Viral marketing
Search engine advertising
MARK 430
WEEK 9
Today’s class will cover:
• Viral marketing
• Search Engine Advertising: Methods of payper-click contextual advertising used in search
engines
• How to set up a Google AdWords campaign
VIRAL MARKETING
Before we start….
• Why videos go viral Kevin Allocca TED 2011 (7
minutes)
• So what is going on here?
Viral marketing – what is it?
• A marketing phenomenon that encourages
people to pass along a marketing message in such
a way that it spreads like a virus or a meme
– Compulsive reading, listening or viewing
• Can be text, image, video, sound file
– So amazing that people have the urge to share with
others
• Social media is the engine for viral marketing
because of the “network effect”
• WoM is trusted
Based on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH
Engaging in the conversation –
balancing control and credibility
CONTROL
Monologue
Traditional
marketing
communications
and PR
“a person like yourself”
CREDIBILITY
Spontaneity
Conversation
Advertising
Dialogue
Community
Based on ideas from Edelman’s Trust Barometer
Viral marketing (word-of-mouth direct
marketing)
• Viral includes any strategy that encourages people to pass on your
message to others
– Word of mouth is the most trusted form of communication
(because the message is coming from “a person like yourself”
• Let the users of the Internet do your marketing for you –
traditionally by eMail, but now by using social networking sites,
blogs and video sharing sites
• Built-in mechanism to pass on to someone else
– It works (sometimes), and it’s free or low cost (sometimes)
– VERY difficult to plan for and do successfully – especially as it has
been around for more than 20 years – people become jaded
Viral marketing – having “remarkable”
products
• Seth Godin on How to Get Your Ideas to
Spread “sliced bread and other marketing
delights” - getting people to talk about you
and your products (17 minutes)
• TED conference, 2003
Using social media sites for viral
marketing – watch out!
• "While these sites may appear to be the most effective manner of
delivering a message regardless of brand appropriateness," he said, "by
failing to truly understand the audience, viral marketers stand to
alienate as many consumers as they interest."
– David Schatsky, President, JupiterResearch, on the pitfalls of social networking sites:
• Undercover or “stealth” marketing - be careful of customer perception
that they are being “used” – people are increasingly sophisticated and
cynical
– Fake bloggers etc (eg. Mazda commercials disguised as user generated videos)
• Watch out for people to highjack your campaign with parody videos, or
highjacking of your hashtag
Elements of a viral marketing
campaign
1. Creative material – the viral agent (text, image,
video)
–
Consider meme-jacking?
2. Seeding – identifying websites, blogs, or people
(influencers) to start the message moving
–
Understand and exploit existing communications
networks – go where the people are
3. Tracking – to monitor the effect, to assess the
return from the cost of developing the viral agent
and seeding
•Based on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH
Can virality be predicted or
reproduced?
• Tod Maffin’s Six Genetic Markers of Viral
Marketing
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
AAC Matching
Simple concept
Sentiment
Reward sharing
Embrace unofficials
Successive rounds
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
AAC matching
• The target Audience must match the Creative,
which must match the Call-to-Action
• No mixed messages
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Simple Concept
• Plots and developed characters do not get
traction
• Keep the campaign simple
• One idea at a time
• Stop over-thinking
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Sentiment
• Your campaign should be either
– Serious
– Silly
– Stunning
• Don’t experiment with other tones
– Definitely don’t mix them
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Reward sharing
• Incentivize people to share your content and
they will share it for you
• Don’t rely on freebies or begging (or bribing)
• Give recognition
• How about gamification?
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Embrace unofficials
• When a fan uses your brand imagery to praise
you, embrace them
• Don’t shut them down
• Enough with the cease and desist letters
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Successive Rounds
• Keep a good idea going (because then it might
become a meme?) – build on recognition
• Plan to have at least three “rounds” of content
which riffs on your first release.
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Then there is this….
• “DisneyCollectorBR is a faceless YouTube
channel giant that is consistently among the
site’s top most viewed per month. In April, the
channel was the third-most viewed
worldwide. During the week of July 4 [2014],
the DisneyCollectorBR channel received more
views in the United States — 55 million —
than any other channel on YouTube.” Buzzfeed
Some successful viral marketing
campaigns
• Hotmail launch – 1.5 million subscribers in the
first 18 months
– Gmail strategy?
• Dove Evolution – “Campaign for natural
beauty”
• The Old Spice Guy wins an Emmy for social
media campaign
• LOTS of examples at Viral Friday
SEARCH ADVERTISING –
PAY-PER-CLICK
Search engine marketing recap
– distinguishing the two
elements
• Search engine optimization – managing
organic search engine placement by
optimizing html pages and devising an
inbound link strategy (covered in Week 6)
• Search engine advertising (Pay-per-Click)
– Paying the search engines to get the results you
want (TODAY’S CLASS)
Paid listings
Organic
listings
Paid search versus SEO
Paid search
SEO
•
Results can be seen immediately
through increased traffic.
•
•
•
But : no spending = no results
•
•
Greater control over which keywords
are most associated with their
company, brands, products or
services.
•
•
•
Additional metrics are available,
which means more detailed Web
analytics that yield sophisticated
knowledge from the data.
Results are gradual – can take months
But the results can persist –
maintaining position over time
Searchers find it more acceptable
than advertising
Can be complex and may require
external expertise
One process – many results (tends to
bring results across many search
engines, not just one)
http://www.iab.net/insights_research/947883/1675/708987
DO BOTH!
Internet advertising formats (IAB report for 2014)
Why is search engine advertising still so
popular with marketers?
• Search engines allow marketers to bid on specific key words
that trigger an ad when a user types those words into the
search engine
• Bought on a Pay-per-Click basis (no click, no payment) –
performance model means easy measurement of success
• Less consumer resistance that other forms of advertising –
people are actually looking for those goods or services(but
remember that CTR still quite low – about 2%)
• Print directory versus search advertising for SME?
–
–
–
–
Effectiveness can be directly measured
Speed of execution and “tweaking” of advertising copy
Speed of consumer response
Usually more cost-effective
Search engine advertising
• Position is purchased as part of an advertising campaign guarantees instant visibility
• While SEO and PPC advertising are separate techniques,
a well optimized page with good content will also
influence the placement of a PPC ad (via Quality Score)
• The website owner has control over:
– Position in search results (BUT not always complete control –
depends on AdRank/Quality Score in Google)
– Keyword choice
– Ad listing copy
– Landing page
– Geo-targeting
– Daily budget and maximum cost-per-click
How is the ranking decided in practice?
Google uses a combination of the bid price or cost per click (CPC)
and the ad relevancy or click-through rate (CTR) and the Quality
Score of the landing page
– CPC x CTR = Google AdRank
– Advertiser sets the maximum CPC per day
– If an ad with a lower bid per click gets clicked more often, it will rank
higher.
– Result - CPC can decrease as an ad becomes more popular, even
though a competitor may be prepared to bid more on the same
keyword: more clicks = more money for Google.
– Ranking can be improved by:
• Increasing the set daily CPC
• Trying to improve relevancy (and therefore CTR) – How? … Tweak the ad text
• AdWords Video: Understanding Ad Rank and Quality Score
Keywords / key phrases
• Just as in SEO it is all about what people are
actually typing into search engines
• Create a list of keywords / phrases just as you
do for SEO
– The big difference is that for search advertising
you can target as many as your budget will allow
– Research the advertising that your keywords
actually trigger
– Get sophisticated (think long-tail key words and
phrases as in SEO)
Elements of an AdWords campaign
• Google AdWords “Campaign”
– Each campaign is made up of one or more
AdGroups – each relating to a separate “theme”,
product group, marketing campaign etc
– An AdGroup consists of a set of keywords, bids,
and individual advertisements that are managed
together
The elements of a basic text-based
search engine advertisement
Headline (25
characters max)
Click to go to
destination landing
page
Display URL (35
characters max) not
clickable
What makes up a text ad? (Google)
Description: Two lines
of text (35 characters
per line max)
Include a call to action
Think about your ads….
• Better ad text, better performance – some tips
on writing better Adwords advertisements
Language and Geo-targeting
• Very cost-effective and highly targeting method
of using search engine marketing – cost-per-click
will vary according to the geographic target
• Especially useful for:
– Small businesses whose target markets are in
particular local areas
– Bricks and mortar businesses
• Allows you to target your advertisement to
– Particular geographic locations
– Particular languages
• Geo-targeting - Bob Nicholson (4 minutes)
Setting goals for an Adwords
campaign
• Before you begin to create an Adwords group
you need to set goals and metrics
(performance indicators so you know you
have succeeded)
• Adwords Video: Define Success, then Achieve
it
Advertising metrics: ROI and CPA
• ROI = Return on investment
• CPC = Cost per click (for performance-based
search ads)
• CPM = Cost per thousand (impression) – for
display ads
• CPA = Cost per (customer) acquisition
• Google Analytics and AdWords are very strongly
tied together
Keyword targeted advertisements
also served to sites other than the search
engine itself
• The keyword-targeted advertisements appear not
just in the search engine results pages, but on the
“content network”
• Major players in PPC search engine advertising
– Google works with an affiliate network
•
•
•
•
•
Google search engine
Google maps
Mobile devices
Content partner network
AdSense publisher network
• Google Adwords Advertising types – don’t forget that
Google offers Display ads as well as PPC ads
Advertising for web publishers
• Google AdWords – for marketers
• Google AdSense – for publishers – Google’s
content network - % of CPC paid
– Ads are matched to page content, not search
terms –
– Different ad formats available, including video ads
– Publishers can choose between PPC ads and Display ads
• How AdSense works
Click fraud
• PPC lends itself to click fraud because of its structure
– Advertiser pays the advertising network, which in turn
pays the publisher
• Click fraud = clicking on a paid advertisement for a fraudulent
or non-legitimate purpose
– By a human, an automated script or a computer program –
an example
• The advertiser pays, the search engine company can be said
to benefit (apart from paying out a % to the publisher)
Why click fraud?
• Two main types of click fraud:
– Search engine click fraud: artificially raising a competitor’s marketing
costs or exhausting their budget to remove them from their position in
the listings (usually on very high cost or competitive key terms)
– Publisher click fraud: artificially raising a publisher’s income from
AdSense
• Estimated 10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion
in annual billings (Business Week, 2006).
• Search firms have put tools in place to detect and prevent click fraud (but
have still been sued by advertisers) Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
(Google)
• Mobile clicks made in error are now an increasing problem (fat finger
syndrome)
• Click fraud is now a social media problem and next class we will look at the
problem of fraud in display advertising
Advertising using other firms brand
names as keywords
• Type in Molson beer and you might get an ad for
Budweiser
• “Tofino hotel” sometimes gets you ads for Ucluelet
hotels
• Legal in the US and Canada? Recent local case
Vancouver Community College v Vancouver Career
College (Burnaby)
• Ethical?
– Google Trademark Complaint process
Hands on practice
• Explore Google AdWords, research a PPC
keyword campaign, and get some practice in
designing text advertisements
• AdWords Home
• Google Adwords: How to create a campaign,
set up ad groups, and types of advertisements