With the launch of the PS4 and the Xbox One on the horizon, we thought now would be a good time to delve into the search and social data around these two console behemoths to see who has the edge in the digital arena.
We’ve analysed their social and search data, and overlaid their launch activity to see how their marketing campaigns have affected their key digital metrics.
The Social Media Duel
Let’s start in the social world, where the obvious battleground for these two is on Facebook. With over 1.189 billion monthly users, Facebook is a key target for both Xbox and Playstation in terms of raising brand awareness and excitement about their launches. First, lets see how big each of their audiences are and how much they’ve grown since July:
As you can see both have grown at a similar rate over the period, but Playstation are 45% bigger than Xbox on Facebook at this time, giving them an early advantage in terms of scale of audience to show their new product to.
With Facebook, however, the second part of the puzzle is engagement rate. Engagement rate is the number of people who interact with a brands posts divided by the number of people who like the page, and is therefore shown as a percentage. As a metric it’s great for showing engagement and interaction over time to detect popular periods of activity.
As you can see above, the engagement rates of the two pages has fluctuated a lot over the period studied, however Playstation’s has averaged 0.75% to Xbox’s 0.63% - again giving Playstation a clear advantage in the Facebook arena.
“Playstation’s average FB engagement is 0.73% to 0.63% for Xbox”
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Playstation’s peaks in engagement rate have come at the points of big launches, trailers and reviews - for example the Battlefield 4 preview, and the NBA2K14 trailer. Xbox’s have come at the point of the Xbox One release date announcement and around topical trailers such as for Call of Duty: Ghosts.
On Twitter, Playstation again has the bigger audience, this time by 26% against Xbox as shown below:
“Playstation’s Twitter Following is 26% Bigger Than Xbox’s”
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Facebook and Twitter are the dominant social media platforms around these days, but we’ve also dug into a few other platforms to again show Playstation’s dominance in the arena.
Xbox are currently not officially participating in Google Plus (presumably due to the Microsoft/Google rivalry), however they’re behind Playstation in terms of YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers as well - showing that at this time they are lagging behind their rivals form Sony on social as a whole.
The Search Battle
Whilst social is more of a natural area for a showdown between these two due to the brand awareness aspect and the impact they are both trying to achieve towards the top of the conversion funnel, search is still a key area for those who are actively looking to buy.
The first port of call for this element is in terms of Google search volume. This data shows us that Playstation 4 receives more interest and searches than the Xbox one and has done consistently during 2013.
When looking at the wider industry, we can see that search demand had increased temporarily earlier this year as more and more details were announced, but that in reality search volume is relatively flat from two years ago. This will partly be down to the fact that the purchasing excitement around the new consoles has not yet begun (as they launch in November), but also reflects the struggle that console makers face with the likes of mobile games on apps cutting into their market share.
In terms of search equity metrics, the sites compare like this:
Xbox currently have more referring domains, IP’s, backlinks and a higher citation and trust flow - in theory meaning they are better rated by Google due to the amount of citation links referencing their site, and the power held by their domain. However, by the time people come to key in their Google search to buy their new console this Christmas, chances are they will have already made their purchasing choice and will simply be searching for branded product terms such as “PS4″ or “Xbox One” meaning that Xbox winning in this arena is perhaps less relevant than Playstation’s social victory due to the purchase stage.
The Winner
It remains to be seen who will be the big winner in this Christmas’s console race, however all of the data we’ve uncovered suggests that Playstation will be victorious. They are dominating the social media sphere, influencing more people more regularly with their content, thus making them more likely to be aware of the benefits of the PS4. The effect on purchase decision will be seen upon release, but these figures surely back up the hypothesis that the PS4 will out sell the Xbox One this year. Xbox are looking likely to come out on top in the search world, however this is a stage too late for them as decisions are now being made at the social stage, particularly with products and brands such as these.
Time for Xbox to take back the social initiative? Let us know your comments below.
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