Winning over cable TV customers is no simple feat. Competition is fierce, and leading telecom service providers offer bundled services that balance savings with premium services that consumers want.

Cable provider Comcast recently attempted to leverage its high definition (HD) television service, a technology becoming popular with consumers, with a triple play bundle promotion. Comcast is marketing a HD Triple Play bundle across media channels. The bundle includes free HD service as an incentive to also subscribe to digital voice and high speed internet.

But this made me wonder: is Comcast actually bringing in more people than its competitors and benchmarks to look at bundles online?

Let’s start with the advertising. The online banner ad (shown below) has a clear call to action with the “Learn More Now” button.

In contrast, the direct mail piece (shown below) lacks any next step for customers. I’m consistently surprised that Comcast’s direct mail pieces don’t always have a reference to Comcast.com, and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this insert. This piece doesn’t highlight Comcast.com or a telesales phone number for customers to call. What is a customer to do?

To explore what people are actually doing online when it comes to cable bundles, I leveraged Compete’s Online Channel Effectiveness intelligence.

First, I looked at what percentage of online visitors do top telecom and cable providers attract to the pages that promote its products, shown in the chart below.

This chart highlights how Comcast (in red) only led AT&T in the proportion of visitors who viewed pages promoting its products. AT&T’s percentage is lower because the provider integrates its wireless cell phones on the same site. Traffic to these wireless pages is not included in this view, which drives the wireline percentage down. Verizon’s percentage is based on all wireline traffic to Verizon.com and excludes traffic to Verizonwireless.com. But what percentage of those wireline product visitors also viewed the bundle pages on the telecom and cable provider sites?

We’ve already seen that Comcast has been promoting its HD Triple Play online and offline. Even though Comcast is behind competitors and benchmarks in getting visitors to look at the product pages, surely this advertising and the free HD offer are helping the provider perform better in bundle interest, right? Wrong. As shown in the chart below, Comcast trails all of the telecom and cable providers in getting the people who make it to the product pages to visit the bundle pages.

It’s no surprise that Comcast’s overall product and bundle interest penetrations are low when marketing tactics like direct mail do little to promote Comcast.com. Comcast should highlight Comcast.com more in its marketing in order to help drive product interest among both prospects and existing customers. Comcast’s HD Triple Play bundle may be an attractive offer, but it doesn’t appear to pose a threat online relative to the percentages of visitors viewing product and bundle pages its top competitors’ sites.

Comcast is now leveraging another emerging technology by giving away a FREE Dell netbook when consumers purchase a triple play bundle. Hopefully, Comcast will improve its tactics in promoting Comcast.com to help drive online interest, which will become even more important when Comcast starts bundling Wi-Max for an even more online savvy segment.

How did the cable provider Comcast try driving engagement with its brand and ultimately online conversion through social media?

As I continued my analysis from my last post on Comcasttown.com, I wanted to see how engaged Comcasttown.com visitors were and if the experience drove more online conversion on Comcast.com. Last time, I highlighted how Comcasttown.com integrated with Facebook.com. In this post I thought I would see if Comcasttown.com’s engagement is even close to Facebook.com engagement as well as compare it to Comcast.com engagement.

Comcasttown.com averaged 1.1 visits per person in March and a little over 3 ½ minutes per visit. These numbers suggest the site was more of a one hit wonder than an engaging experience. Compare that to Facebook.com which averaged nearly 17 visits per person and 17 minutes per stay for the month. This isn’t surprising when only 5% of the Comcasttown.com visitors registered on the site and only those that registered could truly interact with the virtual world.

OK, so this isn’t much of a surprise when comparing Comcasttown.com engagement to Facebook.com engagement, but how did Comcasttown.com compare to Comcast.com? Comcast.com attracted more repeat visits with 3.6 visits per person compared to 1.1 for Comcasttown.com. However, Comcasttown.com visitors spent nearly a minute more on the site checking it out. Unfortunately, visitors did not necessarily return to the site within the same month.

While Comcasttown.com did not reach very many consumers, 2.5% of those who visited the site, submitted an order for digital voice, internet, cable TV, or a bundle of those services on Comcast.com in the same month. This conversion rate was nearly 50% higher than Comcast.com’s overall conversion rate in March 2009.

While Comcasttown.com’s visitors aren’t very engaged on the microsite, they are interested in purchasing Comcast’s services online. I have to wonder though if it was worth the cost to develop the microsite and the integration with Facebook for the limited number of consumers the microsite reached.

This analysis was performed using Site Profile on Compete.com and a combination of Compete’s Marketing and Landing Page Effectiveness intelligence.

Social media networks represent significant opportunities for brands to directly connect with specific segments of consumers more than ever before, but many struggle with how to make those connections relevant, engaging, and influence sales.

Comcast recently tried its hand at increasing both reach and engagement with its brand using a virtual reality microsite, Comcasttown.com, which could be directly linked to users’ Facebook profiles. After my senses were piqued by this campaign, I decided to find out how effective it was at attracting consumers.

In March 2009, Comcast promoted Comcasttown.com in a multi-platform marketing campaign that called on consumers to create and share their personalized multi-media virtual living rooms. Radio advertising played catchy jingles and TV promos showed people singing in their virtual rooms or strolling the animated character filled streets of Comcast Town. Magazine and online banner ads showed “HD monsters” and spacemen “future hopping” down sidewalks.

Sample Comcast Town TV commercial and banner snapshots:

Comcast Town itself is a virtual world. Those who registered on the site could create their own living room by purchasing various items with virtual currency. If users take a registration shortcut using their Facebook profile, their Comcast Town purchases appear on their recent activity tracking on Facebook, publicizing the microsite to their entire network.

The social media angle was important because Comcast didn’t seem to invest too heavily.in offline marketing. Using TNS Media Intelligence’s Adscope™ product, I discovered out of the sample of 207 Comcast campaigns (on TV, radio, and print) observed in March, nearly 13% of them were Comcast Town ads.

Looking at Comcasttown.com’s Site Profile on Compete.com, the site attracted less than 100,000 unique visitors in March, and reached just 1% of Comcast.com’s unique visitor traffic.

Facebook was an important traffic driver to Comcast Town. As shown in the chart below, over a third of referrals, the site that a visitor was on before they went to Comcasttown.com, came from Facebook. Although Comcast may have used display ads on Facebook to drive awareness of Comcast Town, Facebook’s profile activity tracking / newsfeed likely helped to build it too. Facebook users share their interactions with Comcast Town on their walls, which led to their friends to checkout Comcast Town as well.

Comcast’s main website was the second biggest source of traffic to Comcast Town, which was promoted on the home page with a small banner.

Comcasttown.com is a small town and would have a very limited population if it weren’t for its integration with Facebook. Check back next week for Part 2, where I’ll look to see how active users were on Comcasttown.com and its effectiveness in driving online purchases on Comcast.com.