CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing

CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing Class 2: Fundamentals of Online Advertising

Administration • Wiki signup • Anyone do articles yet? • Any ideas on first assignment (online ad critique?)

Online Advertising • Advertising vs. marketing? • Early history – the commercial web is less than 20 years old – why? • Objectives – a) building brand awareness b) creating and satisfying demand c) driving sales • Online – better tracking and analysis of results vis-à-vis traditional media

Online Advertising… Advantages Challenges Multiple platforms, channels, browser, plug-ins, connection speed issues Ad blockers Fatigue • Many similarities with traditional media (e.g., banner ads) • Potential for interactivity and multimedia engagement • Data, data, data

Types of Display Ads • Interstitial • Popup/under • Floating/Mouseover • Wallpaper • Banners • Contextual (e.g., data driven based on search)

Online Ad Design Standards • E.g., banner ad standard sizes (see p. 205) –depends in part on site, but basic sizes exist for a reason • If designing a site to accept advertisements, good to reserve spaces in standard sizes to be compatible with ad networks (which will force your decision anyway) and to minimize need for content creation • Creating ads – read carefully limitations imposed

Ad Networks/Exchanges • Rarely do sites negotiate advertisement on case-by-case basis • Use of networks to feed ads more common – why? • Central ad servers and tracking major reasons

Ad Networks Services • Frequency capping – limiting overexposure • Sequencing – users may see ads in particular order • Exclusivity – banning competitors from your site • Roadblocking – allowing 100% coverage on site • Geo-targeting – tied to location based on IP or GPS • Contextual/behavior info – e.g., based on search, profiles, etc.

Example: Google Adwords • https://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en • Various formats – text, mobile-friendly, static image, animated GIF/Flash, video, etc. • Limits imposed on all formats (e.g., small text ad = 25 character title, 70 character text, 35 character displayed URL; click-to-play video, 300x250 or 336x280 size, 50k intro image, 75MB video.) • Content control for SafeSearch filter, adult sites, internationalization

Example: Facebook Ads • http://www.facebook.com/help/ads • Similar rules, but with much more personal information (as can be expected…) • And a series of interesting rules…! Is this too much?

Payment Methods • Impression (usually by thousand – so CPM) • Per-click (CPC) • Per-acquisition (CPA) • Flat-rate/Sponsorship • Interaction (CPI) • Publishers love CPM, advertisement buyers love CPA – why?

CPC Bidding • A complex dance between money and relevance • Generally speaking – higher bid = better placement • But quality and relevance make a difference – e.g., broad, phrase, exact and negative search references (examples?) – long tail searching as a qualifying factor • QS score in Google Adwords – not just search relevance but historical value of advert/client • Helps prevent well-financed spam

Conversion/Clickthrough • Impression to click to conversion • Are impressions enough? Sometimes they are – examples? • Clicking – what does that entail? • What is defined as conversion?

Tracking and Budgeting • Ad networks offer statistical information to gauge performance • Many also give budget targets – advertise up to a certain $ amount per day/week/month

Advertising and Landing Pages • Sometimes need to advertise not whole entity/site but a subset • Often handy to track awareness – e.g. “phone this extension” or URLs with arbitrary info (e.g., http://www.xyz.com/TV12) • May require multiple pages and fluid integration into main, but better than dumping people onto main and forcing them to find the course of direct action

Strategy • Do your homework – what’s the demo? Business need? Competitive environment? • What’s the point? Sales? Awareness? Action? • Define budget and CPA • Keywords – when people are trying to find you, how are they doing that? (including misspellings and exclusionary terms like free/cheap) • Execution – design, pay and track results • Evaluate and iterate

Gaming the System • Click fraud – especially common in CPC (and sometimes bot-driven) – must keep track of data to ensure reasonable CPA • Bidding wars for keywords – e.g., potential solution for Santorum’s SEO “Google Problem?”

Next week • Email Marketing • Investigate MailChimp resources (http://mailchimp.com/resources/)

CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing