Mozilla Marketing

Online Marketing Results (part II)

By DR ⋅ November 21, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

We’ve been monitoring the performance of our outbound marketing campaigns and I wanted to share some of the results (take a look at the previous post that details which message, “customization” or “security”, performed best this time around).

Over the past few months we’ve seen an especially sharp decline in our CPC (cost per click – the amount we pay per click on search advertising) and our CPA (cost per acquisition, or in Firefox’s case, cost per download — one of the better measures for measuring effectiveness). While our spend has remained relatively flat over the past few months, our efficiency has greatly increased. In other words, we are spending more than we used to, but we are becoming better at encouraging viewers of our online marketing to give Firefox a try (see chart below).

Why has this happened?

A few possible explanations:

• During the middle of September and through the month of October, we tested some display advertising. In the process, our proportion of impressions shifted from 100% text based (meaning search engine text ads) to about 50% text and 50% display (graphical banners). There’s some evidence to suggest that coupling online banners with search marketing improves overall awareness, and some evidence that running both concurrently improves performance. Both of these factors could be driving efficiency (CPA and CPC) of Mozilla search marketing. [Note that the author of the second study works for one of the largest ad serving firms]
• We’ve seen a trend in active Firefox usage over the past few years to indicate that seasonality plays a role in Firefox downloads and usage. This makes some sense – people tend to be away from computer more often during the summer months when the weather is nice than other times during the year.
• We continue to optimize our online marketing efforts, especially on the search marketing side of the house – bidding on keywords that are more efficient and implementing more effective creative and copy to name a few.

The recent performance probably won’t continue forever (there’s getting less room to make improvements as the lines plunge toward the x-axis). And as spend continues to increase, inefficiency will likely creep in. We’ll be monitoring this closely as time goes on. In the next few weeks we’ll be running a few other experiments to try and determine the effectiveness of our paid search program versus organic search engine results. Ken will have more info about this soon.