The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

When Jupiter Drawing Room approached us to help out with a new campaign for The Sunflower Fund we jumped at the chance. The Sunflower Fund is a wonderful organisation which was founded in 1999 by parents of children with leukaemia, to try and get financial support and raise the number of bone marrow stem cell donors in South Africa.

The 1 in 100 000 Challenge was conceptualised as a build up to National Bandana Day on 12 October 2010. The campaign, designed by Jupiter Drawing Room, demonstrates the harsh odds that only one in every 100 000 people suffering from leukaemia will find a bone marrow stem cell match.

The Sunflower Fund has challenged popular personality DJ Fresh to ‘meet’ 100 000 people online in 1000 hours. Every user that signs up to join the challenge counts as a ‘meet’.

Digital integration

We designed and built an integrated mircosite which allows users to engage with the campaign via their Facebook accounts, pledge monetary donations, as well as send emails to their friends, inviting them to join the cause too.

A unique feature of the site is the campaign tracking feature, whereby each user who signs up is represented by a simple graphic profile. This allows users to be acknowledged for there contribution and also monitors the progress of the challenge to reach 100 000.

The 1 in 100 000 Challenge runs until 12 October and there’s still a long way to go until the 100 000 target. Show your support for leukaemia and sign up to meet Fresh by visiting www.1in100000.co.za.

It’s always one of the most satisfying feelings when a few months hard work and a good couple of late nights finally manifest into a beautiful end result. We were very excited to launch finally an all new website for brand and research consultancy OIL Insight last week.

OIL (Original Insight Learning) is a brand strategy agency owned by the Lowe Bull group. Our task was to build an online space to differentiate OIL and establish a more independent image for the company. Part of the challenge was to digitally represent OIL’s unqiue approach to brand strategy, which combines comprehensive research insights with creative solutions.

Our design team did a  particularly great job in creating the colourful and striking website interface. The quirky cartoon-like illustrations, produced in collaboration with Once Horse Town,  are customised for each page of the site, with an animation effect on the Home page. This visual theme is integrated throughout OIL’s various digital and social media channels.

Visit oilinsight.co.za to see the finished product! We are confident that our work will help OIL Insight maintain a solid and powerful online brand as they continue to develop as a business.

Read the story on BizCommunity.

A few weeks ago we featured exclusive insights from the eMetrics Optimization Summit in San Jose California, courtesy of our COO Niel Bornman who attended the event.

What we didn’t mention was that Niel was flown to the conference to accept a prestigious award from the Web Analytics Association.

As chairman of the WAA’s Examination Committee, Clickthinking’s COO was instrumental in the development of the Web Analyst Certification Program, the first official global certification for web analysts.

He was presented with a Presidential Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the WAA and the global web analytics field. Needless to say we are very proud to have Niel on our team!

Read the full story on BizCommunity.

Readers of BizCommunity, South Africa’s marketing and media hub, may have noticed our Feliny for Lucky Pet campaign amongst the top news headlines on Wednesday.

The Feliny Heist is an interactive digital promotion which invites users to participate in solving an intriguing online mystery over a two month period, for the chance to win an Apple iPad.

The project is a fresh approach to petfood marketing, which traditionally emphasises the health benefits of products, for the purpose of introducing Lucky Pet’s new Supreme Dry Kibbles.

Despite the elements of excitement and intrigue, a social responsibility factor is incorporated into the promotion, whereby a donation of petfood goes to the SPCA for every new member who joins the Feliny Heist. So far a substantial donation of 450 bags of petfood has been collected.

Campaign statistics

Feliny.co.za has been live for a few weeks, and the latest figures from our data analysts confirm that the campaign has really begun to take off.

Statistics measured from when the site received its first visits on 19 April to this week:

• 454 sign-ups from 1446 visits by 1005 unique visitors; this is a high conversion rate of 31.3%
• Of these visits, 281 (20%) originated from the banner campaign
• 122 visitors (10%) opted to send the campaign email to a friend
• Of the 1005 visitors, 365 chose to view the campaign video
• The video has been viewed a total of 500 times

Clickthinking worked closely with Jupiter Drawing Room on the Feliny Heist. We can’t wait to see how the campaign fares as it moves into the exciting second phase.

Join the challenge by visiting the site, and keep track of the investigation as it unfolds on Twitter and Facebook.

Statistics released by comScore late last week suggest that social networking site Facebook is at the forefront of the US display ad market.  Facebook ad views accounted for 16.2 % of the market’s total, surpassing all online publishers including giants such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

The report from comScore, a leading digital marketing intelligence agency, shows that a total of 1.1 trillion display ads were shown to American users during the first quarter of 2010, 15% more than the same period last year. Of those, Facebook racked up a massive 176.3 billion display ad impressions.

Yahoo still makes substantially more profit from display ads however, due to their extensive network which serves ads on sites other than their own, combined with the poor click-through rate for Facebook ads. Nevertheless the social networking site is reportedly poised to reach billion dollar revenues for the first time this year.
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This is the second installment in Niel’s two-part account of his experience at the eMetrics Optmization Summit in San Jose, California. If you haven’t read the first part see previous post or click here.

Take action, even in the face of data discrepancies!

It is clear to me that there are two distinct tracks in web analytics.

Technology – this track is concerned with instrumentation, data integrity, data integration, BI warehouses, cubes, data model development, etc. The web analytics space is filled with technologists, people who migrated out of the back office into the limelight when their data warehouses seemed to contain valuable information.
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Our COO Niel Bornman attended the international eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit last week in San Jose, California. This is the first of two posts in which Niel shares his experience of the conference, as well as insight into the web analytics industry.

Are we still behind the rock?

“How far behind are South African web analysts?” is a question I pondered the entire week at eMetric

I spent the most part of the last 9 days travelling to and from the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the rest of it interacting with the best and brightest minds in the world of web analytics…as well as some of the not so bright.

The eMetrics Summit is aimed at the web analytics industry comprehensively and attracted people from all three walks of web analytics life - vendors, clients and consultants. Speakers included Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Jim Novo, Eric Petersen and Bryan Eisenberg.

I walked away with a couple of key insights:

1. Technology vendors don’t understand the world of web analytics, they understand databases.
2. Web analysts at large organisations have very tough jobs.
3. If data discrepancies are stopping you from gaining actionable insight, you probably don’t know how.
4. Web analytics is a third world economy with too many of us thinking we are ninjas.
Read more…

“We’re at the very beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade.”

Steve Rubel - Advertising Age

Rubel in the above article uses statistics from Compete and Nielsen to motivate why he deems Facebook will become the dominant force in the next decade and how they will beef up their core features which will include email and search. No doubt, Media brokers (those with contracts to sell space on Facebook will jump on this information) and use it to excite advertisers into re-allocating their budgets.

What a load of nonsense! Google has been dominant because they match customers with relevant services and products better than anyone else via their search product. This is a service which advertisers are quite prepared to pay for and the ROI potential is very hard to beat.

Facebook on the other hand plays in a space which has proven very difficult to monetise. Once in a blue moon, I come across a campaign on Facebook that offers any value to the advertiser. This is definitely the exception rather than the rule. Until this changes, I think its preposterous to spin predictions about it being the next big commercial dominant player.

Sorry Steve, I’ve buried this article in the bucket with the ones that predicted that Geocities, AOL, Myspace…would become the next big thing

Today,  Joanne Reidy, our creative director, stumbled across the fascinating existence of a South African catalogue website that give you absolutely NO way to purchase from them. I was hoping somebody can help us find the owner of the following website so that we can point the severity of the error out to them. And, of course, the simplicity of fixing the problem.

The story in short: The website is listed in Google for “corporate gifts”:

We click through to the home page:

Evaluating it from a usability perspective …. so far so good:
-    The landing page has relevant introduction copy
-    The gifts are organised into categories that make sense (although perhaps too many of them)
-    The dates on the catalogues are recent.

Joanne opted for the “funky finds” category as she was looking for notebooks to brand as corporate gifts. She lands on a typical CATEGORY PAGE. Although it isn’t the best example of a page optimised to aid simple comparison.

Scrolling-and-scanning she quickly spots the right product and click to the DETAIL PAGE:

There are no calls to action on the detail page!

Well we didn’t want to give up there but even putting our backs into it we couldn’t locate any contact details whatsoever on the entire site. Not even the name of the person/company responsible for the site. Nothing!

Did we miss something? Do they not want people to buy from them? Or is there another mysterious reason for this? Can anybody help?

For the second installment of the Improving conversion series we use analytics data for phinda.com, another lodge from andBeyond that we launched on the same day as Kwandwe.  All the lodge sites have the same content structure and page layout, only the content differs.

FIVE SECOND TEST

Following on from our first conversion post we review the relevance of the fivesecondtest.

The top clicks from the home page for 1 Jan 2010 to 5 Feb 2010 were:

FINDING: As suspected there weren’t any relationship between the fivesecondtest results and the actual behaviour of visitors. Although the Africa and India links were immediately noticed very few people clicked on it.

PATH ANALYSIS

Most analytics tools offer numerous reports to evaluate typical visitor paths. These types of reports are problematic to interpret.  A common mistake is to look for an ideal path to conversion. There is no such thing!  Individuals with a variety of needs, personalities and levels of knowledge are visiting your site.

A better approach is to evaluate bounces and exits for each step to identify conversion opportunties. We start with our Top landing page:

1. Landing page:
•    68% of traffic enters via the home page
•    We are happy with the 33% bounce rate. It is well above category average.

2. Second page:
We selected the Path Finder report from to evaluate the performance of the second page.

Please note: we couldn’t simply pull the exit rate report for these pages it would not have given us the performance of the page as STEP 2 in a journey.

Entrance -> Landing page -> SECOND PAGE -> Exit

We found that the Safari-lodges page performs the best as a second page from the home page. Only 10% left.  Although the exit rate of the other pages is also within acceptable margins we will focus on the Map page to identify conversion improvement opportunities for the next post in the series.

A final test for the second page performance is to see which page is most often the second step in a path that led to a conversion:

The winner is Safari-lodges with 30% and then Specials with 25%. Again it looks like the Map page is best reviewed for conversion opportunity.