Satyamev Jayate Impact : Interest In Issues Piqued By 7x!

Following up on my first post on the impact of Satyamev Jayate I'd like to begin with a serious, serious errata. In the previous post I calculated the percentage rise in search volumes incorrectly. Here's the real impact Satyamev Jayate had in raising awareness around the issues in focus:

• Female foeticide: Searches rose by 610% (!) the week the first episode aired. That's a whopping 7x increase in the average search volume. However, the interest has steadily declined over the past 3 weeks and is now about twice the average interest before the show. I'd say that's still an amazing achievement. Sustaining the countries interest in an issue for 4 weeks at 2x (and more) its regular interest is legendary.
• Child abuse: Again the interest/searches increased by 610% in the week the show aired. Even now the general public is showing 2.5 times more interest than before the show aired.
• Dowry/NRI brides: Interest increased by 150% initially and is down by 40% the next week itself.

Satyamev Jayate - Quantifying the impact

Aamir's new show - Satyamev Jayate - is the new hot thing.

• It's breaking all TRP records [1]
• It's trending on Twitter every Sunday - for more than 24 hours [2]
• It's got more than 3 million channel views on YouTube within two weeks
• About 780,000+ likes on Facebook and 26,000+ followers on Twitter. 

Any "social media expert" would be willing to give his hand & leg for those kind of numbers on a campaign under his/her watch!

Let's shift our attention away from the show itself, to the issues that the show is talking about. Here's what Google Insights tells us about female foeticide and child abuse (the issues raised in the first two episodes of the show):

Traffic comparison: Alexa vs Google Trends vs Compete vs ComScore

I cringe every time someone pulls traffic/audience numbers from Alexa for competition/market research. Alexa is simply bullshit when it comes to Indian websites. But, what about other such tools? Have you ever wondered where & how these website traffic-research tools get their data?

Alexa

Here's what Alexa discloses (emphasis mine):

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources.
[...]
The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population.

That's right. They get their data from people who download and install Alexa toolbars. They mention "other, diverse traffic data sources" about 8 times on that page, but fail to mention, even once, what those "other, diverse" sources could be.

Compete

Here's how Compete does it (emphasis mine):

Compete’s clickstream data are collected from a 2,000,000 member panel of US Internet users (about a 1% sample), using diverse sources.
[...]
Compete’s panel measures US, but not international users. Compete has worked diligently to develop what it believes is the largest and most diverse panel of online consumers in the United States.

Compete also fails to mention their "diverse sources", but at least they mention the sample size (2 million) and sample geography (US internet users) very clearly. Their claim of "about a 1% sample" is also correct: total internet users in North America are about 272 million (source).

ComScore

And here's ComScore's methodology:

Central to most comScore services is the comScore panel, the largest continuously measured consumer panel of its kind. With approximately 2 million worldwide consumers under continuous measurement
[...]
comScore recruits panelists through a variety of online methods designed to ensure a demographically-balanced and representative sample.

ComScore's methodology page is the biggest mish-mash of marketing gobbledygook I've ever seen. And a sample-size of 2 million worldwide is the biggest joke! That would make it a 0.1% sample size based on the world internet user population of approx 2 billion (source). Probably a 0.1% sample size is statistically significant on a global scale, but how does that distribution change for India? Is their sample size in India also statistically significant? They fail to mention that.

And I'm not sure what these "variety of online methods" to recruit panelists are. I have been spending at least 5-6 hours each-day on the Internet since the last 7 years, but have NEVER been solicited by ComScore to become a panelist. Neither has anyone I know.

Google Trends for Websites

Compare this to how Google Trends for Websites generates its data (emphasis mine):

Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Google Search and Google Analytics are the core data-sources that power Google Trends for Websites. For the uninitiated, most websites in India would be getting 30% or more of their traffic from Google (paid + organic). Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics system on the Indian internet scene.

Conclusion

Now think - how many users have you seen (in India) with an Alexa toolbar installed? Is anyone you know on the ComScore panel? Compare that to how many people you've seen using Google Search? People entering domain names in Google (eg. enter 'flipkart.com' as search query on Google)? Websites that use Google Analytics for measuring+analyzing their visitor data?

I'd bet my money on Google Trends for Websites any day for researching the Indian internet scene. What about you?

Advertising as a business model?

If it was not already well-known that Internet advertising as a way to make money is extremely hard, today's Facebook IPO filing gives us more data to support it. In 2011, 85% of Facebook's total revenue (USD 3.711 billion) came through advertising, which is approximately USD 3.15 billion. That's HUGE! However, what is equally huge is their MAU (monthly active users) number at 845 million in Dec-2011. If we take some approximations and do the math, it means Facebook managed to make barely 36 cents per active-user, per-month.

Yes. Barely 36 cents per-active user, per-month. [1]

According to Alexa, Facebook gets an average of 13 pageviews per-user per-day. According to this report each user visits Facebook an average of 40 times per-month. This would mean:

• a minimum of approx 440 billion pageviews (!) in Dec-2011 [2]
• a maximum CPM of 60 cents per thousand page views [3]

Yes. Barely 60 cents CPM. On a per-impression basis this number could be 3x lower because Facebook has about 3 ads per page.

And that's the #2 website in the world. No wonder traditional publishing companies are dying everyday - not everyone can have close to a billion active users to allow a few cents per-user to cover their costs. Internet advertising is such a horrible monetization model. We have to think of something better!

[1] And that's the number per active-user. If we compute this for total users, the number will be much lower.
[2] 845 monthly-active-users  x 13 pageview per-user per-day x 40 visits. Not the best calculation, but good enough to give us a minimum value
[3] USD 3.15 billion divided by 12, to get the average monthly revenue, divided by 440 billion pageviews x 1,000. Again, I know, not the best, but good enough to give us a ballpark.

Brand bidding as a PR tool: Learnings from CCAvenue hack

Following up on my previous post about the CCAvenue hacking incident & learnings from it, I'm really, really surprised that CCAvenue has not started bidding on it's own brand terms.

There's a lot that has already been said about bidding on one's own brand terms in the regular course of things and I'm not about to go into it here. You can read some opinions about it here & here. This post focuses on why you should be bidding on your brand terms during critical public situations.

As of 11 May, 2011, a Google search on "ccavenue hacked" results in a bunch of links from other blogs & news sites, which talk about their take on the incident.

If CCAvenue were bidding on terms like "ccavenue hacked", etc. they would easily have the opportunity to place the official response right on top of the search results page. With a few rupees per-click they could ensure that users hear of the official response first. The fact that their official response sucks, is a different matter altogether.


BP seems to have done this during the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill incident. They were bidding aggressively on keywords like "oil spill", "deepwater", "gulf of mexico", etc. The ads took users to a section on their website detailing the official response and updates on the damage control process. Read more about the BP Oil Spill Google ads here. However, they seem to have gotten a fair bit of backlash -  [1] [2] - for spending time in online reputation management instead of fixing the damn problem. But that's mostly because oil companies don't have a good reputation to begin with. I would presume that that's not the case with CCAvenue.

PS: I'm not sure what the search volume for the CCAvenue-hack related keywords would be. I'm itching to put out an ad and see how many clicks I can get on this. Screw it, let's do it!

CCAvenue hack: What can developers & businesses learn?

If you haven't already read about the alleged hacking of CCAvenue, here's the gist:

1. Hacker, calling himself d3hydr8, posts complete schema of CCAvenue's DB on a mailing list. The post also contains the contents of 'admn_users' table, which include username & passwords in plain text.
2. Story is covered all over the interwebs - MediaNama coverage, Pluggd coverage
3. CEO, Vishwas Patel "patently" denies that this happened.

Developers should read this

Here's what developers can learn about how to safely store passwords:

How to announce an acquisition to customers?

Learn from Wufoo.

It's very rare that an email notifying you about a merger/acquisition makes you smile. Makes you care. Does a good job of explaining what's going on. And does all of this in plain English, not corporate-speak.

That's quite a lot for an email to achieve. But that's exactly what this email from Wufoo did.

Google's ITA acquisition: Impact on Indian OTAs?

Google has just announced on it's blog that it's ITA acquisition had been cleared by the US Department of Justice. Given that Google drives significant amount of traffic to the OTAs, this is big news for the market.

Even though it could take a while for Google to integrate & roll-out a travel search product in India, this is significant for the Indian players here as well - Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and Yatra.

How could this possibly affect the Indian OTAs?

Does copy with character work in India?

There's something to be said about products which have a certain character to them. The first example that comes to mind is MailChimp though they seem to have distanced their monkey quite a bit these days. Another set of opinionated products are from the  37Signals stable, but they don't try to dress them up in a character, in my opinion.

I was surprised to find FeedBurner, now a Google product still holding on to their quirkiness. I love how their their main navigation reads: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize

The "Troubleshootize" page carries forward the character and gives a fun spin to the standard FAQs.

And the dashboard tries to pull a page out of Flickr's book with random welcome messages.

It's a bit sad that their integration with Blogger is not smooth & completely frictionless, but that's a different story altogether.

Something that I've always wondered is whether such quirky copy (or "copy with character", as I like to call it) works with the general Indian internet audience? Or should one play it safe and produce plain-vanilla "transactional copy." What do you think? Any Indian products with such character that you know about?

[Online advertising] Apollo Munich campaign on YouTube

A shout-out to the folks at Apollo Munich Health Insurance (and their agency) for coming up with this brilliant piece of online advertising - a medium otherwise fraught with extremely tactical, stale, and uninspiring creatives.

I recently came across the said ad while watching random videos on YouTube - killing time on a Sunday! Here's the ad placement:

And these are the key frames of the flash banner:

I wasn't planning on buying health insurance. I wasn't searching for health insurance. I was no where near any insurance product. However, the ad content was relevant to what I was doing - watching random videos on YouTube. That's what made me sit-up & take notice. And now I remember the brand which made this ad - Apollo Munich.

I'd love to know if the CTR on this particular creative was higher than the average YouTube sees on that placement. (I know - CTR is not the end-all of online advertising, but still...)

Do you know of any good (and original) examples of display advertising?

How a small change in link text led to 45% increase in customer re-engagements

The emails given below were sent to customers who hadn't been transacting on Cleartrip's site for a long time – potentially lost customers. We wanted to understand why they weren't transacting with us any more through a one question survey.

One of the emails received 45% more survey responses than the other. Can you guess which one?

One link-off read Spare a minute to let us know ».

The other, Answer one simple question & let us know »

Both the links reinforced the fact that the survey was short and would not take very long to complete. Yet, it was the second link text – "Answer one simple question & let us know" – which led to more responses.

That's right. One small change led to a 45% increase in lost customers re-engaging with our brand & giving us an opportunity to win them back.

Any theories as to why the second text performed better? Respond in the comments below.

The email salutation was personalized with the recipient's first name. The only difference in the email templates was the text of the link which led to a very short survey form - everything else was identical.

Contest design - Part 3 of Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite

Part 2 of this series told the story of how we iterated over the visual design of Cleartrip's My Purpose microsite. This part describes the design of the contest & user-flows.

What's in it for me?

Sharing holidays pics, party pics, and status updates on Facebook/Twitter has become part of a person's online identity. Because of the network effect – the (almost) omni-presence of one's friends on such networks – a person wants to share bits of his/her life online.

It would be naive to expect users to find such a value through our campaign microsite – in all of 4-weeks. We were asking users to share personal travel experiences with us, without giving them anything tangible or intangible in return.

We took an easy route to fill this gap – a contest.

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 2

Part 1 of this series detailed the overall context of Cleartrip's TV campaign and the thought that went into outlining the online strategy for it. With just 12 days for the ads to go on-air we had to get our heads down and focus on execution – starting from the visual design of the microsite.

Visual & interaction design

Truth be told, no design process is linear. In a textbook world every process fits into a neat diagram like this.

In the real world, it's more like this.

Courtesy: The Anatomy of Web Design

Fresh off the block

And that's precisely what happened with this microsite. The brilliant chaps at Synapse, our digital agency based in Goa, got all charged-up. They spent the weekend working off a half-baked brief based around a bunch of ideas that we had been bouncing off each other.

One of the first mockups of the microsite looked something like this.

While it drew inspiration from the right products & tried to neatly package the ideas that we had bounced off each other, this approach didn't work for mainly two reasons:

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 1

Inception

Online travel as a category is extremely cluttered. MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, Travelocity, TravelGuru, iXiGO, goIbibo, Aarzoo - the list just doesn't seem to end. Marketing communication for online travel is even more cluttered & undifferentiated. Each & every player is talking about essentially the same things - deals, cashbacks, & discounts. It's a race to the bottom to be the place for cheapest deals.

Given this competitive environment, Cleartrip wanted to go out with a fresh communication to break this clutter. We wanted to take a more "human" approach with our communication. Something that connects with customers at a level "higher" than prices & discounts.

With this background & brief, we called for agency pitches to create our TV commercial. I sat through all the pitches. Some were good. Some not so. But, the one that we finally went with, had a brilliant insight - every trip has a purpose. Think about it. Travel is more about meeting your relatives, going for your honeymoon, or clinching that business deal than it's about the price you bought the ticket for. As a travel service provider, we enable our customers to fulfill an actual purpose. To quote Hrush from the Cleartrip blog: