Aim to be the best to gain more return visits, online sales: Adobe

Source: Adobe.

New research from Adobe has found that marketers across Asia Pacific who deliver best practices are pulling further away from their competitors.

The Adobe Digital Index Best of the Best Benchmark for Asia Pacific compares the overall average versus websites in the top 20% on six key performance indicators across six regions: Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, India, South Korea, Hong Kong, China and the US. Key performance indicators are mobile and tablet traffic, stick rate*, visits-per-visitor, time spent and conversion rate.

“We are seeing a major gap developing between being average and being in the top 20% of marketers across Asia Pacific,” said Tamara Gaffney, Principal Analyst, Adobe Digital Index. “For conversion rates alone, the ‘best of the best’ websites in industries that sell online deliver nearly double the average conversion rate. They are proving that making a commitment to digital excellence can result in a significant increase in revenue.”

Key findings in the Best of the Best Benchmark for Asia Pacific include:

· Australia and New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, have seen the most overall growth in tablet share; the best of the best sites achieve about 5% more tablet visits than the average.

· Time spent on websites is higher in Australia and New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, but has fallen year on year in all other countries.

· Websites optimised for smartphone visitors in South Korea see nearly 90% difference in share of smartphone traffic than an average site; in the past year the gap between average and best in class for mobile optimisation has grown in every country. Mobile optimisation refers to websites which have been optimised for smartphone visitors.

· All countries except South Korea saw an increase in stick rate year on year; India led all countries with that nation’s ‘best of the best’ marketers improving their stick rate by over 14% year on year.

· The ‘best of the best’ websites increase the amount of return visits by as much as 25% compared to the average across Asia Pacific.

“There is no such thing as ‘offline’ any more. The data is telling us that delivering seamless experiences across devices and within social media is driving the best performance and leading to superior business performance,” Gaffney said.

“Across Asia Pacific, those marketers delivering best in class are on par with top marketers around the world. For example, we can see that stick rate is higher across Asia Pacific than in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. This is a leading indicator of two important elements of website success – optimised marketing acquisition activities and homepage relevance and engagement.

“Finding out where your organisation falls within the tiers of the Benchmark will help identify strengths and weaknesses and can help marketers prioritise areas to focus on.”

“Businesses that can improve customer engagement and drive conversion rates via their digital channels will find themselves at the front of the pack; our Adobe Digital Index has shown that an improvement in the conversion rate of just a tenth of a percent can result in millions of dollars of revenue growth,” said Stephen Hamill, Managing Director, Adobe South East Asia. “The consumption of online content and performance of online transactions on mobile devices in South East Asia is only going to increase. 

"Singapore has the highest smartphone penetration in Asia Pacific at 87%, with other markets in South East Asia like Thailand (49%), Indonesia (23%) and Philippines (15%) gaining traction. Tablet ownership in Singapore also grew 30 percentage points in the past year to 47%, with Malaysia up 23 points to 42%1. The opportunities in the mobile arena cannot be ignored.”

Organisations can check where they fall within the Benchmark through Adobe’s Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment.

*Stick rate is the percentage of visits that last more than one page.

Fraudulent clicks and pageviews can inflate digital marketing results

So you've done your due diligence and purchased your online advertisements on a portal which produces really good results, perhaps better results than average. You sit back and watch the clickthroughs rise by the week, paying for 'leads' as users are attracted enough to visit the store locator pages of your website; but sales aren't increasing. What gives?

What might be happening is fraud, and not necessarily from the portal itself.
According to the US-based Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), there needs to be more awareness about non-intentional traffic which is affecting the accuracy of measurement for Traffic of Good Intent.

"The companies that participate in the digital advertising supply chain have been struggling with how to handle criminal enterprises intent on gaming the system,” said Steve Sullivan, Vice President, Advertising Technology, IAB.

“These fraudsters are diluting the value of all legitimate inventory while simultaneously diminishing the integrity of the entire digital marketing industry. The introduction of these best practices is a first step in reducing the marketplace repercussions of these illegal activities.”

The IAB and its Traffic of Good Intent Task Force have released the “Best Practices – Traffic Fraud: Reducing Risk to Exposure” guide to meet this challenge. The document explains how robotic traffic or 'bots' can infiltrate legitimate publisher platforms, and advises premium publishers and networks as well as buyers how to reduce risk.

According to the IAB Traffic of Good Intent Task Force, 'non-intentional traffic' can even occur without the knowledge of a user. In one method, users are automatically redirected to other websites after closing a website. In another, content such as ads or even full websites load invisibly in the background, at a  minute 1x1 pixel size for example, while a user is intentionally viewing content from other sites. 

What do perpetrators of non-intentional traffic get out of it? Huge volumes of pageviews leads to advertising inventory that can be sold on advertising exchanges. Alternatively, driving up traffic can increase the perceived value of infected browsers to both marketers and targeters. 

For example, bots can simulate 'clicks' on the invisible ads or through hijacking the browser software to record a 'visit' to the sites of marketers whose ads have been invisibly run. They may even produce a 'lead' by visiting the store locator page. 

“When only a handful of companies act to reduce fraud, the criminals win. We need to band together to effectively put a stop to the destruction of our industry at the hands of racketeers,” said John Battelle, Founder and Chairman, Federated Media, and co-Chair of the IAB Traffic of Good Intent Task Force. 

“Even the most scrupulous publishers and networks can be hit with non-intentional traffic propagated by criminals. If we want to truly address the problem, it is incumbent upon all stakeholders to embrace uniform levels of vigilance.”

The document on best practices for reducing the risk of online traffic fraud can be viewed here.