“High Engagement” Sites of Food, Beverage Brands Top CPG Website Rankings

Posted on | December 26, 2007 |

Consumer packaged goods brand sites attracted a total of 66.4 million U.S. visitors, an increase of 10 percent versus the same period last year, - republished here from a recently released comScore, Inc. study. All of the top ten positions were taken by food or beverage brands. The average visitor made 3.9 visits to sites within the CPG category, viewing 10.5 pages per visit, and spending an average of 9 minutes per site visit.

KraftFoods.com led the category with 10.5 million visitors (up 8 percent), followed by MyCokeRewards.com with 8.6 million visitors.

Several candy sites have attracted substantial numbers of visitors, including:

Wrigley’s Candystand.com (up 1 percent to nearly 3.8 million visitors)

MyMMs.com (up 79 percent to 2.3 million visitors)

Hersheys.com (up 12 percent to 2.1 million visitors)

UncleBens.com, which increased from 191,000 visitors a year ago to 3.6 million visitors this year, utilized targeted banner ads on Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com that resulted in nearly 2 million visits.

Pampers.com, which ranked as the 12th most visited site in the CPG category, attracted 1.7 million visitors with its interactive site focused on baby development and parenting advice.

Carolina Petrini, SVP of consumer packaged goods solutions at comScore concluded “Savvy brand marketers are beginning to understand the importance of the online channel as a means of engaging consumers, which will ultimately lead to offline sales.”

Interesting is to look at each of the high-traffic generating sites for clues to their performance. In nearly all cases, the sites are highly engaging for - offline - customers of the brand’s products. One blog reader commented that the sites all ran contests, sweepstakes and promotions to achieve the results. While this is certainly relevant for the category, the results from the studies’ top-ranking sites would indicate a mixture of vehicles each catering to a specific Brand’s customers’ lifestyle - well executed - attributed for the success. For example;

Wrigley’s Candystand is a casual game site which explains the traffic. I would be curious to see the e-commerce results from the sites candy-shop, or the overall results of the brand building.

MyMMs.com is strong on personalization particularly B2B as well as B2C, it will be interesting to watch what they do next after the novelty of having “your logo” on an M&M wears off.

Hershey’s chocolates is after a strong vertical - the chocolate lover - with this online publication.

MyCokeRewards requires no further explanation! its evergreen and the perfect online/offline tie-in. Pepsi was oddly not in the rankings.

And finally, UncleBen’s paid probably a pretty penny for banners on Oprah.com and TheFoodNetwork.com. But with a resulting 2m strong upsurge in traffic, it was most likely money very well spent.