Small Change Can Lead to Big Results
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Don't know of how much interest this is to people who consider themselves in the radio industry, but it confirms a simple theory that's been spoken of here many times: small changes can lead to improved results.
The numbers below are pulled from the de facto internet analytics program, which is free to anyone willing to spend time learning how Google Analytics works. The numbers are not open for dispute. They come from complex algorithms designed to measure web site visitors. Read into them what you want, but know that - ultimately - they represent how an idea is measured. For the radio industry, measuring ideas should be read as acounting for the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or radio station web site.
A short while ago I was looking at the numbers associated with streaming links listed at Audio Graphics' RadioRow.com. Compared to page traffic, they showed an extremely small percentage of people using an option that allows them to go directly to a radio station's stream.
This picture shows the direct-to-stream links, and the instruction line I added attempting to improve these percentages.
Now here is the meat of the matter. (I've removed station names to protect proprietary information.)
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| These are the numbers of users for the top-ten direct-to-stream links PRIOR to adding an instruction to use the "colored squares."
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| These are the numbers of users for the top-ten direct-to-stream links AFTER adding an instruction to use the "colored squares."
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These are the nuances of metrics that can help any radio station better understand its online audience. To take advantage of the metrics, though, you have to use them. Most radio industry web sites don't, and there is no active discussion in any radio trade publication about the importance of this action.
Industry analyst Mark Ramsey brought up this point in a recent article titled Here Comes the Post-Arbitron World - "...being popular is easy - being effective is much more difficult."
In the competitive world of advertising today, and with the mindset of trying to pull as much activity from your radio station web site as possible, you can no longer afford to ignore the benefits of using an analytical approach to every action.
As an industry, radio has long held a belief that change is not to be embraced, and that following a consolidator's idea of cutting back is the road to success. I've repeated this many times and will do so again: change is required to recapture credibility lost by pursuing consolidation's ideals.
As the above numbers demonstrate, you don't need to make major changes to have an effect. You do need, however, to use the metrics needed to measure results.
Small change on a web site can lead to big change in audience response.
For the radio industry, that change needs to begin now.
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