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FEMALE SPEAKER:Hi, everyone.
My name's Anastasia Lang and I'm the product marketing
manager here at Google focusing on social media.
Thank you so much for joining our Reaching Your Audience On
Social Media webinar.
So today we're going to cover a couple of things, 7 Must
Knows About Social Media, which will focus on what users
are doing in the space, how they're interacting with
social networking.
Then we'll go over some tools that can help you reach your
audience, some demographic bidding to user interest
targeting, as well as an overview of what both Facebook
and Myspace are doing.
And lastly, we'll take some questions.
So during the course of the webinar, feel free to type any
questions that you have into the Q&A box.
We'll wait to address the questions until the Q&A
session at the end.
Make sure that you select to send the
questions to all the panelists.
So let's jump in.
A lot of people ask, what's the big fuss
about social media?
I think especially as of recently, it's very hard for a
single day to go by without someone asking about social
media or social media touching your life
in one way or another.
Either someone friends you on Facebook, adds you as a friend
on Myspace, asks you to join LinkedIn, or you can read
about social networking in the news.
But the big question is, what's the fuss all about?
The way that I like to think about social networks is by
comparing it to a game that I usually played during long
road trips or lazy Sundays called the Six Degrees of
Kevin Bacon.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this game, but
this is a game where you try to connect actors to Kevin
Bacon in as few steps as possible.
So that's kind of the what social
networking is all about.
Think of how many different people we know in this world.
We have our college friends, our high school friends, our
co-workers, people we know from our yoga group or our
cooking class.
Well, we all know them separately.
And social networking enables you to make all these
connections online.
What they do is they really house your social graph in one
place on the web.
If we think about the evolution of the internet,
when the internet first evolved, it was very hard for
people to build an identity online and visiting the web
was a really anonymous experience.
When social networks popped up, what they allowed users to
do is to specifically go on a site where they could express
what their interests are, what kind of hobby they were into,
and make friends online.
So they could easily say that they liked hiking and publicly
demonstrate that they were friends with a specific group
of people, or belong to a certain group.
The next thing that social networks have gotten a lot of
criticism for are that most people think that they are
really for teenagers.
But in fact, that turns out not to be true.
Actually, 86% [? million ?] users in the US, or 44% of the
entire US online population, are on
social networking sites.
79% of all US social networking
users are 18 and older.
So these sites really aren't just for teenagers.
50% of 34 to 41-year-olds, and sorry for the stat overload
here, are on social networks.
Additionally, a recent report by the Luxury Institute showed
that over 60% people with a net worth of two million or
over were using social networks regularly.
So as we can see, these sites are really compelling to a
variety of groups of people, whether teenagers, affluent
professionals--
and more and more sites are evolving with a specific goal
or specific mission to group users
within a certain community.
So the perceptions that these cites really are for teenagers
is no longer the case.
And as they've evolved, more and more people of a different
ethnicity, different age groups, have joined these in
very rapid numbers.
Everyone on these sites is actively engaged.
Because you face an awful lot of opportunities to
participate, to chat with friends, and to
spend a lot of time.
And what we're seeing is that people spend more time on
social networking sites virtually than anywhere else
on the web except for email.
So as you can see here, teenagers are spending the
most time on these sites.
18 to 24 is a little bit more.
Probably because they have the most spare time to give to
these things.
But 25-yr-olds to 44-yr-olds spend 5.2 hours a month, and
people over 55 about four hours a month.
Those are pretty good numbers.
And given that the web has so many things to offer, the fact
that these users are coming back to these sites day after
day after day and engaging in a visitation pattern that's
regular, it's very compelling for many advertisers because
they really get to start fostering conversation with
the same users over and over time.
Additionally, many social networks have popped up.
So the ones that are probably most familiar to all of us are
sites like Facebook and Myspace.
Those are sites that are really for everyone.
They attract a broad audience of people from
all walks of life.
But with time, more and more niche social networks have
popped up as well.
Sites like Flixster for movie lovers, sites like LinkedIn
for professionals, Flickr for people who
are really into photos.
Additionally, you have more niche sites who are focused on
building a specific community.
So BlackPlanet for African-Americans or MiGente
for Hispanics.
Grandparents.com, again for that older demographic, for
people who have grandchildren and want to talk to each other
about tips to spend time with your grandkids or how to be a
good grandparent.
So as we see, more and more social
networking sites are evolving.
But the great thing is that there's
really one for everyone.
So whether you're into dating, OkCupid, you're a grandparent
or professional, or just a kid, there's a social network
that will be for you.
You can connect with people who probably share the same
interests or hobbies.
So really, the space is involving, not only in a broad
way, but also in a niche way, with more and more sites
popping up that give you exactly the kind of engagement
that you're looking for with the kinds of people that you
want to communicate with.
When it comes to Google, we've partnered with some of the
biggest and best social networking sites out
there on the web.
So in our content network, we have 48 of the
top 100 social networks.
Those are social networks that have been ranked by comScore
as being the most frequently visited social
networks in the US.
So we partnered with these sites to allow our advertisers
to run ads on the social networks.
So if you want show up on Myspace or LinkedIn or Bebo or
Dogster, if you have a product for dogs or dog-lovers, you
can all do this through the Google content network, which
gives you one easy way to reach users
on all those sites.
Additionally, while we cannot run ads on Facebook-- that's
something that you have to do directly through Facebook-- we
can run ads on Facebook applications.
So an application is something that the developers have
created, by which they can essentially create some form
of engagement.
So Scrabulous, for example, is a popular application by which
users can go online on Facebook, go to this
application, and play Scrabble.
It's now called Wordscraper, actually.
So we can run ads on Facebook applications by partnering
with some of these developers to allow you to have a
presence on Facebook.
At Google, we believe that a comprehensive social media
campaign will involve Myspace, Facebook, as well as a lot of
the niche social networking sites.
So we do want to give you an opportunity through our
network to have a presence on Facebook.
People used to go to social networks just for chatting.
Which is why so many advertisers found it
irrelevant, because they were saying to theirselves, you
know what, users don't really pay attention to ads in this
space, they're just there to interact with their friends.
And that's really how this space started.
It really was all about the message board, or what
Facebook calls the wall.
People went online, you could write a birthday wish for your
friend's birthday, you could wish someone good luck on
their test, or just say, you know, I haven't talked to you
in a while, let's catch up, how are you doing.
And the wall gave you this very easy way of doing
relationship management with everyone in your social
network, or everyone who was part of your social graph.
And that's really what the core value proposition of
these sites when they first evolved.
However, with time, we've seen sites build in other features
that allow users to get other forms of interaction.
So one of the things that Facebook has done is to create
a market place by which you can actually find housing on
social networks.
No longer do you have to go to Craigslist or another site
that you don't know.
You can find housing on social networks, on Facebook, see
housing lists that your friends have posted or people
in your network.
So this adds an element of trust that wasn't previously
there on sites like that, where, when you're looking
through posts for something, you actually know what network
they're in, and what friends you have in common.
The other thing you can do is join a cause.
Again, you can make a public demonstrations of the fact
that you are someone who believes in stopping global
warming, that you're committed to the fight against it.
There are many causes on both Facebook and Myspace that
users can belong to, whether it's awareness for cancer or
fighting to prevent the spread of AIDS.
People can join and be part of these more philanthropic
causes and make a demonstration on that within a
social network.
They can also use the space to promote membership to these
groups with their friends as well as let others know that
this is an issue that they deeply care about.
They can make a very public statement about the group
membership that they belong to.
Additionally, and this is brand new, you can watch
television within the social network.
So Myspace a few months ago launched a television show, a
pilot they called Quarterlife, which you make fun, it's
actually of the midlife crisis, and talks about kids
in their early 20s going through somethings they deem
the quarterlife crisis.
Users can actually log onto Myspace and watch a television
show within the Myspace interface while being in an
environment where all their friends are [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
engaging with people they know.
And lastly, LinkedIn has given you the ability
to search for jobs.
So you can see again, people who are in your network,
people who you are connected to in some way or another,
what jobs they're posting on behalf of their companies, and
what other opportunities are available to you.
Given that you can now connect with these people as well, you
can see who's in their network, what network they
belong to, so again, this element of trust is built with
time, as these deeper forms of interaction take place on
social networking sites.
So we've really gone from an environment where all you
could do was chat with friends to an environment where you
could do everything in one place-- whether that's find an
apartment, a job, join a social cause, or
simply watch videos.
So social networking sites are offering many different ways
for users to engage with their content.
And these are exactly the kind of things that are keeping
users within this space much longer.
It's not just about interacting with friends
anymore but really building a bigger identity for yourself
as a user through all these different ways.
Even portals are going social.
And if you think about portals, users love portals
because essentially they get to have
everything in one place.
Their weather, news on topics they care about, sports from
their favorite sports team, or their stock
symbols that they follow.
But now, even Windows Live has added some social elements,
such as the ability to share photos add something to a
blog, or share files.
This again highlights the fact that users are really looking
for that social interaction wherever they go.
They want to be able to engage with friends, and they don't
just want to be able to do it on Myspace,
Facebook, and LinkedIn.
They want to have the opportunity to have that
social interaction wherever they go, and portals are
picking up on this and adding these things to make their
site more social, and get users more involved and really
create a community around these sites.
Two-way dialogue is something that started happening as
these social networks are involved.
So the first important thing to note is the advertising
dollars are increasing. in 2007, about $900 million were
invested into social networking sites.
That's predicted to increase by 200% when we
forecast up to 2011.
In 2008, spending's supposed to increase to $1.6 billion.
About 16% to 25% of US marketers are on social media,
with that number being drastically higher among
people who consider
theirselves digitally advanced.
This is slowly a space where people are moving into because
they realize the potential to engage with users in ways that
are viral and authentic.
So the focus so far has been on really two major players,
Myspace and Facebook.
And this is how the revenue is really broken up.
But again, we're seeing, especially as a recent
evolution of smaller social networking sites that are
popping up and starting to gain revenue for them as well.
There are numerous ways that advertisers can participate in
the community, and here I'll go through a couple of
examples that I've found to be a really good use of the
social media space.
So the first thing advertisers can do is listen.
Really use the space as a focus group.
Think of it as the world's most viral and
authentic focus group.
So I believe in 2008 about 69 million dollars will be spent
on hosting focus groups.
But the hard part is that people come in, and they come
into a room, you do your focus group, and then they leave.
Social networks really give you the ability to have a
longitudinal focus group and engage with users time and
time again.
And that's exactly what Chrysler did.
So Chrysler launched a site called Chrysler Listen.
And this was an ability for them to demonstrate that they
were listening to their community.
They invited people to join the site and then started
discussion groups and forums among
members that they invited.
So saying things like, what do you think about fuel
efficiency, how important is gas to the mileage, what would
you change about the design of the car?
And they let users who had been driving Chryslers for
years actually have a voice into how this company was
making decisions, both from a marketing standpoint, a
positioning standpoint, and an actual product standpoint.
Users felt really rewarded because for the first time in
years they were actually able to give feedback, and the
company was showing that they were listening, and that they
were trying to engage with users.
Additionally, by engaging with the same users time and time
again, you can see what kind of comments they have over
time and how their opinion of your brand is changing.
This is really a dual proposition for both the
advertiser and the user.
The user gets to get their feedback on something they
drive every single day, they probably know all the pain
points they have about the car, they know all the things
that frustrate them.
And they get to kind of unleash that and get that off
their chest, and tell the advertiser what they think.
On the advertiser's side, you get feedback from very
authentic users in an authentic environment, where
they are actually willing to give you feedback.
They're not sitting there in a room, but they're talking to
each other, and you can just listen in on that conversation
and take that advice back to your product or design folks.
The other thing that you can do is attract consumers to
your brand.
Instead of pushing the message onto users, really pulling
them onto try your brand.
So someone that I think did this really well is Jones
Soda, and they used the Facebook interface
in order to do this.
So Jones Soda, they make soda, and what they did is they
partnered with a graffiti application on Facebook.
So I don't know how many people are familiar with the
graffiti application, but essentially what it does is it
gives you a palette of colors--
think of something like Microsoft paint--
and you can design a drawing.
So Jones started a contest for ten days, and they said, we
want you to design a change that you want
to see in this world.
Within 10 days that this contest ran, they had over
7,000 entries.
And as you can see from the designs here, these things
would take quite a long time to make.
And users felt so proud of the fact that they designed these
things-- clearly, they put a lot of time and effort into
it-- that they actually went ahead and embedded them into
their profiles or shared them with their friends, saying,
you know, look what I just created using this graffiti
application, et cetera.
What Jones did to show them that they were listening is
they took some of the best designs, some of the winning
designs, and actually put them as a label on their soda
bottle and distributed that.
So by doing this, not only-- and Jones here, they're not
pushing the soda, they're not pushing soda
sales in any way--
what they're doing is they're affiliating themselves with
community change.
With positive change in their society.
Which is previously something that most users probably
wouldn't affiliated with Jones.
I don't know how many people in general have brand
awareness of Jones Soda, but by doing something like this
in social media environments, they were able to position
themselves as clearly a philanthropic brand, a brand
that cares about change, whether that be preventing
smoking or reducing pollution.
So again, they were able to pull consumers onto their
brand in a way that consumers got to engage with, they got
to create these cool designs without really
trying to push sales.
There is something you can do with engage
and build brand loyalty.
This is an example I use often because I
think it's quite humorous.
So this is a Myspace profile page, and the profile is for a
character called Jack Box.
So jack Box is the iconic character for the Jack in the
Box fast food--
I don't know if it's called fast food, but it's
essentially a fast food slash restaurant chain.
So what Jack in the Box did is they created this profile for
the character Jack Box, and here they post different
photos of Jack.
Jack has a blog within the Myspace interface where he
writes the latest entries.
So my favorite one was when Jack had an entry about the
benefit of exercising, and his photo was of him on a
treadmill with a towel wrapped around his head.
So they're constantly updating the profile to
keep the users engaged.
The really cool thing about this is that Jack has over I
believe 140,000 friends and over 10,000
comments on his wall.
Now, I've read through some of the comments, and they're
actually really relevant.
So people are saying, hey, Jack, I stopped by your
restaurant, loved the milkshake.
Or, hey, jack, when are you going to get a veggie burger?
So they're actually talking to the brand as if the brand were
a real person.
So I think what Jack in the Box has done here really well
is that instead of trying to get the user to go somewhere
else, they've gone to the user.
And they're talking to them in the way that
the user wants to--
in the way that they're talking with their friends.
So again, they're creating an interface to engage with the
user that the user's very comfortable with.
And the last thing I wanted to mention is this idea of
experimentation.
So really using social networks to better understand
what product would stick and which ones wouldn't, what's
having impact and what isn't.
And a big success story here is Del Monte.
So Del Monte created a social networking site called I love
my dog and invited dog-lovers to join.
And there again, much like Chrysler, they started having
conversations around, you know, what do you feed your
dog, how do you interact with your dog, what's most
important about your dog's health.
And through all these conversations that Del Monte
started, what they found was that there was a huge gap in
the dog breakfast market.
A little odd, but those were their findings.
And what that actually led them to do is to create a
whole new product of dog food, and these were dog breakfast
sausages that they launched as a result of all these
conversations they were having in social media, which ended
up being quite successful, because through these
conversations, they discovered that there was no one else at
the time who was serving that part of the dog food market.
So the next part is about creative reigns, and really
focusing on ad format.
I think traditionally we've looked at ad format on the web
as text and display, and at the recent video ads.
And these are still formats that a very popular in terms
of advertising in the social media space.
However, Myspace and Facebook have both designed ways to
create interactions with the users in a way that's
completely different from the traditional ad formats.
So Facebook has something called the news feed.
So the news feed is essentially your homepage when
you log into Facebook, and it just shows you the latest
updates from people in your network, or your friends.
So for example, when I log in, it can tell me that my best
friend is attending an event or one of my other friends
just posted photos.
So I can kind of see what's going on without really having
to spend a lot of time browsing deeply into the site.
And ads are now starting to run within the news feed.
Additionally, much like the Jack in the Box example that I
showed you, some social networks are creating
profiles, or pages.
This is really a place that can be very brand-specific,
where you can really create a holistic environment for your
brand or your products or your service.
You can usually post videos, have discussions, really use
that as an environment to tell people-- in, again, a more
viral, authentic way than an ad--
things about your company and the different services you
offer, and invite the user to engage with you.
And lastly, there are applications.
So applications are something that allow the users to
usually play a game, it's not just about
subscribing to something.
But they allow you to play a game, they allow you to-- you
know, you can put yourself on the map, you can symbolize all
the different places in the world that you've been to.
And some advertisers slowly started developing
applications.
So a good example of an application is the Dell
application.
So they partnered with Project Red, which is a cause that's
committed to stopping the spread of AIDS in Africa.
And they said, we invite you, all Dell users, to tell us
where you are in the world and to put yourself on the map And
someone who believes in stopping the
spread of AIDS in Africa.
And different users used this application interface, which
was clearly Dell branded, and were able to put themselves on
the map and then see the community of Dell users who
believed in stopping the spread of AIDS and who also
see how global this community of Dell users really were.
So again, think of applications as more engaging,
more viral ways to create profiles or brand-specific
pages within social networking sites.
Lastly, as social networks have evolved, so have tools
that can help you reach your specific audience.
And the reason for the evolution of these tools,
think about it, is because social networks attract such a
broad variety of users.
So again, people from all walks of life, all genders,
all ages, go to these sites and engage with their friends.
So really, the person, the advertiser who's able to
connect the message in a relevant way, is going to be
the one who will resonate with the user.
If you think about the evolution of advertising,
traditional advertising used to be very much like
broadcasting.
So back in the day when there was one television station or
one radio station, an advertiser would put a message
out there for everyone and people would kind of lean back
on their couch and watch, and those for whom it was relevant
would pay attention, but everyone else would
kind of tune out.
With the evolution of the web and tools like contextual
targeting, advertising was able to be more relevant, and
really be there at the moment of relevance.
So for users reading something about sports, you would
potentially see an ad for sports merchandise.
However, social media--
it's a very messy environment.
So with social media, everyone is broadcasting, not just the
advertiser.
So if you look at this example here, clearly an advertising
message would have to be very different among a conversation
where people are talking about expecting a baby and needing a
safe car versus someone else saying hey, I just got a big
promotion and I want to splurge on a luxury vehicle.
So the advertiser, again, who's going to be most
effective is the one who'll be able to deliver a targeted
message to a specific audience, and then show them
that they're listening to what they're saying, and they're
responding specifically.
Not to someone who'll be able to throw kind of a blanket
message that, while at first glance might be applicable to
anyone, really won't be applicable to
most people at all.
Here, because there are so many people who are
broadcasting, the more relevant your message is, the
more users are likely to pay attention.
And this is exactly what many social networking companies
have realized, and have started creating tools that
help you do just that.
So here I'll walk through a couple of examples.
The first is this idea of user level targeting.
And what I mean by that is, users volunteer a lot of
information on their social networking profiles.
So they say what schools they went to, what their hobbies
are, who they're friends with, what they like
to do on the weekends.
And many have used that as a signal for showing people
relevant ads.
So Facebook has a platform by which you can go and type in
key words that you would like to appear in a user's profile.
And Facebook will give you an approximate number of users
who have those keywords in their profile.
And you can actually then just opt to target those users.
You can say, OK, let's say I sell a motorcycle, so I want
to target all users who have the word motorcycle or
motorbike in their profile.
You can do that, and then further refine that with age
and gender.
So you're really using self-defined key words to find
the audience that's relevant to you.
Myspace also has a form of user interest targeting, and
this is something that they call hyper targeting.
So with Myspace's hyper targeting platform, what
they've done is they've gone in and said, OK, we're going
to classify users into categories ourselves.
So we're going to kind of look at profile data and decide,
you know, what user is a movie lover and what user is an
outdoors enthusiast. So here, what people can do is actually
select a group that they want to target.
Myspace has over 300 categories for their hyper
targeting platform, and each of those categories can get
broken down even further.
You can get a brand owner saying, I want to target movie
lovers who like Will Ferrell movies, for example.
Additionally, Facebook tried something very different a few
months ago called Beacon.
So I'm sure some of you have probably heard about Beacon.
And Beacon was a really great way of looking at the space.
And what Beacon said was, we think-- or what Facebook said,
rather, by launching Beacon-- was that we think that a
recommendation from a user is more valuable than anything
else when it comes to social media space.
So really, being able to see in your news feed, which is
sort of like your home page on Facebook, that your friends
went to Blockbuster and rented a video online is going to
make you more likely to do the same thing than just seeing an
ad for Blockbuster.
So this platform--
it was, again, I think a very good idea and a very
interesting way of looking at the space, but it actually
received quite a bit of criticism from users, who felt
that they were being tracked all over the web.
So this is something that's still developing, but I wanted
to let you know that there are these different ways of
looking at the space.
So lastly we come to Google.
And on the Google side, we've done a couple of things, both
on the user interest targeting front as well as the
demographic getting front.
And now I'll go into some of these in a
little bit more detail.
So first, there's something we call demographic bidding.
The demographic bidding is a feature that's available in
the AdWords front end.
It's available on the majority of our social networking sites
that we partner with, so that list I showed you
a little bit earlier.
What demographic bidding allows you to do is to modify
your bid or to restrict your ad visibility based on the age
range and the gender of the users viewing your ad.
So for example, let's take the case of restrict.
If I'm a retailer and I only sell women's tennis skirts, I
may not want to show my ads to men.
So what I can do using the demographic bidding interface
is say, OK if the user who's viewing my ad is a male, never
show my ad to them, because chances are they're not going
to buy my product.
So you can actually limit the impression based on the
audience composition of the ad.
The other thing that you can do is modify your bid.
So if you have a product where you don't really have groups
that you'd want to-- you really want the
ad to show to everyone.
One of the things you can do is increase your bid for
specific audiences.
So if you see--
or you know from your back end conversion data or from tools
that we have-- if you know that people between the ages
of 18 to 24 tend to convert better than people over 55,
you can increase your bid just for that audience.
What increasing your bid for a specific audience will do is
it will increase the frequency with which that
group sees your ad.
So it'll make your ad more likely to show to people 18 to
24 years old, if that's the group that you're looking for.
So again, here you're really limiting your impression and
focusing on the users who matter to you.
And I think this is important because a lot of the criticism
we've heard about social networking has been that
there's so many impressions that people don't feel they
could get targeted enough.
And this is really an attempt on our end to give you more
control and really allow you to refine your targeting on
these sites.
So the way you would set up a demographic bidding campaign
is you would go into the AdWords front end, select the
campaign that's running on some of our social networking
sites, and then click on Edit Campaign Settings.
That's highlighted in yellow right there on the slide.
After you get to the Edit Campaign Settings page, if you
scroll down halfway through, there'll be something called
Demographics, and you just click on that.
After you click on Demographics, you will be
taken to a page that looks exactly like this.
So here, this is actually the page where you can make these
bid modification and restriction decisions.
What you can do is click on the Edit button here on the
side, and once you do that, a little box like
that will pop up.
And here you can put a bid up to 500% if you'd like to
increase your bid for a specific audience.
Or you can click on Exclude The Demographic to prevent
your ads from showing to that specific demographic.
We also have something called Demographic Reports.
So these are found in the AdWords Report Center.
Your run them in a very similar way that you run
Placement Performance Reports or all the other reporting
tools that we have at Google.
And what Demographic Reports allow you to do is they allow
you to see how people of different ages and genders are
responding to your ads.
So this is really a tool that will help you make bid
modification and restriction decisions.
You can actually see on what sites, what genders are
driving the majority of the clicks and the majority of the
conversions, and use that data to make
your advertising decisions.
The other great thing about demographic reports is, you
don't actually have to have bid modifiers or restricts in
place in order to see this data.
If you run on my Myspace or Friendster or hi5, or any
other site that allows demographic bidding since July
of 2007, you can go in and run this report now and see how
different groups are performing.
So if you in the past found social media performance to be
ineffective, an interesting way to reapproach this space
and try out social media advertising again is by
looking at this report and seeing if potentially, you
know, yes, there might have been a group of users who were
getting a lot of impressions but not clicking.
But maybe also there were a group of people who were
clicking with a very high click-through rate, but that
simply wasn't showing when you looked at ads and their
performance.
So this should really help you figure out what [? folks ?]
are performing well and responding well to your ad.
The last thing I wanted to mention about demographic
bidding is the ability to create different campaigns for
different users.
So if you have a product for both males and females, one of
the cool things this feature allows you to do is to have a
different call to action for females and a different call
to action for males.
You can create a campaign, upload the ad text and the
copy targeted to males, and restrict all females from ever
seeing the ad.
And then do the same thing for females, where you have a call
to action unique to females and just restrict all males.
So this again allows you to be much more targeted, but also
be much more engaging and much more specific as you're
talking to users on social networking sites.
The other thing that we have is user interest targeting.
And before we talk about user interest targeting, I just
wanted to show you some examples of the kind of
information people provide about
themselves on social networks.
So here's an example of some made-up folks.
So one is Julie, and Julie has an intersection on her profile
where she talks about the fact that she likes rock climbing,
surfing, soccer, kayaking, et cetera.
And then there's a guy named Jack, and Jack
has an About Me section.
And here he talks about, you know, I'm a regular 24-yr-old
guys, and he also mentions the fact that he's really into
outdoor sports, especially hiking, kayaking and biking.
So this is really great, because it gives information
about what the user's into, what information
they like to do.
So now, if we think about contextual targeting the way
we do it on the Content Network, contextual targeting
has been very effective because it's shown users ads
while they're reading content that's relevant.
So for example, if I'm reading a page about coffee and tea, I
can see ads about where to buy tea, or scones-- those things
that are relevant to liking tea and being a tea drinker.
On social networks, however, if I'm reading a page about
something, or if I'm reading my friend's profile, that
doesn't necessarily mean that I'm
interested in the same thing.
So when we do contextual targeting on social networking
sites, what we actually target to is certain areas of the
user's profile.
So let's say I'm looking at my friend Jack's profile.
And Jack talks about the fact that he really likes hiking.
But in my profile, I talk about the
fact that I like shopping.
So showing me ads based on hiking when I'm looking at
Jack's profile isn't going to be relevant to me.
Rather, what's going to be more relevant is the ability
to show me ads based on my interests.
Because even though I'm friends with Jack, that
doesn't mean we like the same things.
So this is kind of some background for you to
understand how we've develop some of this user interest
targeting technology.
And there are two ways to do user interest targeting on
social network sites through Google.
So the first way is by keyword.
We recently launched a feature called
Enhanced Online Campaigns.
So what Enhanced Online Campaigns allows you to do is
run ads on certain sites on the Google Content Network and
then refine those ads with keywords.
So you can say, only show my ad on cnn.com when the word
sport or the word electric car is mentioned.
On social networks, and based on what I've just told you
about the fact that we target ads to the content of the
profile and not the content of the page the user's looking
at, what you can actually say is, whenever I'm running on
Myspace, or whenever I'm running on Friendster or hi5,
show my ads to users who have the word biking, or who have
the word dog in their profile.
So this allows you to engage in a much more specific way of
doing audience targeting.
So this is really how it works.
You would add key words to restrict your place in the
targeting to only those users relevant to your campaign.
So again, you're going from targeting the entire social
network to just targeting those folks who are relevant
to you based on the keywords they've indicated in their
profile, such as hiking, or shopping--
whatever the case may be.
You can also further refine this with demographic
information.
So if you know that you'd like to reach users who are into
hiking, but you just want them to be males, you can add a
demographic bidding restrict like I showed you a little bit
earlier to these Enhanced Online Campaigns.
So you can actually get a granular saying, I just want
to reach males between the ages of 18 to 24 who have the
keyword hiking on their social networking profiles.
And you can do this across most the social networking
sites in the Google Content Network.
There's another way of doing user interest targeting that
we're just starting to test out at Google, and I invite
you to try this out and provide us feedback.
So this is really by category.
What we've done here is we've gone in and we've looked at a
certain audience that's been really popular on social
networking sites, such as car enthusiasts, moms, fashion
lovers or online gamers.
And what we've done is we've actually broken those users
out by placement.
So this is a feature that's just available on Myspace, and
what it allows you to do is, just like you would select the
site via the AdWords front end, it allows you to just
select that placement.
So you can just say, I just want to reach car enthusiasts
on Myspace with the click of a button.
So the way you would do that is you would use a placement
from the AdWords front end and go to the list URL function.
And under that, type in myspace.com.
Again, unlike the Enhanced Online Campaign feature, which
is available on the content network, and on all of our
social networking sites, this Category User Interest
Targeting feature is only available on Myspace.
So you would type in myspace.com, and then click on
Get Available Placements, and then you would see all the
different Myspace placements that we have. And here, you
can actually select placements based on the user's interests.
So you can select to target users who are interested in
dating, users who are interested in fashion, users
who are outdoor enthusiasts or car enthusiasts, or any of the
other categories I showed you a little bit earlier.
Just click on the Add button on the right-hand side, and
this placement should appear in your campaign.
The one word of caution is that if you are using these
placements, make sure you don't target a specific user
interest placement and
myspace.com in the same campaign.
And the reason for that is, by targeting a specific user
interest, you're targeting a very, very
specific group of user.
By adding myspace.com, into that, you're adding a whole
site, so you're really kind of negating the point of having a
very specific targeting mechanism in place, because
myspace.com includes all users, not just those who are
interested in dating or fashion, et cetera.
So some of these categories are relevant to
you and your business.
Definitely just try to target the user interest as opposed
to myspace as a whole.
And again, this is something you can definitely refine with
a demographic bidding tool.
So you can say, you know, I want to reach people who are
car enthusiasts, who are just females between the
ages of 35 to 44.
And then your ad will just show to that group of folks.
So again, basically as a wrap-up, on the user interest
targeting we have two ways of doing this.
One is by keywords using Enhanced Online Campaigns and
the other one is by category and this is just a
Myspace-specific feature where you can select certain
categories to target users that are relevant to you.
So the very last thing I wanted to talk about is this
idea of metrics.
And I've already showed you an example of the Demographic
Report, which gives you insight into how users of
different age and gender groups are
performing with your ad.
But I think a lot of really engaging and seeing how people
are responding to your campaign comes from other
types of metrics, not just CTR or conversion rate.
A lot of people have started looking into metrics like how
many people shared their apps, how many people subscribed to
their site or their newsletter.
How many people embedded the ad, like
the Jones Soda example--
lots of people went in and embedded their creation into
their profile.
If you upload a video of someone or have a video
running as an ad, how many people decided to share it
with their friends, or how many people said this is a
video they really liked?
Additionally, some of the other things you could look at
are qualitative feedback.
So if you have a brand channel or a profile on social
networking sites, look at what users are saying.
Are they saying positive things or negative things?
If they're saying negative things, what are
those things about?
So really use this environment to see what kind of response
people are having, because people are being authentic,
and they're giving you their honest opinion, and this could
potentially be very helpful from all phases of the product
and the service.
And lastly, think the Dove Evolution campaign, which was
a video that ran on YouTube, I believe a year or two ago.
What marketers really looked at there was, how much of an
impact did my brand make.
While this is just a YouTube video, they not only looked at
people who watched the video, but how many people responded
to it by making a parody of it, or by making another video
that either criticized or complimented what Dove did.
The Dove Evolution video, for those of you not familiar with
it, was a video that showed a woman sitting into a chair,
and slowly how she got-- you know, she went from having no
makeup on, her hair was up, she was kind of sweaty, to
getting all dressed up and fully made up, and then using
Photoshop to really alter what she looked like.
And the underlying message that Dove was trying to send
is, no wonder our perception of beauty's so distorted,
because look at what everyone is doing to models, and to all
these women, trying to make them look very different from
what they actually look like in real life.
So Dove, what they measured at the end is not only how people
perceive the campaign but how many people were talking about
it, and this is very much in the air.
With CTR, additionally, CTR I think is a metric that we've
all come to rely on, from things like Search and even
things like the Content Network.
But on certain social networking sites, the number
of impressions can be very high.
So what many of us encourage you to do is, not only look at
CTR, but look at the raw number of clicks that you're
getting, both from search, from content,
and from social media.
And the reason for that is, because the number of
impressions can be quite high on social networks, sometimes
the CTR doesn't fully reflect how you're performing.
So it can be helpful, and we found this with some case
studies in the past, where people were really not
thrilled with their click-through rate, but the
minute that they stepped back from that a little bit and
compared their raw number of clicks on social media versus
their raw number of clicks on another site, they actually
saw that social media was driving quite a high number of
clicks, it's just that number wasn't showing through.
So these are the 7 Must Knows About Social Networks, and
we've talked a little bit about the different options
for reaching your audience in an effective way.
I think now we'll probably collect some
questions from you guys.
So we'll take a minute here while we see the questions
that have come in, and then I'll answer those.
And feel free to type more of those if you have them.
So I will get back to you in approximately one minute.
Thanks for your patience, guys.
So now we've got a couple of questions, and definitely let
me know if you have more.
So the first question was, who ranks the top social network.
Good question, I should have clarified that.
Those top social networks were ranked by comScore.
So comScore does something, usually every month, where
they'll put out a list of the most visited social networks,
and that's where we got the list. So there are other
companies that do that as well, like Hitwise has put out
a list of all the Top 20 social networks, and out of
those, 16 were in the Google Content Network.
Let's see.
See what else we have. Can we place a target--
a site on TV Canada?
As far as I know, I haven't heard of it, but that's
something we can double check.
I want to say no right now, but if you have-- whoever
asked the question-- if you have an account manager or
want to email one of our general support listservs, I
can definitely look into that and give you a
definite answer on that.
Some people argue that folks don't use social networks to
shop, how would someone respond to this?
I think that's a very good question to ask for a number
of reasons.
So primarily because when people go to social networks,
they don't really want to leave the
environment they're in.
So they're in this space, they're engaging with their
friends, they don't really want to go somewhere else.
So there are a couple of ways that I think people have
responded to this.
The first one is, social networks are really a good way
to do your research before shopping.
So obviously, this'll depend on how high-touch of a
purchase you're looking to make.
For some of the smaller things potentially people just buy
online, they don't really seek the input of their friends.
But a lot of what social networks offer is the ability
to go and ask other folks who you know have a similar
product, they'll try the company or have a presence on
the social networking site what they think about it.
So you can easily, in this environment, ask your friends
what they thought about it and what their interaction was.
The other thing that some people are doing is launching
rich media gadget ads, by which people can essentially
complete all phases of the shopping experience within the
social network and only have to leave it to enter their
credit card information.
So this is a rich, media-interactive gadget by
which you can feed in in real time, let's say you get some
clothing accessories.
And users can interact with the gadget, pick out a pair of
pants that they want, or a suit, et cetera.
And then simply say the size they want to do it in, and
then order it.
And in order to order, they would have to go somewhere
else, but this essentially allows you to create an
engaging environment by which you can pretty much complete
everything else, look at what you're looking to purchase,
and then just go somewhere else to complete it.
The other question's about social media targeting being
available only in the US, or globally.
Most of these features are available globally.
Demographic bidding is available in Europe as well,
as well in some of our Asian countries.
For user interest targeting and some of those features we
mentioned, right now those are just North America specific,
and we are working to roll them out.
So I wanted to share them with you today because there's some
new things we're testing, and based on the feedback that we
receive, we really want to consider rolling them out to
the broader audience.
What if I want to target a site in specific?
Can I just choose Facebook, for instance?
The answer to that is absolutely.
So you don't have to target all of our social networking
sites at once.
You can just select the ones that are relevant to you.
So if you know, for example, that you just want to target
animal lovers, you can just choose Dogster and Catster,
and not have to worry about advertising on Myspace.
Same thing for Facebook.
Again, the point I want to make here is, please keep in
mind that we can't run ads on Facebook as a whole, we just
run ads on different Facebook applications.
So these are, again, things that users are downloading in
order-- rather, participating in to get engagement and to
play different games on the site, and we've partnered with
some of the most popular Facebook applications.
How can we find the list of websites in the Google Content
Network to determine what would be best?
The best thing to do that is go into your AdWords front end
account and look at the placement tool in the AdWords
front end AdWords There, you can select sites by category,
and there's a category there called Social Networks.
You can click on the category and see the different sites
that we have that are social networking sites, and see
which ones make sense to you.
We definitely encourage you to visit
those sites for yourself.
So even if you're not a member, take a look at what
the home page looks like, what kind of conversations people
have on there.
The other question someone had is, beyond user interest
targeting and demographic bidding, is there any more
specific customer profile based targeting, such as
psychographics like financial purchases, most used sites,
and specifics of geography.
So the answer to that is sort of twofold.
You can target by geography, just like you can with AdWords
ads or with Google Content Network ads.
You can target by geographic location In terms of
psychographics, there's really nothing above what I've
described today at this time.
So we don't want to target users based on any sensitive
information while they're in a social networking space, such
as email or financial information, et cetera.
So right now we don't offer that kind of targeting.
We are looking at being able to provide more categories,
such as number of children in
household or level of education.
But that's something that's not available right now, and
that's something that we're just talking about.
And the last question is about Google Ad Planner, and using
that data to identify the social networking sites you
want to target.
And the answer to that is yes, you can definitely look
through Ad Planner to find social networking sites that
are relevant to your demographic, so relevant to
the group that you'd like to reach.
So unless no one has any more questions, I think we will
conclude the webinar for today.
I want to thank everyone for coming.
It was really helpful for me to be able to talk about
social media, and I hope you found this
webinar to be useful.
We'll send out a [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
for your reference.
You can have this material online, and we definitely
encourage you to email us if you have any questions or
anything else.
Additionally, we wanted to share some of the upcoming
webinars that we have. One on Conversion Optimizer coming up
on September fourth and another one on the Content
Network coming up on September 24th.
Additionally, if you have any questions you can contact us
at adwords-support@google.com, or visit the AdWords help
center at adwords.google.com/support.
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