Giant Spatula > a Rolnitzky blog

Awesome collage created by my co-worker Tara, who ran the Firefox 3 t-shirt contest.  We received over 2,000 designs from Firefox fans that submitted artwork for the chance to have their design become the official Firefox 3 t-shirt.  The collage contains images from a selection of the designs.  The winning t-shirt, voted on by the community,  will be available for purchase in the Mozilla Store sometime in the next few weeks.  Make sure to accessorize the new shirt with the new version of Firefox.

Mozilla and eBay recently launched a new version of the Firefox Companion for eBay, which includes full support for the US.  You can stay connected to your eBay trading, watch items, receive alerts and search in real-time — all from the comfort and convenience of your Firefox browser, no matter what site you’re visiting.  In addition to US compatibility, the new features include drag and drop functionality and audio alerts.

Plus, you get all the goodness from the previous version:

• eBay sidebar for quick access to items you’ve bid on or are watching, updated in real-time
• Synchronization with “My eBay” information
• Status alerts about important trading events and your bid status, such as being outbid on an item or auction ending notification
• Integrated eBay auction search that makes finding, bidding, and selling easier
• And of course safer browsing, with Account Guard integration for eBay and PayPal sites and Firefox’s built-in anti-phishing protection
• Check out the full list of features here

So if you’re an eBay user, I highly recommend taking it for a test-drive.  I’ve found it quite handy.  Support for Firefox 3 is coming soon.

Today the Mozilla Firefox dashboard odometer for downloads finally ticked past the 500 million mark. This is a mind-boggling number for a product that didn’t exist just a few years ago.  When you use Firefox, you’re not only using a superior browser built by a passionate open-source community, but you’re also indirectly giving your thumbs-up to the larger Mozilla mission to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.

In honor of the 500 million download mark, we’re encouraging folks to help raise 500 million grains of rice in one day to help feed the world’s hungry. Head on over to freerice.com, an innovative website that partners with the United Nations World Food Program to help directly feed 25,000 people for one day.  And help your vocabulary at the same time.

There have been a number of big round-number milestones set over the past few weeks, including 150 million active users of Firefox based on the calculations illustrated in this blog post, and 600 million add-on downloads. With Firefox 3 just around the corner, it’ll be great to see Firefox and Mozilla milestone usage numbers continue to pass thresholds with a lot of zeros attached.

Great post by Ken “Numerator” Kovash that summarizes another one of our search marketing experiments here at Mozilla.  It’s definitely worth a read.  See if you can pass the quiz question.

I’m always fascinated by the commercials that are revealed during the Super Bowl — and usually much more so than the game itself. Most years, wherever I’m watching, the TV sound is turned *up* during the commercials and back down again for the actual game. However, for me, this was the most disappointing commercial crop in years — maybe ever. So many of the commercials that aired failed to communicate a clear consumer benefit with their product. And many were just puzzling. A unibrowed woman selling nuts? A guy breathing fire granted from a beer that gives you “everything you want”? I’m not ready to call Super Bowl advertising dead (even if creativity and smart messaging seems to be). In fact, from an economic standpoint, the practice is thriving; this year it cost the most money yet to be part of the big game — a reported $2.7 million per slot, or about $90,000 a second. A second! And viewership was as high as ever: 46 million homes, and an estimated 90 million viewers, second place only to the final episode of M*A*S*H. Nielsen has some other interesting data in their Super Bowl recap report that’s worth taking a look at (including the fact that some people are actually watching commercials even though they have a DVR, the very piece of technology that was supposed to make the 30 second completely obsolete).

One of the trends I find interesting is that advertisers are finally catching on to this thing called the Web. And some of the more successful advertisers are using it to truly integrate their communication.  Take a look at this Google trend data for some of the day’s advertisers: Go Daddy stands out with a significant spike in traffic:

I always thought it was really interesting for a company trying to bridge the gap between online and offline media, using the Super Bowl as a platform. Go Daddy has reportedly had some success doing this (now #1 in market share for registering domain names), and even though their execution was crude, gratuitous, and low-budget in my book, it may have worked. At 1.5MM visits to their website (they claim), let’s say 15% of those users actually buy a basic domain name @$10 a pop. Right there they’ve recouped their expenses (excluding the costs to actually produce the commercial). I would imagine that Pepsi or Bridgestone or Audi, or any of the other advertisers would be hard pressed to beat that rate of return in such a short period of time. Sure, some would argue that by advertising on the Super Bowl, you’re priming the consumer for a purchase consideration bias sometime in the future. But if I’m company CMO, I’d be looking to recoup my investment as fast as possible and measure the impact of my mass media expenditure.

Some commercials were hilarious, but not because they tried to be. The new hybrid GMC Yukon, with the “Why push? Why grow? Why dream?” self-congratulatory message about building an SUV hybrid that could help the planet, and then reading the small print on the bottom that says the car gets “22 mpg”. A message that really rings hollow. And it’s an ugly car.

Here are some criteria that I think should help guide a decision about Super Bowl spot:

1) Your product or service appeal to a mass audience. In other words, everyone *could* theoretically be interested in the product I’m showing on TV. The viewership for a Super Bowl is just about as broad as you can get for any TV program. Showing an ad for a very niche product (say financial retirement services) automatically turns much of the mass audience into wasted reach. In other words, you’re paying for reach (e.g. to young adults) that you probably don’t need.

2) Your product is new to the world. From this year’s crop, consider the case of Pepsi Max. Prior to the super bowl, few people had probably heard of this new brand extension. Plus, given that the majority of households in the US watching the Super Bowl probably have a complimentary product (potato chips) in front of them and an addiction to caffeine (the clear Pepsi Max differentiator), running a TV ad could make sense.

3) You have the commercial creative that clearly connects your product to a consumer need. And you do it in a memorable way. It’s almost as if some advertisers are just running commercials on Super Bowl Sunday out of habit — how else can you explain Budweiser running multiple ads that were so disconnected from their product attributes. Then again, maybe I’m just disconnected from the rest of the country.

4) You’re finding ways to use the Web to increase the longevity of your message. Beyond the entertainment value, you’re offering viewers the chance to get something extra by visiting your Website and the chance to get the product online. It’s not really enough to put an easy to remember url at the end of a commercial and call it a day.

There were some companies that I think did a good job with their spots and met some of the criteria above, like Tide and eTrade. But it’s hard to imagine any of this year’s ad class becoming a greater part of pop culture the way that past advertisements did. Or more importantly, actually helping the companies that put those spots on the air to move product. In years to come, people won’t remember the Planter’s nuts woman, but they will remember what a thrilling game it was. And as long as the games are competitive, that’s a trend I can live with.

We’ve recently coined the term “100% Organic Software” as a metaphor to help explain to the general consumer audience what makes Mozilla (and the Firefox product) a little bit different from other traditional software makers. John has some well thought out posts about why we’re doing this and the full cliff-notes version of what it means, but I wanted to give a glimpse of the creative that will support the effort to better communicate this “organic” aspect of our organization.

For starters, in the US we’re going to feature “100% organic software” on an update to the US Mozilla.com homepage. We’re also running some search and contextual advertising (both text and graphic banners) on a number of different websites. Check out version 1, version 2, and version 3 of the animated banners that will promote the “100% Organic Software” concept.

Our focus is to reach out to the general consumer that tends to be environmentally conscious, political aware, and interested in social causes — consumers that are web-savvy, but unaware of the technical or social benefits of open source and open web standards. In order to reach these folks, we are going to run these contextual display and text ads on a number of political, environmental, social, and consumer websites where these consumers hang out.

Trying to come up with a good concept for this was challenging, but Nobox, an agency that we have collaborated with on many projects, did a nice job of creating visuals and copy that blend the complexities of open source, the “organic” nature of Mozilla software development, and the user benfits of a free and open web.

Recently, Ken and I set out to answer a question about our search program: how does organic search (meaning results in a search engine that are not sponsored) interact with paid search (those sponsored results that you see at the top or along the side of search engine results)? More specifically, would people click on organic listings for Mozilla related results if no paid search listings appeared? And, how does that ultimately affect the number of downloads of Firefox?

First, a little background; readers of this blog probably know that Mozilla participates in paid search advertising with the major search engines. Roughly 10% of all Firefox downloads are a direct result of paid search marketing. And the cost effectiveness of these downloads through paid search has been steadily, if not dramatically, improving during the fall.

Over the last couple weeks, we ran an experiment in which we turned off paid search on alternating days. Ken has more information about methodology, but I wanted to report on some of the really interesting findings as a result of our test.

Below is a chart depicting the differences in clicks for the test:

It turns out that there is a large degree of overlap with paid search and organic search.

When we run paid search, we receive a boost of about 10% in terms of click volume. In other words, if we did not run any paid search engine advertising, we would receive about 90% of the clicks that we would get from running both.

Conclusion #1: For Mozilla, there is a large amount of overlap (in terms of clicks) for organic and paid search

A study this past summer from Enquiro Search Solutions found some related, interesting results. For branded terms (for example “Firefox”), presence at the top of both organic listings and paid listings together does seem to help spur action — to the tune of a 7% boost (in the study’s case this action was purchase intent; in our case it would be download intent). This 7% figure is interesting as it’s in the ballpark of our 10% figure above. You can download the complete white paper here (after registering for free) to see more of the findings.

Things get a little more interesting when we look at the effect that this has on directly driving downloads. When we ran both paid and organic search at the same time, we increased the number of downloads in the search channel by about 35%. The conversion rate (defined as a click on a search listing which results in a download of Firefox) is 3% better when we run both.

Conclusion #2: Running paid search on high ranking branded terms improves conversion compared to not running paid search.

You could imagine why this would be the case. A user enlists their favorite search engine and types in a branded term, and sees a results page that has both paid and unpaid listings at or near the top. The user may think that seeing multiple results confirms that they are on the right track. Or perhaps seeing the paid advertisement reinforces, through the ad copy, the positive attributes of the organic (unpaid) listing.

So which key word terms are driving the bulk of these overlapping clicks? It seems that it is largely driven by branded terms, and specifically the term “firefox”. If you type in “firefox” in just about any top search engine, a Mozilla page comes out at the top of the list. However, type in a non-branded term like “browser” and a Mozilla page, while still highly ranked, does not have the top spot (thanks Wikipedia!). Mozilla’s organic search optimization (SEO) is quite good – and we’re looking at ways to get even better.

Some other open ended questions to ponder from this test:

• Are users that download Firefox via paid search more valuable later on in the funnel than their organic counterparts? In other words, do those users end up being more active Firefox users?
• How do we evaluate the different costs associated with acquiring users through different channels? Ken has some good thoughts around marginal costs of acquiring users that I’d encourage you to read
• Are all branded terms created equal? What is the interplay among different branded terms with organic and paid search?

While this is just an initial test, these findings are certainly surprising — we’re going to continue exploring these questions to figure out how we can make our search engine marketing as successful as possible. These results are sure to vary among different industries and different companies. I’d love to hear your thoughts about your search campaign’s relationship between organic and paid and what mix you’ve found to be successful.

One of the challenges to Firefox marketing is to improve our active user retention — people that download Firefox, try it out, and end up using it regularly. As part of the Firefox retention brand campaign (one component of the Firefox retention plan), we are going to be shooting a short video this coming Monday in San Francisco. It’s a viral video with a “We are the World” style benefit message that we hope will ring-true to anyone who uses Firefox. The goal of the video is to fire-up existing users and infuse even more pride into those that are already spreading firefox around the world (and of course, maybe convince some new users to give us a try as well).

If you are in the area we’d love to have you join us, whether you are a community member or just a big fan of Firefox and Mozilla. We want this to have a grass-roots feel and your participation will help make this video a success (and it should be fun as well). Be sure to wear your Firefox gear. Time and location TBD (will post an update here with the information shortly - sorry for the late notice).  If you are interested, you can email me as well: david [at] mozilla [dot] [com].

I wanted to give a brief update about the Mozilla store. Late fall and early winter is the busy season for the US Mozilla store, and we have a few great new items to check out (some of these will make their way to the International store sometime soon as well). We’ve recently introduced a cool looking Mozilla beanie and hooded sweathshirt, a Firefox long sleeve t-shirt, and for those looking for a selection of Mozilla gear at a discounted price, we have a holiday bundle available for purchase.

Right now, you can save 10% off your next purchase at the Mozilla store by entering one of the coupon codes below at checkout:

(for the US Store): HAPPYHOLIDAY

(for the Int’l Store): FIREFOXHOLIDAY

Since the US store relaunched, nearly 2.5 million people have visited (interestingly enough nearly 10% of which are arriving with IE browsers — note that you can look great in Mozilla gear no matter what browser you use). Since the relaunch, the top sellers have been:

1. Hip Hop Messenger Bag
2. Brown Firefox T-shirt
3. Metro Backpack
4. Black Temple T-shirt

(pictured: The new long sleeve t-shirt — perfect for winter)

Legal mumbo jumbo we’re required to include: *Discount can be used one time only. Discount cannot be applied to previously purchased merchandise or combined with any other offer. Discount does not apply to shipping and handling or taxes. Discount has no cash value and cannot be sold, transferred or reproduced. To receive discount, enter code HAPPYHOLIDAY (US Store) and FIREFOXHOLIDAY (Int’l Store) during checkout at store.mozilla.org. Expires 12/31/2007. Void where prohibited.