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Conversions through user engagement

News flash: Success in the search engines isn’t the be all and end all for determining the effectiveness of your online presence. Although ranking highly in Google against your chosen keywords is definitely part of making it big on the net, another very important measure you must consider is “conversion”. Particularly if you want to make a positive return on your investments (ROI).

Whether you’re selling shoes, providing news or advertising the products featured in your physical shop front, converting your website traffic into tangible cash is a task that doesn’t always come as easily as many people expect. Representatives from Google this week spoke on this very issue in relation to the woes many online news providers are currently experiencing.

While the debate still rages about the positives and pitfalls of hiding content behind paywalls, Google have suggested that the key to a strong ROI is user engagement. And think about it - unless your website is purely e-commerce where conversions can be counted as the total number of items sold - you ideally want to keep users on your website for as long as you can, impressing them all the way to the “Contact Us” form.

Although adding regular doses of relevant unique content to your website is a surefire way to back your SEO efforts, it’s also a winning method for engaging users with your website. Don’t underestimate the benefits of a glowing review and link to your website shared by an impressed user on a site like Facebook or Twitter. Having a website that users want to share and regularly revisit requires a lot of investment - not just of money, but of time and brainpower. Returning to our newspaper example, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian noted that “the average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day".

We can think of those 70 second breaks as the times when someone quickly clicks to your website to see what you offer, check a price or grab your phone number or physical address details. To move towards full user engagement, expand your business base and turn all those little clicks into big conversions, you need to begin thinking of ways to attract users to your site more regularly. Features such as a scattering of regularly updated images, a blog relevant to your industry or prospective clients, and videos of testimonials or how-to tutorials can all keep users returning to your site, lingering for longer, and returning to do business with you again and again.

Online accountability

On Facebook alone, more than 5 billion pieces of content are shared each week. On YouTube, more than 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Could you imagine either of these websites employing enough editors to fact-check and approve every single item posted by their users?

How about Google? What if they replaced their web-crawling spiders with real people who had to verify that every single site they came across was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Given there were more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the web in mid-2008, it seems to be an incredibly unrealistic prospect.

In the wake of the criminal convictions delivered to the three Google executives in Italy last month, American columnist Ted Rall has not only thrown his support behind the controversial verdict but also suggested full fact-checking be done by gatekeepers employed by Google and other online content sharing platforms.

Hypothetically threatening to post an “atrocious lie about you being a drugged-out kiddie porn entrepreneur” to his blog and various social networks, Rall incorrectly argues that “there's nothing you can do about it”. Unfortunately for Rall, if he tried this, there is certainly a lot someone could do about it and, if that were to happen to me, my biff would certainly not be with Google, Facebook or any other website - it would be with the perpetrator himself.

One would expect that as a blogger, Rall should be up on at least the basic ins and outs of how search engines and social media websites function, but the following statement shows that this is clearly not the case: “It's not like Google can't afford to hire an editorial staff. Shouldn't they have to make sure that, for example, I don't libel you as some crazy porn gangster?” And yes, he’s serious.

As posted on Techdirt, Rall’s reasoning “defies logic. He seems unable to comprehend the difference between a publisher and a tool or service provider.” Writer Mike Masnick goes on to say that Rall “seems terrified of free speech, and would prefer that it only come from the 'professionals' like himself”. Given the Facebook censorship issues we’ve seen recently in Australia, I have no doubt that many people would, sadly, agree with Rall’s sentiments.

I wholeheartedly agree with Masnick on this point - just because the internet may be used as the medium for spreading a false statement, “destroying the freedom to communicate and to express yourself online” does not make sense. Whether online or offline, individual accountability is still a key concept that many people, such as Rall, have clearly not yet grasped.