Advocacy Campaign Report
Week of October 31, 2022
Thank you for your interest in this pro-DRS advocacy campaign. This is the second weekly report 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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KPIs: key performance indicators; these include the terms listed above and are basic gauges for measuring campaign progress.
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All currency is listed in U.S. dollars.
Executive Summary
The second week of the Q4 awareness campaign delivered better performance than the first week, in terms of clicks through to DRSGME.org and cost per site visit. $1,618 was spent total for the week, just $14 less than the first week, which means the campaign is on an even pace for weekly spend.
Total site visits increased by 30% week over week, from 794 in week one to 1,033 in week two. Subsequently, the cost per site visit decreased by 24%, from $2.06 to $1.57. Additionally, total clicks nearly doubled, while the CTR more than tripled from 4.03% in week one, to 13.17% in week two. This is largely the result from the Twitter ads:
This is despite the campaign delivering nearly 40% fewer impressions than in week one, and seeing the average CPM rise from $1.31 to $2.15 in week two.
However, the basic objective of the campaign is to drive traffic to the site to increase user awareness, and interest in the DRS and $GME. Thus far, the positive trends in total site visits and cost per site visit suggest the campaign is on the right track, and are more valuable metrics to monitor than the fluctuations in impressions and CPM.
Week over week, total site traffic for DRSGME.org continues to increase, and particularly return visitors to the site. Average time on site also increased by 34%, suggesting that more people are being reached and/or are engaging more deeply with the site content. This all indicates a high quality of traffic that the site is seeing right now, since the content provided requires purposeful time to absorb, and in many cases multiple visits to fully digest.
Meta Performance
(Facebook and Instagram)
Although, Meta again did not deliver as many site visits as Twitter in week two, it showed marked improvement week over week. Total weekly spend was roughly the same, while total impressions served dropped by a whopping 86%, and CPM subsequently rose from $0.55 to $4.06. This CPM is still lower than our initial estimate, but more on par with what we might see for the rest of the Meta campaign:
Total clicks decreased by 31% and CPC increased by 53%. However, CTR saw a notably positive upward trend, increasing by nearly 400%, from 0.12% to 0.59%.
While at first glance, some of these basic KPIs may seem less impressive than from week one, this all resulted in 23 site visits in week two versus eight in week one. This also led to an impressive decrease of 64% in cost per site visit, from $38.88 to $14.17 in week two.
We saw distinctly more site visits from users who have been identified as those interested in gaming or game-related topics. Though, the average cost per site visit from those users is comparable to that from site visitors who have been identified as having interest in the broader category of finance.
Twitter Performance
Yet again, Twitter outperformed Meta during its second week across all basic KPIs. The ads drove a total of 1,010 site visits out of the total 1,033 for week two. These were delivered at a slightly lower cost week over week, decreasing from $1.68 to $1.28 per site visit.
Weekly spend, impressions served, and CPM remained roughly the same. Though, both clicks and CTR nearly doubled, a positive result and respectively totaling 98,613 and 14.67% for week two:
In week two, new ad groups were opened up on Twitter, and the ads are now being served in European countries where there is a high proficiency in English as a second language. These are Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
Intriguingly, users in these countries drove more total average site visits for the week than users located in the five countries where English is spoken as a first language (Australia, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, and United States), with Sweden and France being the top two countries delivering the most site visits for the week.
The ads most engaged with in the second week were the carousel ads and also the static ad with Ringo, followed by Whisper, Grandma’s Recipe, and Seedling.
Site Activity
As expected, total site traffic has increased since the launch of the ad campaign on Oct 24, with more than double the number of unique visitors over a seven-day average, compared to the previous weeks.
This is largely a result of the paid advertising, as well as direct traffic. One possibility that may contribute to the increase in direct traffic, is that people who saw and clicked on the ads, later returned to the site directly after bookmarking or saving the site.
Partly supporting this hypothesis is the increase in the seven-day running total number of unique return visitors, seen since the launch of the ad campaign. Though, more definitive conclusions can be drawn as the campaign progresses, since there are only only two weeks of data so far:
Following the same pattern seen last week, the broker guides getting the most traffic during week two of the campaign were for the international broker IBKR and then U.S.-based Fidelity, respectively seeing 22% and 30% more unique visitors. However, there was a major uptick in engagement with the DRS guides for Canadian broker WealthSimple, seeing a 364% increase week over week, and with British broker Hargreaves Lansdown, seeing an 800% increase week over week:
Conclusion and Next Steps
Although Meta again delivered fewer site visits than Twitter for week two, it is trending in the right direction and will continue running for the third week to see whether that performance is sustained. The smaller budget may still account for the lower delivery results, but the week over week increase in site visits and dramatic decrease in cost per site visit are both positive signals.
While the campaign metrics for Twitter so far look impressive, particularly the increased click-through-rate, there are still concerns that the campaign is facing the problem of bot traffic and click fraud at a much higher rate than Meta. While there are positive indicators of high quality traffic still coming from Twitter, the data is likely skewed to an unknown degree by invalid (non-human) activity. This is an unavoidable issue for all digital advertising platforms. Due to the site still seeing high engagement with some of these users, the campaign will continue running uninterrupted on Twitter for week three.