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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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The Grinch that Stole -- Mrs. Fields' Cookies?

October 23, 2007

Occassionly strange data crosses my desk (o.k. maybe not occassionly, regularly really). Luke McGuinness our VP of Sales on the West Coast popped his head in my office to ask if I knew why Mrs. Fields, suddenly, was getting almost all of her traffic from web based email services (such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc...). Here's the clickstream report that I pulled on the Mrs. Field's site for the day of the spike October 12, 2007.

mrs fields 3.PNG

But what caught my eye was what was on the other half of the clickstream report... where people go when they leave MrsFields.com. Over 73% were heading off to -- The American Family Association?

mrs fields 4.PNG

Whatever was happening between email services and the American Family Association was having a huge effect on visits to the MrsFields.com, increasing the marketshare of visit to over 3x its normal level.

mrs fields 1.png

A little Internet searching revealed the source of this mystery. Apparently, according to this story, a Michigan woman, called a Mrs. Fields to order Christmas cookies. The company representative gave her inaccurate information according to a later statement from Mrs. Fields that, the store was no longer carrying "Christmas" cookies. An email blast was issued from the AFA site. Mayhem ensued. Mystery solved.

This little diversion today highlights the value of daily Internet data as a source of information for what, at first, appears to be errant data, but later proved to be the negative impact of an email campaign.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 02:51 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Shopping and Classifieds