Image from: Floris Slooff/Shutterstock

Compete recently hosted a webinar on “How Ad Effectiveness Tools Can Help Optimize Your Media Strategy.” Learn how our panel based solutions are able to provide data and insights you need to understand how your advertising affects consumer behavior.
A few takeaways from our presentation:

1. An ad campaign impacts consumer behavior beyond just the brand site, extending into 3rd party site research, competitive visitation, search, and so on. With Ad Impact, we have the advantage of measurement based on a panel as opposed to cookies, giving us insight into all peripheral activity.
2. It is beneficial to future campaign optimization to break down overall activity results and analysis into exposure frequency, targeting tactic, placement, or creative to better assess the drivers behind your campaign success.
3. With Ad Impact, not only are you finally able to quantify the results to your marketing efforts, but you can do so at the dollar spend level. Our ROI analysis provides data-backed cost-efficiency evaluation across various data cuts.

Check out the replay below:

Check out the slides here:

Image from: TV Equals

Everyone know about comedian Dane Cook. He has released five comedy albums, has starred in a handful of movies and TV shows, and has managed to accumulate over 2,800,000 Twitter followers. So I was intrigued when I read an AdAge article that suggested that Cook’s high number of Twitter followers gives his new TV, called Next Caller which will air on NBC in the fall, a leg up over other new television shows.

I decided to check Compete PRO for any correlation between Twitter and the NBC website, so I looked at the incoming traffic to nbc.com.

It appears as though Twitter drives a decent amount of traffic to the NBC site – 44,031 visits to be exact. However, this may be due to some of NBC’s other social media efforts as well. Next I decided to check out the search referrals to nbc.com, to see if people saw Cook’s tweets about his new show, and then searched for more information. However, NBC’s veteran shows dominated their search referral list.

In fact, I couldn’t find mention of  Cook or Next Caller anywhere on the search referrals list. All hope isn’t lost though, as the show hasn’t premiered yet. Going forward, it will be interesting to take a look back into the data to see if Next Caller will be able to maximize on Cook’s fan base. With only 3 tweets and less than 200 followers, the @NBCNextCaller twitter handle certainly has a lot of room for improvement!

Image from: Olympics Image / Shutterstock

With opening ceremonies just 58 days away, excitement for the summer Olympics was in full swing as the Torch Relay began last weekend. I wanted to see which events are drawing the biggest crowd, so I checked the search referrals to the london2012.com (click to enlarge).

Surprisingly, there is no specific event was mentioned until the 22nd search referral, “when does the 2012 gymnastics olympics start” which drove .61% of traffic to the site. Instead, the majority of the search referrals revolved around the games as a whole, or information about the date or schedule.

Next I looked at the daily keyword destinations for the term “london 2012″ in the hopes of finding an event-specific site on the list.

On the keyword destinations, the website for the USA’s Olympic basketball team was #16 on the list, accounting for .72% of search volume. Either way, there wasn’t an event that blew search traffic out of the water.

Which event are you more exited for: basketball or gymnastics? Or is there another event that is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

Image from: Ticket Image / Shutterstock

With the summer concert season upon us, and lots of great shows coming to Compete HQ’s hometown of Boston in the next few months, there’s a ton of buzz online about the best shows, and the best venues.  I wouldn’t mind checking out some of my favorite artists this summer, and maybe catch a Sox game or two.  Where does a fan go if they absolutely must have front row Bieber tickets?  If you’re looking to find seats close enough for Biebs to be able to see your tears when he rips into the chorus of “Love Me”, (who wouldn’t!) you have some options.   I decided to take a look in Compete PRO, and do a little snooping to see which ticket sites consumers are heading to for their entertainment needs.

At Almost 10M unique visitors for the month of April, Ticketmaster.com has a nice lead on the competition, with Fandango in second in the Entertainment & Ticketing category.  While Fandango is strictly a movie site, and Ticketmaster has everything from sports to concerts, I did find it interesting to see Fandango’s traffic increases at such a huge rate in the summer, hitting a peak of more than 12M UV’s last July.  Apparently those folks in Hollywood know a thing or two about America’s appetite for movies, and summer blockbusters actually make a few bucks for them.  I can’t say I’ve never headed to the movies on a hot day to get out of the humidity in Boston!

A look into the category search referrals also shows a similar trend:

The keyword “ticketmaster” is driving 7% of the search referrals into the category, with “fandango” and “stubhub” also capturing a very respectable 7% combined.  Here we get some insight into how Americans actually search for tickets online, and it’s fairly clear most of them have some idea where they’re going to get them before they do a search.

Rather than search for “Bieber Tickets” sites like TicketMaster and StubHub do a great job keeping their brands top of mind, and when Beliebers see tickets go on sale, they’re heading directly to the brand site to buy the tickets, instead of searching by specific type of ticket.

Scrolling farther down the list we start to see more specific, longer tail keyword searches.  One Direction wields some serious search clout to ticketing sites, with two appearances in the top 35 terms.  I’m not exactly sure who they are…who has time for more than one boy band?  We also see a lot of sports activity with my beloved Red Sox ringing in with the 54^th most referrals for the category.  That’s 48 spots higher than “Yankees Tickets”, for those of you keeping score at home.  The AL East Standings don’t look quite so great for The Sox, but the season is young…

Where does all this traffic come from, you ask?

Not surprisingly, the lion’s share is coming from search, with Google, Yahoo and Bing responsible for about 20M visits last month.  MLB.com also makes a strong showing on the list, and it’s interesting to see how important baseball is to ticketing sites on the whole, with almost 2.5M visits a month from MLB.com alone.

With all these different options to find and buy tickets, it would be very interesting to see which sites are actually doing the best job converting shoppers into buyers.  What do you think?  Have you had a good experience buying tickets on one of these sites?  If you’ve shopped a bunch of them, I’d love to hear your feedback on which ones work best for you.  Hit me on Twitter @tkeene6, or shoot me an email at tkeene@compete.com.

Image from: Photo Image / Shutterstock

Happy Memorial Day weekend! This week for our Sunday Series we’ve got 10 photo sharing sites with large monthly increases in unique visitors.

Did you know that the average Facebook brand post only reaches 16% of its audience? Mashable reported that Facebook has rolled out an updated feature that makes it easy to tell brands the percentage of fans that see their posts among other analytics updates.

CMO’s: Are you looking to extend your tenure? According to AdAge, social data may be the key. Their posts suggests that social data, when used well, can add years to your job’s lifespan.

Is your brand on Google+? Have you had any marketing success with the platform? Digiday writes about brands like H&M, Ferarri and Starbucks that have performed well on the social network. Not surprisingly, these were all B2C companies. Have you found any B2B companies with good Google+ profiles?

Where is the future of SEO headed? According to Search Engine Watch’s Andy Betts it is towards “investment, innovation & integration.” He includes a diagram that demonstrates how search engine optimization has changed over the past few months and is leaning towards more investment in the development of technologies that fuel innovation and integration.

Finally, for all of the recent college graduates out there, this article may be really helpful: Heather Ward of Boston Innovation writes about what she has learned during her first two years working in marketing. She emphasizes the importance of asking questions and spending time planning to make sure you don’t encounter too many “surprises.”

For more competitive intelligence and online marketing news, subscribe to the Pulse, Compete’s monthly newsletter. The Pulse includes the latest industry news, web analytics, market research, Compete PRO education and tips, and much more.

Image from: Financial Image / Shutterstock

This white paper provides an update on financial service (FS) consumer online behavior trends that occurred over the past year. We aim to provide you with a clear sense of what is currently going on in the online landscape by examining key metrics – derived from Compete’s panel of two million consumers – to evaluate and benchmark how the industry is performing.

Download the report today and learn:

• What has increased in demand in the last year
• What type of shopping is at a two year high
• What cards and campaigns are attracting super-prime shoppers

Download Digital Trends: Consumer Behavior in Key Financial Sectors

Image from: Indy 500 Image / Shutterstock

According to their website the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indy 500, has “long prevailed as an icon of motorsports excellence.” That may be true, but their online presence has a much less spectacular following. Their site, indianapolismotorspeedway.com, usually sees a fairly low number of unique visitors each month, but experiences huge month-over-month increases (590% last year, and 821% the year before) around the time of the Indy 500.

While these increases seem impressive, I think that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has the potential to see much more traffic, and that their search strategy is a huge missed opportunity for the venue. Below are the daily keyword destinations for “Indy 500.”

You’ll see that indianapolishmotorspeedway.com is the 7th most popular site, coming in behind a central Indiana publication, a mortgage company, and even an obituary site. If the marketers at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway were to re-focus their search strategy, they might be able to take a bite out of the 422,333 referrals that were sent to indystar.com, potentially doubling their traffic.

Image from: Emerson College ECommunication Thoughts

Tomorrow is one of the most important days in my young life. Star Wars turns 35. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s been 35 incredible years since those genius yellow words of sci-fi storytelling scrolled across screens around the country and inspired the world.

The franchise that has had one of the most significant impacts on American pop culture has held its staying power for 35 years for a reason. Star Wars is a marketing machine. Most recently, the films are being converted to 3-D to delight new generations of diehard fans. Although it’s not the first time a massively popular film has been re-released in 3-D, it’s the first time that 6 massively popular films have.

As a fan of all 6 movies (yes, even Phantom Menace), I wondered if re-releasing the movies in 3-D generated any buzz, knowing that many Star Wars fans have become disillusioned with the many significant changes introduced by George Lucas over the years. Apparently, most of the franchise’s younger fans (myself included) are still interested as nearly 40% of visitors to StarWars.com in April 2012 were below the age 35, far too young to have seen and understood any of the original trilogy in theaters.

Despite being panned by fans and critics alike, the 3-D release of Phantom Menace managed to gross nearly $103M at the box office after its February release, a trend that’s mirrored in daily reach and attention as seen above. And as you can see by the chart below, StarWars.com garnered more than 1.2M unique visitors in February.

How do you feel about a beloved series of films like Star Wars being released in yet another iteration? Is the success of Phantom Menace in 3-D due solely to good marketing practices? Will you be celebrating the 35th anniversary tomorrow? I know I will be. May the force be with all of you this weekend.

Image from: Ikea Image / Shutterstock

In the last year sales for IKEA have risen and with plans to expand even further it looks like the Swedish owned furniture store may just land on every continent. But with the success of growth internationally, how is IKEA fairing in the US?

Looking at Compete.com we can see that visitors to Ikea.com are spending a good deal of time on the site. With an average stay of approximately eight minutes and roughly 15 pages per visit, are visitors to the site purchasing or perusing?

While Ikea does give customers an opportunity to purchase online, how are they engaging customers between clicks as they choose to shop offline at brick and mortar stores specifically for products that aren’t offered online?

As we’ve seen before, a good indicator of online-to-offline interest is a retailer’s store locator tool.

Looking at the daily search referrals we can see that customers are searching for an IKEA store in various locations throughout the United States.

But is IKEA losing customers because the click to the brick is too complicated? Are customers leaving the site when they realize that their item isn’t available for shipping and a store is too hard to locate? Will IKEA be able to keep customers engaged online so that they do end up at a store?