Web Surfers Have a Schedule and Stick to It
Note to web marketers: Consumers won't carve out more time to
visit your site. So how do you attract them? Start by understanding their
online habits, reports new research by Shane Greenstein and colleagues.
In most markets, products and services compete for the
consumer’s money. On the internet, however, the coin of the realm is time, not
money—websites and other online services fight for the attention of visitors.
So understanding when, how, and for how long we allocate our scarce time for
activities is crucial to online success.
A recent research paper offers insights that carry unexpected
implications for advertisers or anyone else trying to capture
that attention. The
Empirical Economics of Online Attention was written
by Andre Boik, University of California at Davis; Shane Greenstein, Harvard
Business School; and Jeffrey Prince, Indiana University.
The study notes, for example:
·
We devote a more or less fixed amount of time online each week.
We don’t allocate more time when something new comes along; instead, we shift
our fixed amount of attention to new sites at the expense of old sites.
·
Our online visits often come in short bursts rather than
extended leisurely strolls through cyberspace.
·
People with higher incomes spend less time online than those
making less.
In other words, consumers behave online in a much different way
than they do in markets in the physical world, where they will carve out more
time for shopping and for sniffing out the best bargains.
HOW WE BROWSE
For their study, the researchers analyzed browsing activity on
the primary home computer of more than 40,000 US households in 2008 and more
than 30,000 in 2013, studying how much attention was allocated, where that
attention was allocated, and how that attention was allocated. Clickstream data
was provided by ComScore, an audience measurement firm.
In the development of the internet, 2008 and 2013 were landmark
years. Netflix and Hulu began offering streaming services in 2008, and YouTube
videos were all over the Web. Smartphones and tablets provided new ways to
access the internet. With such expanding amounts of appealing content, it
seemed feasible to Boik, Greenstein, and Prince that people would have visited
more sites during that period, and spent more time on them as well.
But that’s not what happened, the researchers discovered.
Instead, both numbers remained remarkably stable over the five years. There was
an overall shift in the types of sites visited, however, from chat rooms and
news to social media and video.
“We were taken aback,” admits Greenstein, the MBA Class of 1957
Professor of Business Administration.
The stability of the time spent on the internet might be a bit
more understandable if you take into account what anthropologists have discovered—that
internet use inside most homes is “bursty” and “plastic.” In other words, we
use little moments of free time, what the researchers term slots, to go
online—the 10 minutes between dinner and kids’ homework, or the five minutes
before your favorite TV show starts. The researchers confirmed that
observation.
“There’s an underlying inflexibility here,” Greenstein says.
“What we observe suggests that households have fixed amounts of time to give to
sites, and that going online is a ‘filler’ activity.”
Researchers also found that households with annual incomes of
$25,000 to $35,000 spent an average of 92 minutes more time online than
households making $100,000 or more. (The average daily amount of time spent
online in a US household was two hours.)
While internet penetration in US households has been high for
years, that number still increased, reported Boik, Greenstein, and Prince. In
2007, nearly 62 million households had access to broadband; in 2013, that
number has risen to 73 million, with the majority of adopters falling into the
lower-income category.
ADVERTISERS TAKE NOTICE
For web-based businesses looking to attract users, the
implications have some interesting strategy considerations, although this is
not a large focus of the study.
“To reach people, you can’t do what you usually do, which is
have a sale,” Greenstein observes. “You can sell your products for less, but
you still have to get people to your site. There is no price that will cause
people to allocate between different choices, which makes this unlike any other
market activity.”
The bursty nature of online attention also helps define what is
required for effective advertising or promotion. “If you have a concept to
communicate that is 20 minutes long, you will be competing with other instances
of 20-minute content,” Greenstein says. “Don’t expect households to take two
10-minute slots and put them together for you. That’s not going to happen.
Similarly, if you have three minutes of content, you’re competing with other
three-minute content sites; you shouldn’t consider households with six-minute
slots that they’ll divide. That’s a stark implication of what we found.”
It would seem that one bright spot favoring advertisers is
demographics, since internet adoption (at a solid 99 percent penetration) skews
to high income, high education households. However, those users don’t spend as
much time online as lower educated, lower income households, making the window
for catching the attention of the affluent even smaller.
“From an advertiser’s perspective, those two statistics work
against, rather than reinforce one another,” Greenstein says. “With that said,
when these findings are projected to US demographics, it is still slightly more
likely that an advertiser will capture the attention of a higher income
household than a lower one.”
As internet adoption became more ubiquitous, the average online
encounter shifted to someone of lower income and longer sessions. “We expect
that trend to continue,” says Greenstein.
The researchers note that the typical household spends more than
half its time at two sites. Targeting within those two sites is one approach to
reaching users. The typical household also spends more than a third at an
enormous variety of specialized sites. Targeting specialized readers at the
entire site is another approach.
FUTURE STUDIES
In addition to adding more recent data to the research,
Greenstein hopes to look at information captured on other devices, such as
smart phones and tablets.
Another question to be answered: Where are people visiting when
they are not on the top sites that most everyone looks at? With some 4 million
URLs in the dataset, Greenstein wants to explore consumer behavior on sites
outside of the Top 3, which in 2013 were Facebook, YouTube, and Google. (The Top
3 in 2008 were MySpace, Yahoo, and YahooMessenger).
“The top three sites for most households is the same—but when
you get to four or five, they could be anything. Household preference variance
is something we’re very curious to look at more closely, because those sites
account for a significant percentage of online attention.”
Getting a clearer window into how households allocate what
little available attention they have could have implications for other markets,
Greenstein adds, such as television and radio. While their study doesn’t focus
on either medium, a similar dynamic could apply, with an increase in the supply
of television (and ways to view it) causing a shift to new content and perhaps
a small drop in how it’s viewed, but no real change in the allocation of time
or watching behavior.
Whatever the format, gaining a richer understanding of how
attention is allocated can only become a more pressing question for content
producers and advertisers. And that understanding is in its early stages of
development, leaving many open questions to explore.
“Online advertising is still a work in progress, with
considerable effort being invested in improving its cost effectiveness,” says
Greenstein. “Those efforts—and lessons learned—are relevant across many formats,
not just PCs. There is so much more to come.”
by Julia Hanna
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/web-surfers-have-a-schedule-and-stick-to-it?cid=spmailing-13437606-WK%20Newsletter%2009-14-2016%20(1)-September%2014,%202016
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