Advertisers have already been using Twitter’s paid ad service since 2010 to promote their Tweets and Twitter profiles, to share their message and gain more followers. But this could only be done indirectly by contacting Twitter or one of its partner agencies. With the self-serve platform, advertisers can gain more control over their promotional activity on Twitter. However, the paid advertising options are still limited to Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, and it doesn’t look like Twitter will be adding any more paid advertising options on its portal.

The ad platform allows you to target audiences simply based on their geography and interests. The costing works on a Cost-per-follow (CPF) model and like Google & Facebook, allows you to set daily budgets and CPF values for your bids. It is unclear as to the kind of CTRs we can expect from this platform, but it is obvious that advertisers should pay great attention to their profile structure and the content of their tweets while their campaigns are on since the audience’s attention span will be low.

The platform shows a simple 4-step procedure to launch ads and it should be no trouble for marketers who are used to advertising on other social platforms.

We haven’t tested out the platform yet since it is only available in the USA presently but Twitter has announced they will be launching it in other countries in a phase-wise manner. So watch this space for more updates on what’s trending on Twitter advertising.

So how does Facebook get hold of offline data? Its simple really. Facebook’s research partners, Datalogix for example, has been taking down the Facebook user id of customers when they apply for loyalty cards or a promotional offer. So everytime a purchase has been made by this customer using either of these schemes, the data enters the Facebook server, courtesy Datalogix. This gives Facebook enough data to classify their users into various shopper categories, thus making audience targeting easier and giving greater scope for CTR improvement in Facebook advertising.

Smart indeed!

The basic accounting equation dictates:
Assets = Liabilities + Owners’ Equity.

In the Google Adwords world, this translates to:
Keyword Ad Rank = Keyword Quality Score x Keyword Bid Price (CPC)

Simply put, higher the Quality Score, higher is your Ad rank and at a lower CPC.
While there are a number of factors that influence the Quality Score, the relevance of the keyword to the ad group, ad text and landing page is critical in deciding the score. Long-tailed keywords can be one of such influencing factor in improving the quality score of your ads.

What are Long-tailed keywords and how do they work:

Let’s think of a Webstore which sells a wide range of Samsung cell phones. As part of the SEM keyword strategy, let’s go through a few iterations:

Iteration 1 Keywords: “Samsung Cell Phones”, “Samsung Phones”, “Samsung Android Phones”
Well, the problem with these keywords are that they’re too broad and hence very expensive in terms of CPC.
Sample ad copy across all keywords – This Ad is very generic

Iteration 2 keywords: “Samsung Galaxy S”, “Samsung Galaxy Note”, “Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere” and the combination with “Cell Phones”, “Phones”, “Android Phones” etc.

Now we are getting a bit more specific where we are targeting the Samsung Galaxy subset of keywords.  I can further add a layer to differentiate a Samsung Galaxy SII Vs SIII Vs S4.
Sample Ad Copy for Samsung Galaxy S4 – Here we are able to target a specific product with the text. Also notice the landing page consistent with the S4.

Iteration 3 keywords: “Buy Samsung Galaxy SIII”, ““Samsung Galaxy SIII price”, “Buy Samsung Galaxy SIII price”, “Samsung Galaxy SIII discount”, “Buy Samsung Galaxy features” , “Compare Samsung Galaxy SII v SIII” and the combination with “Cell Phones”, “Phones”, “Android Phones” etc.
Notice here that we have moved away from matching the keywords with the product to matching the keyword with the users search intent.

Sample Ad copies:

Add to that the possibility of including the Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) option and the intent based long-tailed keywords become incredibly powerful.
Notice that from Iteration 1 through Iteration 3, we have increased the Keyword length from 2 words to 4+ words. In effect we have moved from the generic keywords to intent based long-tailed keywords.

Is all good with Long-tailed keywords?

If Long-tailed keywords are so effective, why are they not the standard used in defining Adwords keywords?

For starters, Long-tailed keywords are hard to produce, and more importantly maintain. As an example, you can typically produce 1 million plus keywords for a mid-size e-commerce website. It is important in such a scenario to identify the non-performing keywords and pause them at the earliest. If not, you will be hurting the quality score than helping it. One key driver for the success of the long-tailed keywords could be a robust optimizer platform that can auto enable/pause keywords on the fly.

Second, with a crowd of Long-tailed keywords, there could be a competition within internal campaigns for an account. E.g. A “Samsung Galaxy SII Discount” will be competing against a “Samsung Galaxy SII Offer” within the same campaign. Two ways of avoiding this conflict are through a. Having well defined negative keywords for each ad-group b. Using a combination of Broad Match Modifier keywords.

To sum up, Long-tailed keywords do impact the Keyword Ad rank by driving the quality score up and effectively help reduce the keyword CPC. They do have some shortfalls. But when used with a strong technology platform, they can significantly drive the Adwords account performance.

The defining-attributes for online advertising have been “cost-effectiveness”, “enhanced reach” and “tracking conversions”. With faster Internet penetration and more reasons for people to get online, it will become mandatory for almost all the businesses to allocate a certain percentage of their advertising budgets to online spends. I will go further to say many businesses have now realized that the above three are so effective that they have chosen to stop any other form of advertising, like OOH and TVCs.  Many onground stores choose not to do online ads because they feel their enterprise has nothing online-related. It is a common misconception that online ads works only for ecommerce related activity. It is more cost-effective for any advertiser to try online ads as compared to creating hoardings of their service or product, or creating TV commercials. The reach is phenomenal and can be controlled to any specific location you choose. Your ads can appear in Cancun, Mexico while you are based out of Pune, India.

The final straw is measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns or, in short, “tracking conversions”. Tracking conversions using the online media is actually far simpler and easily automatable, using technology right off the bat! Here are techniques used by various SMBs to effectively track the reach of online advertising  and measure the return on investment.

Online ads to phone calls

A very popular real-estate enterprise of Pune has completely removed all the hoardings across Pune and Mumbai, and placed just one hoarding right outside the construction to provide for directions. The reasons are very clear, they don’t know where their potential customer is. And hence, placing a hoarding everywhere is neither possible nor economical. Instead they have resorted to Google Search ads. A potential buyer knows exactly what he/she is looking for and will “search” for a suitable construction. The real-estate enterprise tracks the conversions by the number of times a client called using the phone number on their online ads or the number of times “contact us” page on their website is filled. The phone number that is listed in the ad is a unique number different from their usual website phone-number or their offline-sales number. The number of times their “online phone” rings provides for how effective their online ads are. Many savvy enterprises have allocated different numbers to different channels to differentiate conversions between email marketing, Facebook marketing or Google marketing.

Online ads to increased footfalls

A popular apparel store started using online advertising only to increase their brand-awareness. With limited budgets and with an aim to reach across the city, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the mighty retail chains and also to add a special oomph-factor over their competitors. The store was very clear that they didn’t want to get into ecommerce just yet, but would rather increase the number of footfalls to their already established swanky retail store. They had taken special care in creating a website that preserves the culture of their store, that highlights their catalog and provides unique promotions. To increase their footfalls, they also provided for a downloadable coupon which offers a 10% discount if they visit the store by a certain date with the coupon. The online-coupon now provides a measure of footfalls being driven onground. This store now runs ads local to Pune on Facebook and Google targeting folks looking for “Paithani sarees in Pune”.

Its a wrap
There is of course the traditional questionnaire approach to identify how the client heard about your enterprise. This helps with most walk-ins.

Many enterprises are now adopting various techniques to increase their new customer acquisition and increasing their repeat traffic by storing their email addresses and phone numbers. Through these details you can stay in touch with your clientele and possibly win them back more than once.

Give the online ad world a chance and increase your sales!

Sokrati seeks to hire talented Business Analysts to deliver best in class account management solutions.

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

Sokrati is seeking a Creative Designer with an unmatched ability to transform abstract ideas into exciting creatives.

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

Sokrati is looking to hire young user experience engineers for developing best-in-class UI models.

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

Sokrati is looking for a Technical Writer with strong technical knowledge and writing skills.

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

Sokrati seeks to hire talented Business Development Managers who’d help build a strong Clientele base for Sokrati and spread the word about how we offer the best possible Digital Advertising experience in the industry.

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

To be a geek at Sokrati you need to know how to build scalable and high performance systems. Nothing at Sokrati is small. We start with a proof of concept that demands a traffic rate of 10M+! To achieve any of this you need to understand Distributed Systems, Distributed Caching, High-scale Databases. And we possess the skills to create software that makes this entire heterogeneous system function together even if it runs on 100 boxes. A system that is so widely used cannot sustain any downtime and hence it uses elegant high-availability techniques to survive an outage. Not many startups can say “been there, done that”!

You need to have:

You’d fit right in, if you have:

@Sokrati

If you are excited about:

then let the wonderful journey of coding begin!

Please fill the table on the right or mail to careers@sokrati.com . To make yourself standout, please mention a thing or two about yourself. It will enable us get through to you ASAP.