For the launch of the 2007 Office system, Microsoft’s global ad campaign spent 60 percent of its budget on digital advertising. It hired Web analytics firm WebTrends Inc. to measure the results and track all visitor activity occurring within its rich, interactive interface.
The “It’s a new day. It’s a new office” message appears on the campaign Web site at www.office2007.com that debuted in April. The campaign also encompasses print and relationship marketing.
“Microsoft wanted the ability to create a broad campaign across 12 countries and to have the ability to combine the metrics of all of the online aspects along with the offline metrics as well,” said Matt Langie, director of product marketing at WebTrends, Portland, OR.
WebTrends and McCann Worldgroup developed key performance indicators to gauge advertising success based on the quality of users’ product experiences on Microsoft.com. It also measured test drives and trials occurring on third-party sites.
Microsoft’s core objective for the campaign is to drive people to the Office2007.com site where users can view guided demos of the solutions, interact with the new product running on remote machines and download the 2007 release for a 60-day trial.
The site features five two-minute videos focused on customer troubles over computers. WebTrends (www.webtrends.com) is helping evaluate creative effectiveness by determining whether visitors have a higher propensity to engage in one of the three product experiences after viewing these films.
“With end-to-end insight from WebTrends we instantly know how we’re tracking against our objectives for every single digital marketing campaign we are running,” said Jeff Olund, Microsoft general manager at Microsoft Office Productivity Applications. “That instant insight and consistent worldwide view is invaluable, considering the optimization opportunities we’ll have over the 18-month life of this campaign.”
