Advocacy Campaign Report
2022 Q4 Final Report
Thank you for your interest in this pro-DRS advocacy campaign. This is the ninth and final report for the 2022 Q4 advocacy campaign.
Some helpful keywords and terms to frame this information are below:
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Impressions: ad views; number of times the ads are displayed on device screens. Does not reflect unique number of people who saw the ads.
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CPM: Cost Per 1,000 Impressions - a primary advertising cost metric.
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CPC: Cost Per Click.
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CTR: Click-Through Rate - the rate at which people saw the ads and subsequently clicked on them.
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KPIs: Key Performance Indicators - these include the terms listed above and are basic gauges for measuring campaign progress.
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WoW: Week over Week - refers to changes in performance metrics from one week to the next.
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All currency is listed in U.S. dollars.
Executive Summary
The ad campaign continued to deliver strong performance in its ninth and final week of the campaign, winding down over a three day period and ending on Wednesday, December 21, 2022.
A total of $13,893.58 was spent for the entirety of the campaign, leading to a sum total of 11,524 site visits driven by the ads, which averages to a cost of $1.21 per site visit:
Twitter accounted for more than 94% of all site visits during the campaign, with a cost per site visit 84% lower than Meta. Though, Meta provided the highest conversion rate of any platform, averaging at 8% in the end, which is well above average for standard digital ad campaigns across all industries. DRSGME.org has also seen return visitors attributed to the Twitter ads continuing into the new year, even though the campaign ended in December.
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By age and gender, women age 50+ were reported to be the largest demographic of people leading to the majority of site visits, across all platforms. By country, people in European countries where English is spoken as a second language accounted for the most site visits, particularly those from France (Meta) and Sweden (Twitter).
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People indicating interests in gaming and gambling drove the majority of site visits from Meta. For Twitter, site visits driven by interest segmentation were about equivalent across gaming and gambling, finance and investing as a larger category, and web3-related content.
Jump to the Conclusion section for more insights and closing thoughts.
Meta Performance
(Facebook and Instagram)
At the end of the final week, the Meta ads delivered a total of 622 site visits for the full span of the campaign, at an average cost of $5.44 per site visit:
Although the Meta campaign made up just over 5% of all site visits driven by the ads across all ad platforms used in the campaign, it landed at a final average conversion rate of around 8%, well above average when measured across ad campaigns for all industries.
Two ad groups were established for the Meta campaign to determine if there may be trends for audience engagement based on segmentation. Altogether, Meta users who identified as having an interest in gaming and/or gambling drove over 71% of site visits, while those interested in the larger finance and investing categories led to the remaining 29%.
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By platform, Facebook delivered more than 95% of Meta’s site visits, with Instagram delivering the remaining 5%.
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By country, French users made up the overwhelming majority of site visits at 78% of the total, and with an 8% conversion rate. The remaining 22% of site visits were split amongst the 12 other countries selected. However, the highest conversion rate came from Australian users at 15%. This was followed respectively by Ireland, Germany, Great Britain, Netherlands, and Sweden, all between 10%-14% conversion rates.
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By gender, women accounted for 61% of all site visits, while men accounted for 39%.
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By age, the breakdown for all site visits is as follows, in order of age demographic:
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18-24 | 1%
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25-34 | 2%
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35-44 | 12%
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45-54 | 26%
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55-64 | 29%
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65+ | 30%
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By ad variation, Grandma’s Recipe drove the most site visits, at 72% of the total. This was followed by Lady Yellow at 14%, and Whisper at 9%, with the remainder split amongst the other five ad variations. The ads which drove no site visits at all were Ethel, the carousel ad featuring Ringo, Lady Yellow, and Ethel, and the carousel ad featuring Couch Man, Seedling, and Grandma’s Recipe (see ad previews here).
Reddit Performance
The Reddit ads were paused during the week of December 5, 2022. See the report here for more details in the final campaign performance summary.
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Applying the test-and-learn approach by employing Reddit ads for a two and a half week period proved to show that it may not be an ideal platform for any future paid advertising efforts. It did lead to some organic engagement. Though, as far as can be determined, this was from users who were already familiar with the subject matter.
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As mentioned in previous reports, Reddit ads in general have historically delivered much lower performance than many other advertising platforms. There are various reasons for this, including that the average Reddit user tends to be more tech-savvy and skeptical of interacting with advertising. There are also a number of third-party apps supporting the Reddit platform that eliminate all paid advertising from the user experience.
For this campaign specifically, the smaller budget might have been a significant factor affecting the success of the ads. It is also possible that the message of the DRS and GameStop as a valuable investment had already over-saturated Reddit through preexisting organic reach, limiting the audience of people who were not aware of the phenomenon and might engage with the content promoted through the ads.
Twitter Performance
The Twitter ads ended up driving a total of 10,883 site visits over the full span of the campaign, at an average cost of $0.88 per site visit:
Difference of $0.01 spend shown in Twitter lifetime campaign view ($9,605.63) and total charges billed to credit card ($9,605.64) is due to Twitter rounding charges from total campaign spend.
While the conversion rate for these visits was lower than average, Twitter accounts for more than 94% of all site visits attributable to the ads across all paid platforms employed. This is while having used 69% of the total campaign spend allowance, and delivering at an average cost per site visit nearly 84% lower than what Meta ultimately achieved.
Even though the campaign delivery was halted in December, DRSGME.org continues to see visitors attributable to being driven by the Twitter ads (see chart in Site Activity section below for Unique Visitors split by Traffic Category for detail). This is a result of those visitors who clicked on an ad when the campaign was still live, which led to a site visit, who then consented to the site’s cookie policy, and have subsequently returned to the site again.
The ad campaign for Twitter was targeting users who have engaged with relevant interests, keywords, and profiles of leaders and individuals who are heavily active within spaces of identified interests (see Target Audience characteristics section from original media plan for more detail). Targeted users were further segmented by country based on Twitter’s limitation of five countries per ad group. Countries were grouped by people who live in countries where English is spoken as the primary language (AU, CA, IE, UK, US), and then by regions of countries where there is strong proficiency in English as a second language. These included Nordic countries (DK, FI, NO, SE) and central European countries (BE, DE, FR, NL).
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By country, Sweden delivered the most site visits at 31% of the total. This was followed by France (13%), Denmark (12%), Belgium (12%), and Norway (10%). Countries that drove the fewest number of site visits were respectively the U.S., Australia, and Canada.
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By gender, women drove more than 72% of site visits, men drove almost 7%, and users whose gender was categorized as “unknown” accounted for 21%.
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By age, Twitter is not as specific with ten-year ranges like Meta or other ad platforms are. However, it was seen that users age 50+ account for almost 61% of site visitors from the Twitter ads.
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By ad variation, Whisper and Seedling drove the most site visits at more than 12% each. This was followed by Ringo and the carousel ad featuring Couch Man, Seedling, and Grandma’s Recipe, both at more than 11% each, and then Ethel at almost 11%. Lady Yellow drove the least number of site visits at just under 3% of total (see ad previews here).
Site Activity
Site traffic during the remaining three days of the campaign in its ninth week remained steady relative to prior weeks’ trends. Since then, unsurprisingly, site traffic overall has seen a drop in average daily and weekly activity.
Though, there was a notable spike on December 28 and 29, after the ad campaign ended. New unique visitors on these two days almost tripled from the count of new unique visitors in the prior two days, while return visitors respectively increased by 32%:
Unique Visitors, New vs. Returning (all traffic sources) - click to expand:
The majority of visitors on these days were from direct traffic, which saw a nearly two and a half times increase in the number of unique visitors on December 28, versus the prior day. Although smaller in total count, visitors from organic search and organic social sources also doubled respectively in this one-day time frame:
Unique Visitors, split by Traffic Category (new and returning combined) - click to expand:
Aside from the homepage, the most visited page during this traffic spike was the broker guide for Great Britain-based Revolut, which saw a more than seventeen times increase in unique visitors on December 28, versus the average baseline number of visitors from previous days and weeks:
Unique visitors to Revolut guide, all traffic sources - click to expand:
Since the majority of visits to this guide were direct, and because direct traffic has no trace-back links to determine an origin source path for navigation to the site, the exact reason for the heavy jump in activity for this broker guide on these dates is unknown.
The charts below include all site traffic seen during the campaign, which lasted from October 24, 2022, through December 21, 2022. Click each to expand for detail:
Unique Visitors
Site Sessions
Page Views
Conclusion
Due to this being the first major and sustained awareness advertising effort for DRSGME, there is now a set of data points that can be leveraged for any potential future paid outreach.
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There was a clear difference in ad engagement between Meta and Twitter based on audience segmentation by interest. Meta skewed more heavily towards engagement from users indicating interest in gaming and/or gambling, and Twitter saw about equivalent engagement from people interested in gaming/gambling, as well as finance, investing, and economics as a larger category. Of course, there may be some audience overlap of these interests, but it can be inferred that the interest targeting for this campaign was well directed.
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People in older age demographics, and particularly women, proved to be more heavily engaged with the ads on Meta. Though, to see a similar demographic also more heavily engaged with the Twitter ads was an unexpected and surprising result.
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The reason for this outcome on both platforms may be explained by the fact that on average, people in older demographics tend to have more accumulated wealth than their younger cohorts. This would likely cause them to have a keener interest in investing that wealth, and pay greater attention to content that promotes that interest.
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However, as stated in previous reports, bots and AI activity are a notorious problem within digital advertising, particularly Twitter, and are nearly impossible to fully identify and entirely separate from data reflected by actual human activity. Even with the site excluding what it counts as bot traffic from its analytics, the degree and magnitude of any non-human activity remains unknown. Though, various indicators reflected over time, as shared in previous reports, reveal that the ads did reach a wider audience than what organic engagement alone has been able to achieve.
It is also important to note that site visitor data is captured and reflected only for people who consent to accept cookies according to the site’s cookie policy. Depending on various factors such as location, demographic makeup, and cookie type, as well as statistics for the average internet user’s cookie consent behavior, actual site traffic may be understated by as much as two to five times or more.
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The ads and DRSGME.org were initially designed to accommodate people who are fluent in the English language. Despite that, high engagement with the ads was seen from people in European countries where English is not a first language. The paid advertising efforts also seemed to complement and boost organic engagement, wherein people from European countries not targeted by the ads, such as Italy, Poland, Romania, etc., reached out to the DRSGME team through various channels to learn more about how to DRS their GME investments.
A possible explanation for lower engagement from people in countries where English is the primary language (such as Australia, Canada, and the U.S.), could be that there was already an over-saturation of knowledge and awareness of the DRS and GME content within these audiences. Additionally, the algorithms for both Meta and Twitter auto-optimize their ads on the back end, to deliver to people considered to be the most likely to engage with them. So it is possible there was a delivery bias established by the platforms themselves to show the ads more heavily to people within specific locations. This cannot be controlled for independently, outside of manually removing those locations from the targeting parameters.
Still, given the fact that the most highly engaged users with the ads were from countries where English is not the first language, any future outreach efforts should include a broader variety of languages, such as designing language-specific ad variations.
Since the launch of the campaign in October 2022, the DRSGME volunteers have already been turning this insight into action - the site has since been translated for availability in French, German, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish, with constant additions of DRS guides for lesser known brokers that cater to clientele of specific countries and languages. There continue to be ongoing efforts in providing additional language translations for the site, including Danish in the near future, with the intent to reach as wide a global audience as possible.
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In light of the time available from the DRSGME volunteers, as well as the budget allowance for this campaign, this can be considered a modest effort that provided some fundamental informative insights for future application. Time and budget permitting, any potential future advertising efforts may be well served with a more robust and diversified media plan, utilizing other media channels and outlets. These might include influencer marketing, sustainable paid search advertising, and out-of-home execution such as billboards.
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The organic engagement that the DRSGME team continues to foster has also shown to be a powerful force in generating awareness of the DRS and GME. Although, it has been observed that people who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon can be more receptive to messaging about direct registration as a general concept, without a specific stock ticker accompanying it.
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In order to continue reaching a wider audience and gather momentum around this movement, future advertising and outreach efforts may be focused on the broader message of the DRS, serving as the bread crumb leading to awareness of the sandwich that is a GameStop stock investment.
Continuing on that path, the DRSGME has announced a parallel effort to launch a sister site in 2023, WhyDRS.org. This effort is being undertaken with the intent of taking the same support and resources now known to GME investors, and expanding that model more broadly to investors for every public company in America.
Until the new site is fully ready for launch, WhyDRS.org will redirect to the current DRSGME.org site. To follow developments on this project, please visit and/or subscribe to the r/DRSyourGME subreddit.
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Special thanks and gratitude goes to the generous individuals who donated to the original GoFundMe campaign, and the community at large who continues to support the DRSGME team and movement. The encouragement and contributions from all of these individuals make it possible for this site to continue providing retail investors with the knowledge and tools to take control of their investments and financial future.