The news comes a weeks after Twitter started selling app install ads, following Facebook’s lead. Yahoo is floating the idea as well.
YouTube’s app install ads will run with TrueView, the in-stream service that allows users to skip through videos, the company said. It was added to mobile in August of 2012.
A mobile ad with the new capability of opening an installed app on a user’s phone.
Following is an article from Ad Age on Google+ and a link to a demo of Google+.
It looks like Facebook is in for some real competition in the coming months. Google+ is in a closed friendly-user trial right now. They are gathering feedback and tweaking it, but soon it will be available to everyone and Google will know more about us and our behaviors than anyone ever has.
How Google+ Will Transform Search and Search Marketing
Google+ is gaining users faster than any social network ever before. After many stumbles, Google has finally built a social network that delivers value to consumers. That makes Google+ a bigger competitor to Facebook than anything we’ve seen.
So far, a lot of Google+ coverage has debated its value, and examined the network from a consumer and tactical standpoint. Less scrutinized is the way the launch of Google+ could end up enhancing the competitive positioning and value of Google’s search business, giving it an unprecedented view of consumer interest, social graph, intent data and conversion data.
What you want vs. what you like
The biggest difference between Google and Facebook right now is that thanks to search intent data, Google knows what consumers want. Facebook, on the other hand, has a very clear understanding of what users like and who they know. Google+ is the first step for Google to close this gap. It aims to build out a complete profile of Google’s users, giving Google access to profile data, likes, interests, and friends.
Google+ integrates across all of Google’s products to make sharing easier and more relevant, but also to add value to Google search. If Google can incorporate data from the social graph to deliver more relevant results, it will have a product competitive with Bing’s Facebook integration . This is of critical importance in order for Google to maintain search market share and growth by improving relevancy and personalization of search results vs. the aggressive challenger Bing.
In my opinion, Google is interested primarily in building user profile data to deliver more relevant and personalized search results with better, more relevant advertising. Studying Google+ and collecting even more consumer data empowers the company to integrate its data for a better consumer experience and advertising across all their products, from search to social to mobile and even to email.
Engagement and ROI
One major issue with Google+ is the absence of brand and corporate pages. If Google wants to compete with Facebook, these pages are crucial. Facebook works as an advertising platform because it goes far beyond traditional display. Rather, it’s an engagement platform where brands and advertisers interact with consumers.
Adding brand pages to Google+ will finally give Google a branding engagement platform. Right now, Google’s big revenue business is search, which relies on clicks to measure ROI and advertising success, whereas Google+ can offer a branding platform where the campaign goal is engagement rather than immediate ROI.
Once brand pages are launched and populated, the next logical step is to build an ad platform that encourages engagement and incorporates the social graph. With this, brands can appeal to consumers by using interest data — the things consumers say they actually like — just as we see on Facebook. The difference is that Google can target ads based on consumer intent data, at a higher level of relevancy than is possible on Facebook. An engagement model based on social and search intent data will improve the efficiency and efficacy of social advertising, in terms of both relevancy and performance.
Keys to success
One thing lost in Google+’s rapid growth is the importance of user engagement and time spent. Success in social networking is not determined by total number of users. Twitter has tons of registered users, but a very small percentage is responsible for the majority of activity. Google+ must regularly engage consumers, or the content loses relevancy and thus its power as a branding tool. Without broad and regular participation, scale and frequency (and successful advertising) become impossible.
The key to Facebook’s success is not just the social interest and social graph data, but the tremendous amount of time users spend on the network. That time creates the advertising opportunities. The ultimate measure of success would be for Google+ to become the first social network consumers visit when they go online. It’s a similar obstacle in search, where Google owns 65 percent of the market, compared to Yahoo’s 15 percent. Being second place is far different from being the industry leader, and Google is already late to the social game.
Google+ has several other demerits, which is to be expected for a brand new product. The system doesn’t recognize corporate Gmail addresses, a fact that agitates against its “easy-to-use” premise, especially for corporate Gmail power users. Google is also pushing the limits of data and privacy, given its recent FTC investigation. Consumers should be concerned about giving too much personal, professional and social data to one entity, and Google is already collecting data on search queries, mining usage data across its networks, purchasing data from third parties, collecting conversion data from Google analytics, taking impression and click data from its Doubleclick ad-serving product. Thanks to Google+, it will soon also know what you do, who you are, and who you know. That’s frightening from a consumer standpoint, especially if Google+ becomes the top social network.
There’s also the chance that Google could stretch itself too thin. This moment is oddly reminiscent of the time that Yahoo tried to become a portal, a search engine, and everything at once. Ultimately it diluted its brand and its position in the industry. Social networking is Facebook’s core business, and it has a massive head start and loyalty from all the core demographics.
But we’ve seen Google topple web titans before, so Google+ unseating Facebook is not outside the realm of possibility. The biggest and most important aspect of Google+ is that Facebook is no longer the only channel on TV worth watching. Strong competition leads to innovation, and a Facebook/Google+ battle will lead to a better consumer social networking experience, as well as improved advertising results and options. Google+ has value, and we look forward to further developments, innovation and continued growth.
Google+ demo
http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/
Good overview of what needs to be done by marketers “beyond creating an app” in order to drive awareness, usage and ROI!
So you’ve made an iPhone app, now what? Lisa Bettany, creator of Camera+, an app for the iPhone which has sold 2.6 million copies and has achieved the top spot in the App Store in the first release, gave CaT attendees tips on how to sell a product through the app store.
1. Create a Twitter contest. The contest that Camera+ ran had two simple steps: follow one designated account and post as many pictures as you want. “Twitter contests generate buzz,” she said referring to them later as “Tweet blasts.”
2. Sell strategically. Releasing an app on the weekends or a holiday, such as Christmas, has proven to be beneficial to sales numbers. Also, targeting the U.S. might be a good idea, since 58% of total iApp revenue was generated from the U.S. store.
3. Create a loyal following through engagement. Camera+ app users were sharing photos daily for a year. “If they’re loving it, they’re sharing it,” she said.
4. Wow your users. Research the features people actually want. Ms. Bettany advised to take app store reviews into consideration (while taking “You Suck” with a grain of salt, she said).
5. Fix bugs and boost performance. While this may be fairly obvious, she said Camera+ problems resulted in the app dropping from the top ten to roughly the No. 180 spot.
6. Don’t get kicked out of the App Store. Jokingly, Ms. Bettany referred to the time in which Apple took its app out of the digital store for creating the ability to take a picture using the volume button. Apple did not want that feature included in this app. Spoiler alert: It is going to be a feature on the iPhone 5 camera.
With the tremendous success of her Camera+ app, Mr. Bettany said, proudly, that “zero dollars was spent on traditional advertising.”
Procter & Gamble Co. is taking another plunge into Facebook commerce with a new platform and an effort to bring new retailers on board after scrapping an earlier effort using Amazon as a fulfillment partner.
Tide’s new ‘Shop Now’ page on Facebook
P&G quietly has added “shop” or “shop now” buttons to Facebook fan pages of several brands in recent weeks, including Tide, Gillette, Olay, Gain, CoverGirl, Luvs and Febreze, with several more expected to come on line in the weeks ahead.
Fulfillment of items purchased within Facebook on the P&G brand pages comes through P&G’s own e-store that opened last year (PGestore.com), but the layout leaves room for other retailers to join as alternatives. Walmart.com is considering linking with P&G’s Facebook pages as an option, said a spokeswoman for the retailer.
People familiar with the matter said other e-tailers may also eventually join the P&G f-commerce effort as partners, including Amazon re-joining. In an e-mail, P&G spokeswoman Tonia Elrod said, “As we expand the tests across more of our brands, P&G products will also be available for purchase from a variety of qualified retailers,” but declined to comment on specific ones.
Through “buy it now” buttons across many of P&G’s brand websites, shoppers already can select from a variety of retailers, but the P&G initiative may mark a couple of firsts in Facebook commerce. It appears to be the first time a brand has allowed multiple retail partners for fulfillment of orders on Facebook, and, should Walmart follow through on joining the effort, it would be the first time Walmart.com has sold products entirely within Facebook.
“Social-network selling is an extension of our overall focus on innovation and brand building,” Ms. Elrod said. “We expect testing commerce via social networks like Facebook will help us accelerate e-commerce growth as consumers buy more of our categories online.” P&G began Facebook e-commerce last year with some fanfare via its Pampers brand fan page, which also offered products from several other P&G brands without leaving Facebook, using Amazon as the sole retailer fulfilling those sales.
But P&G quietly pulled the plug on that effort earlier this year for a couple of reasons, according to people familiar with the matter. The company was concerned about backlash from other retailers, particularly Walmart, being shut out of its Facebook pages, and the Amazon platform had technical issues that made for a poor user experience.
Similar issues appear with Amazon’s own brand fan page on Facebook, which does allow people to buy products without leaving the site, but doesn’t make it easy to find all the buttons needed to complete a transaction, in a stark contrast to the smooth running of Amazon’s mobile apps. Amazon didn’t return e-mails for comment.
Disclosures on P&G’s Facebook brand sites indicate they use the Distributed Commerce Platform from Columbus, Ohio-based Resource Interactive to complete the transactions. Resource also created the P&G e-store and is the digital shop for one of the brands involved — Gain. And the agency has used DCP for f-commerce efforts from retailers such as Victoria’s Secret and Home Depot and formerly handled digital work for Walmart. But people familiar with the matter said other retailers won’t necessarily have to use Resource’s platform, provided they use something more compatible with Facebook than Amazon’s current offering.
Vitrue handles Facebook management for many of the P&G brands involved, and a variety of digital agencies, including Publcis’ Digitas, Omnicom’s Proximity, and independents IMC2 and Strawberry Frog, handle digital duties for other brands involved in the Facebook commerce efforts.
While Walmart.com is still undecided on joining the P&G f-commerce effort and doesn’t currently sell goods entirely within Facebook, it has boosted its profile within the social network recently, said spokeswoman Amy Lester, by adding Facebook “like” buttons to item listings throughout Walmart.com. That enables one of the key advantages of conducting sales within the social network — making it easy to tell friends about purchases or suggest gifts.
Speaking at Wal-Mart Stores shareholder meeting last week, CEO Mike Duke said, “In global e-commerce, we will not just be competing, we will play to win.”
At this point, however, Walmart.com is well behind Amazon in e-commerce, according to industry watchers, including in packaged goods, where it also lags Walgreens, which agreed to buy Drugstore.com earlier this year. Getting ahead of Amazon on Facebook commerce, where Walmart has 6 million fans to Amazon’s 1.2 million, would give it one clear victory in the space, though it’s unclear that will hasten a link to P&G’s efforts.
Asked at a news conference after his speech last week how long he thinks it will take Walmart to catch Amazon in e-commerce, Mr. Duke said, “Catching Amazon is not the mission.” Walmart, he said, wants to leverage its strength as a multi-channel retailer that reaches 150 million weekly shoppers by offering online, offline and site-to-store linkups.
“What we’re doing is really being Walmart and investing and creating the e-commerce strategies that allow for continuous shopping the way that the customer wants to do it,” he said, “and not restricting them to one way or another.”
Interesting article in Ad Age about a new tool to measure Social
Media ROI. I think some marketers and finance people are too obsessed with measuring the ROI of Social Media, unless you are talking about a true ecommerce component like some retailers such as Express, JC Penney and others are integrating into their Facebook presence.
Most social media is considered upper funnel activity that drives awareness and consideration. This does ultimately lead to increased purchase activity by makigng your SEM more effective or increasing organic site traffic, but it’s very difficult to tie back to your SM activities due to all the other variables at play.
– Steve Copertino
Social media has struggled for years to demonstrate return on investment on the same analytical playing field as more established media. Now, Marketing Evolution, which has been working on cross-media analytics for more than a decade, is joining with media planning software provider Telmar to release an ROI tool they say will do just that.
The companies will unveil the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool, which became available earlier this week for early clients including Interpublic’s Universal McCann, during a presentation at Federated Media Publishing’s Conversational Marketing Summit June 6, the start of Internet Week in New York. That’s fitting, said Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs, because a statement by Federated’s executive chairman, John Battelle, at a conference last year prompted development of the new tool.
“He lamented the fact that there was no way you could put the investment you were making in social media side by side with your TV investments or even digital display to figure out where you should be investing more or how much,” Mr. Briggs said. At that point, Mr. Briggs said he turned to Rick Brunner, a Doubleclick and Google veteran and longtime internet marketing analyst who has headed Marketing Evolution’s work on the project, and said, “We’ve got the data to do that. Why don’t we solve that?”
Mr. Briggs has been conducting cross-media effectiveness analysis with a wide variety of marketers for more than 10 years, adding new media in along the way as they emerge. The Telmar Matterhorn service will be based on data collected in working with clients such as as Unilever, Coca-Cola Co., Nestle, MTV, Time Warner and EA, among others. Inner workings of how the TMR tool evaluates media will be open for inspection, Mr. Briggs said, and open to addition of new media as they emerge.
“A lot of social media, search and digital advertising models just don’t follow the traditional reach and frequency and cost-per-thousand framework that media-planning tools have been using for decades,” he said.
In fairness, marketing-mix modeling now used by many big advertisers already can analyze sales impact from just about any marketing input, given sufficient levels of spending and a sufficiently well-defined time horizon. The problem, however, is that lower levels of spending for digital and social media often get swamped by the impact of higher-reach media, and earned media such as social and PR don’t always work on the same predictable schedule as paid media.
Also, not every campaign has as its objective an immediate sale, often focusing further toward the fat end of the so-called purchase funnel. Mr. Briggs points, for example, to automotive marketing that may aim to get a brand into consideration for a purchase that may not take place for years.
To address this problem, Marketing Evolution years ago began analyzing campaigns based on objectives often besides sales — such as changes in survey responses regarding what brands consumers are considering.
The TMR tool will look at “basically for every dollar you spend, how many people do you influence on whatever that business objective is — building awareness, changing a brand position, generating purchase intent or generating sales,” Mr. Briggs said.
Analyzing much of digital advertising isn’t so different than traditional, given that it operates on similar reach and frequency data and often similar pricing schemes, he said. But social media and other earned media, that is, public relations, depart from those norms in two key ways.
The costs are often structured very differently, with much of it coming in the form of relatively fixed salary or fee costs for internal or agency staff to, say, run a social media monitoring command center, Mr. Briggs said. Traditional analysis tools also often fail to count all or some of the pass-along effect of social media.
Lack of any ROI norms may have been OK when social-media marketing was still in its infancy and considered experimental, he said. But now the discipline has been around a few years — at least in its toddlerhood — and increasingly expected to stand on its own two feet.
“Earned media and the people curating it probably need to be held a bit more accountable today,” Mr. Briggs said.
Seemingly, such programs would have such a short history and wide range of reach, pass along and impact that it would be difficult to predict outcomes based on past experience, which is how the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool works for other media. But that hasn’t been the case, Mr. Briggs said.
“What we began to see pretty quickly is that there is a range of results just like with any advertising,” he said. “Some TV ads are better than others. Some programs are more conducive to social sharing than others. But there are absolutely common patterns and averages. One thing we can do is say if you spend $100,000 or $1 million, what should you be expecting to get back as results? If you’re not getting these levels, the budget should really trade over to be invested somewhere else.”
At the same time, other ads in traditional media also generate social-media pass along that needs to be calculated, and draw on some of that investment in things like social-media monitoring, Mr. Briggs said. TMR can account for that, but, he said, more important, it aims to calculate the combined impact of media elements, including their synergy, rather than viewing them entirely in isolation.
Interesting move with wide-ranging implications.
By: Michael Learmonth Ad Age Bio RSS feedPublished: March 30, 2011
Google is adding its take on the “like” button — which it is calling the “plus-one” — in its latest bid to make search more social, as well as combat the growing dominance of Facebook.
Starting this afternoon, Google will allow users to vote plus-one on search results they find useful, and to share that preference with their connections in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz and, soon, Twitter. Users will see both the total number of plus-one votes, as well as the names and photos of their contacts who have stated a preference.
It’s the most aggressive foray into social search to date and the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results. Over time, Google will integrate the plus-one into the search algorithm itself so human votes will have an impact search ranking.
“When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s principle engineer for search. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.”
Google is also adding the ability to vote plus-one on search ads. Internal tests have shown that plus-one votes increase clicks; Google won’t charge for the functionality, but expects better ads to return more plus-ones and, in turn, more clicks. Higher click-through rates can improve quality scores, meaning marketers with better ads could pay less for a given keyword or position.
“We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones,” said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. “Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations.”
The changes are some of the biggest to the visual architecture of search, the classic list of blue links, as well as its functional underpinnings. Plus-one buttons and social connections are going to join a search-results page getting more and more complicated with both real-time and local-search results, in addition to search ads that have also added functionality.
Traditionally, inbound links have been the strongest indicator of relevance and component of page rank. Last year, Google added Twitter updates to also add results that are more recent. Adding the plus-one will add another social component.
“Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance,” said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. “Do a search on ‘DVD player’ today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 milliseconds. It’s meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience.”
But the biggest move here may not be about search at all, but about taking another swing at the social networking business — and at Facebook itself. The first time users clicks on a plus-one button, they will be prompted to create a Google profile, as well as be given the opportunity to adjust privacy settings.
Microsoft’s Bing integrated Facebook “likes” into search results late last year but not into its actual algorithm, meaning a “like” has no affect on search rankings. Google has no immediate plans to add Facebook connections to the system, partly because they don’t have the right to do so. “It would depend on whether that data were available,” Mr. Cutts said.
“Its important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. “I do think they need to have the Facebook ‘likes’ in there because you’re going to have two webs, the social web and the open web.”
In addition, Google will allow publishers to add the plus-one button, so users can vote on content outside of search, and ultimately improve the ranking of that content in organic search results. Google has by far the largest publisher network, including websites that use DoubleClick for ad serving or Google’s ad exchange, so penetration of the plus-one will be immediate and comprehensive.
The question is whether Google can keep bad actors from gaming the plus-one system for fun or for profit. Google, to its credit, has a lot of experience filtering out attempts to game its algorithms. “The worst case is you just ignore them,” Mr. Cutts said, adding that more complexity makes that more difficult. “If you give somebody five signals — and give them five more — it can actually get harder for spammers.”
Copertino Digital 