Authentic Brand Conversation and Social Media Strategy

Social media is all about staying connected. Users opt to join Facebook to keep up with old friends, Instagram to showcase their photography skills and pets, and Snapchat to see what their family and friends are up to day by day. In a fast-paced digital world, social media is the key to maintaining relationships across continents and busy schedules. But social media isn’t just for the individual anymore - brands have flocked to social media sites in the attempt to build relationships as well. In a climate that values personalization and speed-of-light communication, marketers have jumped in to establish their brands as staples in their customers’ daily social media interactions. By creating and curating social media accounts, brands have taken on an almost human entity as they interact with customers in their digital social circles.

According to DeMers (2014), “brands who engage on social media platforms enjoy higher loyalty from their customers.” And brand loyalty is what marketing is all about – targeting a carefully selected audience segment and connecting with these users in a way that makes them not only lifelong customers, but brand ambassadors to their friends who are also part of the target audience as well. Because having loyal customers is so important to the health of a brand, every feasible effort should be made to leverage social media to help make connections with potential customers and maintain relationships with current customers. According to Erdogmus and Cicek (2012), social media marketing is “more sincere in its communication with the consumers, trying to show what the brand is rather than trying to control its image,” as is the trend with other types of carefully crafted advertisements on paid and owned media. Users appreciate this sincerity, and it is on social media where genuine brand-customer relationships can be formed. And from an ROI perspective, the higher the number of brand loyal customers, the higher the conversion rate.

Page Exit Ratio and RJMetrics

 In today’s increasingly digital world, consumers are bombarded with a slew of ads and over-saturated with content every time they go on the internet. Being able to cut through the noise and reach these consumers is getting increasingly difficult, and, as anyone involved in online marketing can testify, getting a visitor to the desired web page is only half the battle. The other half rests on a brand’s ability to engage visitors long enough to successfully convert them.

      Not every page visit turns into a conversion, however. If a visitor leaves a page before the conversion criteria is met, this can be classified as a page exit, with the “number of exits from a page divided by the total number of page views” as the page exit ratio (Web Analytics Association, 2008). While discouraging, page exits prove to be a useful metric because they provide data that can be used to improve a website and ultimately increase the website’s conversion rate. Determining the page exit ratio, or “the number of exits from a page divided by the total number of page views of that page” (Web Analytics Association, 2008), and measuring it against the company’s Key Performance Indicator for this metric is an important step in identifying what specific aspects of the website are keeping visitors from successfully converting.

Conversion and Brian Gavin Diamonds

Conversion, or the accomplishment of a “desired outcome” (Reed College of Media, 2017), is a crucial metric and a necessity for all successful online marketing efforts. Each conversion made by a website visitor propels a business forward to reaching its grander online goals and satisfying its business objectives. The building block metrics and those of visitor characterization, visit characterization, and engagement, while important in their own right, are useful to analyze because they help a business optimize its conversions, or push its bottom line. These macro conversions are crucial to measure, but micro conversions must be considered as well. According to Kaushik (2008), there are some people who “refuse to be converted online” and are more interested in pursuing goals that are not related to the business’ macro conversions (e.g., researching products to buy offline). By analyzing micro conversions, or other meaningful events not necessarily linked to purchasing, etc., a business can measure its success in all areas and learn more about the goals of its users. While there are many different types of desired outcomes for businesses’ online endeavors, analyzing visitor purchase behavior leading up to and after conversions can help optimize the online experience for both the user and the business.