I recently helped Paul Legutko, who heads up Semphonic’s Boston office, put the finishing touches on his “Measuring Microsites” whitepaper. It’s a brilliant piece of work. If you are using or thinking about using Microsites (small, focused, marketing oriented sites dedicated to a single campaign or product/service), this is an indispensable whitepaper for understanding their appropriate measurement.
It’s not indispensable because it lays out some pretty cool metrics for Microsite measurement that you will almost certainly not have thought about. That’s just a nice to have. What makes it truly important is that the metrics it describes provide a significantly better framework for understanding what success in a Microsite really involves. If you need to answer questions like “Is a Microsite appropriate for this content?” or “Was the design of the Microsite really successful?” or “Is this Microsite helping our brand?” then you need a set of metrics that are specifically designed to get at what’s fundamentally different about a Microsite.
“Measuring Microsites” steps through a set of metrics specifically designed to capture these fundamental differences. The paper starts with an in-depth discussion of measures of Independence and Integration. These metrics reveal (at both the visit and visitor level) how the Microsite interacts with the parent site and the extent to which the Microsite supplements, cannibalizes or is parasitic on the parent site. These measures are fundamental to good Microsite measurement because achieving the right balance between independence (the Microsite shouldn’t feel like just another piece of the parent site) and integration ( the Microsite shouldn’t act like a completely independent brand) is a major design goal for almost any Microsite.
Independence and Integration are not the only unique aspect of Microsite measurement. The small size of a Microsite fundamentally changes the design goals for good navigational patterns and consumption of content. Unlike large parent sites where flexible navigational patterns are generally encouraged, a Microsite should have tight control over the visit flow. This design goal is captured in the metrics we provide for Saturation and Directionality.
Saturation metrics help you understand how much of a Microsite’s content is consumed in a visit (or by a visitor). For a parent web site, such a metric is pretty much always meaningless – though it’s a metric we first used as a topic-specific measure of mindshare when developing behavioral segmentations. But for a Microsite, it’s a powerful measure of success.
Directionality is really just a simple routing metric (similar to what we do with Functional Router analysis) applied to the Microsite landing pages and to the Microsite as a whole. The goal is to measure the Microsites success at folding routes into a relatively narrow funnel. Microsites should display a much tighter directionality than your main site if they are working appropriately.
The whitepaper also steps you through one of the most useful metrics we’ve developed – effect size. Paul first developed effect-size metrics to help us measure the mindshare generated by individual tools or content areas on media properties. The goal of the effect-size metric is to help you understand the impact on consumption and repeat visits of a specific piece of content. In the context of Microsites, it’s used to help understand the overall impact of the Microsite on the brand.
Finally, Measuring Microsites provides a better framework for understanding Microsite sourcing in comparison to the parent site. Based on the simple but profound insight that Microsites will have a very different distribution between “brand,” “core” and “tail” words when generating sourcing, the measurement framework suggested gives you a way to really test Microsite sourcing success.
There’s even some insight into measuring viral and studying Microsite sourcing patterns to understand the optimal longevity of a Microsite. This is measurement as it ought it to be – with powerful metrics that are geared toward the understanding of particular and highly-specific business problems.
Put all this together, and you have a fundamental re-thinking of how to measure your Microsites.
If you haven’t paid serious attention to Microsite measurement – perhaps thinking that such small sites don’t warrant much attention or that you can use the same “views/visits/outcomes” metrics you’re applying to the parent site, then I hope this whitepaper will be a revelation.
You can get the "Measuring Microsites" whitepaper right now in early release (not yet on our website). Just click here to go to the AdWeek White Papers site and do the short super-simple registration - or just drop me a line and I will send it to you. And let me know what you think!
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