Measuring Viral Success

While MarketingSherpa chose their Top 12 Campaigns for the Viral Marketing Hall of Fame for 2006, they had some pointers for future viral campaigns.

It is obvious that it is difficult to come up with new and inventive viral campaigns year after year. However, the basic standards should always stay the same. Simply having a goal of driving awareness and product recognition is not good enough. Just because viral campaigns are not “standard” marketing tactics, does not mean measurement should be forfeited. It is imperative to keep track of the success and statistics of each campaign to see how effective they can really be.

A good example of a solid viral campaign was MarketingSherpa’s crowned number one: Peerflix Paparazzi. This is an online game consisting of 5 levels. The idea is to gain points by capturing pictures of celebrities that are behaving badly. The better pictures you get, the more points you earn to move onto the next level, ultimately reaching the 'Celebritology' center.

“Within 90 days after launch nearly two million unique visitors played the game more than two times each - plus 5% traveled onwards to visit the main brand's site. And that's the entire point after all.” MarketingSherpa realized the creativeness and precise execution of this viral campaign and awarded them with first place.

The brand it was promoting was a website where you trade DVDs which worked very well with the Paparazzi theme. Buzz was created from placement on well-known blogs, game directories and other websites. It was reported on by popular websites and also entertainment weekly. MarketingSherpa reported, “the key metric for Peerflix was the # of unique game plays. That figure has exceeded 2 million since launch in early January…Roughly 5% of unique visitors (100,000) also visited the Peerflix.com main site.”

This is a great example of viral execution and success. Remembering the importance of measuring the success of any campaign is critical. It will help aid in future endeavors and help uncover which parts of the campaign were positive and which parts need tweaking. Just because viral is meant to be simple and work on its own does not mean it should not be tracked just like every other marketing campaign around.



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