Category: Business

When I’m working with clients, the topic of page views often comes up.

Page views are requests that are made to load a specific HTML page on the web. In the early days of the www, we didn’t have great metrics or analytics to measure statistics up against the more mature offline world, and page views became one of the default ways to tell if a site or page was successful. It’s a terrible metric that is easily gamed, and those of us who work in marketing know that page views are not valuable to determine a site’s health.

Yet, we continue to fixate on them from terrible “clickbait” Buzzfeed headlines to Communication Ministers constantly checking a site dashboard to see if the latest Christmas Cantata podcast post has more links than last year’s version.

Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter and now Medium, has an interesting point for churches and non-profits to ponder as we head into the new year…

I would rather have fewer people stop by and read something for five minutes that makes them think than a million people stop by for five seconds because of a catchy headline.

The optimistic part of the message is that advertisers get this too. Brand advertising has never worked on the Internet anyways, because banner ads don’t work. So whatever the form factor is, people have to be actually engaged in something for it to be meaningful.

via Q&A with Evan Williams, co-founder of Medium and Twitter.

Or as Cory Haik writes,

Purely chasing pageviews is a fool’s errand. In the short term, it gets you a bigger comScore number. But those calories are empty.

The clients I like to work with are groups that have a mission to make the world a better place in some fashion. For those clients, I like to keep reminding them that thousands or millions of page views mean next-to-nothing compared to actually engaging a few people and impacting their lives. So the answer to my question in the title of this post would be a flat out “No.”

As the web continues to mature and change, we’ll certainly move away from the page view as the venerable metric of a site’s success. Attention, engagement, sharing… those are much better metrics. Particularly for the types of clients that want to change the world.

SXSW has come to epitomize so much of what is wrong with web marketing in 2014.

I gave up on the idea of attending SXSW every year after things took a turn for the worse (in my opinion) back in the 2009-2010 timeframe. We saw the first real takeoff of Twitter at SXSW in 2007 then Foursquare hit it big at the show in 2008. Since then, it’s been a place to “find the next Twitter” or “improve your brand marketing.”

As an agency person who cares deeply about social media and about marketing in general, I just can’t bring myself to go see this spectacle. That might make me an elitist hipster or whatever, but the truth is I have taste (again, in my opinion). That taste doesn’t correlate with things like fashion but I do have good taste (imo) when it comes to marketing.

I’ll keep doing what I’m doing with our agency here in sunny SC and leave the “idea vomiting” and “hashtag highness” surface level approach to “marketing” to my friends who go to SXSW from the larger agencies with insane expense accounts but a shallow grasp of tasteful marketing.

Given SXSW’s status as a birthplace of social media, the festival attracts an outsized number of self-styled gurus leading panels to educate the less savvy. Attendees flock to standing-room-only sessions with names like “Idea Vomiting” in the hopes that beyond the bluster, the social media ninjas and rockstars in attendance will share some pearls of wisdom. “Eighty percent of it is useless,” confides a man who is attending on behalf of a large American company. “You’re looking for those diamonds in the rough.” We are sitting next to one another at a session named “High On Hashtags”. A colleague of his, overhearing us, raves about a session she attended the previous day called “The Digital Cronut”. “I heard that was awesome,” her colleague says.

via Hucksters and hustlers: inside the hidden brand orgy of SXSW | The Verge.