Best Practices

Rethinking Click Throughs in the context of widgets and social applications


When thinking about widgets you have to ask yourself - do you even want click throughs to be the goal? It all depends on the environment where your widget will appear.  Many of our clients deploy their widgets as social applications on sites such as Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace, sites where end users tend to spend a lot of their time catching up with friends, playing multi-user games, and generally hanging out in the digital sense of the term.  In these environments, widgets and their social applications are a way for agencies, brand marketers, and entertainment companies to bring the brand to where their target audience is spending the majority of their time online - recognizing that they could spend a ton of money and never inspire their audiences to come to them.  So click throughs may not be an appropriate goal or metric to measure widget and/or social application success.

So instead of click throughs - which take people away from what they were doing on Facebook or MySpace or their favorite blog site - think “Engage and Stay”.  Properly executed widgets and social applications provide content that is engaging, energizing, useful, or just plain old entertaining to your end users.  After all, we live in a post literate age, where people don’t want to read about something but to experience it and videos and photos go a long way to extend your brand experience into social and viral environments. A great example of this is CBS Mobile/CBS Interactive’s highly interactive, Danny Bonaduce lifestyle coach widget. 



This is a widget that grabs your attention, provides value in the form of great and exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else to visitors, leverages multimedia content (video, cartoons in a slideshow format) and encourages users to participate via comments and to share the widget with others. 

Our client, CBS Mobile/CBS Interactive has used the Engagement Metrics provided to determine exactly where to place the various pieces of content inside the widget for maximum impact.  While we can’t share exact number with you, we can tell you that like a lot of widgets and social applications, one way we measure results is based on the number of widget installs over time.  The curve looks like this:

Content ... think of it as a resource you must renew
One key finding is that current users re-engage with the widget to the extent that we post new content - in the form of new episodes.  But - just as importantly - new episodes cause installs to go up - which is the hills you see coming after each plateau.  Installs go up anywhere from 20 - 40% each time you refresh your content.  Timing is up to you and depends a great deal on the business objectives behind your widget or social application.  Some of our clients update their widgets or social applications weekly; others monthly; others use the engagement metrics provided through the MuseStorm Engagement Platform to determine exactly when wear out is occurring on a particular piece or type of multi-media content and thus when they need to rotate in new content.  Our point is that the timing of content updates will vary ... what is important is to plan for frequent content updates versus programming the content you’ll place in your widget in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for you to update that content over time. 

In short, click through rates are one metric of success used in interactive marketing ... we’re just not sure they’re all that important when it comes to widgets and social applications.  We do agree with others on the web where they state that “The best widgets have sticky, timely, lively content that provides value to visitors”.  But we find that the content that is needed must encourage engagement not click through - including viewing, sharing, and rating.

Relevant Link
Has the Clickthrough lost its relevance?