Advocacy Campaign Report
Week of October 24, 2022
Thank you for your interest in this pro-DRS advocacy campaign. This is the first weekly report of several to come for the current 2022 Q4 advocacy campaign.
Some helpful keywords and terms to frame this information are below:
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Impressions: ad views; number of times the ads were seen. Does not reflect unique number of people who saw the ads.
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CPM: cost per 1,000 impressions; a primary advertising cost metric.
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CPC: cost per click.
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CTR: click-through rate; the rate at which people saw the ads and subsequently clicked on them.
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All currency is listed in U.S. dollars.
Executive Summary
The first week of the Q4 awareness campaign revealed some insights which will help to establish some baseline performance metrics as the campaign moves forward. Overall, positive trends were seen in traffic to DRSGME.org as a result of the ads, with notable time spent on specific pages where users could absorb more comprehensive content.
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Although initial estimates were quite conservative for total clicks, impressions, CPM, CPC, and CTR estimates were far exceeded and generally saw lower costs than anticipated:
In total, the ads received 50,158 link clicks with an average CTR of 4.03%, versus the initial total click estimate of 20,816 and 0.73% CTR. Total impressions were almost 1.5 million, which is just under half of the initial estimate for the entirety of the campaign. Total CPM was initially estimated to be just under $5, but the total average CPM during the first week averaged at $1.31.
The ads drove a total of 794 visits to the landing page of the site, which is the home page. Keep in mind that all of these performance values are only for the first week of the campaign, so the totals and averages by the end of the campaign will be different.
Meta Performance (Facebook and Instagram)
Meta performed more poorly than Twitter during its first week, driving a total of eight visits to the site. This could be partially because the campaign was in “learning mode” all week. This is the first stage all Meta ad campaigns enter after going live, when the platform’s algorithm is learning how, where, and who to best serve the ads:
The smaller budget allocation could also be a factor that impacted performance the first week. Typically across any digital ad platform, larger budgets will drive more website traffic. The initial budget split was 20% to Meta (totaling $2,800 for the eight-week campaign plan), and $311 was spent this first week for an average cost of $38.88 per site visit.
There is not enough data to come to any meaningful conclusions about the characteristics of the audience who engaged with the ads, because there were only eight landing page visits to the site from Meta. Hopefully, performance will improve, but the Meta campaign will continue to be monitored closely.
Twitter Performance
Twitter showed greater performance during its first week as compared to Meta, driving a total of 786 visits to DRSGME.org. This is in spite of the fact that Twitter delivered a higher CPM and did not receive as many impressions for the higher budget allocation, delivering just under 19% more impressions than Meta with more than four times the budget:
The more successful delivery on Twitter could be partially due to the narrower targeting parameters set up versus those on Meta, and the Twitter ads potentially reaching the desired audience more successfully. It could also be due to the fact that 80% of the budget has been allocated to Twitter (totaling $11,200 for the eight-week campaign plan), spending $1,321 for the first week, which averages to a cost of $1.68 per site visit.
As can be expected, we saw greater organic engagement with carousel ads on Twitter versus the traditional single-image static ads. Carousel ads are the interactive format with multiple images that can be swiped/scrolled through horizontally to view each image. The static ads drawing the most overall engagement and driving website traffic are “Ethel”, “Seedling”, and surprisingly, “Grandma’s Recipe”. “Ethel” is driving the most Twitter profile visits and delivering the highest user engagement on DRSGME.org.
Considerations
A problem with all digital advertising, that cannot be entirely avoided, is bot traffic and click fraud. Twitter is notorious for unreliable methods of preventing bot activity, and data points have been collected that indicate the ad campaign faces this problem.
One indicator is the breakdown of ad performance by gender: according to Twitter, almost 90% of users who clicked on our ads that led to site visits were women:
Due to the demographic attributes of both the known and target audiences, it is suspected most of these engagements were not quality users, and instead may be bots or AI algorithms set up to execute click fraud.
The breakdown of ad performance by country may also be an indicator of click fraud, as Twitter recorded users driving the most site traffic being located in the United Kingdom and Ireland, with the U.S. delivering just three site visits out of 786 total:
This seems unusual, in light of the fact that Twitter is a U.S.-based company, and that U.S.-based individuals comprise the largest group of active users on the platform, followed by Japan.
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Although it cannot be proven that most site visits from Twitter are the result of non-human activity, it also cannot be ruled out.
Site Activity
Overall site statistics for the month of October show the site seeing heavier traffic since the launch of the ad campaign on October 24, with the largest increase seen on Friday, October 28:
Although, this was a result of Google-driven traffic which more than doubled from trends of previous days, and not from the paid ad campaign. This is likely attributable to larger social media activity last week from Fidelity and Ortex, and the subsequent negative sentiment expressed by social media users to their posts.
Below are links to that content:
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Fidelity LinkedIn post poking fun at people who invest in “meme stocks”, and a detailed picture of "Meme Stock Guy". Fidelity deleted the post on the same day, but these links are archived for historical reference.
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Ortex post on Reddit regarding a massive spike in short interest of $GME.
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It is suspected this activity generated general interest in GME, and likely drove people to search the internet for related topics, causing some to land on DRSGME.org.
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Looking at engagement with the broker guides over the last week, it can be seen that IBKR (an international broker) has received the most unique visitors, followed by Fidelity, Revolut, and TD Ameritrade. Degiro and Avanza are also high on the list, which are both European brokers:
Conclusion and Next Steps
There is now a good baseline of data gathered for assessing the value of the audience trying to be reached with this ad campaign. Although Meta did not perform nearly as well as hoped, the campaign will run for at least another week to see if it might deliver more successful results.
The quality of traffic driven by Meta ads can also sometimes be higher than other platforms, but another week of data may help in forming the decision of whether to continue running the campaign on that platform. There is also a thin overlap between users of both Meta and Reddit. Reddit is where the majority of directly registered investors are active on social media. As a result of this, Meta may be more inclined to reach the ideal targeted users, who would likely never know about direct registration or GME as a valuable investment. Therefore, Meta should still currently be considered as a potentially valuable platform for outreach.
For Twitter, the current ads are targeting only users in countries where English is spoken as a first language. This is due to the limit that Twitter ad groups have for advertising in only up to five countries. Since there has been high site engagement with guides for brokers that cater to European investors, new ad groups will be opening up this week that will target users in European countries where there is high proficiency in English as a second language.