Hitwise looks at the Dragons' Den effect

Hitwise’s Robin Goad has published a few interesting thoughts on the overall ‘Dragons’ Den effect’ – the sales and publicity entrepreneurs can generate from the show, ignoring whether they get funding or not.

Taking the example of Sarah Lu’s Youdoo Doll, featured a couple of weeks ago, Robin says traffic to the company’s homepage peaked the day after the programme was aired (although Robin hasn't released any absolute numbers).

He says a lot of visitors weren’t just there out of curiousity – almost half (48%) went on to Google Checkout after leaving the site, “presumably to make, or at least contemplate, a purchase”.

With the dolls retailing at £20, that could have delivered an immediate boost for the business, alongside the £35,000 invested by Deborah Meaden (in return for 45% of the company).

Having retailer agreements in place was also a good plan – Robin says I Want One of Those was the largest recipient of traffic, not the company’s homepage.

He adds that another issue Sarah seemed to anticipate was misspellings of searches:

“Youdoo is a catchy name, but also open to potential misspellings. We ran a search term analysis on a number of these, and... they all saw a significant increase in search volume following the show.”

As Robin says, those figures provide another great example of how offline media coverage and ads can influence online behaviour.

Related research:
Search Engine Marketing Buyers’ Guide 2007

Related posts:
Using search to measure offline success
Offline ads influence two in three searchers
Affiliates bag Dragons’ Den funding

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