From Vertical Acuity’s beta music measurement network, we can see that Notorious B.I.G. (in the following screen shot) started to see a massive increase in traffic to his content starting around January 3rd which peaked around January 7th. Content articles analyzed included everything ranging from movie related articles, to track postings, to photo pages. So what do these numbers represent?
Notorious B.I.G. Traffic Summary
For the week of January 1, Biggy experienced a 1400% increase in web traffic to his content with the typical consumer spending an average of 28 seconds reviewing Biggy related content articles. While the majority of his page view gains occurred from website home page postings, music related pages containing his album and track information came in second. His top 10 viewer cities are listed above with Atlanta receiving 19,710 page views of his total 857,251 during the period – a fairly even geographic distribution nationally. Biggy’s velocity is 1.64 page views per session, which means the average user will read 1.64 pages of Biggy content during a visit. This is on par with the industry average of 1.67 page views per visit for the top ranking 100 artists (ranked by total page views). We also noticed that some of the publishers within our beta measurement network took advantage of this trend by featuring Notorious content on their home pages, which significantly boosted page views for their sites during the period.
We also noticed around January 1, 2009 that Fox Studios began running major campaigns across music and entertainment sites for the upcoming movie of Notorious B.I.G.’s life. While these campaigns and other PR related activities can help explain the rise in consumer interest, previously there has been no way to quantify increases in web traffic to a particular artist like Notorious. To do this would require assembling web analytics data for 100’s of different URL’s representing Notorious content across dozens of music sites.
So the first question we might ask is, isn’t this the same information we can get from Google Trends or from a company like Hitwise, or from one of the companies that monitors consumer buzz? While we will dedicate a future post to looking at the online measurement landscape and different companies represented in that landscape, the short answer is no – aggregated traffic data across major points of consumption (music sites) is not available by subject. Let’s compare this with information we can get from Google Trends:
Google Trends for Notorious B.I.G.
While Google trends does show a significant increase in search volume during the same period, this only represents people who are trying to find Biggy content – what happens after they leave Google search, or the people that go directly to music sites versus using a search engine? Where is he most effective? If you were Fox, what markets would you target and how well did his campaigns do? The differences in the top 10 cities between searches and actual consumer views of Biggy content highlight that the geographies where people search for subjects are not necessarily the ones where people read the most about a subject.
This also highlights the differences in using subject level market intelligence data as a source for geo targeting versus search engine data. One supports onsite display and banner advertising, the other search engine marketing. Considering less than 25% of internet users utilize search engines to locate entertainment subjects (according to Hitwise data on search engine referrals by industry), it is critical to mine the wealth of information that comes from the other 75% to improve contextual targeting with behavioral trend data.
In our next post I will discuss where we feel Vertical Acuity fits in the measurement ecosystem, and compare and contrast the differences between Web Analytics, Market Intelligence, Consumer Sentiment monitoring, and Ad Serving technologies.