Ask.com: Crossing the Digital Divide
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- December 12th, 2006 | Recommend ThisRecently, Ask.com has implemented an offline media campaign to get people to use their search engine. The question is “did it work?” Cutting right to the chase the answer is a whole hearted “maybe, but it sure was expensive.” Let’s start at the highest level and work our way down to the details. If you trend IAC’s spending on Ask.com against the number of unique visitors to the site you get a high level measure of the campaigns success. In the chart below we’ve actually split the spending into online media spending and offline media spending.
The first thing that pops out at you when looking at this chart is the heavy offline Media Spend in March. At first blush it looks like this did a really good job of driving traffic to Ask.com in April and May. A 30 day lag in traffic response is not uncommon. Upon closer examination I would propose that the $2.3 million in offline spending (predominantly Network TV) in March may have had very little to do with the lift in traffic to Ask.com. I propose that the traffic increase was more tied to the online spending trend.
This becomes more apparent when we observe the substantial lift in Ask.com traffic in September and October when IAC had essentially “turned off” the spigot for offline spending. Upon breaking it down to the query level or more specifically a Search Market Share level this becomes even more apparent.
Through out the period from November 2005 to November 2006, increases in Ask.com search market share has correlated most closely to online media spending and not offline media spending.
So from where we sit it appears that this offline campaign didn’t do much for Ask ( at least not yet anyway). It seems as though the folks at IAC may have been better off sticking to their knitting and focusing online.
Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month. A unique query is defined as unique user, search engine, and term with no double counting for repeat queries within a session by the same user. Compete tracks the 20 top search engines. For more information please contact Compete.
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December 12th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Ask and you shall receive… Thanks Jeremy…
The general market buzz about Ask is that they are doing really well. Their partners are happy… Their traffic is up… and the TV spots bring this artificial sense of ‘establishment’ to the brand.
I think you are right that the TV spend was ineffecient… however, sometimes we have to look at these mass market campaigns from a more subjective standpoint. My guess (I do not work at IAC) is that they are happy with their marketing execution and this was all part of the plan.
December 12th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
We are all exposed to cross media every day, so not a single media can dominate comprehensive effect all alone. Taka a look at survey resources from IAB, OPA, EIAA, and so on. All says TV, Print and Online are interweaving each other to get awareness, recall, brand preferenec and purchase intent.
Also we need to consider exposures of competitors such as Google, Yahoo and MSN that definitely affect and sometimes erode the effect of exposure from Ask.com. It’s not a simple calculation to determine the effect of Ad of any media with those added conditions.
So I just wonder how you can segregate TV Ad effect from Online, and how you can reach the conclusion.
December 15th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Excellent points dramroll and Red Roster. My post was obviously not by any means a complete analysis of Ask’s media campaign. It was really just a thought starter at a particular point in time. To date the correlation has been stronger between online spend and traffic. That is by no means the end of the story though. Time will only tell how effective Ask will be at penetrating the super competitive search market. They are definitely doing a lot of really good things though. For instance Ask’s ExpertRank search results are regarded by many as the most relevant among the top players. The recent launch of AskCity has been heralded by most as a major breakthrough in local search. Hmmm … that gets me thinking. Maybe it’s time for Compete to weigh in on AskCity and the Local Search space.
Thanks for the great comments … keep ‘em comin’
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