For those of you who have never placed an ad in the paper, on radio or television, or even on the side of a skyscraper, CPM is the unit of measurement used to determine the advertising sales rate you pay based on the number of impressions possible for your ad. Impressions, of course, are determined by the location of your ad and how many people could potentially view it.

“Consider this: While 30-second Super Bowl commercials cost $2.6 million each and reach 80 million people, the One Times Square tower draws 211 million pairs of eyeballs when the New Year’s Eve ball drops … According to media sellers, the rental prices for ad real estate varies widely depending, in part, on size and — like everything else in Manhattan — location.”

~ Advertising Age, The Cost of Advertising on Times Square

While the CPM model does apply to online advertising campaigns, the effectiveness of web content as a whole can’t be measured by the number of “eyes” landing on a web page alone.

So why do so many people focus their ROI on the number of “Hits” and “Page Views” their website receives?

Anyone who has visited Times Square can tell you the barrage of billboard advertising can lead to a sensory overload of colors, lights and imagery. So much so, that although you might see an ad, you probably don’t entirely absorb its message. The same applies to the web:

Web Pages May Be Viewed But Not Read

Most web content writers will use the “Average Time On Page” from Google Analytics as a rudimentary way of determining the effectiveness of their web content. I know the statistical “before and after” results garnered from web content projects I have worked on show convincing arguments towards professionally written web content.

A generally accepted Google Analytics target-result in my industry takes “Average Time On Page” from seconds (before) to over 2 minutes (after).

The ambiguity of the results, of course, leads us to assume in our favor. We choose to believe that the web content we have written is connecting and engaging with its intended target audience. But the increased time on page could just as easily be doing otherwise.

Web Content Is An Incredible Marketing Opportunity!

While Google Analytics may only be able to report broad results similar to the CPM of a billboard in Times Square, web content offers something print content can’t:

Web Content Is Bolstered By Technology

What this means is that interactions with a web page – clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements – can be tracked to determine the effectiveness of the web content on it: video, audio, images and copy. These results (both individual and aggregated) give organizations invaluable feedback on whether their website is working or not …and how!

I believe that web content is a valuable business asset. I have worked in traditional marketing, communications and advertising, and the reason I love the web is because it is the only medium that can deliver reports and results based on concrete data.

Until now, I’ve only been able to “tell” clients about the value of web content based on what I know as a web professional working in this industry since 1999. Thanks to the generous support of ClickTale, however, I’m now going to be able to show you. ClickTale has given DigitalWord a free three-month subscription to track, analyze, and monitor this website and blog as a means of “showing” results. My goal is to be able to share with clients and readers alike, how

- mouse move heatmaps
- attention heatmaps
- scroll reach heatmaps
- click heatmaps
- link analytics

can give us contextualized data that will help to create better online experiences, and in turn, demonstrate the ROI of a quality web content strategy and professionally written web content.

Many thanks to Shmuli Goldberg, Director of Marketing and Communications at ClickTale for believing in and supporting this approach to illustrating the business value of web content

…and to Jeff Parks of i.a. consultants inc. for making this important introduction and connection between DigitalWord and ClickTale.