Guys, I was doing comprehensive research on “JABONG”, A Life Style e-Commerce maestro with whopping 1.6 million likes on Facebook in a span of approx 2 yrs. Jabong is really doing a commendable Job in Online selling and has created a strong brand presence via Social Media. I will try to unravel their secrets and approach towards Facebook Marketing and then we can brainstorm what factors are really important in creating an online presence of a brand through FB.
A complete FB Page Analysis & Case Study of an Indian fashion and lifestyle e-com portal “Jabong.com”
Jabong.com is one of the most successful Fashions and Lifestyle portal in India. It retails apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty products, fragrances, home accessories and other fashion and lifestyle products. Portal Started operating in Jan 2012 and brand was awarded as ‘Most Impactful Launch of the year’ at ‘Pitch Brands 50 Awards 2013. Revenues in 21 months are estimated at 100-150 Million USD i.e. 611.6 – 917.4 crore rupees in 21 months i.e. 29-43.7 crore rupees per month. According to its founder Arun Chandra Mohan, the website currently receives approx 16000 orders per day.
I won’t be plaguing you will repetitive information which can be gathered from other resources on the web and will come straight to their FACEBOOK page insights @ www.facebook.com/myjabong.
I would be using Indian INR for this Case study, you can convert it to USD as per your convenience ( As on 18th Oct when am still writing this article conversion rates are: 1 US Dollar equals 60.97 Indian Rupee )
My Objective from this case study is to understand Facebook marketing strategy of an eCommerce portal.
Take away from this analysis should be:
- How to create FB Marketing Strategy
- How to plan content marketing over FB
- How to approach and execute the plan to achieve designated targets
- Understanding Ratio of Organic vs Paid efforts and how to contrive and execute them
Total No of Fans and their Growth Rate
Jabong’s Facebook Business Page is currently boasting an average growth of 863 likes/day this month (Sep14-Oct14), and if we average out their fan growth over past 21 months (1604019), it will come out to be 76384 likes per month i.e approx 2546 likes a day which is awesomely good for a brand just 21 months old. This demonstrates company’s seriousness in relation to Social media since inception, which was executed in an extremely thriving manner via aggressive advertising travails through Facebook.
Geographical Distribution of Fans: Country-wise
Geographical statistics play a very vital role in the performance of a website, If the fan base is not in conjunction with the geography of the targeted market one cannot get desired results from Overall branding efforts. Jabong caters India and their marketing strategy is very streamlined. In the total no of 164019 fans, 1575168 are from India that makes approx 98.35% share i.e. they are laser-focused on their targeted geography with resonating advertising efforts.
Growth of Fans: Per Day analysis
While analyzing the growth of fans at their FB page I saw some interesting figures popping on different dates, so to give it a closer look and understand why the data per day is so staggering I took out stats of 41 days.
To mark out some massive nos ahead of the crowd, 3 sep boasts 3327 fans, Sep 6th @ 2793, Sep 7th @ 3428…. I have listed few selected dates when their Fan indices evinced amazing bullish run.
| Date | No of Fans |
| 3-Sep | 3327 |
| 4-Sep | 2030 |
| 6-Sep | 2793 |
| 7-Sep | 3428 |
| 8-Sep | 3266 |
| 9-Sep | 3612 |
| 1-Sep | 1965 |
| 14-Oct | 2456 |
Dates to mark for further analysis are the one that received maximum no fans during the period of 41 days it is Sep 9 with 3612 likes and the one which received minimum no of likes i.e. Sep 27 with 385 likes, so why some dates were 10 times as bullish compared to other dates?
This question can be answered by researching and analyzing the content they posted on those particular dates. I will try to do a content analysis of Jabong further in this post itself to identify the ratio of their paid and organic engagement efforts. But on a broader spectrum, metrics clearly suggest that advertising efforts via Facebook ads and sponsored post were aggressively executed on above 8 mentioned dates as compared to other 33 dates.
People Talking About Strong Metric of FB to keep an eye on
This metric needs a deeper analysis and a strong documentation of strategy regarding content, which should be directly proportional to rising and fall of “People Talking about” numbers. This metric is showing a tentative number of people engaging with your content and creating stories, which includes: Liking, Commenting, Posting, Sharing, answering Questions, Mentioning your Page or tagging a picture, responding to an Event, Browsing in to or commending your Facebook Page to others. It also includes sequential Likes or Comments received from posts Shared by Page Fans.
Between Sep 3 – Sep 10 there is a sharp rise in nos of people talking about and the nos are locomoting between 50k and 60k. A very steep fall in nos is seen after 10th Sep, to do an in-depth analysis lets walk across the week and see if nos are in unison with the likes received during that period
| Date | No of Fans | People Talking about |
| 3-Sep | 3327 | 60324 |
| 4-Sep | 2030 | 59108 |
| 6-Sep | 2793 | 57323 |
| 7-Sep | 3428 | 51850 |
| 8-Sep | 3266 | 51850 |
| 9-Sep | 3612 | 55827 |
| 10-Sep | 1965 | 55827 |
Clear figures are complimenting each other mandating the fact that Jabong pushed in huge sums of money in FB ads and promotional posts during Sep 3-Sep 10. On an average this week was JABONG’s highly engaged week reaping maximum no of likes during the analyzed 41 day period.
A steep fall to 14k clearly demonstrates that the hype created during 3-10 September was through FB advertising and engagement rates were virtually inflated, as organic engagement rate is stable at 14k consistently reaping an average of 600-800 likes/ day.
Post Sources indicate that 21% of posts are been advocated via Power Editor i.e. they are promoted.
If you haven’t heard of Power Editor, its a tool which is used to manage and create FB ads, basically its a chrome extension and is highly recommended if you are running FB ads at regular intervals.
Till now we have grabbed a better perspective and have seen demonstrated proof of Jabong’s FB advertising moves but to give our analysis rock solid base, lets dig on to the posts which reported maximum no of Engagement rate during our analysis period, if those posts fall in the same week i.e. 3-10 September, our verdict will be validated with a strong evidence. Meanwhile, we will also do a little content analysis to understand why those posts were promoted/ received enormous fan attraction.
Post Analysis
During our analysis period, 124 total posts were reported with an average of 2.88 posts per day
The below post is the highest engaged post in last 41 days grossing 17541 likes, 394 comments and 570 shares, Content features a TV commercial of Jabong which was premiered online through FB just before it was aired on TV. This post was created on 6th of September and according to my approximation, it was continually promoted for more than a week with an eminent audience and high CPM bidding.
further analysis prompted that most engaged content type was video and to my amazement, it was the least preferred, they only posted 2 videos in 124 pieces of content But together they received 18348 likes. First Video was a teaser created on 5th of September which exposed a glimpse of the full commercial with the tagline “Why are all the pretty ladies whispering?? ANY GUESSES?” and subsequently on the 6th full commercial was released.
These videos were primarily created for TV but were used online to give FB campaign a significant boost.
Below are some other top grosser posts which were created between 3rd Sep to 9th Sep and nearly every post is boosted via promotional campaign, Interesting point to note is that among all 6 pieces of content only 2 are advertisement, rest all other pieces are created just for fan engagement leveraging Emotions, & Social Currency, i.e. to develop a story.
- First one says “Deepika Padukone to play a significant character in the Hollywood film ‘Fast & Furious 7’ Are you Excited?” they have added a curiosity factor asking an entertaining question with no suggestion to buy, Image used is highly enticing with glamorous look of a celebrity. If this recipe is advertised its ought to create a vibe in no time.
- Second One is simply wishing “Happy Teachers Day” published on 5 of Sep evoking emotional chords, it received 2881 likes because they aren’t selling anything (This would be promoted for 24 hrs). Delivering right content at legitimate occasion or festival is very necessary as it provides you a ready emotional trigger to push any related content with guaranteed impact.
- The third post targets a specific section of females who love High heels: “I don’t know who invented High Heels, but all women owe him a lot- Marilyn Monroe. Do you Agree? This is what I call Suggestive Trust Marketing. you are building trust with related content without selling anything.
- The fourth Post again is on the same lines of Suggestive Trust Marketing, attracting fans who love interior designing/Home furnishings “Simplicity at its best! We loved how this simple space is decorated! Share your views, if you loved it too
- Fifth Post and 6th post are advertisements which are directly selling there Kitchen and Apparel product lines
Now I think we can weave wrap and weft of the above analysis and answer few related questions like How should we devise Our content strategy? What should we post? What can be promoted and what shouldn’t be pushed.
A prominent takeaway in this whole content analysis is, try to build trust and channelize your efforts (both organic and paid) for maximum engagement, do not try to sell up front. It should be minimum of 3 steps 1. Attract Audience (construct authentic fan-base), 2. Built Trust (Supply content with practical value), & then 3. Push Offers (Suggest them your products)
Daily Interactions on FB i.e. Likes Comments and Shares per Day
DI is a little different from Engagement as Engagement Rate is percentage reach of a particular day calculated by (Daily Interactions / Total no of fans in a Given Day ) *100, while DI is just count of likes comments and shares/day. DI is an important metric to understand the behavior of an FB page. Below graph will help us to identify whether DI nos are organic or boosted as we can easily filter the bullish(above average) dates
Just for an idea am secernating high interaction dates in a table below so that we can ascertain whether an advertising boost is been provided to the posts, and what is its frequency. In all 41 days, I have calculated an average of 40 days, deducted 6th September (as the huge unnatural spike was noted on that day). Approximately 15 dates evinced interactions above average of 2136.05 di/day
| Date | Daily Interactions |
| 3-Sep-13 | 3208 |
| 5-Sep-13 | 5298 |
| 6-Sep-13 | 24458 |
| 7-Sep-13 | 3429 |
| 8-Sep-13 | 2843 |
| 10-Sep-13 | 2652 |
| 11-Sep-13 | 2794 |
| 14-Sep-13 | 3100 |
| 17-Sep-13 | 4457 |
| 19-Sep-13 | 3052 |
| 24-Sep-13 | 2889 |
| 28-Sep-13 | 2252 |
| 1-Oct-13 | 3940 |
| 2-Oct-13 | 2475 |
| 10-Oct-13 | 2312 |
So are these interaction nos natural/organic “I Think NOT” 🙂 … What do you have to say?
Well we would be analyzing 2 more metrics before we reach to the critical and most important part of our analysis “BUDGET PREDICTION”
User Activity i.e. Social Timing When Users Demonstrated Maximum Engagement
It’s critical to know when your highest no of the audience is eavesdropping on your content and accordingly you should sync the posting activity. In the below stats we can clearly ascertain the best “Social Timings” i.e. maximum activity hrs/ days of the week.
I won’t be analyzing this in too much depth because this differed gravely for other FB brands I analyzed (I would be writing separate blog-post for the same) but for now I will just divulge all time and days which demoed maximum interactions.
| Day | Hour | Comments |
| Tue | 17:00 – 18:00 | 175 |
| Tue | 16:00 – 17:00 | 160 |
| Tue | 10:00 – 11:00 | 134 |
| Thu | 10:00 – 11:00 | 116 |
| Tue | 11:00 – 12:00 | 115 |
| Thu | 09:00 – 10:00 | 107 |
| Thu | 12:00 – 13:00 | 107 |
| Wed | 21:00 – 22:00 | 102 |
| Tue | 12:00 – 13:00 | 91 |
| Thu | 15:00 – 16:00 | 90 |
| Thu | 11:00 – 12:00 | 89 |
| Tue | 18:00 – 19:00 | 87 |
| Wed | 22:00 – 23:00 | 76 |
| Thu | 19:00 – 20:00 | 70 |
| Thu | 14:00 – 15:00 | 65 |
Best Days of User activity i.e. maximum comments received:
Highest to Lowest
- Tuesday
- Thursday
- Wednesday
- Monday
- Saturday
- Friday
- Sunday
Best Times of User activity i.e. maximum comments received:
Highest to Lowest
- 17:00 – 18:00
- 16:00 – 17:00
- 10:00 – 11:00
- 11:00 – 12:00
- 09:00 – 10:00
- 12:00 – 13:00
- 21:00 – 22:00
- 15:00 – 16:00
- 18:00 – 19:00
- 22:00 – 23:00
- 19:00 – 20:00
- 14:00 – 15:00
Sharability i.e. Total shares per day/ Per period
This metric depends on virality score of your content, If your content is contagious and has enough attraction value, it ought to go viral, people share your content on their timelines, friend timelines, and business pages and it subsequently deplumes wider reach and bigger fan base. Sharability is a very important metric by which you can grade the quality of your content its also directly proportional to exposure of content which can be easily inflated with the aid of sponsored post, thus we will analyze the dates when maximum shares were received. We can then relate those particular dates to Jabong’s advertising efforts.
| Date | Shares per Day |
| 5-Sep-13 | 1226 |
| 6-Sep-13 | 756 |
| 7-Sep-13 | 187 |
| 8-Sep-13 | 133 |
| 9-Sep-13 | 132 |
| 17-Sep-13 | 106 |
| 30-Sep-13 | 302 |
| 1-Oct-13 | 665 |
| 2-Oct-13 | 382 |
| 3-Oct-13 | 243 |
| 10-Oct-13 | 135 |
| 11-Oct-13 | 107 |
| 12-Oct-13 | 128 |
| 13-Oct-13 | 181 |
We could see maximum shares received between 5th Sep-9th Sep, 17th, 30th and then from 1-3 oct … 10th,11th,12th, 13th and then 16th of Oct, Unnatural spike in sharability graph is a strong evidence that content is been promoted. If sharability is normal and fan growth exceeds exceptionally then FB like ads have been pushed hard for eg:
6th September: “Clearly shows that “Jabong Premier Commercial was bountifully promoted“
14-15 Oct witness neither any oscillation in engagement nor in Daily interactions or shares (everything is normal) but fan growth is stupendous. This testifies the fact that on
14-15 October: “FB Like Ads were pushed hard“
| Date | Growth of Total Fans | Daily Interactions | Shares per Day |
| 14-Oct-13 | 2456 | 878 | 5 |
| 15-Oct-13 | 3108 | 1325 | 63 |
Budget Prediction i.e. Speculation of monthly campaign cost
The most critical part comes down to the budget analysis of any paid campaign, till now we were speculating whether paid advertising is used by the eCommerce giant or not but now as we have sufficient evidence that they are running Facebook ads our challenge is to speculate how much money they are pushing in.
If by anyhow you have made this much far… am sure you must be famishing for it 🙂
First, we need to significantly segregate Organic efforts from Paid ones and then we need to dissect 3 metrics :
- Growth of Fans i.e. Likes
- Daily Interactions
- Shares per Day i.e. Sharability
Predictions of exact budget is really very tough as their are no existing tools which can give you exact cost per like, its dependent on many factors at a given time, cost models in FB use a bidding system – Its an auction, the cost depends on what other advertisers are willing to pay for clicks or impressions from the same demographic Industry i.e. Competition any given time & Target audience i.e. City, gender, age, interests etc.
But as we have to start at some point I would rather try to unriddle this puzzle through my experience, a little bit of comm0nsense and with aid of some mathematics. Please don’t shoot me if am wrong 🙁
I will analyze 2 scenarios one pessimistic approach considering minimum spent and other Optimistic considering maximum spent, in minimum cost approach, I have taken a speculated arbitrary value of 3 Rs/ Like ($ 0.049) considering the enormous fan base of Jabong ( Facebook per like cost decreases gradually as you increase your fan base). we have subtracted a minimum of 385 likes (the minimum it received) from each day of analysis considering them as minimum organically earned. Rest are multiplied by 3 Rs
Eg: 3rd Sep: (3327-385)*3=8826 Rs ($ 143.4)
For Daily Interactions, I compared total actions received on my current on-going FB campaigns and have calculated a speculated price of 1.8 rs/Interaction
Eg: 3rd Sep: (3208-678)*1.8=4554 Rs ($ 74)
For Maximum budget am just increasing the value per like to 8 Rs ($ 0.13)
I have designated color codes to decide whether the particular day was either Paid (Green), Neutral (beige) (can be either paid or organic) or Organic (Pink), if all 3 metrics are green it’s decidedly paid and if all of them are pink its organic. Rest combinations can be easily understood.
You can easily go through the above chart 18 days are mandated for Facebook like ads and 34 days for Sponsored posts. We cannot intervene and predict whether they preferred CPC or CPM model but the above analysis is an approximation of their total spent.
On the lower side, they could have spent 229236 Rs i.e ($3725) and on the higher side 376542 Rs i.e ($6119)
This costing is from 3rd Sep to 15th Oct i.e. 42 days ( Fan growth of 42 days: 53966 ) so to conclude:
If you have a fan base close to 1.5 million and want to achieve 40-50k fans a month you should target a budget between Rupee 2 – 3.5 lakh a month i.e. Rupee 24 to 42 lakh annually for fan-base close to 6 lakh a year.
For businesses who are about to start or are at very nascent stage they can budget their campaigns according to current suggestions on FACEBOOK i.e. if you are targeting India with an undefined audience you can earn a like anywhere between 3-10 rs, Till now you must have understood that quality plays a very significant role in reducing your CPC cost subsequently reducing Per Like Cost, if your ad performs with good CTR rate in initial run then FB quality scores automatically feed your ads for maximum exposure and if your business page + content offered is highly relevant to your ad then Fan Conversion rate is likely to increase.
I hope I did a satisfactory job in analyzing “Facebook.com/myjabong” and I would like you guys to annotate/criticize/and Teach me better by leaving some of your precious comments …Wait for my next FB brand Analysis. Till then Ciao Astalavista & Adios …………………..Don’t forget to subscribe me 🙂
*FB Analytics Data Courtesy: Socialbakers.com (Paid Service) They are the best.
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