Starcom MediaVest Group,
Wendy’s, an SMG client, and social media sharing service ShareThis have released results from two online advertising campaigns utilizing the ShareThis platform.
SMG and
ShareThis disclosed last November that they were teaming up to test new metrics for assessing the value of shared content online. The basic idea: the more people share content with others online, the
more they are engaged with that content. Advertisers are often willing to pay a premium for media that delivers more engaged audiences.
Earlier research from SMG and ShareThis indicated that
shared content constitutes 10% of all Internet traffic.
ShareThis has developed what it calls a “social quality index” (SQI) to determine engagement levels of audiences
across 1.4 million Web sites. To develop the index, it evaluated data such as outbound shares, inbound click-back traffic and page views of sites.
For the two Wendy’s campaigns, 30
million impressions were delivered to the same audience via two sets of sites, including one set that scored higher on the ShareThis social quality index. Those latter sites delivered higher
click-through rates, page views, locator inquiries and email sign-ups at lower cost, per the company’s findings.
“We’re talking about some impressive stats here,”
stated Brandon Rhoten, director of digital marketing at Wendy’s International. “SQI helped drive the most socially relevant audiences to the custom message we developed, creating a larger
impact than any other paid part of this campaign. It helped us tap into audiences we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”
ShareThis also unveiled new tools to navigate its
platform, including an analytics dashboard that summarizes the social activity that takes place on each publisher site within the ShareThis network, such as shares, clicks and traffic. It assigns
publishers a score on the SQI. A separate “lookup” tool reveals the score of any publisher within the ShareThis Network, and showcases top SQI sites by category.