Quiz Show The Return – Part 1

Almost two years ago, an exploration of coffee led us to a unique lead generation site, although at the time, its revenue model and link to the lead generation world looked much less clear than they do today. The site dispenses free quizzes as a user acquisition vehicle, with quizzes coming in third probably behind porn and humor sites for longest running types of sites online. Most people don’t go to quiz sites, i.e. they don’t act as a destination or starting off point for Internet activity like Yahoo.com or NYTimes.com. Historically, you went to a quiz site after receiving one in the mail from your friend or a coworker coming over and telling you that you have to take this quiz, because they know it will lead to laughs at your expense. All of this has changed in the advent of Facebook and other social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean that quiz sites themselves have gone away in a post-Facebook, app intensive area. In today’s content is king, quality score is everything world, the business of quizzes has shown surprising staying power. Of the ones we see today, we can separate the major sites along a couple of axis – their propensity for repeat visitors, i.e. how likely users are to engage the site again on purpose, and secondly, the monetization mechanism, whether it is adjacent or ancillary. The third dimension deals with whether the content of the quiz has a purely promotional nature or on the other extreme, no obvious marketing spin. This time around we’ll look at a couple of different variations along the spectrum. We’ll start with an obvious one.

Here’s the ad:

Take the name compatibility quiz. Just enter your names and find out!
www.PerfectMatchGame.com

Looking at the ad, we can make a guess at part of who the site targets, and unless they know something about me that I don’t know, I do not fall into the group that will click or convert. The title of the ad aside, the text gives indications of what type of site you will find. The notion of a "compatibility quiz" suggest a site with some backend logic, something built out slightly, but the rest of the ad hints more at the true nature. That it requires only "your names" could go either way, it could say "it’s long so don’t be afraid to click," or it could very well imply that there’s nothing here. Those on the slightly cynical, who assume everything has an arbitrage component will find themselves completely correct, and those with quite a bit of experience will have correctly guessed this site to be a mobile subscription marketing play in the "crush" vein.

Here is the landing page.

It has the now famous “cartoony” style that asks you to select your gender, which takes you into a conversion funnel that next asks for your name and the name of the person you like. After completing both steps, you are taken to a page with the following:

While perhaps not universally best practices, say in the eyes of the FTC, this site does show their mobile savvy by using all of the known best practices for generating conversions. Only on this step does a headline appear (not shown) mentioning the price, and the check box for the terms and conditions includes some additional non-legal language that would entice the average user to continue forward, saying, "Yes, I’d like to know whether this crush is for real." Nowhere is there an option to receive the results without entering your phone number nor do you have the opportunity to obtain it without then entering your pin and being added to a billing service. On our three scales, this one scores at the extremes on all of them. The site makes no accommodations or attempt for repeat users, it isn’t really a quiz, so it definitely scores as purely promotional, and it’s incentivized in that you can’t see your results without first performing such action, an action that in this case costs money.

The crush offer above markets itself as a quiz, but as we see, the user experience doesn’t fulfill on that. This next site does to some degree, although it uses the same monetization strategy as the above. After clicking on an ad, which unlike many of the others runs on both search and display, you go to the following landing page:

Complete the ten questions, answer an additional question about your gender, and then you see the following:

While the site offers a quiz, it doesn’t really count as a quiz site, more of a reskinned crush offer. It’s certainly an interesting approach to connect mobile marketing and quiz, and if anything it shows that with the right hook into the user, you can leverage quiz content in ways not expected. The reverse holds true as well; it also shows the power of mobile services, and will most likely be the first of many uses of mobile outside of the current ringtone / crush paradigm.

These two mobile examples are just the beginning. Click here to continue for other direct marketing ingenuity.