News

Wendy's taps into sharing platform to measure social activity

June 11, 2012

Wendy's has yielded positive results from its deployment of ShareThis, a sharing platform that recently launched two new tools. The new tools are based on the Social Quality Index (SQI) and help publishers measure and leverage the social value of their content and engagement of their readers.

Last year, ShareThis unveiled the SQI, a universal measure of social activity across the Web. After testing the methodology behind the metric with its publisher and brand partners, ShareThis recently rolled out benchmarking solutions — an SQI Analytics Dashboard and SQI Lookup — that will give publishers additional tools to develop their digital strategies and monetize their content and, in turn, deliver advertisers better insights into how to reach the most social audiences.

SQI provides publishers and advertisers with scoring insights across 27 key content categories. ShareThis has developed a patent-pending, proprietary algorithm that derives a raw social traffic score by evaluating a site's share data such as outbound shares, inbound clickback traffic and page views. The resulting figure is benchmarked against the broader measure of social quality across 1.4 million sites and more than 15 billion monthly user events across the ShareThis Publisher Network.

ShareThis ran two campaigns with Wendy's to determine the impact on performance of delivering campaign messages on high SQI sites. Throughout both campaigns, ShareThis delivered 30 million impressions to the same audience: the first set on non-SQI sites to determine a baseline, and the second on high-SQI sites.

When SQI-targeting was introduced:

• The click-through rate exceeded the campaign average by 209 percent;
• The volume of Wendy's menu page views increased 236 percent;
• Wendy's store locator inquiries increased 236 percent;
• WendyMail sign-ups increased 234 percent;
• The results were accomplished with nearly half the average cost per menu page view (0.61x), store locator inquiry (0.59x) and WendyMail sign-up (0.62x) taking total spend into consideration.

"We're talking about some impressive stats here," said Brandon Rhoten, director of Digital Marketing at Wendy's International. "SQI helped drive the most socially relevant audiences to the custom message we developed, creating a larger impact than any other paid part of this campaign. It helped us tap into audiences we wouldn't have been able to otherwise."

The new SQI Analytics Dashboard summarizes the social activity that takes place on each publisher site within the ShareThis network, including shares, clicks and traffic, assigns publishers a score on the SQI and organizes all this information in a central dashboard. The summary provides publishers with an actionable snapshot of their monthly social score across each of the 27 content categories. The dashboard allows publishers to track their social activity so they can better engage with their readers, optimize content using sharing insights, draw more traffic and gain more value from their existing inventory.

"Before SQI, online publishers had no standardized way to measure or leverage the value of social activity taking place on their sites," said Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis. "As publishers look for new ways to monetize, SQI gives them the benchmark they need to optimize their content, better engage with their readers, attract new advertisers and take advantage of untapped revenue opportunities. In essence, these tools bring the vision behind the social Web and SQI to life for publishers and advertisers alike."

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