Of course it is. It's fairly useless on the 2D web. With the proliferation of AJAX based web applications which bork the whole concept of a "page view", the rise of social networks and blogs where brand control is a laughable concept and, the widgetization of the web, where content becomes untethered and free, traffic as a measurement of success is ridiculous. It is however, something people can easily understand and digest, so as part of the overall picture, it still has it's uses.
In a somewhat defensive post in response to the "SL brands ranked by traffic" meme that did the rounds a couple of weeks ago, Satchmo Prototype of the Electric Sheep Company calls for a ranking of brands by engagement rather than raw traffic figures, pointing out that many campaigns in Second Life don't even have a destination where "traffic" can be measured. Unfortunately he doesn't offer any suggestions on how we might measure engagement in the virtual world, so I guess we're stuck with traffic and product distribution right Chris?
Putting SL activity into its over-riding context - marketing, I think traffic should be ONE of the metrics assessed to gauge the success of a campaign or initiaitve. Or more appropriately, EXTRA traffic.
When referring to traffic, one should think more in terms of Reach - the extent to which a marketing campaign or message is spread into a target market, even if the campaign is not strictly speaking a destination-driven idea.
Traffic is of course important because brand owners create brand experiences in SL and they need residents to visit the venue. This is traffic and you want as much of it as possible.
SL activity doesn't just take place in-world. Blogs like this one, a my own and a load of others discuss brand and marketing campaigns in SL. Typically we have to visit these island in order to provide our assessments of the strategies. This blogging and other website activity acts as information to existing SL residents who might then visit the site to see for themselves. This activity also acts as a stimulus for people to join SL for the first time. So, SL venues and campaigns need traffic from people like us.
Extra internet traffic, over and above predicted patterns for microsites, blogs and websites is what should be focussed on from a ROI perspective. This is the incremental increase in visitors that can be attributed to SL activities. Don't tell me this is not important.
Sure, SL is a very new platform with yet to be benchmarked metrics but the bottom line is simple - metaverse marketing is no different to any other channel - you need people to see it.
It depends on how you define "see it" Nic :)
I tend to think of measuring success by traffic as being akin to measuring digestion by turd lengh. Pointless, and full of crap lol...
As I mentioned, as part of the overall picture raw traffic figures have their uses. On their own though, they're worse than useless, they're misleading...
I would define 'see it' as 'reach'.
They saw it in-world
They read about it on a blog
Or a website
Or a newspaper
Or were told about it by someone else.
Sure, I would agree that in isolation they can be misleading but they are useful on their own if compared to other SL activities with similar marketing objectives.
I am seriously doubting the value of traffic per se, since hordes of non-buyers, or of mere curiosity seekers, due to an opportune or opportunistic post title, with, say, a photo of two kittens and a ball of yarn, next to the venerable historic hotel, the Paris Hilton.
Traffic matters only when the business model is based on a "numbers game": force enough people through the funnel, and you should be able to shake some cash out of some of them, just by sheer luck and massive numbers.
For an insight site, a place of tranquil considerations and scholarly disputes, traffic is a negative, it just increases the chances of trolls and spambots.
You also mentioned content for Second Life newspapers, newspapers inside SL. Can a virtual reality, a purely digital, fictional world suffer too many invasions of reality? so that the virtual world becomes virtually realistic, so much so that it is no longer distinguishable from offline reality, and must be governed, policed, etc., full of actual/virtual "crimes" and "rewards" and "consequences" that are bleeding over into real reality, which then begins to mirror more and more of virtual reality, until the two are one, or three, with a third invasion coming from Other Worlds unknown now?
I wonder.
got to go send my digital surrogate to work now...
Vaspers on Twitter
I didn't see Satchmo's post as defensive at all, but rather an attempt to keep the conversation real and honest. This topic comes up again and again as some people myopicly treat every project as a destination project. There's more ways to skin this cat.
Nissan's traffic count today on their two main sims is about 4,000. What does it mean that Nissan has given out over 24,000 virtual sentras and over 9,000 virtual altimas? I don't think we quite know yet, but we know this is about more than dwell.
Reuters island traffic is 832, but who really cares? What matters is how many people are going to their blog, using their HUD, and putting those news displays up on their land.
etc etc. It's worth keeping things in perspective.
Hi all,
Measuring traffic has it's marketing use, no doubt.
But if we're talking about it now it's because of the SL's traffic meter saddly being used as a way to measure success.
The fact is, LL promotes that impression by measuring locations because it's their business is to sell land and they have that statistic on hand. Doing so is effectively judging success by LL's. Bad idea.
I'm not a marketing expert but I can see that the SL traffic metter is way too simplistic on it's own for serious marketing.
And of course, what about the ever present bane of campers? (I had to say something about that :)
~Misacha Vaughan
New Business Horizons
Giff, I couldn't agree more, and likewise with Nic's last point. Though I did get the feeling that perhaps Satchmo's post was prompted by ESC clients wanting to know why they we'rent in the top 10 hhh!
Misacha, bang on with the campers. It really is like the early days of the internet eh? Once upon a time, all you had to do to rank well in search engines was stuff a meta tag full of keywords. Thankfully we're far beyond that now, and Im looking forward to how thing will inevitably change in SL..
Aren't "traffic" and "reach" both just proxies for the things we really care about - actions? Every avatar in SL could visit Nissan's sims and pick up a virtual Altima, and if none of them was moved to buy a RL Nissan, then the campaign would be a complete waste of money from Nissan's point of view. The problem is that measuring actions is difficult, expensive, or impossible, so we fall back on easier to measure things and then do some song and dance to try to convince ourselves and our clients that there's a correlation.
It certainly did not come from any clients wanting to know why they aren't in the Top 10. Truth be told, clients all have different measurements of success before the project event starts and I've never met one of them that wanted "Traffic". If there was defensiveness at all it was over people proposing a definitive ranking of projects around faulty metrics. I wasn't being defensive though, I just wanted to say "Hey wait, we're having the wrong conversation here!". And look, now we're having the right one!
We actually have been having this traffic conversation every few months since 2005. It's now time to move the conversation from "Yes we know traffic is not a good measure" to "What should the measurements be?".
I'll post my additional take on it all later tonight.
I think it is clear, that traffic is only one thing to measure as Giff pointed out but nevertheless it's important to have such numbers.
And if it's just about which parcels might be more frequented than others you can learn on how to improve these others.
The overall success of a campaign depends very much on the campaign itself (e.g. how to measure the virtual thirst campaign? surely not only via traffic).
So you have to combine the pieces individually and maybe also define goals in front.
Eeeek! Apologies to Misacha, her comment got caught by the spam filter! It's above this one higher in the thread now though...
Ok, so we know this is not a new discussion.It's new for ME to talk about it in terms of SL, but even for me it's not something fresh -- we know that traffic alone is not a valid measure of "success" for any online campaign.
This leaves us with the unenviable task of defining other ways in which to meausre success. Here are a few thoughs in no particular order: