Europeana Impressions: Pinterest, Facebook & Wikipedia
Europeana’s 2013 Business Plan was published last week. You might have noticed an interesting KPI (and a personal favourite of mine) under the ‘Distribute’ track - we hope to generate 20.5 million impressions of Europeana content on other sites, namely Facebook and Wikipedia this year.
When it comes to online measurement,we are excited to be exploring new avenues, in particular off-site metrics and the reach of the content available via Europeana. It is easy enough to measure on-site metrics such as visits, bounce rates and time on site. I think it’s safe to say we have mastered that; however what happens to the content we hold once it is re-used and lives outside its original source? Does re-use on social media and Wikipedia ultimately impact traffic to Europeana and do impressions convert to visits or engagement? We are on a mission to find out.
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Thanks to the launch of a new analytics suite within Pinterest, we are now able to estimate the number of impressions of Europeana content on that platform in 2012 and compare them with corresponding metrics for Facebook and Wikipedia. As mentioned in my previous blog post this is great news as one of the main pitfalls highlighted in our Pinterest case study is the lack of integrated statistics, now we will be able to see how content really performs, rather than simply relying on referral traffic as a loose indication.
We estimate that Pinterest generated 3.5 million impressions last year – that is, content from Europeana.eu pinned by Europeana and end-users that appeared on Pinterest in someone’s main feed, in search results, or on boards. On Facebook, content from Europeana’s Facebook page appeared on people’s news feeds 4.2million times. Finally, on Wikipedia, we estimate that 173 images from Europeana that are part of Wikipedia articles were seen 13.7 million times.
In terms of total impression numbers,Wikipedia wins hands downs due to the obvious volume of traffic to articles; however Facebook sends almost as much traffic to Europeana as Pinterest and Wikipedia combined. As a result, we can calculate some conversion rates: 0.71% of Facebook impressions resulted in a visit to Europeana, 0.24% on Pinterest and 0.16% on Wikipedia. These figures are simply indications; Wikipedia visits include those unrelated to content impressed in an article – however they are certainly interesting and definitely food for thought.
In 2012, there were an estimated 32,000 engaged users on Europeana’s Facebook page. An engagement indicator includes any click or story/post created by Europeana. Pinterest saw an estimated 12,000 re-pins of Europeana content, however unfortunately this figure does not include comments or ‘likes’ on content. Despite this, 0.34% of impressions resulted in re-pins and 0.76% of impressions on Facebook resulted in an engagement indicator. These findings show that content impressions on other sites are more likely to raise engagement indicators on the platform rather than send traffic directly to your own website. It is also interesting to see that despite the fact that we are unable to record comments and ´licks´ on Pinterest, the engagement rate is still higher when compared to Facebook.
We believe that the measurement of off-site metrics is important as it not only helps justify the value of re-use and social media, but highlight the potential of end-user engagement outside of the Europeana portal. By mapping out the jigsaw, we can build a more complete picture of our users and how re-use can lead to engagement indicators and visits.
Over the next year, we will be working to expand our measurement of off-site metrics and we are interested in hearing about your own experiences. Are you measuring the re-use of content on social media, Flickr, Wikipedia, etc.? If so get in touch with Neil Bates (neil.bates@kb.nl).