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Measuring Microsites Paul Legutko
Abstract
A Microsite is an independent, focused website subsidiary to a larger, parent website. Its marketing, branding, and Search/Viral potential has been increasingly recognized by marketing and website managers, but measurement and analysis of a Microsite's effectiveness requires analytical strategies and approaches that differ from the analysis of the parent website. Independence, Integration, Saturation, Directionality, Lifetime Contribution, Branding Awareness, Keyword Concentration, and Sourcing Velocity should be measured and analyzed when understanding the overall contribution and effectiveness of a Microsite. Many of these metrics and analytical techniques require planning and resource-allocation, and are all not necessarily straightforward, but ultimately, such analysis allows managers to measure how effective a Microsite is over time, compare different Microsites to each other, and identify opportunities for new Microsites.
Introduction
Microsites have become an important part of the online marketing arsenal. Serving as distinct landing pages for marketing initiatives, Microsites provide highly-targeted marketing and branding opportunities as well as better-optimization for Natural Search. While they are being launched with increased frequency, measuring them, and understanding how they contribute to overall online business success, presents challenges different from measuring the larger, parent site, or from measuring a separate, independent website. When measuring Microsites, independence, integration, contribution to overall parent site success, saturation, marketing stickiness, and brand-development, should all be taken into consideration, and appropriate measurement set up ahead of time by which to measure and analyze these performance metrics.
What is a Microsite? A Microsite is a web page, or pages, subsidiary to a larger, primary website. A Microsite usually is focused on a specific product, information, or service. It may have its own domain, or subdomain. It is often intended to have a short life-span: months, weeks, or even days, tied to a particular marketing initiative or promotion. SEO is usually easier on a Microsite than the parent site, with a more narrow range of keywords optimized. A Microsite usually has internal design cohesiveness unlike the parent site, with simplified navigation (if any), a higher concentration of Rich Media, new copy or branding, and a different overall look/feel from the parent site. Microsites are typically outside of any parent site hierarchy. They usually link to the parent site, but this link might be minimalized or relegated to top-navigation or logos. Cohesiveness in design also applies to cohesiveness of content - they are focused and targeted, while the parent site is broad and over-arching.
For example, a large financial services website might have a 10-year history of optimization, feature an internal search engine and rich navigation, with a distinct hierarchy comprising both secure and non-secure
Measuring Microsites ©Semphonic 2009 Page 1 pages. Search Engines have long ago spidered the site, and keyword optimization, while broad and effective, has essentially peaked.
Imagine a new service offering - one tied to the Tax season for example. No matter how keyword dense individual pages of the site for the service might be, the site has too much content and too much structure to provide a really powerful SEO boost. Navigation to the service will be limited by a site structure that has to incorporate hundreds or thousands of alternate paths. The look-and-feel of new pages has to conform to a relatively safe design that may have been first developed several years ago in another age of online marketing. In short, integrating a small short-term service offering into the broad site will sharply limit the effectiveness of the new content.
A Microsite can solve these problems. The look and feel of the Microsite can match offline advertising, and new, fresh copy can be employed to emphasize the promotional aspect of this campaign. The site will be live from Mid-January through the end of April, but would then be taken down. The page titles, page meta-data and SEO will all specifically support the new service. The navigation will be streamlined and dedicated to the service structure. There will be no distracting elements a... [download for more]
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