Pints of good beer never really need a hard sell. So we
weren’t surprised to see the overwhelmingly positive response to
Central Market’s
recent artisan beer promotion, Brewtopia. During the promotion, Central
Market featured beer-related cooking classes and tastings, while highlighting
beer and brewer
profiles from microbreweries around the country, including
Boulevard,
Brooklyn,
Magic Hat,
Fat Tire,
Real Ale and
Sierra Nevada. They partnered with Springbox
to create an interactive experience to help promote the event online.
Springbox designed a flash-based homepage highlighting different
beers and their brewers, as well as call-outs to sign up for cooking classes
and opportunities to share the event through Facebook and Twitter. We also
built a new In
Stores page, with a complete list of beer-related classes by store
location.
Over the course of the promotion, we:
Conversion
The promotion’s primary
call-to-action encouraged people to sign up for classes on Central Market’s
Cooking School domains. So for a conversion rate, we looked at clicks on the
buttons that referred traffic to those domains divided by the total number of
hits to pages with those buttons. We found that 4.01% of the traffic able to
click-through to the cooking school did!
SEO
All the new beer-related content on the homepage and the
In-Stores Now page meant new opportunities to rank for keywords. To gain
insight into whether this new content really had an effect, we looked at search
traffic hitting the site, and then further isolated that traffic to unbranded
searches containing the term “beer.” This subsection of search traffic seemed
particularly interesting, since it corresponds to visitors looking for beer,
but not necessarily at Central Market. In that way, it speaks to how the
promotion helped procure new visitors and expand Central Market’s market share.
During the promotion, Central Market secured 118 visits
from unbranded searches containing the term “beer”.
The table above outlines a few examples from the
unbranded “beer” searches that Central Market received during Brewtopia. Note
that:
-
They’re almost all new visitors.
-
Many of these persons are in the buying phase of
the purchase cycle — “where to buy beer...”
-
The engagement metrics are really high. For
example, a new visitor looking for where to buy beer in Houston hit the Central
Market site and spent 11 minutes on 12 pages.
-
People searched for “are you really into beer”
in quotations — a line from a radio ad that ran during the promotion.
Comparison
The metrics looked great, but before we got too jazzed,
we had to ask: Would Central Market have received that traffic anyway? After
all, they have a beer and wine subdirectory.
To find out, we graphed unbranded searches that contained
“beer” by day from Aug. 1 through the end of the festival. The graph below
shows what we found: unbranded, beer-related searches peaked during the
festival and started climbing in late Sept. as promotional content about the
festival began circulating.