I am fascinated by the ongoing analysis of the March 2 integrated Farmville promotion for Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Over a 24-hour period, Farmville players were offered 3 units of Farm Cash if they became a "Fan" of Bing on Facebook. This promotion resulted in over 425,000 new fans; a fourfold jump. Bing's Facebook page now boasts 592,000 fans to Google's 531,000.
More pawns - FTW!
From a quantity standpoint, growing your fan base by 425,000 people is an impressive leap. But what is the qualitative value of these new "fans"? Are they now fans of the product or were they simply fans of the promotion?
This initiative seems successful if the following were objectives:
- Grow the Bing fan base
- Interact with a new audience
- Connect with social gamers
- Surpass Google in a social media metric
- Make a splash and get a PR boost
However, if the objective was to increase usage of the Bing search engine, the campaign does not appear to be successful. As seen below, there is no appreciable increase in Bing users as a result of this promotion. Those plucky Googlers still have a healthy lead in search engine usage:
"OMG Free FV ca$h - thanks Bling!"
From another perspective, it feels like the majority of the new fans are more enthusiastic about the promotion than the product.
Only 106 of the 714 comments actually mention Bing by name. (The two people who actually wrote "Thanks Bling!" get honorary positions in this smaller group.) Many of the comments that do mention Bing compare it unfavorably to Google. The vast majority are focused on whether or not the 3 units of cash actually showed up in a user's Farmville account.
If this is representative of the feelings of vocal participants, one can assume the majority of the 1,287 people who "liked" Bing on March 2nd more accurately "liked" Farmville and getting free Farmville cash.
Virtual Currency, meet Real Money
Finally, I was curious how much this promotion cost. Naturally that is unknown information, but one can get a sense of the price tag by looking at the value of all that virtual currency Bing sponsored.
**Caveat - My knowledge of the actual value of Farm Cash is gleaned from Zynga's user forums. I do not play Farmville. I've actually blocked this application from appearing on my wall, because I really don't care if Stevie H. from high school sold his Brown Alpaca for a profit of 84. See The Oatmeal for an accurate visual representation of my Farmville feelings. Also, Farm Cash is not a recognized currency in online currency exchange calculators, and if it ever is you can be sure the apocalypse is nigh. Nigh!!**
Known costs:
- The "best value" package reportedly gives a user 310 Farm Cash (FV) for $10.00
- At that rate, 1 unit of Farm Cash (1 FV) is worth about $0.16
- Bing offered 3 FV per fan, so each fan was worth about $0.48
- If Bing paid 3 FV to each of the 425,000 fans, the total expenditure would be about $204,000
This does not account for whatever creative development and execution costs Deep Focus (Bing's interactive agency on this project) may have charged, and I would expect Zynga received a healthy sponsorship rate for hosting this campaign.
Clearly this was a pricey project,
but from a pure acquisition standpoint, this is still a good deal.
Assuming Bing had leveraged standard media instead, with a .05% CTR,
the campaign would have required 850,000,000 impressions to deliver the
same end result!
Conclusionville
It is difficult to gauge the success of this campaign as the overall objective was not publicly stated. As written last week, I believe that key engagement metrics vary depending on the campaign purpose. With an unknown objective, there is room to speculate on the outcome.
If the objectives were driven by the quantity of new Facebook fans, it seems worth the expenditure. However, if the objective was a new audience who actively uses the product, it appears this campaign was more fertilizer than seed.
Comments and feedback are welcome. @cyberdingo57