So there’s a nice article at AdAge about how the “Dove Evolution” clip on YouTube has generated more page hits for campaignforrealbeauty.com than a SuperBowl ad. But more than that, has earned it time on Oprah, Ellen and even Geraldo on Fox — things that a mere Superbowl ad doesn’t do (that often).
Getting back to those pageviews, I think the broader question is … well, so what?
Of course, its great that the site is getting hits — traffic is always good. But, the broader question for Dove should be “did it translate into action?” And of course, what “action” are they measuring?
The AdAge article does a magnificent job hyping up the magnitude of a viral ‘hit’, but it does little to follow up on the real meat and potatoes of the issue lies. Of course “conversion” is not a very sexy topic; and of course, its also a function of the site itself. But, its also a function of how warm that traffic was to the topic at hand.
I guess what I’m saying is that — sure, it got a lot of traffic, and yes, we should all be shocked at the power of viral marketing, and wow, it cost next to nothing.
But, out of that traffic, are they able to answer the following questions:
- How many donated to the Dove Fund?
- How many items were downloaded?
- How many calls did they get enquiring about their message?
- How many “self-esteem” stories did they share?
- How long were they even on the site?
- And critically … how did it compare to the traffic before?
How about this question — has traffic stayed up? Or has it fallen to pre-viral trick levels?
These are questions that are worth answering — and AdAge doesn’t answer any of them.
To be fair, who knows if Dove is willing to part with that information. After all, if the conversion rates are abysmal, it reflects poorly on the site, and makes the story of “viral-marketing-as-a-hit” less palatable.
But for every story about “traffic” the corollary needs to be asked — what did that traffic do?
Here’s an analogy for the Web2.0 crowd.
Posts that get “Dugg” get huge surges in traffic … up to 30-40 000 page views. Well, that’s nice. However, a tiny miniscule percentage of that traffic actually clicks on ad sense ads. There are a legion of reasons for this; however, the point is, the metric that the webmaster really cares in are those clicks — and how much residual traffic he or she can retain.
Perhaps 1% of traffic may have clicked on those ads previously — but with the Digg spike it might proportionately fall to 0.001%
So, congratulations to Dove — and Edelman, the firm that kicked off the viral video — for their traffic-related successes. But, for a full story, why don’t you release all of the numbers? It would give a fuller picture of the “Dove” story, and give a real conclusion to the successes of viral marketing.
UPDATE: I’m glad I’m not the only one sounding the Metrics horn; Donna Bogatin of ZdNet also holds MySpace and YouTube traffic bonanza’s feet to the metaphorical fire for not returning a commensurate ROI. Nice.
October 31st, 2006 at 6:41 pm | Permalink
Bang on. Traffic from Digg and virtually all the other social bookmarking/cool-stuff-finding aggregators is pretty much dead traffic in terms of ad click conversions.
My guess: people coming in are too much like us … geeky techy newshounds who are adblind.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:03 pm | Permalink
Hey John,
Thanks for stopping by! :)
I tried to address something like this last month:
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/09/07/is-your-blogs-revenue-built-on-a-house-of-cards/#comments
Darren Prowse stopped by for a lively debate and made a good point; conversion rates will often depend on the topic at hand … because it will likely affect the traffic you attract.
Geeky topics –> poor conversion because … well, we’re adblind.
Mundane regular topics (or consumer related topics) –> much better conversion.
Cheers!
t @ dji
November 1st, 2006 at 3:41 am | Permalink
[...] My del.icio.us DivX Unmuzzled - The Quiet Period Ends David Freeberg goes deep into DivX. Deep Jive Interests » Fine, But What?s Viral Traffic Worth? Good article dissecting some of the differences between “traffic” and “valuable traffic” iRobot announces "Sentinel" robot army project - Engadget I’m interested in the robot angle, but these look like what I used to make with my Legos - BEFORE MindStorms… Time-lapse software for Canon Digital Cameras Just plain cool. Advertising Age - Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot ANY given ad can have a better ROI than a SuperBowl spot - that doesn’t mean they ALL will.more… [...]
November 1st, 2006 at 5:20 am | Permalink
Tony - you are asking the right questions, however, how does Coke put a price on branding? Much of advertising’s goal is simply to keep a brand or product “top of mind”. Can we correlate that a Coke ad that someone watched on YouTube translated to a viewer grabbing it over Pepsi at a convenience store 8 weeks later? That seeing a Coke can as product placement in a TV show translated to a single extra sale?
I think it comes down to the law of averages. If this very article gets Dugg, and a million people see it, will you be upset because you could not directly correlate this to immediate and lasting benefits to yourself. You have simply exposed more people to your product, with the likelihood that a certain small percentage may subscribe to your RSS feed, or come back again. More likely, people will simply leave your site - but - what if you get Dugg again next week, and people begin to see a pattern, that you have a site worth visiting.
Building a brand happens slowly over time. True, it would be great to backup these “viral success stories” with cold hard metrics as to the benefit to the brand. However, you cannot always get the brand to share these metrics, even if they have them. Correlating them to actions would be an inacurate science, leaving more scrutiny that benefit.
If Dove said that the “viral-ness” of the ad led to a 40% increase in donations to their fund? How could they prove that - and how could we believe them?
November 1st, 2006 at 2:33 pm | Permalink
[...] Measuring the impact of Viral is more than a numbers game… Via Mathew Ingram’s blog, I read with interest Tony Hung’s interpretation of Dove’s viral “Evolution” campaign - which Adage recently suggested achieved greater ROI than a Superbowl ad - and specifically his thoughts around measurement. However, I tend to disagree with Tony’s assertions. Without question, the ability to directly connect a PR or marketing initiative to a specific business outcome will always be the holy grail. But that isn’t always the full measure of success. Without having the insight of being involved in this campaign, I would suggest that there are multiple motivations to this exercise - donations to the Dove Self-Esteem Fund being only one, albeit perhaps the most important. The value of viral - and particularly now with technologies such as blogs and YouTube - is, in my view, as much about being able to capture - through a single activity - raw audience insights, whether via feedback, comments and blog posts; all of which can serve to further enhance the overall perception of the brand. Without these tools, we might only be able to share our collective admiration for the ad, and/or disgust at what it represents (if that’s how we, in fact, truly feel) with the person sitting next to us on the couch. It filters raw emotion and uncompromising feedback like no survey or focus group ever could, and becomes a powerful gauge - and potential influencer - for overall brand reputation (obviously, reinforced by the collective success of other “Campaign for Real Beauty” initiatives). It even feeds into those who would suggest that this campaign is, in fact, a subtle reverse psychological marketing ploy. But I think that last point is important. Are we to measure this campaign from the basis of individual tactics, or do we need to look at it from the broader perspective of the overall campaign? According to Adage (quoting Todd Tilleman’s of Unilever): …the emotional response the “Campaign for Real Beauty” has evoked from women has substantially strengthened brand loyalty, noting that two-thirds of brand sales now come from people buying more than one product, up from one-third three years ago. “If you stood only for function, people would assess the brand based only on one category,” he said. While cross-marketing, new-product performance and other tactical appeals have helped build that number too, he said, “I’m convinced the real driver of it is that the brand has increased awareness of this mantra, this mission.” It hasn’t hurt sales, either. Dove has gained share in the past year in four of its five major categories: personal wash (body wash and bar soap), hair care, deodorant and hand-and-body lotion. Personally, I also wonder what impact the potential for repeat viewing has on a specific audience… This video continually fascinates me. I’ve watched it a number of times now and, as a father of six-year-old twin girls, it has undeniable impact - perhaps even more so than for other audience segments. So what, then - to use Tony’s phrase? The fact that the article makes no mention of a spike in donations shouldn’t take away from other potential metrics of success - the numbers game being only one… Published 01 November 2006 13:28 by Brendan Hodgson TrackBack URL for this post:http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/trackback.aspx?PostID=5650 [...]
November 1st, 2006 at 9:53 pm | Permalink
Dan — Thanks for stopping by.
Apologies for the late response ;)
And you make a point.
There’s a role for branding in all of this as well. Of course its important — we live in a branded world.
But I guess the follow up question is how to keep brands (and “branding” the verb) honest? Sure, we all want “top of mind” awareness, and yes, being the brand leader conveys all kinds of bottom-line goodness.
I think we can keep things honest by re-inforcing the idea of metrics.
How are we measuring brand success? What are those end points that are important that we’re measuring?
As for your question about how “40% increase in donations to their fund? How could they prove that - and how could we believe them?”
Well, sure you’d have to take what they’re saying on faith — but there’s a way to measure that, and they’d have to have something in place BEFORE the viral campaign rolled out.
1) on the site, “key” all online donations so that they’re easily accountable as coming from the site (”Ask for Cathy” is an old DM trick)
2) then over time, as long as your dating each donation, you could see if there’s been a spike after the viral campaign.
And — you could see if there’s a commensurate spike in donations as the traffic rises … or the percentage drops.
Thanks for stopping by!
Cheers
t @ dji
January 25th, 2007 at 3:03 pm | Permalink
[...] There is no doubt that Digg and Reddit and similar sites drive massive amounts of traffic, as Search Engine Journal points out — and SEOmoz also notes the benefits of what it calls a “linkbait” strategy. But is that traffic actually worth something over the long term? It might be nice to brag about, but it’s not always something to build a business around. Ravi says Digg traffic is worth “diddly-squat.” Tony “Call me Dr. Tony” Hung has also written about this. [...]
February 14th, 2007 at 7:18 am | Permalink
[...] Tony “Call me Dr. Tony” Hung has also written about this, and others are commenting on Kim’s experience, including 10e20, Chip Griffin at Pardon the Disruption and Small Business SEM. And Webomatica has written about his experience with Digg and Megite and other sites. [...]