Virality- Jim Pugh

8/16/2019 Virality- Jim Pugh

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Measuring and Improving Virality


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Overview

•

What is virality?

• Measuring virality

• Improving virality

• Case Study: Commit to Vote Challenge


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What is Virality?

•

Often used, poorly understood: – “There’s a viral campaign happening on Twitter”

– “Social media goes viral on Capitol Hill”

• Virality measures organic growth, not overall

popularity

• Determined by amount of user sharing

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What is Virality?

•

Virality Ratio – average number of new peopleeach user recruits

• Definition of viral growth: Virality ratio greater than 1

• Virality ratio less than 1 is sub-viral – growth is limited

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• Virality Loop:

• Users take action

• Users invite friends

•

Friends respond, become users

• Repeat

What is Virality?

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Measuring Virality

•

How can you measure your virality ratio?

• Qualitatively:

– Are we recruiting lots of new people?

• Curve-fitting:

– Estimate time needed to complete virality loop

– Plot number of new users after every loop time

– Fit to best exponential curve

– Exponent = virality ratio

• Can be very inaccurate

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Measuring Virality

•

Generation Tracking: – Record what “generation” each user is

– Initial user = generation 1

– Invited user = generation of recruiter + 1

•

Can exactly track virality ratio for each generation:

Gen 2 users / Gen 1 users = Gen 2 virality ratio

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How to Track Generations

•

Embed data as URL parameter in sharing link – Facebook post link: http://my.site.com/campaign?generation=1

• When loading, application should read URL data

and store for user

– Susan clicks link and signs up – becomes Gen 1 user

• When user shares, increment generation count

– Susan posts link to wall: http://my.site.com/campaign?generation=2

• Can store additional information in link: – http://my.site.com/campaign?generation=2&inviter=Susan&source=FB

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Saturation

• In theory, no growth limit for viral campaigns

• BUT, only so many people on Earth (or in target audience)

• Eventually, growth becomes sub-viral – campaign hits

saturation

• To calculate virality ratio, limit to only early generations

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Improving Virality

•

"Ok, I can measure my virality -- but how do Iimprove it?”

• Return of the virality loop: – Action

–

Invite – Response

• Remember: Virality Ratio = Action Rate x Invite Rate x Response Rate

• Improving rate of any step improves virality ratio bysame percentage

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Improving Virality – Example Campaign

•

New campaign has virality ratio of 0.75

• Virality Loop Optimizations:

– Optimizing action page -> 8% higher conversion rate

– Optimizing share page -> 15% more invitations sent

– Optimizing share content -> 9% higher click rate

• New virality ratio: 0.75 x 1.08 x 1.15 x 1.09 = 1.02

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VIRAL


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Commit to Vote Challenge App

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Commit to Vote Challenge App


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Early Growth

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Full Growth with Saturation


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Measuring Virality of Commit to Vote Challenge

•

Take all Gen 1 users from first week (10/17 - 10/24)• Identify all later users descended from Gen 1

• Virality ratio of first five generations: 1.11

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Top Optimizations

Action – Limiting the required Facebook permissions to exclude Religious/

Political Views and Friends’ Location boosted signups by 18.5%

– Prompting for the user’s reason for voting after they hadcommitted boosted signups by 11.1%

Invite – Using an “ask” rather than “inspire” frame on the invite step

boosted invites by 5.9%

– Adding “optional” to the reason prompt increased invites by 4.5%

Response – Changing invite text to a “ asks: Will you commit to

vote?” frame increased click rate by 19.2%

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Virality Workshop Notes

•

There is only one set of parameter choices that willgive you a viral campaign

• Use your Excel calculators to determine if the

difference in conversion rates is statisticallysignificant

• IMPORTANT: To use the Excel calculator with yourconversion rate on the Invite Tester, divide the rate

by 10

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Virality- Jim Pugh