MTM Organic Traffic

Traffic to my food blog is driven mostly from organic searches on Google search. There are some outliers to that data set and I'm beginning to think that my GA dashboard is flawed, my understanding of GA metrics is flawed, or something else is flawed. Mostly, this is because I don't do any paid search, SEO, or white/black/grey hat SEM for my food blog. 

Just this year I started looking at referrals from social platforms -- currently accounts for a tiny speck of traffic from Twitter and Pinterest, far less than 1% of all session traffic.

Impact of Acquisitions on Customers

Through an exploratory interview with Endurance International, the parent company of branded website hosting services such as Domain.com, BlueHost, TypePad, and more than 50 other brands, I learned of their $1.1B acquisition of Constant Contact. This sure beats the default listserv capabilities that comes default with web hosting. Endurance manages its brand properties as independent companies; e.g., the same way Honda is Acura, Toyota is Lexus, Peet's is Stumptown Coffee and Salesforce is Pardot. The business practice of allowing each subsidiary to maintain a brand identity independent of its parent is more commonplace than you think. 

The basics:

• 650k worldwide Constant Contact customers
• 90k net new hosting subscribers per quarter
• CC acquired 5% new customers from Endurance partnership before the acquisition

Interactive Interstitials

Just like GIF ads have made a remarkable comeback, so have interstitials. 

In this instance, Fox.com is experimenting with in-video clickable ads. It doesn't seem like much but it's a baby step in what will be a long evolution of how end users are able to interact with brands. At the moment, advertorial interaction is optional -- to go beyond just clicking once on the ad space with your mobile video player.

Fox.com Interactive Ad

Fox.com's video player allows viewers to view ads in one of two formats:
1. Watch and interact with a 30-second commercial; or
2. Do nothing and view the video with regular commercial breaks, about 2.5 minutes of ads


However, given the number of commercial breaks, the viewer isn't saving that much time away from the streaming content. So far, I've only seen Fox.com with interactive ads. There are ads of a similar nature on Hulu.com; but these direct you away from the site when you click on them.

Here's an example of Walgreen's interactive ad. Even after watching the ad several times, I have no idea what it's about. But it features two women talking about something. The interactivity asks you if you want to view the ad in Spanish or English. Having been raised by the public school system in California, Spanish is a second language. If you click onto "Spanish", only the text at the top changes to Spanish and the video plays in English with no Spanish subtitles, speakers, or dubbing. It was a very disappointing feature. Or, perhaps streaming video technology switching isn't quite there yet for on-demand custom video plays.

Fox.com Walgreen's Ad - part 1

If a user clicks "English" play the default ad; if a user clicks "Spanish" play the Spanish speaking ad. One would hope user engagement would be as simple as that.

The Walgreen's ad falls short of the basics.

Fox.com Walgreen's Ad - part 2

In retrospect, I'm not sure how viewers are expected to leap from a Black woman eating something on the kitchen floor with a skateboard in the background to a couple of Caucasian millennials out walking. What was the point of the ad??