For years people have been asking the question “how does online behavior impact my offline sales?” The question has been asked so much so that an entire industry has been built around trying to find the answer. In comes Compete…

Yesterday, Compete and Cannondale Associates, a marketing and sales management consulting firm, announced a partnership that gives marketers new insight into online to offline purchases.  For the first time, marketers will be able to see which digital marketing campaigns are actually delivering results.   Specifically, the partnership will provide insight into the impact of online activities and media consumption (including search, ad exposure, sites visited, etc), on in-store purchase behavior and brand loyalty.

Read yesterday’s press release…

2009 is BIG for Back to School: Staples and Office Depot See YOY Growth in Q3

September marked the beginning of the school year and the end of the Back to School Season for office supply retailers. Q3 sales figures have yet to be released, but if site volume is any indicator, online office supply retailers saw a year over year boom. Industry leaders, staples.com and officedepot.com, each saw huge gains – staples.com up 59% YOY to 23.7MM unique visitors (UVs) and officedepot.com up 21% YOY to 13.3MM UVs in Q3.

Traffic from the search engines contributed greatly to these gains – staples.com up 45% YOY and officedepot.com up 22% YOY in total search referrals.

Continue reading “Sept Data is Live: 2009 is BIG for Back to School” »

In July, Gold’s Gym worked with their agency, McKinney, to launch saynotokankles.com, a “light-hearted” effort to generate buzz around “Cankle Awareness Month.” For those who are not familiar this ‘aesthetic affliction’ that impacts thousands of woman (sure you’re not), the site does a great job at breaking down the highly scientific term as “the combination of ‘calf’ and ‘ankle.’ It occurs when the calf merges with an obese or swollen ankle, so that there is no clear demarcation between the two.”

According to Brandweek.com, Gold’s Gym “CMO Lisa Zoellner said the chain is curious to see if the phrase, ‘Say no to cankles,’ minus the ‘Gold’s Gym’ branding, is enough to drive visitors to the web site.” The advertising for the campaign apparently included display ads, Facebook applications, and an in-network TV campaign to support its 600 locations in 28 countries.

So, how much traffic was Gold’s Gym expecting to drive? No one really knows. During the month of July, saynotocankles.com had 12,080 unique visitors. In the month’s pre and post “Cankle Awareness Month,” the site had around 1,300 UVs. I know, right now you’re thinking “Wow, all that hubbub and they were only able to stir up 12,000 UVs?!”

Taking a closer look at the data and we can see where the campaign fell short:

• What display ads? Sure they had a cool looking, funny banner ads, but Saynotocankles.com has only received referrals from a handful of sites - google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, wsj.com, and salon.com. Considering the first 3 sites can’t even host display ads, I wonder where the ads were actually displayed. (referral report)
• Over the past 90 days, saynotocankles.com received 2.44% of all search referrals from keywords containing the word “cankles.” 9 other websites received a larger share of referrals. Squidoo.com (4.4M UVs in July) and urbandictionary.com (3.7M UVs in July) accounted for over 26% of all the search referrals. Maybe this should have been where they displayed ads?(keyword destination report)
• Only 3 keywords drove traffic to saynotocankles.com – “cankles,” “say no to cankles,” and “cankle awareness month.” How about some paid search ads? A quick search in Google’s keyword tool shows over 100 keywords with thousands of estimated monthly searches.
• Saynotocankles.com received an average of 408 monthly search referrals… SEM anyone?

So, I guess the answer to Ms. Zoellner’s question about seeing if Say No To Cankles thrived without the brand power of Gold’s Gym is clear. Since the object of the campaign was drive traffic to the site via a search phrase, it’s amazing that they didn’t execute a paid search campaign. Results would undoubtedly have been much better. Also, if they incorporated their brand power or even put an ad for saynotocankles.com on goldsgym.com (280K UVs monthly), traffic to the site probably wouldn’t look like this:

This could have been an awesome campaign. It’s sad that it fell so short. Thoughts?

August data is live and there was plenty of movement with the summer winding down, back to school, back to business, and the kickoff of football season.

Football Season

For marketers, the college and NFL action during football season translates to major ad spend, and as the action heats up, fans jump online to stay in tune. Football sites saw a sharp uptick in seasonal traffic in August, with Unique Visitors (UVs) to the Compete Football category up 92.2% over July, 2009. While NFL.com led the pack with nearly 6.5 Million Unique Visitors in August, fantasy fanatics flocked to cbssports.com (up 41% to 4.35 Million Unique Visitors), fantasysports.yahoo.com (up 79% to 4.75 Million UVs), and fftoolbox.com (up 350% to 579,000 UVs) to start their own seasons.

Fast Movers

Business, mass merchants, and government interest all climbed the ranks in August.

Recently, Slate Magazine released an article comparing the coffee brews of Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, and McDonalds. Surprisingly, the coffee shop whose biz is dedicated to coffee first came in last. Starbucks was the worst rated, next to McDononald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts was the winner.

People are passionate about their coffee and the rivalry between Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts definitely runs deep. My first thought was that these results were impacted by marketing efforts and reach, but when looking at online engagement and traffic to each of their websites this is not the case. Starbucks.com is indeed the more engaging, not to mention it garners about 80% more UV’s than Dunkindonuts.com monthly.

What’s your take?

July data is live and there are tons of tasty data nuggets ready on compete.com! Healthcare is top of mind and “cash for clunkers” sent droves of people online to research how they could get the most bang for their rusty rides. Plus, the Twitter craze spells success for Twitter tools riding its coat tails.

Top Health Insurance and Physician Websites

On July 28th, Compete released a list of the top Insurance and Physician sites for June 2009. Over the past month, overall unique visitors (UVs) to Insurance and Physician sites increased by 3.5%, and the category saw a 7% traffic increase over June 2008. The top ten destinations in the category include physician rating sites - healthgrades.com and vitals.com - and insurance plan comparison services - ehealthinsurance.com and dentalplans.com.

President Obama’s healthcare reform is definitely helping fuel the fire. In fact, barackobama.com has received over 9% of all search traffic resulting from the keyword “healthcare” over the past 90 days. The buzz about the reform has also spurred an increase in online research of government-sponsored healthcare. As a result, medicare.gov received almost 1MM UVs in July.

Twitter Traffic Flat - Related Sites Going Strong

No doubt people are still tweeting out there and looking for real time news, updates, and information. However, traffic to twitter.com has flattened over the past few months while other Twitter related sites showed major growth.

Aggregator site Tweetmeme crushed it in July, ramping traffic by 85% month over month to 11.8MM UVs, suggesting that there is some real value in combing through the noise and offering consumable information. July traffic to Twitpic (up 9.6% to 4.6MM UVs) and bit.ly (up 20% to 5MM UVs) also grew in July, indicating increased adoption and usage of more Twitter related tools.