Why would McDonald’s not use filetofish.com to capitalize on its most ignored sandwich the one time of year 23.9% of the US population is compelled to consume it at least once a week (lent)? Where is the website counterpart to the viral Arnold phenom that is “Gimme-that-filet-o-fish”? Where is the follow-through?

First, some history. According to USA Today, the filet-o-fish (one “L”) was “invented” in 1962 in Cincinnati by McDonald’s owner Lou Groen for the sole purpose of satisfying the demands of his predominately Catholic clientele on Fridays. Comprised of fried fish, half a slice of cheese, and tarter sauce, it has since gone on to sell, amazingly, at a rate of 300 million patties per year.

So given the history and the Canonical rules, it seems like McDonalds would want to seriously chase the Catholic dollar online; however, filetofish.com has been left suspiciously derelict. If you look at Unique Visitors during Lent for the past three years, you can smell the scent of demand. With no memorable substantial web-presence or campaign tie in (that I know of, or that the Wayback Machine could show me) there are still organic spikes in UVs to filetofish.com during the pre-Easter season. Admittedly, the data is a little thin here (low sample), but the seasonal variance is obviously undeniable.

There is a unique opportunity for McDonald’s to execute a campaign once a year AND to follow through with a related “filet” inspired web presence. By matching Catholic consumers weekly demands for fish with the often forgotten, often maligned, filet-o-fish, McDonald’s could briefly capture some fish sandwich market share.

In my post last month, I contrasted swing-for-the-fence Powerball Marketers from companies that follow a scientific, Moneyball Marketing discipline. The quick summary is that Powerball Marketing is analogous to gambling, and unfortunately many companies continue to make big bets without investing in data or techniques that could improve their odds. Moneyball Marketers, on the other hand, represent a new breed of analytically driven, outcome-oriented practitioners who use new metrics and game plans to consistently beat their competition. While some readers took issue with my criticism of Denny’s “Free Breakfast for America” campaign as pure Powerball, no one disagreed that changes in technology and consumer behavior make relying on conventional marketing wisdom a career-limiting endeavor. To that end, this post will focus on what companies can do to become Moneyball Marketers.

In his book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Michael Lewis describes how a handful of Major League Baseball general managers have succeeded in creating championship-caliber franchises despite substantially smaller budgets and supposedly inferior players. My view is that the approach these managers are taking is directly relevant to what marketing managers need to do. In my assessment, there are three skills that companies need to develop in order to win consistently.

Start with quantifiable outcomes. I continue to be amazed by how many agency personnel think that achieving a large number of impressions is the primary measure of a campaign’s success (a fact I have been exposed to when judging industry awards). In my view impressions, as well as reach and frequency, are a simple input into the marketing equation. Outcomes matter more, and if you can’t quantify them, then they don’t count. What are some good examples of outcomes? How about “grow 10% each quarter” or “increase customer retention five percentage points by the end of the year?” Defining great outcome statements upfront is the critical first step in marketing planning — and when they are quantifiable, they establish clear success criteria for your agency and media partners. Point: Don’t invest resources in a marketing program until the desired outcome is identified and you can connect the dots from program execution through to success.

Use new metrics based on new data. Data can be a blessing and a curse; in the end, the determining factor is knowing what to measure. In baseball, sabermetrics has emerged as the new math, complete with new data and metrics. “Run production” is the number one performance measure, and old school metrics like batting average don’t predict run production as well as innovative new metrics like on-base percentage and range factor. Similarly, conventional marketing metrics like purchase intent (collected via surveys) are no longer adequate when we can use consumers’ actual online shopping behavior to better calculate the brand and sales impact of a particular campaign.

Like sabermetrics, clickstream-based marketing measurement has proven to be a better measure of consumer purchase behavior than the conventional techniques it is now replacing. The best example of this may be in the auto industry, where consumers’ online shopping activities have been translated into a whole new class of demand, conversion and shopper quality metrics like cost per shopper, shopper conversion rate, and reverse cross shop. As a result of these new metrics, auto makers now have a better understanding of how their marketing is performing, and precisely what they need to adjust in order to hit their monthly and annual sales goals. Point: Discard old-school data and metrics in favor of rich, new clickstream-based analytics.

To see what other skill Moneyball Marketers like ING Direct and Hyundai possess, check out Compete’s monthly post on MediaPost.

February marks the slow transition from pro football to Major League Baseball, and while dissecting Superbowl advertising and Theo Epstein’s off-season maneuvers, my thoughts gave way to a new view of marketing in 2009. I’ll characterize it this way, “There are two kinds of marketing executives in the world – Powerball marketers and Moneyball marketers.”

Powerball marketers cross their fingers and hope for great outcomes
Take the Denny’s Free Grand Slam campaign, an effort to drive trial and traffic for the restaurant chain. The number of people who visited dennys.com increased twenty-fold immediately after the Superbowl, but consumer interest since then has receded all the way back to pre-advertising levels.

Can a single Grand Slam be so remarkable that consumers remember to choose it over closer, more familiar alternatives? This seems like a big bet with Powerball odds.

Moneyball marketers start with data and then engineer the outcomes they want
Moneyball is the opposite of Powerball. The basic concept is that the conventional wisdom about creating championship-caliber baseball franchises is patently wrong and that several less familiar statistics can be used to predict success.

Want to see how Hulu has become the moneyball advertiser of early 2009? Check out the first of Compete’s monthly posts on MediaPost.

Dunkin’ Donuts took the gloves off in its battle against rival Starbucks with the October 21 launch of its “Dunkin Beat Starbucks” campaign featuring a national blind taste test where Dunkin’ coffee was preferred over Starbucks. Has the campaign resonated with coffee drinkers?

*Daily reach is the number of people that visit a website on a given day
as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users online that day.

• 45,516 people visited the dedicated microsite dunkinbeatstarbucks.com the week ending October 25
• Weekly traffic to dunkindonuts.com jumped 61% to more than 196,000 the week after the initial media launch
• The daily reach of dunkindonuts.com saw a temporary increase on October 26 & 27

So, will the battles for coffee drinkers continue? Starbucks has already launched a new media campaign with a TV ad during Saturday Night Live offering free coffee to voters on Election Day. Daily reach to Starbucks.com the day before the Election skyrocketed. Coincidence? Not likely.

Below is some advice from one coffee drinker.

Taste matters. So does staying top of mind with coffee enthusiasts. Creative marketing campaigns that break through the media clutter and reach coffee enthusiasts regardless of their brand preference may help to grow the overall market, even if only temporarily. Consumers who visited both Dunkin Donuts’ and Starbucks’ sites last week jumped to more than 485,000, its highest level since mid-September.

Stay true to your brand promise. Make sure your brand strikes a chord with the coffee drinkers that are core to the brand’s identity. Go beyond demographic-inspired or comparison pricing messages to see how the behavior of your coffee drinkers differs from your rival’s. Find out what we’re searching for, our attitudes, and where we spend time online versus (hint – I have been known to spend time on hsus.org versus either Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks despite my love for and daily cup of, coffee!). How would you reach and engage me?

Marketers invest a significant amount of time and money in online marketing campaigns aimed at delivering positive post-click advertising experiences. However, less than 1% of ads get clicked on and 95% of those clicks never lead to a sale. In fact, post-click experiences vary so widely in the same market, it’s likely that one competitor is converting more than five times as many customers than other competitors in the space.

Compete looked at the post-clickthrough conversion rates among wireless carriers. Across 20 campaigns, an average of 3.4% of those who clicked through an ad and visited the carrier’s landing page purchased online from that carrier in the same quarter. In the top quartile, this jumped to 7.8% of visitors. In this instance, improving performance from the bottom quartile to average or best-in-class could translate into a 2-6x improvement in conversion. Assuming the cost of changing the landing page experience is minimal, this increase in conversion would be a direct increase to ROI.

In the credit card space, we have seen instances of campaigns with even greater disparity in conversion between competitors.

Given these kinds of disparities, and the potential for quick, direct improvements to ROI by boosting post-click through performance, we think CMOs spending money in the Online Channel should all be asking their teams some questions:

• What is the Best in Class performance in our industry for engaging and (if applicable) converting people who click on our ads?*
• Where do we stand in relation to Best In Class?
• What can we learn from all the other campaigns our competitors are running?

*According to Compete analysis, Chase and Citibank campaign conversion outperformed American Express and Capital One by 15-30x.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Compete has a few thoughts about the answers to these questions. For some immediate things you can do to improve your company’s landing page experience, visit the replay of our recent webinar.

Guest Author: TJ Mahony, CEO & Co-Founder, FlipKey.com
(Former Managing Director at Compete)

Many moons ago, Carl Query and I helped create Compete.com. After working at Compete for five years and watching it grow from a little start-up to an industry leading web analytics firm, Carl and I decided it was time to start our own company.

Armed with a little angel money, an idea and Compete data we set off to create FlipKey.com - a community driven travel site to help consumers find trusted vacation rentals throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties.

I’m happy to report Flipkey.com is doing well and would like to share concrete examples of how Compete data helped us successfully get FlipKey.com off the ground.

Sizing the Market – Leverage Traffic Statistics to Measure the Opportunity

I will not profess to be an expert in writing business plans, but I can say that any decent business needs to know its market’s potential. If you can’t provide evidence of “how big” you could be, then there is little reason for people to get excited.

Vacation home rentals provide a great lodging option for vacationers. There are over 6M second / vacation homes in the United States which are rarely occupied by the owners. To help pay the bills, many of these second home owners will rent their beach homes, winter chalets and lake cabins to vacationers looking for a more personal, and often more affordable, lodging experience. It’s a brilliant example of P2P commerce; however, the potential can only be measured by how many consumers are aware and interested in staying in a vacation home vs. a hotel / resort.

Using Compete data, FlipKey measured how many people actually considered a vacation home accommodation as determined by unique visitor traffic to leading vacation rental listings sites (e.g. vacationhomerentals.com) and vacation rental property management sites (e.g. allstarvacationhomes.com).

Using Compete data we were able to determine over 30M domestic consumers consider vacation rentals each year. When accounting for the popularity of vacation rentals in Europe, we were able to confidently estimate over 50M consumers worldwide are seeking these unique accommodations…

Customer Acquisition – How will you attract visitors and how much will it cost you?

Last year I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and was able to listen to Reid Hoffman (PayPal, LinkedIn, Angel Investor Extraordinaire) discuss the keys to a successful start-up. Reid boiled it down to one point, “what’s your customer acquisition strategy? If you don’t know or you don’t know how much it’s going to cost you then you don’t have a business”.

I took Reid’s advice to heart.

Step 1: Using Compete customized ‘Site Referral’ reports, I was able to analyze the referral sources driving traffic to existing vacation rental sites. The data was pretty definitive – SEARCH (go figure).

Step 2: I knew it would take time for FlipKey to climb up the relevance rankings on Google, therefore SEM was the only immediate channel that could afford FlipKey access to substantial visitor traffic in the early stages of the company. As we all know, SEM can get expensive, so we needed to accurately estimate the types of key words we would need to bid on and how much they would cost.

Using Compete Search Analytics we downloaded a report of every search term in the Compete database over the last year used to refer visitors to sites in the vacation rental market. We then applied these key terms to the Google Estimator. After a few hours of copying and pasting we had a robust spreadsheet of 17K relevant key terms and a solid proxy for how much SEM would cost.

Buzz and Awareness – Let the words of consumers sell your value proposition

FlipKey is focused on delivering a community driven travel site to help consumers find trusted vacation rentals throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties. It’s easy to find reviews of hotels online, but nearly impossible to find a robust collection of vacation home reviews.

FlipKey works directly with vacation rental managers to provide a proactive guest review cultivation system. To help highlight the potential of guest reviews in driving more bookings, FlipKey conducted a survey of 400 consumers through Compete’s behaviorally targeted survey panel.

Relevance of Sample: Compete contacted consumers who exhibited interest in staying in a vacation home based on visitation to leading vacation rental listing and manager sites.

Results:

• 78% of vacation renters indicate they are significantly more likely to book a property that provides feedback from prior guests
• Only 16% of vacation rental guests were asked to leave an online review
• Had all participants been asked to leave a review, 81% would have recommended the unit, 16% were neutral and only 3% expressed a negative experience

By presenting the words and opinions of real consumers as measured by Compete’s survey panel, FlipKey was able to communicate its value proposition to the market and provide valuable research that had not previously been available.

Concluding Remarks

As of today, FlipKey has been a live service for little over two months and already represents 50,000+ vacation rental properties. Over 50 management companies have begun using FlipKey’s guest review platform and several partnerships are underway to bring FlipKey to an increasingly wider audience, both domestic and abroad.

Starting a new business and/or creating a new product requires more than data driven insights; however, I am witness to the advantages afforded by leveraging unique data sources like Compete to develop a business plan, guide tactical strategies and effectively communicate a service’s value proposition.