
The fact is that any anecdotal or qualitative view of value is only powerful when there is someone respected enough to argue its case. Only when enough people think about it in the same way does it have the true value of a currency. A currency that proves the effectiveness of brand online would be pretty useful right now. That's where our consumer is, after all. And one thing that's an absolute certainty in the current economic climate is you are going to have to show the value of investment, if you want to keep your budget.
So how do we fight for the digital budget associated with brand? Let's start with two simple points:
1. Are people engaging with what you have built?
2. Are they leaving the experience with the brand message you want them to?
At Collective, we have created a concept called the 'dwell minute', which basically captures a site visitor's positive brand experience. That positive experience could be because the site is very usable, or it could offer a useful bit of functionality or a widget. It's a positive, entertaining and engaging experience. Not all dwell minutes are equal. People could be dwelling because they can't find what they are looking for and are frustrated (or have gone to make a cup of tea), or they could be dwelling because they love it. So you can time a dwell minute but you cannot measure its quality and effectiveness.
Contrast that with a TV advert. Broadcast media get their metrics through surveys -- a national telephone sample of a thousand viewers gives them enough indicative feedback as to whether people will remember an advert and whether they feel positively about the brand and so on.
We cannot do that online because even with a very successful campaign, maybe only three to five per cent of the population will see it and there is no cost-effective way of getting qualitative feedback from them, especially as the total cost outlay is usually about 5 per cent to that of a TV campaign. Instead, we're stuck with the quantitative tools of digital measurement (unique visits, etc.) that in some ways are very powerful because they measure a wide range of events but don't actually give any insight into what's going on.
I have a very selfish reason why this issue is important to my agency, but so should you. You need to make sure you build the right site, not the wrong one.
The right site needs to do two things:
1. Deliver the right message (sounds simple but isn't).
2. Be useful to the user (information, entertainment, insight, etc.).
Currently, there are few ways of differentiating the right site from the wrong one until you get to view it, which is usually about four days before it is due to go live. Functionally, it might do the right thing, but could be a terrible experience for the consumer -- no one would have had any enjoyment out of it.
So what is the answer? How do you find a way of qualifying a factor of dwell time into a site? To me, it should be based on feedback on the success of the brand messaging, and teasing out its effectiveness by testing the site against its purpose. In a perfect world we'd do that with an independent series of case studies both pre- and post-live, organised by an accredited independent body.
But actually it can also be simpler -- we just have to keep in mind the site's purpose and how well it achieves that. We can set up to four key brand point markers that should be communicated, understood and embraced, and we can use small focus groups to measure whether the communication has been positive and effective. Then we start having some real value to the dwell minute and say with confidence that we've got a really good website -- it does what people need it to do and lots of people use it.
We're all pushing towards a currency for digital brand effectiveness and we all know that it's a complex problem. So here's the Collective working formula: dwell minute = dwell time x effectiveness factor. The effectiveness factor should be based on how close the brand message take out is to what was intended (from 0-10). An underlying point here is that there is a reason why many traditional marketers are worried about these kinds of measurements coming out. It's probably going to show that well-targeted search journeys, clever seeding and above the line pointers towards very effective microsites are far more effective than average TV ads.
Whatever direction we take, we need to nail the terms for our new currency pretty quickly.
Greg Doone is managing director, Collective.