The launch of Speed played out as an interesting case study of the changing nature of the media and the rise of social networks. The campaign on 19 March combined online ads, media relations, direct communications via email, and promotion via social networks.

Our headline numbers for visitors to the site in the first week were as follows:

Unique visits: 2,904
Page views: 15,640
Pages/visit: 5.39
Average time on the site: 4 mins 14s

The majority of the traffic came direct – 49%. That’s as a result of briefing clients, suppliers and other agencies within the Loewy Group. Referrals accounted for almost 44% and search engines 7%. More than four minutes is an impressive average visitor time and we assume it results from competitors checking us out.

It’s when you unpick the referral sources that you start to understand how people found out about Speed.

Old friends
The old web sites of the businesses that made-up Speed (BMA Communications, Custard PR, Lighthouse PR, Mantra PR and Rainier PR accounted for the largest chunk (37.1%) of the referring, traffic followed by social networks (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) traffic at 31.9% combined.

This demonstrates the potency of social networks as a means of driving word of mouth communication and traffic. On launch day everyone rolled over their Twitter photo to the Speed logo and content about the company was quickly distributed through profile pages.

Organic search
The success of organic search via Google is a surprise, but Google was quick to index the site. We now need to work on its authority. The email newsletter also pulled in a significant number of people. This traditional means of communication is clearly not dead for mass communications.

Online ads
The laggard has been the limited pull through of the online ads – we ran a two-day news page takeover on Brand Republic and have a similar campaign ongoing on PRWeek.com.

Brand Republic pulled in 3.1% of referring traffic and PR Week 1.4%. This has led us to debate internally whether online advertising is an appropriate means of brand promotion. It could also be down to the creative, but that’s an entirely different debate.

There’s also a debate to be had over the value of the audience. A potential client that reaches us via Brand Republic has much more value to the business than a competitor, or a mate, that comes via a social network. We’ll need to look at ways of measuring this going forward.