Bradley Howard's Blog

Views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

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Happy birthday post

Jan 23, 2012 at 3:44pm
 

Churchill1
It’s embarrassing when you forget a birthday, and it’s double embarrassing when you forget your own. On 16 January this blog turned two years’ old.

As has become custom - well, I did it last year so I'll do it again, here are some of the traffic stats.

Before I begin, thank you and all the visitors who have been coming to the site. 

This is a comparison between the year up to 17 January 2010 and 2011:

    18 Jan 2011 to  
17 Jan 2012  		   18 Jan 2010 to  
17 Jan 2011  
Posts

100

133
Visitors

5,065

2,556
Page Views  

7,675

3,723

So, whilst I apologise for not writing as many posts as last year, the ones I did write seem to be more interesting!

These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.

I said last year that my aims for 2011/2 were to double the traffic and have more people commenting. The table above shows the first objective was achieved. As for the number of comments, this is measure using the blog tool (Posterous).

My aims for next year is to keep growing the traffic by the same amount - here’s to over 7,500 visitors in the next year.

Once again, if you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly. As soon as I get requests I usually act upon them within a couple of days.


 
tags:
analytics, stats,
0 Comments

Facebook A/B testing and barriers to entry

Apr 4, 2011 at 10:03am
 

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Photo from 8ball.

I'm regularly being asked about the conversion stats for User Generated Content and the barriers to entry/what prevents users from uploading content.

Here's an amazing article from Facebook which discusses A/B testing and their barriers to entry.

The highlights:

  • Out of 100 people that try to upload a photo to Facebook: 
    89% reach the starting point - the photo uploader. 
    58% select the photos they want to upload. 
    57% actually press the upload button. 
    54% succeed in uploading photos in one shot. 
    70% of people eventually succeed by the end of the day.
  • The last time Mosseri gave the talk, only 48% of people succeeded in uploading photos in one shot.
  • There is incredible anxiety for users in updating their status: 
    Out of users that enter three or more characters into the status update box, 17% don't post anything at all.
  • "That's one in six people who attempt to post something but don't," said Mosseri. "That's pretty crazy."
  • There are "way more people using Facebook on feature phones than smartphones," but those using smartphones are "way more engaged."


 
tags:
Facebook, User Generated Content, stats, usability,
0 Comments

TV audiences v Web traffic part 2

Feb 16, 2011 at 9:34am
 

I've always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet when it comes to BARB figures. Just the concept of extrapolating from 5,000 homes to an estimated audience of 26 million in 2011 starts gets me frustrated.

Two recent articles provide further evidence in my favour.

The first article was in an excellent interview with Keith Weed, the CMO of Unilever. In the interview he provides an answer to the ROI (Return On Investment) question of social media:

The measurement of ROI in this area is a big issue for us. We have different ways of measurement, some of which are more experimental than others. The good news is that I have enough evidence that says most of the time we can prove better ROI online than in TV. It is much more measurable.

So Unilever is the second largest spender on TV in the World (a statistic he mentions in the interview), yet he's happy putting his faith in ancient, unscientific BARB figures, but when it comes to digital, Unilever want it to be scientific to the n'th degree.

There's another way to interpret his answer though - I estimate that BARB figures are hugely inflated because of the extrapolation that was perhaps sufficient with 4 or 5 TV channels, but nowadays as useless as a chocolate teapot in the age oif hundreds of TV, IPTV and PVRs such as Sky+. ROI from a huge TV ad spend is then going to be lower, because the TV ad is at an inflated cost, and the returns (e.g. increased revenue) are much more measurable by the brand.

So no wonder that Mr Weed is experiencing an increase in ROI from social media and digital in particular.

The second article I read was from Cadbury, who can now measure their ROI on digital so precisely that they find a return of 3 to 1 for each pound spent in the new world (you need an NMA subscription for that original article, or click here for a copy of the article). Again, I think it's because the measurement tools available on the web are so superior to TV measurement.

URLs for this article:


 
tags:
ROI, TV, analytics, brands, business, digital media, social media, stats,
1 Comment

Facebook - the facts and stats

Sep 29, 2010 at 8:53am
 

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If you're looking for information on the success and popularity of Facebook, here are two excellent resources:

  1. Facebook facts and stats
  2. Facebook timeline

 
tags:
Facebook, stats, web traffic,
0 Comments

157 impressive mobile stats

Aug 25, 2010 at 8:32am
 

I have an issue with people throwing mobile statistics into presentations because they are usually unfounded and questionable.

However this presentation contains references to all the statistics, which adds a high degree of credibility.

157 Mobile App Stats You Should Know About
View more presentations from stuartdredge.

 
tags:
FourSquare, apple, business, eBay, ecommerce, iPhone, ipad, mobile, stats, technology,
0 Comments

If Social Networks were a continent...

Aug 23, 2010 at 1:39pm
 
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via flowtown.com

Excellent visual representation from Flowtown comparing the size and current status (no pun intended) of the major, new and receding social platforms.


 
tags:
social media, stats,
0 Comments

TV Stats, Web Stats and Future Stats

Feb 1, 2010 at 10:34pm
 

According to BARB, 12.09m people watched Eastenders on Friday 1 January. How does BARB work this out?

"Viewing estimates are obtained from a panel of television owning private homes representing the viewing behaviour of the 26 million TV households within the UK. The panel is selected to be representative of each ITV and BBC region, with pre-determined sample sizes. Each home represents, on average, about 5,000 of the UK population." (Source: http://www.barb.co.uk/about/tvMeasurement?_s=4)

OK. Now imagine we worked out web figures on such a low tech 'sample'. Actually web stats are surprisingly accurate -- products such as Omniture and Google Analytics track every page impression pretty accurately, which means that to a very small percentage, we know exactly how many pages were displayed across a website.

Marketing folks are often surprised how low some web 'traffic' (in TV speak, read 'viewing') figures are. But actually they're very accurate, especially compared to the totally inaccurate method of TV stats.

The next generation of web applications are already posing further problems. Two years ago we pitched to a very well known football club to look into redeveloping their website and other Internet applications, once of which was SecondLife. They specifically asked us to recreate their stadium in SecondLife. During the pitch, our Creative Director boldly stood up (as Creative Directors do) and showed a screenshot on SecondLife of their stadium, already in the virtual world. His point was twofold - 1. there was already an unofficial one which the club could 'buy' from the obviously-bored fan; and 2. he was the only person in the stadium, which had about 45,000 'seats'.

To summarise:

  • TV stats are inaccurate
  • Web stats are accurate at the expense of appearing lower
  • Finally, when brands or Rights Holder start looking at 'concurrent' stats, they're actually much lower than even the web stats.

 
tags:
analytics, stats, television,
0 Comments
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Bradley Howard

Bradley Howard

Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.

 

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