A First Look At Fund Website Benchmarking Data

Digital marketing success isn’t defined in terms of Website traffic. There’s so much else to consider.

However, benchmarking data on the overall level and composition of your site traffic vis-à-vis your competition can be useful. You’re appealing to the same broad audiences, and their behavior on related sites should have some meaning for you.

This is a follow-up to last October’s post about the return of benchmarking to Google Analytics. Now there's data to analyze! Here's a first look at it.

The graphs below reflect 12 months of activity (April 15, 2014-April 15, 2015) on 426 fund Websites whose firms have opted in to share anonymized data to enable benchmarking.

The sites are grouped by number of daily sessions, and the data in the graphs are based on three groups: 0-99 daily sessions (sample=377), 100-499 daily sessions (sample=29) and 500-999 daily sessions (sample=20). Google doesn't yet have a large enough sample to report on fund sites with 1,000 daily sessions and more.

All data can be found in your Google Analytics account. Just go to Audience/Benchmarking. I looked at data at the Funds level (including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds [ETFs] and hedge funds), exported in Excel spreadsheets to be able to work with it.

This is more real (not based on user panels but on actual data that Google is collecting on sites) and more granular (most free benchmarking services stop at Finance or Investing in general, which includes brokerage sites).

Still, the benchmarking will be even more useful:

• When mutual fund and ETF site benchmarking data is able to be reported separately. That can’t happen until a sufficient number of properties agree to contribute data. If your firm hasn't yet opted in, you might want to consider. More on that in my previous post.
• When some category inconsistencies are addressed. Google has no trouble recognizing direct, search (organic and paid), referral and even social traffic. But if site publishers aren’t using tracking code to distinguish between display and email traffic, Google may mis-categorize it as direct traffic data. You’ll see below that Google benchmarking data is being reported for paid search, other paid traffic sources and email for the less trafficked sites but not for the most trafficked sites.
• When you isolate your own peer group and delve in. I’m presenting the three groups together to get a high level sense of fund company Website traffic in 2015. Compare your site's traffic to your peer group and you’ll learn more.

A Few Takeaways

1. Overall, it looks as if the most that a fund site can hope for are a couple of minutes of the visitors’ time and a couple of pages viewed. This data suggests—let me amend that—makes the argument for easy-to-find content on sites that anticipate the task-oriented visitor. They come, they get, they go. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

2. Finally, we have data on the contribution being made by social efforts and by email—two areas that there is great interest and investment in.

In fact, see the growth in the total number of sessions driven by social in the most recent 12-month period over the previous period. Benchmarking data is available only from August 28, 2013, so the earlier period comparison is from 8/28/2013-4/14/2014, eight months versus 12.

3. Direct traffic (a reflection of brand awareness and product familiarity), organic search (a measure of content availability, quality and accessibility) and referral links drive the better trafficked Websites. Less trafficked sites rely on paid search, other advertising and organic search.

4. There’s a difference in the traffic sourced by each channel: Direct traffic, organic search and referrals lead to more longer-duration sessions, with more pages viewed.

5. Just about one out of four visitors to fund sites comes from non-desktop devices (e.g., tablets or smartphones). This is a remarkable change that has undeniable implications for sites created for desktop use.  

6. Desktop sessions last longer than mobile sessions, which is to be expected. But, there isn’t a big difference in the number of pages viewed across devices. Here too, it’s few pages across the board.

Drilling into your firm’s analytics will help you understand whether this is a good or bad thing. It’s good if you can see that visitors are immediately finding what they need and then moving on. Not so good if the short visits point to visitors—even more frustrated because they're on smaller screens and possibly on the go—who give up.

An Over-The-Shoulder Look At Advisor Sites

Out of curiosity, I also looked at the benchmarking data of sites that are in the Financial Planning & Management category, which together represent about 6,800 Web properties. Nine out of 10 of these attract fewer than 100 daily sessions. Google reports data on sites attracting as many as 10,000-99,999 sessions.

Make no mistake about it—many financial advisors are turning to the same content marketing and paid search tactics that asset manager sites use to build awareness and drive interest. I spotted certified financial planner Jeff Rose ranking for "Roth IRA" searches back in 2010, and more advisors have gotten more serious about inbound marketing since. (In fact, see FMG Suite’s 2015 Inbound Marketing award winners—there are some impressive marketers on that list of financial advisors.)

Few advisory firms may enjoy the brand recognition of your firms or the marketing budgets. The benchmarking data gives us an idea of the organic search strength among financial planning sites.

And there's more—but I'll leave the rest for you to explore.

Say Yes To Google Analytics Benchmarking*

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies work together on all kinds of issues (see the operations agendas of the Investment Company Institute or NICSA, for example).

But except for the occasional conferences and other get-togethers, asset management marketers don’t have continuous access to one another, least of all their data. Well, here’s your chance. 

What would you give to know how your Website performs against its peers?

Google Analytics has resurrected its benchmarking capability (discontinued in 2011), and since September has been rolling it out to accounts. The most excellent news is that two of the 1,600 verticals are Exchange-traded Funds and Mutual Funds.

To find, just start at Channels, Business & Industrial, then drill down to Finance, Investing and then Funds.

Other sites, notably SimilarWeb (see post), provide free competitive data. Since this service is straight from the source itself, ostensibly it should be even more reliable. A comparison of traffic sources, location and devices across six metrics that include sessions, percentage of new sessions, new sessions, pages/session, average session duration and bounce rate is being made available.

In order to access benchmarking data, you need to opt in. Participating is as simple as checking a box in the Admin settings of your account. This effectively grants permission to Google to remove identifiable information about your site, combine anonymized data with similar sites and report benchmarks.

If you work on a mutual fund or ETF site with 0 to 100 daily sessions, you’re in luck! The data is right there and waiting, thanks to the fact that 20 Web properties are contributing to the benchmark.

However, traffic on the vast majority of fund company sites exceeds 100 sessions. Unfortunately, there’s no peer data for you because an insufficient number of firms are contributing. 

I suppose you could benchmark your site against all Finance sites, but that might just confuse things.

(Note to the financial advisors who pop in here from time to time, you’ll be able to benchmark your Financial Planning Management sites up to 5,000 daily sessions.)

Why The *

Data in exchange for data is a common benchmarking model but in your particular case, conditions may apply. My advice: Don’t make a unilateral decision to turn benchmarking on.

Early on, I had a few go-rounds with managers of IT departments who were opposed to relying on a free service for business analytics.

Still today, despite the high number of companies that rely on Google Analytics (70% of the top 10,000 Quantcast Websites and most of the competitors you care about, according to BuiltWith), some enterprise IT people continue to have their suspicions. Web analytics is data that can provide a particular view into a business. How can we be sure that it's secure or that it will always be there for us? For that matter, what could or might Google do with it?

I am not the one to try to explain these objections or whether participating in benchmarking if you’re already a Google Analytics user elevates the risk. To be sure, just check in with your own IT management. There may be no pushback, probably won't be.

It’s going to take more than a little old blog post to get some data flowing into the benchmarks but maybe if you tell an asset management marketing friend and that friend tells a friend…we’ll get there.  

How To Track The Content That's Shared Via Email

If you had to guess, where do you think most sharing of asset management-created content takes place—on social networks or via email and other non-social means?

My guess (and yours, too, I’ll bet): Our enthusiasm for social media notwithstanding, most of your content is shared via email, instant messages and message boards, etc. Email, in particular, is the most widely used communication channel and one where the sender can control both context and, to some extent, audience. 

The sharing that takes place via non-public (and believed to be un-measureable) exchanges was dubbed “Dark Social” by Atlantic Senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal last fall (an idea so interesting that it was one of my “20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012.")

It’s especially germane to this business where, like fund company products, the vast majority of mutual fund and ETF content is distributed not directly by fund companies but by intermediaries. Wouldn’t you like to know the percentage of your site traffic that comes from individuals sharing links in emails? Or even the site content that's being called out in emails from financial advisors to their clients and prospects, for example? 

There is a way to get a handle on this, as identified by a few blog posts I’ve been reading lately, the highlights of which I want to share with you.

Direct Traffic Unbundled

When a financial advisor (or somebody else) includes a link to a page on your site in an email and the receiver of the email clicks on the link, that traffic is today being counted by your Web analytics. But in all likelihood, it’s being reported as direct traffic, and that’s what needs to be more closely examined.

For insights into the content that’s being shared—with sharing serving as a measure of the value of the content that you’re creating—you need to dig a little deeper into what's being attributed as direct traffic.

The classic definition of direct traffic is traffic that comes directly to your site. The assumption is that the visitor typed the URL into the browser or used a previously set bookmark. But, take a look at the specific pages for which direct traffic is reported as the referrer to your site.

Is it realistic to expect that someone arrived at your site by typing every character of those long, hairy URLs that many fund companies are unfortunately burdened with?

Example: https://performance.yourdomain.com/web/yourfundcompany/products-performance/mutual-fund-details/details/19765J624/mutual+funds/Intermediate+Municipal+Bond+Fund+A/Class+A

Probably not. The link to this page was either copied and pasted into an email or other communication (more likely) or bookmarked (less likely).

While it will be far from exact, it’s relatively easy to identify Website traffic that is sourced by email and other Dark Social sources. You just need to segregate the traffic that went straight to your home page—that’s probably the true direct traffic—from the traffic that went to pages deep in your site.

This can be done with any Web analytics package.

Segment Using Google Analytics

Here are two options for doing it with Google Analytics.

If you want to assume that all traffic that came directly to pages other than the home page was referred by Dark Social sources, click on this link while signed into Google Analytics.

You’ll see a page with the image below. Choose your profile (if you have access to more than one) and then select Create.

You’ll then be taken into Google Analytics, where you’ll see the image below. Save the segment and you’ll be able to view Dark Social as one of your available custom segments.

For a more narrow approach, click on this link as provided by the Gravity Search Marketing blog. It filters the home page and any subfolder with four characters in it. (This uses regular expressions—if you're not familiar, see the primer ebook I came across in March.) 

As noted in the post, if you promote marketing URLs with subfolders (such as www.yourdomain.com/micrositename), then you’ll want to refine this by excluding those from the Dark Social segment, too. You might also want to further refine by excluding product pages or by including only types of content (e.g., investment commentary or blog posts.)

This analysis is worth doing. Based on what I’m seeing in the analytics profiles I am privy to, your Dark Social traffic could represent anywhere from 10% to 30% of your overall traffic. It’s an overall, if crude, measure of the resonance of your content and will give you some perspective on which specific product and content pages are being shared. 

You Know You're A Digital Marketer If...

Recently MarketingProfs asked its Facebook group to finish the sentence: “You know you’re a marketer if…” About 17 responses were then illustrated and shared yesterday in the presentation embedded below.

You Know You're a Marketer If... (17 Signs You're a Marketer) from MarketingProfs

I’d like to flatter the feature by imitating it, sort of. Digital marketers can benefit from a self-awareness exercise, too, but Rock The Boat Marketing doesn’t have the reach that MarketingProfs does. We'd be waiting quite a while if I tried to crowdsource responses to the “You know you’re a digital marketer if…”

So, I’ll go first with my list, shown below. But, please don’t leave me hanging out here all alone—mutual fund and ETF digital marketers (others welcome, too!), add your own contributions in the Comments below.

You know you’re a digital marketer if…

QR Is Never Far From Your Mind

You’re sitting in a pew at Catholic Mass, joining the choir in a spirits-lifting song. Your sister leans over and whispers, “I want this song sung at my funeral.”

Your response, also whispered: “Each song in the songbook should have a QR code so whenever there’s a random statement like this we could capture it. We’d just scan the code and the code could be added to a funeral service page layout assembly program on the Web. So, the program can be built over time and not all at the last minute and in fresh grief.” Bewildered, your sister nods her head and looks away.

Digital First—And Sometimes Only

You mark the sale of your house (after 2.5 years on the market) by hosting a mammoth two-day garage sale featuring all kinds of abandoned tech (digital pens, early ebook readers, MiniDisc players, you get the idea). You press friends and family into donating a few hours of service to staff the sale. But the turnout is disappointing, and idle talk turns into an inquisition about what kind of advertising was done.

“What do you mean that you didn’t advertise in the community newspapers? What? The only advertising you did was online? Are you serious? Not everyone is online, Pat. Typical.”

Gifts That Endure

You give domain names to children as gifts, certain that these will be treasured for years to come. And, gradually realize that the gift is a lot like giving a magazine subscription. It has impact the first year. But the enthusiasm and thanks fade as you dutifully renew year after year. Meanwhile, the domains don’t even have Google AdWords running on them!

But It’s So Pretty To Look At

You’ve added the Analytics HD app to your iPad mini, enabling you to share Google Analytics insights with friends at dinner or during lulls at parties. Only the super-nice feign interest, and then not for long.

Parallel Universes

Your brother is a financial advisor. His Website is barely findable in the search engine results, let alone on page 1. He’s not on LinkedIn, doesn’t use Twitter, enjoys YouTube for recreation only. And yet he is crazy successful. You're a digital marketer if you find this maddening.

Your turn: You know you're a digital marketer if...?

5 Ebooks For The Digital Marketer To Curl Up With

You’d never know it from my behavior at Costco but I’m no pushover when it comes to free samples. I do have a discriminating eye. Lately, my eyes have landed on some excellent ebooks and whitepapers that I recommend. And, their price is right, although a few will require your contact information.

The Digital Marketplace: An Overview

You know how it is when you’re just looking for one piece of data—smartphone market share, let’s say. For an update on the lay of the land and some interesting statistics (see page 34 for the mobile market share), you can’t do much better than to turn to comScore’s U.S. Digital Future In Focus 2013 as a resource. The 46-page report was released in February.

Click to read more ...