As this country’s Boomer generation enters into their 60’s many are looking forward to retirement. In turn, investment firms are looking to attract the attention and dollars of these individuals as they try to solidify their financial situation before leaving the workforce. It is no surprise that Fidelity, one of the nation’s leading institutions, has gone to innovative lengths to attract those individuals approaching retirement.

One such campaign is the Fidelity-sponsored “Focus on Retirement” series of articles running on Yahoo! Finance since late last year. Located center mast on this financial portal’s home page is a featured article that Fidelity makes very apparent that it sponsors (with both a link to its site and a line of text). These articles cover a wide assortment of retirement-related issues ranging from healthcare/financial decisions to popular retirement vacation spots.

The “Focus on Retirement” articles have been getting substantial readership throughout the year. Average traffic to the articles in the first half of 2008 was approximately 523,000 unique visitors/month. While readership is all well and good, driving traffic to Fidelity’s own site from these articles is essential for the success of the campaign. There has been consistent overlap between readers of the articles and visitors to fidelity.com. On average approximately 65,000 article readers per month click through to fidelity.com.

This equates to around 13% of readers each month making their way to Fidelity’s site. Of particular interest is the fact that the trend holds pretty constant even as readership of the articles declined starting in February. From an efficiency standpoint the past few months have been the most effective at driving traffic from article readers.

This campaign is a good example of a marketing effort that is mutually beneficial to both the consumer and company. Far too often we see straight advertising that does not provide the viewer with usable and relevant information. With the “Focus on Retirement” series Fidelity is raising the bar by sponsoring quality content designed to assist consumers in planning for an important life event such as retirement.

Compete is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, September 24th at 2pm EST that will provide an overview of the online consumer trends of near retirees and which companies are currently winning the battle for their market share. For more information and to register for this event, click here.

It’s no secret that the economy is currently in a state of flux. Rising oil and gas prices have a way of financially affecting almost every aspect of our lives. The word “recession” has been floating around for the better part of a year now and worried consumers are trying to keep tabs on the financial markets more than ever.

This consumer anxiety becomes apparent when looking into the traffic of the financial sections of popular domains such as yahoo.com, msn.com, and google.com. These sites have seen a great deal of growth over the past year. MSN Money and Yahoo! Finance have had year over year growth of 27% and 77%, respectively. Google Finance has experienced a whopping increase of over 20,000%. Granted this area of Google’s domain was still in its infancy last year, the increase in traffic has been quite steady compounded by a 1,334% jump from May to June of this year. The increase in traffic to these sites is even more fascinating when considering that the largest domain level growth was google.com at 13%. Yahoo.com and msn.com experienced more modest yearly progress with 5% and 3% improvements.

Determining the root cause of the increase in visitors is an inexact science since there is a wide variety of information available when visiting these financial hubs. One trend for Yahoo! Finance is the increase in visitors checking specific stock quotes and tracking custom portfolios. Year-over-year growth in these particular activities has been close to 28% each.

These trends indicate that the online population is increasingly interested in keeping a pulse on not only the financial markets, but on their personal livelihood as well. It is no secret that in troubling financial times people tend to worry about retirement savings and personal investments even though they are long term in nature. Investors just have to remember our history indicates the further we fall, the greater we bounce back.

*** UPDATE*** Since this blog was first posted we have had a chance to revisit the historical data related to Google Finance. We discovered that the trended data dating back to June of 2007 was undercounted which in turn augmented the growth figures reported for this subdomain. Year over year for Google Finance was actually 169% which still indicates a great deal of momentum for this financial hub. This represents growth that is still significantly greater than that of both Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money but to a lesser degree. Below is a revised graph to show this reported change.

Everyone’s favorite investor in diapers is back as the E*Trade Baby makes a new appearance promoting Mobile E*Trade Pro. By now I’m sure most of us have seen those popular E*TRADE Baby advertisements either on television or online. There are now three ads with the mobile variation joining the E*Trade Banking Baby and E*Trade Trading Baby. The previous versions have both gained over a million views on YouTube since the first release during this year’s Super Bowl.

While airing a Super Bowl advertisement likely increases awareness for each advertiser, there is the inevitable debate over whether Super Bowl ads really pay off in terms of actual revenue. In the case of E*Trade, the question is whether the company managed to attract new customers post-airing of the Baby ads.

We first looked into how E*Trade has performed in terms of site traffic to its home page since launching the Super Bowl ad. Although the advertisements received great reviews, the campaigns did not result in increased traffic to etrade.com. Below we see that in February and March of 2008, visitors to E*Trade actually decreased 10% compared to February 2008. What makes this decline even more interesting is the fact that in January traffic increased 4% over the previous month. The subsequent decline continued into April by a modest 3%.

While on the surface it may look as if the ad campaign was not effective for E*Trade, one has to look deeper to see the real story. The idea of quality over quantity comes into play here. While monthly site traffic to etrade.com decreased after the E*Trade Baby made his first appearance, the quality of the traffic increased greatly. Below is a measure of velocity at etrade.com using the Super Bowl (February 3, 2008) as the starting point. Velocity measures the attention (or time spent on a site) and how it changes compared to one point in time. For example, during the first few days after the Super Bowl, attention increased nearly 200% at etrade.com. This shows that even though fewer people were going to etrade.com, those that did visit were spending more time engaging with the site than people that visited prior to the big game.

In the modern era all too often we see trendy Super Bowl ads that might be a hit with the public, but do not generate results on the bottom line. If someone were to look just at the traffic for E*Trade they might think this is another example of such a flop. By looking at the bigger picture however, it is apparent that the campaign was successful when it came to getting people more engaged with the brand which is a win in my book. E*Trade certainly seems happy with the results since they are willing to invest more in having this wise cracking infant be their public face.