January 11, 2008

Act on C02 campaign an environmental success

A lot of new years’ resolutions will have included a promise to reduce carbon footprints. Therefore it was a shrewd move by the Department of Transport to choose this time of year to launch Act on CO2. As the chart below illustrates, the online and offline campaign has been a success, with searches for ‘act on co2’ increasing almost 10-fold last week.

Last year Heather Hopkins wrote about UK searches for global warming and found that, although the volume of searches was increasing, most searchers were ending up on US sites. What’s interesting about this campaign is that it seems to have avoided that problem. It has also encouraged people to visit sites that provide advice on how to tackle climate change, rather than just sites that provide information about it.

The two tables below illustrate the top five sites that people searching for ‘co2’ visited over the last four weeks, as well as the top five search terms containing the phrase over the same period. Wikipedia remains the top site, and two American sites (www.co2science.org and The American Institute of Physics) are also in the top 5. However, the second and third sites are UK-based government ‘action’ sites, rather than just ‘information’ pages

The second table is also revealing. There were more searches for ‘act on co2’ than even ‘co2’ over the last 4 weeks, which again nicely illustrates the campaign’s impact. It is also interesting to note the differing success rates for the top 2 terms: over 92% of searchers for ‘act on co2’ clicked through to a website, whereas the success rate for ‘co2’ was just 55%.

The top three sites receiving traffic from ‘act on co2’ were all UK government sites: the Department of Transport (66.5% of searches ended up there), Directgov (27.7%) and www.actonco2.direct.gov.uk (4.6%). As the chart below illustrates, the success of the campaign has helped increase the market share of Department of Transport’s website. This growth was assisted by a paid search campaign: 38% of the search traffic that Department of Transport website received from the term ‘act on c02’ over the last 4 weeks was paid traffic. This combination of offline marketing and paid search meant that 43% of traffic to the site last week came from search engines, and 93% of that was new visitors to the site.

This page lists the ‘brand partners’ (mostly transport related) that are working with the Department of Transport on the campaign. The smallest company is also the one that has benefited most: 4% of upstream traffic to Stapleton’s Tyre Services came from the Department of Transport last week, and traffic to its site increased 70% week on week. The larger brands didn’t see quite the same uplift, but three in particular experienced notable increases in traffic last week. The chart below illustrates the impact on the Caravan Club, EasyCar and Ford.

Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
Posted to Environment | Government | Politics | Search

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