Gateways (part 2)
In Gateways (part 1) we introduced the concept of gateways. Check out that primer to this article if you haven’t already read it.
Gateways are the sites and apps consumers go to every day (e.g. Facebook, Gmail, Google Search, Huffington Post, etc). These are the places the majority of consumer traffic flows through to get to brands’ online experiences.
This shift has, in part, been brought about by the rise of mobile. When you only have a couple of minutes to spend on your phone, you’re not going to risk 30 seconds of your attention exploring a site you haven’t visited before (unless you have a good reason to expect immediate gratification). Consumers will usually go to the places they know will give them guaranteed or immediate value.
Unfortunately, tools like Google Analytics don’t do a great job tracking where web traffic comes from. Whilst query param-based tracking systems can help track traffic sources, the only way to truly know where a site visitor came from is if the previous site actively identifies itself. This identification step is optional and most sites don’t identify themselves when sending users to a brand’s experience. There are also technical limitations that limit the accuracy or referral tracking. In one renowned example, a Groupon experiment in 2014 found that 60% of ‘Direct’ traffic was actually organic search traffic. Long story short, your analytics tracking is probably an inaccurate representation of how users are getting to your site.
There are a lot of software companies trying to enable brands to track where web traffic is coming from. However, the existence of gateways diminishes the need for technologies that track different sources driving web traffic to the same experience. Why? Because most effective response to gateways a marketer can make is not setting up complex tracking systems that identify where consumers are coming to the same experience from — it’s providing the consumer with an experience that matches the reason they engaged with the brand on the gateway irregardless of where the consumer is coming from.
Let’s illustrate this by walking through how the typical consumer reaches a brand’s website today…
- The consumer goes to one of their daily gateways
- The consumer scrolls through the gateway’s content, which is usually a feed
- The consumer clicks on an item in the feed
But wait, why did the consumer click on that item? Well *something* intrigued them. The content of the item in the feed (e.g. image, title description, CTA, etc) spoke to the consumer. This is the key difference between consumers coming to a branded experience directly vs going through a gateway: when the consumer arrives through a gateway we can control why the consumer is coming to the brand’s experience and provide an experience that matches that ‘why’.
That means that every reason someone might engage with a brand probably requires a different experience at a unique URL.
This why — why the consumer clicked on the item in the feed — is called context. It’s the desire created in the consumer’s mind by the content shown in the gateway: “I want to know…”, “I want to see…”, “I want to buy…”, “I want to go…”, etc. Think With Google is a great authority for more perspective on context. Context is the less-obvious half of relevance. The other, more-obvious half is personal preferences, which we won’t dig into today.
Each of these context-driven moments is usually a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive motivation in the consumer’s mind that manifests itself as a click to the brand’s experience.
To drive consumers to a brand’s experience, the brand must get ahead of consumers and predict what these motivations and moments will be. But brand’s can’t possibly afford to guess what impulses may drive a consumer to engage with the brand. Brands must anticipate each consumer’s needs. Brands must learn what makes each person tick, at a very personal level.
It’s always been the case that talking relevantly to consumers isn’t as simple as matching their personal interests. It’s also been about matching each consumer’s desire in the moment. Unfortunately, when consumers used to visit brands’ experiences from a large variety of places (including non-digital) with a large number of reasons for visiting, this desire in the moment often was too vague or too hard to track. However, gateways are consolidating the flow of web traffic (via their feed-based format) to a single post, email, or other feed item. With gateways, brands can send consumers to an experience tailored to whatever message the consumer clicks on.
Brands don’t need expansive microsites, blogs overflowing with content, and shiny websites for every context a consumer may engage with the brand with. Brands just need small and seemingly simple consumer experiences that give the consumer what they want.
Sure, that’s easier said than done, but at least we’re beginning to understand what each consumer wants from the brands they engage with.
One of the most effective responses to gateways a marketer can make is not setting up complex tracking systems that identify where consumers are coming to the same experience from — it’s providing the consumer with an experience that matches the reason they engaged with the brand on the gateway (regardless of where the consumer is coming from).
We’ll dig into how brands can plan to use context in Gateways (part 3). I encourage a healthy debate around the topic of gateways and how they’re affecting your brand; see you in the comments!
