It’s well known that Microsoft’s ten year old Internet Explorer 6 is still widely used by late (late, late) adopters and those that are held at the mercy of lethargic Corporate IT departments.

Until now, Microsoft hasn’t really prioritized encouraging users to upgrade.

Continue reading “Browsers for Food” »

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?

It is restaurant week here in Boston, a two week promotion to encourage diners to try out someplace new. Offered twice a year, you could say that it has a very ‘seasonal’ trend. This is a good example of how localized events like restaurant week, which happens all across the country, can identify and target a hard to reach segment. I took a closer look at some of the traffic patterns building up to the event by week. The celebration officially started on August 9th and continues through to the 21st (minus Saturdays) and you can see the buildup of anticipation in the chart below. One thing that jumps out is the trend of the official site Boston USA versus resturantweekboston.com – the two sites were about in line until the kick off on the 9th when the Unofficial Site took off, but there is an easy answer for that, there are no menus available on Boston USA!

How many people are on the site this week? I’ll let you know after I finish booking my forth 3-course meal, but an interesting trend is that unique visitors for the month of July are up 2x over 2007, gearing up for the August promotion. The 2009 March event had an all time high with almost 55,000 hungry visitors but after looking at the counts for last week… It’s safe to say that, using internet interest as a measuring stick, this will be the largest event to date. This may be from increased adoption of reservation booking online or the ever-present and looming economy. Some restaurant owners have already extended the offer to a third week (65 out of the over 200 participating locations) or even the entire month of August hoping to continue to stimulate business.

So go out, eat and enjoy, you still have plenty of time to take advantage of these great deals. I recommend Bacco in the north end, Chicken Florentine and a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon, (yeah I know it’s supposed to be white, but I like red). Make sure you set up your reservation in advance though; especially for that one restaurant you have been pining over going for the last 3 months. Thank you to the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, American Express and all the participating restaurants, let’s keep this tradition alive! And marketers take note that quality content, like including menus, can push a site to the top and reach a desirable target segment.

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.

Following the spirit of service promoted by her husband’s administration, Michelle Obama recently opened the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco, speaking to the importance of volunteering. The First Lady announced a summer-long program – ‘United We Serve’ – stressing the importance of including civic service in lives of Americans. Despite the fact that the administration’s volunteer initiatives as still taking shape, we can already see some of the effects of this push online. Traffic to national service groups such as City Year, the PeaceCorps, the AmeriCorps, and Teach for America, have increased over the past six months since the 2008 election, and have seen double-digit growth over the past year.

Americans are also flocking to volunteer website dedicated to local, part-time opportunities. Volunteer information sites, such as VolunteerMatch.org, DoSomething.org, and 1-800-Volunteer.org have seen similar gains as well. DoSomething.org itself has seen traffic more than double since the 2008 November election.

The average time spent on these sites has also seen increases; despite occasional fluctuations, there has been positive growth in time spent online over the past year. In May,on average, visitors spent over seven minutes on the sites for Volunteer Match, City Year, the PeaceCorps – and nearly twice that on AmeriCorps.gov.

We should not, however, attempt to make a direct correlation between the Obama Administration and increase in UVs to suggest a new found civic duty by the American public. Fellow recent graduates can attest the current state of the economy has made the job hunt quite bit harder, and more of us are looking at alternatives to immediately joining the private sector. We can see this in online traffic patterns as well; for example, the trend in UVs for the AmeriCorps website follows a pattern similar to GradSchools.com over the past six months.

Last week’s craze over Twitter and Iran was the height of media buzzdom. Democracy + social media + possible election fraud = PR Gold. The State Department asking Twitter to delay server maintenance? A former National Security Advisor honcho suggesting Twitter should get the Nobel Prize?! That’s so good, even the craziest novelist couldn’t make it up.

But what was really happening in Iran and on Twitter? Some sobering thoughts suggest that Twitter may not have been that widely embraced inside Iran. Other reports suggest that the government has been actively suppressing digital resistance.

Meanwhile, a few terrifying and sad reports have leaked out, like protest violence photos and the Neda video, displaying the immediacy and emotional impact of social media.

Outside Iran, these scant bits have whipped the disenfranchised Diaspora and simpatico millions to take to the streets and social media streams. Starved for the latest and eager to commune, they have pollinated the web with millions of bits of Iran Election information – on leading search engines, news sites, wikis, social networks, sharing services and real time search engines.

Taking a web-wide view, Compete looked at searchers on “Iran+Election” at over 25 sites like Google, the New York Times, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, real-time search startup OneRiot and, of course, Twitter.

It’s no surprise that Twitter claimed 55% of searchers the week after the Election, given all the media hoopla. But note that Google was the leading search property in the days leading up to the event, the day itself and the day after. Searchers used Google to learn more about the event before it happened and Twitter to get the latest on the fallout.

As OneRiot has written about, there’s a bit of an outstanding question among Google, Twitter and others: who will win real time search?

Search doesn’t equate to media consumption. With Iran in the headlines on nytimes.com and streaming down Twitter apps as #IranElection, people don’t need to search for the latest. But many will search nonetheless, especially the highly engaged.