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April 2009 Archives

Charlie Crist vs. Marco Rubio or will it be Justin Sayfie vs. David All?

By friedgator on April 29, 2009 12:24 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
As Charlie gets ready to announce for Senate, the big question becomes how do the rest of the dominos fall. Does Marco Rubio run for Senate and challenge Crist on the right? It looks more and more like he will run for Senate and this is going to be an amazing primary season on both sides of the aisle.

But one of the more interesting things that happened recently is that Justin Sayfie created a new new media firm serving Republicans (Yes, for all your Democrats that love Sayfie the #1 site in Florida is controlled by a serious partisan Republican that worked for Jeb Bush). It's called NetPower strategy:

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In the same week the conservative group running ads on Charlie Crist claim that Sayfie denied them the ability to run ads on SayfieReview.com -- Sayfie says they never contact him. Considering their buy is sizable and has some money behind it, that answer might be a bit of a non-denial denial. 

Why is this interesting? What if the Crist vs. Rubio race will be a new media match between Republican new media consultant David All who is working for Rubio, and maybe Justin Sayfie's new firm will help Charlie Cirst. 

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David All has done a great for Marco Rubio so far (Hulu.com ripoff design aside) and in my opinion is running the best online program in Florida right now. But Justin Sayfie has done great working on everything from RebuildtheParty.com to SayfieReview.com. This

If your Democrat reading this -- why do you care? Aside from using this race as a testing ground for Republicans to catch up to us online before the 2012 Presidential election.Its possible that this primary could also energize their base enough to build a serious online force in Florida to support Republcians at all levels. 

We need to get moving now and pressure all our candidates and party leaders (this means you Alex Sink and Bill Nelson) to not take the internet for granted, invest in it, and keep our lead on them.


Can a Blogga Get a Break

By friedgator on April 28, 2009 6:13 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Both of us here at Friedgator.com took a break for a while because we needed a bit of a break -- so we can take care of the rest of life. But with Sansom getting incited, Greer running for Congress, Crutel and Atwater negotiating behind closed doors, Crist announcing that he is running for senate next week, Charlie Justice running for Congress, attacks on our election system, attempts on drilling off the coast and the great license plate drama of 2009 -- these Florida politicos insist on not letting us take a break. 

So here we go today -- working on a few posts about everything above and a lot more as Florida begins one of the most exciting cycles in history. 

But with my returning post I have to applaud Al Lawson for trying to give a brotha a break -- by creating a specialty license plate that would give money "for the purpose of offsetting salary and benefit cuts by the Legislature and providing grief counseling." On the bottom it would say "Give a Brotha a Break" and the mock-up on the Buzz included a handsome picture of the Democratic leader and congressional candidate. 



Nevermind that he forgot the sistas, or that not everyone in government is a "brotha" or a "sista" -- I am downright depressed this didn't get passed. Because it is a huge let down after saving $30 of beer money to buy one for Allen Boyd. Now what should we spend that on ...

Attorney General Bill McCollum's Cyber Crime TV ads by his political consultant wasted our money

By friedgator on April 1, 2009 5:10 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
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Jim Greer's RPOF twitter account declared this week that Alex Sink "goes to bat for sexual predators." They went on the attack again because she questioned Bill McCollum's $1 million addition to his $1.4 million ad campaign to promote SafeFlorida.net. But it turns out, Sink was right to wonder about whether this was the best use of our money. According to documents from Attorney General McCollum's office, he used millions in taxpayer's money to serve an extra 767 web pages per week -- which comes out to $50 per additional web page served. 

In light of this, I (Friedgator) am announcing -- as a service to Florida -- I will bid on the almost $1 million contract addition (if he will open it up to Floridians) for just $500,000 and I guarantee that I will drive at least twice as much traffic to the site (don't worry Bill, we'll even keep you name in the ads). That's four times the value for you math fans. 

In addition, McCollum paid over $100,000 over Spanish language ads that featured him and directed people to SafeFlorida.net which has never had any information available in Spanish, even after the the redesign. So, I'll throw in Spanish translation of SafeFlorida.net in the half-million dollar contract too. 

SafeFlorida.jpgWhy are we so confident? To put it into simple terms: Friedgator.com gets the same traffic as SafeFlorida.net - for $0. Yup, we average about 2,500 pageviews a week these days -- which is about the same SafeFlorida.net  (Not that we're bragging, but thanks for making us look good). 

I make this comparison because, recently, FriedGator was given documents from the Attorney General's office regarding traffic to SafeFlorida.net. The documents -- include the total "hits" per week (SafeFlo.pdf) and a record of every "hit" by IP address (ipreportSafeFl.pdf). This is not every visit but every "webpage rendered"  by their computers. 

So instead of ridiculous attacks as the RPOF prefers to wage, we'll just let the numbers tell the story. There is no doubt that the ads had an effect on raising traffic, but it was the most in-efficient way I have ever seen after years in online marketing. The numbers added up to 92,378 web pages rendered since the ads started airing in August, or about 2,497 web pages rendered per week since they started running the ads. Before the ads, the site rendered an average of 1,881 web pages per week. 

But the return on that investment of 1.4 million in TV ads to drive traffic was embarrassing. From just the numbers, we know they paid $15 for every web page viewed (including staff) and $50 for every additional web page viewed after the TV ads began running. But remember this is not "number of people visiting the site," this is the number of pages on the site that were looked at. 

The documents indicated that they didn't have a way to measure unique visitors so we'll have to try and figure that out ourselves (For the AG's office here is a link to sign-up Google Analytics it'll help prepare you for our help). I did my best to breakdown the data and use third party information at Compete.com -- despite their often dubious numbers, we found compete.com to be fairly accurate. We found that about 13,375 people visited the website in the last year, with about 3125 unique visitors before the ads and about 10,250 unique visitors after the ad began airing last year. You can even see the spikes in the graph when the ads were aired in August/September and February:



The graph shows the ads produced a spike as Bill likes to tout about, but spikes that cost about $1.4 Million for 6,000 additional people visiting the website. That comes to about $215 per additional visitor to the site. Yes, $215 -- I think they could have saved money by handing out $100 to parents for visiting the site.

Why is this bad?  Well the attorney general isn't running a single Google Ad or web ad in his campaign about ... wait for it ... Cyber Crime. Like the the name of the unit his attempts to inform people about the information available on the site is stuck in the last decade. 

So if it was this bad at getting parents to use the resources on SafeFlorida, then what was the buy designed for? Well I am sure it helped boost his name recognition and tie him to his favorite amongst parents who vote too. In case you forgot here are the 

McCol-717265.jpgBut this is why it is a travesty: On a day when the Cyber Crime unit has caught three sex offenders in one day -- it saddens me that Attorney General McCollum never asked to use these millions for that unit. The leader of it said they just need more people to catch more predators -- if $2.5 million was used for that unit maybe we could have caught 4 today. Wouldn't you rather trade 157 web pages served for $7,500 to pay a few people to catch that guy?  

While some claim he never could have done that, it is clear that the legislature could move that money anywhere or he could have used the money to boost his Cyber Crime unit or at the very least expand his highly successful school based outreach program which costs about $2.5 Million less than the TV ads. Or he could have followed the report generated by a task force his office was part of and focus on the much bigger problem of cyber bullying, as Smashed Frog points out. So many options ...

So Bill, if you're going to stick to this program, LIMRL and bury the hatchett so we can talk about how I can do a better job than Mottolla at driving parents to SafeFlorida.net.


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