We are seeing a welcome return to positivity this month, all but two brands in our series seeing traffic up on the year. This is a nice turnaround from the last couple of months where we saw a material slowdown over the summer.
In aggregate, brand website traffic is at its highest point this year as a result of the broad increase seen across all brands, and breakout growth among a significant proportion of them.
A couple of brands though have seen a steady decline throughout the year, something of a cause for concern, given the overall market trends.
Audience growth remains broadly on trend but there are a couple of noticeable breaks on the rate of growth which is partly being held down to structural changes within the brands running on Affino, with some brands being spun off, in turn reducing the upward trend.
It is also down to brands increasingly using Affino’s User Auto Archive automation to remove legacy audience data automatically, which maintains GDPR compliance, whilst focusing the brand efforts on the engaged audience.
The fact that we’re still seeing steady growth in the audience numbers remains positive, but we are also on the lookout for this to accelerate as we move into the 4th quarter.
The volume of emails being sent has hit a new peak for the year, and if we were to include brands outside the main series, we’re approaching a 300% increase in the volume of emails sent since the start of the year through Affino.
This is a big reversal from last month, which saw a significant dip in the number of emails sent. The return to growth means that this month’s email volume is almost exactly on on the trend line for the year.
Engagement has also seen considerable recent growth, back up to levels last seen early on in the pandemic. This is a positive sign, and thankfully in line with expectations. There is a significant gap still between our effort and engagement trends, that while closing from where it was in the summer, is still more significant than we would want to see it at this time of year.
It opens up the possibility that we need to refine the metric further to break down better the Affino activities and identify the specific activities that make up the overall effort, hopefully giving us more insight into which activities best convert to engagement. It is something we’re going explore for next year.
One of the highlights for the Affino team from this month’s stats is that the use of Affino’s management tools is up 238% so far this year. It means that as a platform Affino is increasingly delivering value and insight to our users.
This is especially pleasing given our broad investment in usability and delivering more value across Affino’s Control Centre, in particular on the Commercial, CRM and Analytics elements.
238% Increase in teams using Affino this year
Overall we see brand engagement getting back on trend in Q3, the crucial indicator to look out for going into Q4 is to see the gap closing between the volume of interactions and meaningful engagement.
This insight piece is one of a series where we explore Affino Client Brand audience engagement, traffic, reach and more, to identify the latest trends.
For a more in-depth conversation please reach out either to myself of Jonathan Collins, your project manager, alternatively you can reach through the forums to your support team.
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