Image from: Por Homme

As a longtime Seinfeld fan, I was excited to see none other than Jerry Seinfeld himself staring in a commercial for the new Acura NSX on Sunday. The commercial follows Seinfeld on his quest to bribe the man in line to receive the first of Acura’s hot new concept vehicles. The spot featured Seinfeld’s classic humor and even included a tribute to the iconic Soup Nazi. I thought the commercial was clever, funny, and can imagine that it was enjoyed by Seinfeld fans nationwide, but did it get people interesting in the car? The Wall Street Journal’s Driver Seat blog hailed the commercial as a success; they cite AutoTrader data which shows searches for the Acura NSX up 1,800% (though of course the NSX shown in the commercial is not yet available for sale and the sales of the prior NSX ended years ago).  Acura was reportedly enthused that Acura.com got so much traffic its site briefly crashed right after the ad.

Yesterday, I noticed that “Acura NSX” was the fourth most searched for phrase, according to Google Trends. I decided to check out Compete.com to see if there was a spike in traffic to the site, after the commercial aired.

As you can clearly see, there is a huge spike in unique visitors to the site on Sunday, when the commercial aired. So people are definitely interested today in this future car, but does Seinfeld have anything to do with it? Out of the entire 1 minute and 52 second commercial, we only see the car for about 10 seconds. Could the sleek and sexy design of the NSX that we saw for those 10 seconds alone be enough to drive so much traffic to the site? It might appear so, because although AdAge awarded the commercial 4.5 stars, Seinfeld did not make Mashable’s list of celebrities who helped Super Bowl ads the most.  Of course, the Jerry’s blatant desire for the car was designed to spawn interest beyond just the images of the NSX itself—looks like it worked.

Although the majority of us watched the ad during the Super Bowl, it was released online several days prior. I decided to check the Daily Search Referrals to Acura.com on Compete.com for the days leading up to the Super Bowl to see whether the ad’s pre Super Bowl release had increased interest in the car.

You’ll notice that the phrase “acura nsx” was the fifth most popular keyword, driving 1.67% of all search referral traffic to the site.  It is also possible that some of the “Acura” research was also tied to interest in the NSX,  However, any mention of Seinfeld doesn’t appear until #23 on the list, with the phrase “jerry Seinfeld commercial car” driving on.32% of search referral traffic to the site.

What do you think? Are you interested in Acura’s new concept car? If so, was it because Seinfeld was in the commercial, or was the car cool enough to draw you in on its own?  Or maybe you’ve always thought Jay Leno was funnier, so you’re glad he beat Jerry in the end.   How long do you think all the interest the ad generated over a period of several days will sustain?   Let us know what you think in the comments!

If you haven’t seen the above picture within the last few days, chances are you haven’t been online – and those chances are very slim. No one really knows where this picture started and how it went viral, but viral it has gone, and social media users everywhere seem to get a good laugh out of this poke at all social media sites and users. At one point or another, whether we’d like to admit it or not, we are all guilty of Facebook stalking, Instagram-ing until we’ve brought “hipster” back, notifying far too many people of our whereabouts (and unless we are David & Victoria Beckham, I’m sure no one cares), and tweeting one or two thoughts that maybe should have just stayed in our heads (that’s what thoughts are for).

Above it all, there seems to be a social media outlet for every social action you might want to take, and that amount of functionality can be extremely overwhelming – especially when it involves keeping up with multiple networks. So therein lies the genius of the Donut picture. Great job, anonymous! You’ve inspired us. We’ve decided we’d like to pay tribute to both you and our customers and use your donut analogy to explain the features of our tool, Compete PRO. Check it out:

Saved Sites & Groups – Competing donut shops

Recent Sites – All the donut shops I’ve looked at lately

Website Profile – Donut shop web performance

Category Profile- Web performance of all donut shops

Search Referrals- Keywords people use to search for donuts

Site Comparisons- How does my donut shop stack up against the others

Top Sites – “And the best donut goes to…!”

Unique Visitors – How many individual people ate donuts this month?

Visits – How many times did people come in for donuts?

Page Views – How many donuts are they eating?

Total Time Spent – How long does it take the average user to eat a donut?

Monthly Attention – What % of all total donut eating time is spent eating our donuts?

Demographics – Who eats our donuts?

Incoming Traffic – Where were our donut eaters right before they ate our donuts?

Outgoing Traffic – Where do donut eaters go next?

Related Sites – Similar donut shops

Image from: littleny / Shutterstock

Valentine’s Day is next week, and if you are celebrating, you are in good company.  57 percent of consumers will be celebrating Valentine’s Day this year, up 4 percentage points from last year.  And while this holiday is traditionally for couples, more and more people are using February 14 to show affection for other important people in their lives.

In fact, 55 percent of shoppers plan to buy more than one gift.  While 4 out of 5 will buy a gift for their significant other, 1 in 3 will buy a gift for their child, 17 percent will buy a gift for their parents, and 16 percent will buy a gift for another relative.  Women are more likely than men to buy gifts for a non-partner, especially parents.  They are, in fact, almost 3X more likely than men to buy a parent a Valentine’s Day gift.

Looking at spend, however, it seems like men are going for quality over quantity.  This Valentine’s Day, men will outspend women by 68%.

The difference in spending may be due to the types of gifts being purchased.  While men favor classics, like flowers and dinner (which don’t come cheap!), women buy a much broader range of smaller ticket items, including stuffed animals, movie tickets, and gift cards.

When it really comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what you buy or how much you spend, as long as you do with love.  Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Image from: Mitar Art

As a follow-up to a much celebrated blog by Damian Roskill last November I felt it was about time we jump into Round 2 of Tumblr vs. WordPress vs. Blogger: FIGHT!

In addition, to a quick update of the metrics on these platforms, I thought it might be nice to take a look at top blogs from each of these networks. We’ll be taking a look at top blogs to get a better understanding of the difference in the types of engaging content across platforms. Are there similarities or differences to top content across these popular blogging platforms? Find out after the benchmarking…

Here are the updated numbers for how round 2 of Tumbr vs. WordPress vs. Blogger is shaping up.

Unique Visitors

WordPress by in large dominates the competition in terms of UV’s, but we all know that’s not the whole story. They’ve seemlingly plateaued the past year with UV’s of about 30-35M UV’s each month, where as Tumblr has gained momentum with about 5-10% growth M-O-M for the last year and 105% growth from last December. While Blogger is having what looks like smooth waxing and waning between 6-10M UV’s since December of 2010.

Visits

Tumblr is up almost 70% from last December, steadily gaining share. WordPress seems to have followed a similar path on par with an audience size close to Tumblr. Lastly, Blogger seems to be on a steady albeit conservative growth path.

Average Stay

Tumblr still holding strong in terms of capturing the audience’s attention and keeping them engaged.

Category Share of Visits

From a category perspective here’s how the visits and attention share break out over the last 3 months.

Attention

Now on to the 5 top content contenders in each platform.

Tumblr’s top 5 resonates with gamers, particularly Minecraft fans, and those that love memes. Which matches what we’d expect to see in terms of overall Tumblr age demographics skewing younger.

While these last two blogs didn’t make the top 5 list, you can see that Kim Jon Il Looking at Things and Teenager Posts are break-outs to keep an eye on.

WordPress’ top 5 seems to engage those interested in personal stories with a blog about fibromyalgia and dark poetry & satire beating out the meme blogs.

WordPress has a less niche audience, with age demographics closer to the US internet averages.

Blogger top blogs on the other hand are highly engaging with coupon and discount seekers, a-k-a Moms.

Blogger also is pretty close to the US average in terms of age engagement, but over indexes slightly with 18-34 year olds and 55-64 year olds.

While the fight is still raging and there are no clear winners, what are your thoughts on these platforms?

Do these metrics align with your expectations for these networks?

What is your experience with content from these sites?

Image from: J Corey Davis

Now that the dust has settled from the initial launch of Google+ it is time for some analysis of the social network’s functionality and popularity. No doubt people are extremely excited with the new release of Google’s social platform, which links together personalized search, a customizable social network, and the ability to add value to any page on the web with the new and highly versatile +1. 2011 was certainly an exciting year for the company, with over 37.9 billion dollars of revenue, 96% of which came from the advertising budgets of companies such as: Amazon, eBay, Expedia, Lowes, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, Verizon, and State Farm (to name a few sources that WordStream provided). The search giant is literally dominating the online marketplace, and it doesn’t look like they are losing any momentum.

Google+ was certainly controversial during its initial launch phases. Many people doubted the ability of the famously creative company to turn their focus from search onto the development of a social platform. But it seems that once again, the people at Google have gone above and beyond the expectations of the consumer population. People can now publicly +1 literally any page on the internet. In December, the landing page for the feature of Google+ (google.com/+1/button also known as the sub-domain plusone.google.com) has grown to over 40 million unique visitors. Since November, Compete has been tracking this activity and the monthly growth for the feature has been enormous. As shown below, the Compete.com graphs for plusone.google.com are showing the growth for the month of December (remember that this feature has only been tracked since November which is where the data points start to appear):

It is safe to say that the +1 button is being received well by the audiences using Google+. These growths are tremendous and indicate that Google+, thus far, has been a success. The Google Circles feature has also been one of the primary differentiators between Google+ and its competitors. The simple and very visual way to segment friend groups, audiences, and customers is sure to be an excellent tool for varieties of users.

Feature analysis is great, but when it comes to the popularity and reception of a social platform by its users, nothing paints a more realistic picture for computer (non-mobile) usage than the panel based performance of a website based on click stream data. With a 1% sample size for the US, Compete’s enormous panel of 2 million Americans is the best measure of a website’s popularity for non-mobile US based users. It is important to keep in mind that Google+ is an extremely popular mobile application. Over 700,000 Android-powered smart phones are activated daily which include complimentary Google+ accounts. Google+ has grown by about 40% for US non-mobile traffic in each of the primary metrics that shows website performance. In December, Google+ reached a new high of 20 million unique visitors (considered to be the primary indicator of popularity), 50 million visits, and 200 million Page Views. Below you can see the graph depicting the past months of Unique Visitor and Page View growth since its implementation on June 28th:

It is now safe to say that Google+ is becoming an enormous success, with nearly half of the unique visitors of Twitter (40,411,065 unique visitors in December). With a steep upward trend and knowledge of the power behind a Google product, expect continued growth from the unequaled search engine’s social platform known for ingenuity, creativity, and revolutionary product offerings.

Do you think founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page would have ever predicted that their experiment as PhD candidates at Stanford would have turned into a social platform? If you think the answer is yes, then what about personalized search based on individual preferences social interactions? Google is now able to do personalized search, which is sure to evolve with the social platform that the company has built. Google is merging social and search to create an intuitive search engine that can literally predict what you will be looking for. The feature is called ‘Your World’ and could effectively change search forever (again). Users are now able to toggle in between the Your World function and the ‘normal’ Google search functionality. This important step towards combination of search and social is absolutely a result of the power of social networks and their increasing popularity on the web. Google, it appears, wants a piece of that very large advertising pie.

The bottom line: Google is dominating the Internet marketplace. 2011 has surely been a year of enormous success for the company and 2012 surely holds many surprises. The streamlined privacy policy was also a necessary addition to the multiproduct platform and should be a great way to continue to experiment with product offerings in 2012. This newly updated policy will also aid in serving the most pertinent ads to the appropriate consumers, across a more unified product portfolio. This will also provide the ability to serve the most relevant ads to target consumers in perfect harmony with the consumer’s needs. Check back in to see more posts about Google performance and product releases in 2012.

Using competitive intelligence is a crucial component for gauging your marketing performance against the efforts of your competitors. By doing a little research before you develop and build your new marketing strategy, you can see what is working and what’s not for your competitors, giving you the edge to emulate and improve. Using a competitive intelligence solution like Compete PRO can help you get a better understanding of your competitive landscape and show you how to close the gaps between you and your competitors.

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Download 5 Steps to Marketing Success Using Competitive Intelligence today! For more helpful resources, check out our other whitepapers and webinars at Compete.com!

Image from: HerCampus

Calling all college ladies: HerCampus.com is the up and coming guide for all a college girl’s needs.  From work out tips, to fashion trends, and campus cuties, this site gets detailed and in-depth about all the do’s and don’ts of college life. As a college student, I first heard about this site early last year and I found myself coming back to it often as an increasingly more interesting procrastination tool.  I decided to take a look at the data from Compete.com to see what else people are turning to the site for.

As seen from their visits, HerCampus.com has been growing steadily from their kick off year in 2009. Founded by 3 female Harvard Students, two of which have since graduated, there is no telling what this “collegiette’s guide to life” will think of next. Currently, HerCampus covers over two hundred campuses and the numbers are still growing. HerCampus.com provides a personal touch to each campus while also remaining true to what the college years are all about, especially for young women.

I wanted to see what exactly others are logging onto HerCampus.com for, so I pulled the top 10 search referrals for this month.

Judging from the graph above, you can tell that these topics can vary on the holiday season. Valentine’s day drove the most traffic with 1.92%, while the rest ranged from sorority tips to why a college minor is important. Geared towards women, made for women, and utilized by women, it is clear that this site has done something truly innovative for the female college network.

As I suspected, most of the traffic for HerCampus.com comes from search engines and social networking sites such as Google, Facebook, Bing and Twitter.  I think that many college girls may find themselves interested in one post, tweet or blog from HerCampus, and can than inevitably spend hours deep in the sites many other details. The easily navigable tabs allow users to find their own “campus” from a list of colleges and universities.  There is a section for every college girls needs, including style, beauty, health, love, career, and my personal favorite: deals & steals. Although the site itself might seem a bit cluttered visually, I think it matches perfectly with the not-so-organized life of a college girl.

To be honest, I am thrilled with a site that targets college women in such a positive and playful way. Check out HerCampus.com and let us know what you think!

Image from: Tatiana Popova / Shutterstock

Now that Super Bowl XLVI has aired (with a home team loss), I’ve been thinking about the next big event for network TV: The 84th Academy Awards. While the trend for Super Bowl viewership has been rising for several years now (the 2011 game was the most watched program in TV history), Oscar’s ratings have been on the decline. After a positive bump in 2010, ratings were down again in 2011 by about 10%.

There are several theories as to why ratings slipped; most revolve around talent of the hosts and popularity of the nominated films. Snarking on the hosts is easy, but I don’t know anyone who watches award shows based on who is presenting. So, I won’t put too much blame (or praise) at Billy Crystal’s feet for the 2012 ratings.

More interesting is the reported correlation between nominated movie box office and ratings. It feels right to say that viewers will tune in to see if a movie they have seen wins an award. And the bigger the box office, the more people potentially care about the film. But is it actually true? ABC better hope not because if it is, this year’s Oscars ratings will be much lower than last year’s. Compared to box office receipts of past nominated films at comparable times of the year (via boxofficemojo.com), the current crop of nominees have made less that have of the 2011 and a third of the 2010 films.

2010 nominated films:

Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

2010 total nominated box office (as of feb 5 2010): $1,531,005,145

2010 TV ratings: 41.7 million (0.027 viewers per dollar)

2011 nominated films:

Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone

2011 total nominated box office (as of feb 4 2012): $1,244,746,772

2011 TV ratings: 36.7 million (0.029 viewers per dollar)

2012 nominated films:

The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse

2012 total nominated box office (as of feb 3 2012): $567,129,551

2012 TV ratings: ?? (If popular wisdom is true, ABC can expect a dismal 17 million viewers this year)

But TV ratings aren’t the whole story. Consumers are growing less dependent traditional media like television every year. As a web developer here at Compete, I’m particularly interested in what was happening online. And the internet was much better for the Oscars than TV was last year.

First, take a look at this traffic graph to the Oscars.org site for the last 24 months.

TV viewership may have dropped by 3 million between 2010 and 2011, but web traffic to the official site was up by 100,000 unique visitors year over year for the month of the show. People still want to know who won, but – at least last year – were less willing to watch the actual broadcast to get it.

The official site isn’t the only place to go for Oscar info, of course; Go.com (the official ABC network site) and Wikipedia both get significant traffic for the keyword “Academy Awards.”

Another place we are all increasingly turning to is Twitter. Those that watched live kept their followers updated via live-blogging. And in Twitter traffic at least, the Academy Awards seemed to hold its own with the Super Bowl last year.

So how many of us watch the envelopes open on February 26th? I guess we’ll all know in 3 weeks.

Image from: Tatiana Popova / Shutterstock

A few weeks ago, we wrote about our Webinar that highlighted shopping trends during the 2011 Holiday Season. Recently, our retail and consumer products senior associate, Debra Arbesman talked to the people at Monetate about some of the trends in the 2011 Holiday Season. This past year, online shopping on promotional days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday increased 20% year-over-year. Debra identifies three key trends in the 2011 Holiday Shopping Season that explain this increase.

She notes, “Consumers are increasingly turning to the web for their holiday (and everyday) purchases. Brick-and-mortar retailers need to think of their online channel as an extension of their stores. Make it easier for consumers to switch back and forth between channels seamlessly (e.g., allow them to buy online and return in store, offer in-store pick-up, accept in-store coupons online). Keep messaging, pricing, and offerings as consistent as possible across channels,”

Check out the rest of Debra’s 2011 Holiday trends over at Monetate.

It’s the week before the Super Bowl and everyone is gearing up for game day. Mashable notes that many things have changed since the Giants and the Patriots last faced off in 2008 in Super Bowl XLII. Particularly, how social media has totally transformed the marketing strategies behind both teams.

Facebook made huge news this week by filing for IPO. This decision revealed a lot of interesting information; for instance, we learned that Facebook has barely even “scratched the surface” on advertising, according to Digiday.

What are you Twitter pet peeves? BostonInno looks into things that make you an annoying tweeter. As it turns out, no one else cares about what you are eating for lunch.

Search Engine Watch published a report this year that suggests, with the help of the Olympics and upcoming elections, search ad spending could hit $19.51 billion. Similarly, we learned that Facebook is planning to run mobile ads.

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