Research Details Consumer Reaction to Groupon's $11 Million Day

In our analysis of data provided by Experian Hitwise on the August 19th national Groupon deal with Gap, we observed that unlike most social media activities, this promotion was anchored with metrics allowing us to use it to put both our collective concepts of "best practices" and our measurement tools to the test. Social Times asked two companies known for their social media analytics to provide additional insights to help social media marketers apply the lessons of this deal to their own campaigns. As Alterian did when we examined the JetBlue flight attendant incident, the company used its SM2 monitoring and analysis package to uncover consumer social media activity related to the Groupon/Gap deal. It's easy to see the spike of mentions of Groupon, both alone and in combination with Gap. The lift for Groupon alone exceeded that for mentions of the brand combination; conversations about the deal appear to have faded while mentions of Groupon continue to spike, albeit with smaller peaks, probably in relation to ongoing regional deals. The slight "resurgence" Groupon/Gap mentions on August 26 may be due to an Adweek post on that day. The data (all figures are rounded) show that 55% of the Groupon/Gap mentions and 40% of the Groupon-only mentions were driven on microblogs, such as Twitter. Based on publicly available information, 10% of the Groupon/Gap and 19% of the Groupon-only mentions were on social networks such as Facebook; while 30% of the Groupon/Gap and 16% of the Groupon-only mentions were on mainstream media sites with commenting functions and social bookmarking sites. Message boards generated 9% of the Groupon/Gap and 5% of the Groupon-only mentions. This distribution indicates marketers may want to pay attention to a broad spectrum of platforms. Using a combination of public (age and gender) and derived (popularity) data, Alterian concludes the mentions of the promotion were by a general audience with limited influencers. The Groupon-only statistics are similar, except for a somewhat more even age distribution from 18 to 49. Groupon/Gap mentions (top map) are huge in major metros, but limited in the Midwest. Groupon-only mentions (bottom map) have a somewhat more even distribution. This difference could be due to availability of Groupon deals and/or Gap stores in certain locations; geographic-based differences in the popularity of the Gap brand, or other factors. It appears that people were sharing information on the promotion, but were not driving ongoing conversations. That said, the lift for Groupon - independent of the promotion - may be a plus for the brand in the long-term, even with chatter about the promotion being short-lived. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at data from NetBase on the sentiment behind the comments.

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Research Details Consumer Reaction to Groupon's $11 Million Day

Neil Glassman

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Neil Glassman