In a blog post back in July, we outlined the impact of Springbox’s Facebook ads on Central Market's Passport Argentina campaign — noting the traffic’s high engagement metrics and new visitor percentage. It was great to see the positive impact social media had on that promotion. However we were curious if we could expect a… second helping of highly qualified traffic on our next campaign. (Oh, don’t groan. It wasn’t that bad.)

From Aug. 18-31, 2010, Central Market hosted their Hatch Chile Festival, which features Hatch Chile-focused cooking classes, recipes, blogs and a cooking contest. To help foster involvement, Springbox designed an interactive, Flash-based homepage takeover with callouts to enter the recipe contest, sign-up for cooking classes and events, and enter for a chance to help judge recipe submissions. Springbox also managed Facebook ads to help drive traffic to the site, which we launched on the 19th. As we saw with the Passport Argentina campaign, the Hatch Chile-themed Facebook ads drove a notable amount of visits (3,823) to the site and provided better-qualified traffic than the most comparable source, Doubleclick, which referred slightly more visits overall: 4,125. Our ads featured two call-to-actions: one that asked people to submit their recipes to the contest, and another that requested entries to judge. Similar to the Doubleclick ads, which ran during the same time period, these Facebook ads:

• Drove traffic the “In-Store Now” page of the site (where persons registered to both enter and judge the contest).
• Represented CPC/impression-based campaign referrals.

Their similarities, however, end there. The Springbox-managed Facebook ads delivered serious results:

• 31.68% higher recipe submission rate. 
• 2,676.76% higher “enter to judge” rate.
• 5.60% lower bounce rate.

We were especially surprised at the click-through on the “Enter to Judge” ads, so we dug a little deeper. What was the “Enter to Judge” form completion rate for persons who arrived at the site via Facebook? 57.14%. All other traffic sources averaged only 26.00%. The Facebook ads also procured more new visitors as a percentage of total referrals, which is great from a brand awareness perspective.

Check back soon for more insights around this promotion. In the next blog post, we’ll discuss the performance of the homepage takeover.