Break the Spine

Case Studies. Have something to submit? Email monique@breakthespine.com

Douglas & McIntyre’s Tar Sands Online Marketing Campaign

Douglas & McIntyre

During the week of March 16 - 20 2009, Douglas & McIntyre (D&M) experimented with providing a free PDF download of Andrew Nickaforick’s entire book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

http://www.dmpibooks.com

Description

We had four goals in mind for this project:
1. To have as many people as possible download the book
2. To increase traffic on our site
3. To increase sales
4. To establish Greystone Books as a leading environmental publisher through the
development of relationships with environmental bloggers and websites

Approach
From March 16 - 20, 2009, we had a PDF of Tar Sands available online as a free, unprintable download from our website. This coincided with the book’s release in the U.S. The PDF was plainly laid out to encourage people to buy the actual book. We optimized the Tar Sands book page on our site to ensure high ranking on search engines, particularly Google. We also used key search words relating to the tar sands to create a series of paid Google Ads. 

One interesting part of this experiment was in conducting a 50/50 campaign or what is often called an A/B campaign. When visitors to the download page arrived, 50% were able to download the PDF directly, with no barrier to entry, and the other 50% were first asked to fill in their name and email address. These 50% were randomly selected through programming on the webpage. We did this to see how much resistance there might be to having to submit a name and address.

We also coordinated this campaign with the David Suzuki Foundation and the Boreal Songbird Initiative to spread the word about the promotion and offered one week of guest blogging services by the author, Andrew Nikiforuk.

Results

Results
Based on the measurement of these goals as tracked by Google Analytics, as well as through anecdotal evidence, we’ve deemed this campaign to be a success.

Over a five-day period, 6,000 people successfully downloaded the Tar Sands PDF, hugely surpassing our expectations.

Our efforts resulted in a huge increase in traffic on our site, and specifically on the Tar Sands book page. During the week of March 16-20, we had 11,502 unique visitors to our site, a 604% increase in traffic from the month before.

We cannot know if offering the free download deterred sales or increased them. But what we can confidently state is that by offering this download and spreading the word of the campaign to circles and markets we don’t always reach, thousands of people have become aware of the book and the issue that otherwise may not have. By noting the number of new visitors to our website during the course of the campaign, we can see that we’ve attracted a new audience for our books. Again, this is a measurable that goes beyond just quantity sold. All this said, however, we do have sales data for Tar Sands . According to BookNet Canada,sales of Tar Sands during the campaign week increased by 10% over the previous week. Sales dropped slightly in the US during the campaign week, but increased the following week by 46%.

To conclude, we’ve deemed that all goals were successfully met to the degree that we were able to measure them. Overall, the campaign was an experiment in providing free content and the knowledge, contacts and web presence we gained from that has proven extremely valuable.

Responses
“Thank you for allowing us to download Tar Sands. We went to a talk by Andrew but never bought the book. We worked on the tar sands 30 years ago – in fact it got us into the country. It is a different scene now. It should never have come that far. We’ll read the book now and see where we went wrong. We have noted some of your other books! Some worth purchasing.”
—Rob and Tjarda Barratt

“I just downloaded Andrew Nikiforuk’s “Dirty Oil” from your website, for free - thank you! However, I feel an obligation to both the author and the publishers for creating this valuable book, and to ensure that works like this are created in future. Is there any mechanism or a suggested payment I could make to support Andrew and yourselves? Thanks again.”
—Ian Theaker

Further Notes

TarSandsCampaign-Report.pdf

Monique’s Test Entry

Boxcar Marketing

Just thinking of a project.

http://www.boxcarmarketing.com

Description

Stuff here

Results

Results here.

Further Notes

PDF here.