How much is a visitor worth?

I was recently in a meeting and a colleague asked about the value of a visitor. This got me thinking about visitors, impressions and CPM. I mean we quantify our online advertising in cost per thousand impressions, cost per click and cost per acquisition. Is there room in there for cost per visitor without the action aspect? Can we state that if there is information on the site and a consumer spends time with that content we have achieved our goal, thus quantifying our spend? Well I think that many people would think I was crazy, but we do this every day with print, billboards and yes TV (the devil). There are countless millions spent on commercials that people are skipping and fast forwarding on the ever growing adoption of the DVR. Thinking about it that way the visitor is actually more valuable than the TV spot because for whatever reason the consumer is on your site. So, my opinion is that we should all take a hard look at our visitors and figure out how much they are worth.

CD

Measuring Above the Line Advertising

Something that is becoming more and more important is quantifying you ATL Advertising budget. This is easy in some industries (eCommerce) and very difficult in others (Automotive). You can measure or analyze the impact of a highly viewed commercial, you see a direct correlation during and immediately after the commercial hits (this is usually a three hour buzz due to east coast and west coast air times), but how do you measure the constant regional and local adverting lift? Well you can look at traffic in those regions and cross reference the regional or local GRP's to the spikes by analyzing the geographic data on your site. This is just one thought there are many others out there. I think it is important for companies to understand how ATL effects their website and bottom line. There aren't and concrete way (yet) to obtain ROI of TV but with VOD and the upcoming ability to measure down to the household, we may get a lot closer. Think about it, you see a commercial (the cable company knows what show/commercial you viewed) you then go to the internet and view the URL that was in the commercial (the two are cross-referenced) and we now know that commercial had in impact on your purchase, but that is the future. Today, the best way to quantify your ATL is to turn it off and see what is the impact.

SEO demystified

In honor of the SES conference I will post the following: SEO is voodoo! What I mean is that natural search is a game of mice following the cheese and then the the cheese is moved. Understanding the search algorithms is not really that difficult. Understanding how the different measures are applied is the difficult part. I mean we all know that relevance is really important to google, but what constitutes relevance. An automated spider that reads the content and then looks at the URL and Title Tag to see if it is relevant to the consumer? I do think that for the most part the engines are dead on, but when does a search engine know if a consumer is searching for a Ford Mustang when they type in Mustang or a Mustang horse? Today, it doesn't. It is just a software program that does what it is told. I am in the process of pulling together all the different algorithms and I will post the Big three later. I just feel that SEO is not that hard, but then why are there thousands of people attending the conference?

CD