Digital Media Buzz > Designing For Better Conversion Rates: BuzzLogic & VideoEgg Case Studies

Designing For Better Conversion Rates: BuzzLogic & VideoEgg Case Studies

Next Page « 1 2 »

By Ron Callari

Conversion rates in online advertising depend on a number of factors, namely what kind of product or service is being branded or sold, online conversations, the firms’ goals and how the brand responds to the question; “what does ‘success’ mean to my organization?” DMB recently reviewed the marketing approaches of two very different campaigns as to how they were conceived, developed and executed by marketing organizations that designed the campaigns for enhanced interaction with the customer to produce higher conversions rates.

BuzzLogic and OTA’s “Organic. It’s worth it” campaign

San Francisco-based BuzzLogic is a different type of technology company that has developed proprietary software to track and analyze the flow of data and conversation about its clients across a panoply of social networks and websites in an effort to target its advertising effectiveness. By hyper targeting the social media Web, BuzzLogic focuses on influence and meaningful conversations that lead to “top-notch brand advertising” and “competitive CPMs.”
This year, BuzzLogic worked with the Organic Trade Association (OTA) and Haberman, its brand public relations firm, as one component of a bigger campaign to drive its “Organic. It’s worth it.” initiative. According to Valerie Combs, vice president corporate communications for BuzzLogic,

“Haberman and the OTA knew conversations were occurring about organic food in blogs, forums and social networks.” Their goal then was to tap these conversational media channels to reach “almost new” organic users and build awareness around organic food consumption as a healthy and affordable lifestyle choice.
BuzzLogic used its proprietary targeting technology, which incorporates a hybrid of search, contextual and social analysis, to identify sites leading discussions on topics tied to people’s personal interests.

Because the OTA’s goal was to reach specific audiences – most notably moms with young children and adults with an interest in healthy living – BuzzLogic first focused on determining the conversation topics most likely to attract these target markets. BuzzLogic’s platform focused on four different and distinct types of conversations: the parenting conversation (or “mommies”); the parenting and novice organic conversation (or the “light green” crowd); the health and nutritious living conversation; and the fitness, beauty and popular culture conversation, given green’s significant presence in pop culture. The goal was to identify the sites that were leading these discussions, engage audiences around these topics and ultimately ensure a prominent positioning of OTA’s ads juxtaposed to this content.

Once the locations of these conversations were identified, BuzzLogic launched a nationally targeted campaign that leveraged 300×250, 728×90 and 160×600 standard IAB flash units across the participating sites. The campaign was launched in March 2009 and ran from March 5 to May 31 across 450 sites. BuzzLogic leveraged a mix of qualitative social analysis and quantitative data to determine where to launch the OTA campaign. The online sites of RockinMama, BigRedKitchen, NotSoBoringLife and Noshtopia were selected based on site characteristics, including the length of time an author has been posting on the above topics, the relevancy of the author’s posts among his/her peers and the freshness of the content. BuzzLogic is also able to integrate quantitative elements, such as audience reach and demographics into its targeting approach, pre-campaign launch.

Post campaign, BuzzLogic delivered on the below traditional metrics. However, BuzzLogic’s focus on unearthing influential conversations helped the OTA locate receptive audiences in unexpected places – for example, those immersed in conversations about pop culture produced much higher response rates to the OTA’s ad than those immersed in conversations about health and nutrition. Because BuzzLogic measures campaign performance against specific conversations, the OTA has a better understanding of topic areas their target audience cares about.

From a traditional metric standpoint, the campaign’s conversions were as follows:

• Click-through-rate (CTR) for the campaign varied and was dependent upon the conversation topic. The range for the CTR was between .10 percent and .20 percent (which is double the industry average), with the fitness/beauty/pop culture conversations producing the best CTR.
• Delivered 5 million impressions and outperformed traditional ad network buys by more than 2 times the industry average
• Outperformed ad buys on a social networking site dedicated to moms – one of the OTA’s most important constituents – by more than 4 times the industry average
• Was responsible for more than one fifth of newsletter signups
• Was cost effective: BuzzLogic came in as the second-lowest estimated cost per click, based in terms of how much the OTA paid for each click BuzzLogic delivered.

Next Page « 1 2 »