Table of Content

Introduction
Who am I? Who this book is for? How this book is structured?

1
2 3 4

Digital Marketing Overview

$36.6B was the Digital marketing spend in US 2012 China landscape dominated by locals Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011 Digital marketing in Vietnam

5
6 8 10 11

Potential in Vietnam
31M internet users in Vietnam

13
14

Agency world in Vietnam

Big Agency Group in Vietnam Other Agency Groups Local agencies, ad networks and others Jack of all trades

17
19 21 24 28

Digital Marketing Career How to learn Digital Marketing The Big Picture
Owned, Paid and Earned Media

30 33 38
39

PC Assets
Getting the basics right

42
43

Development plan User experience Reference

46 55 65

Mobile Assets
Post PC era is here Mobile options for Brands Reference

66
67 69 76

Social Media Assets

What is Social Media? Facebook domination in Vietnam Channel Recommendation Guiding principles Facebook fanpage Measuring success Reference

77
78 79 81 83 90 99 106

Digital Analytics
What is Digital Analytics Definition Different Analytics Tools Free Offsite Tools Paid Offsite Tools Listening Tools Effective Analytics Strategy Google Analytics Overview Reference

107
108 109 111 114 118 123 128 135 137

Display Advertising
What is Display Advertising? How to plan a Display Campaign Google Display Network Facebook Ads

138
139 140 148 151

Real Time Bidding Tracking different media campaigns Reporting and Optimization Reference

156 158 161 164

Search Marketing
Demand Capture Channel When to use it? How Paid Search works? How SEO works? SEO Cheat Sheet Working process for PPC and SEO Performance Evaluation Common Myths How much does it cost? Reference

165
166 173 181 187 195 200 201 204 207 210

Digital Strategy
Brief Research Ideation Evaluation Campaign Development

212
214 216 218 223 225

Conclusion

227

First Edition

Intentionally Left Blank

Introduction

Section 1

Who am I?

I have been very lucky, to be able to work with wide range of professionals from various industries and company sizes, from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, the US, UK, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, mainland China etc... I have worked with companies like Shangri-La Hotel & Resort global account, Millennium & Copthorne global account, Hong Kong Disney Land global, Club Med Asia Pacic in hotels and resorts; Apple in 13 countries, Avis in car rental, Citibank regional account, HSBC, ANZ, Standard Chartered to local banks in Vietnam like Techcombank, ACB, Vietnam Airlines, Tan Hiep Phat Group, Mead Johnson, Sapporo beer etc...Some of the clients are from dark market industries like Tobacco (JTI), Diageo. As for why I write this book, I hope I could contribute a bit to the Digital marketing industry in Vietnam. I know my experience is very limited so many things in this book could be wrong/ debatable. This is partly why I publish this book as an ebook so that from readers comments, I could quickly make changes. Feel free to share your comments/feedback through chandlerblog@gmail.com

About Chandler Nguyen

I was lucky. I found what I love to do early in life. In 2003/2004, a friend introduced Google Adwords to me. I still remember, the rst ever book that I read on this subject was The Denite Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall. Initially I started as an afliate marketer without even knowing what it was, a friend needs sales leads and I used Adwords to generate them. After that I worked for an agency focusing on SME segment in Singapore. I helped the agency to set up the Google Adwords program at the time Yahoo still sold Yahoo Search Marketing on a CPM basis per keyword. Then I moved to a regional agency started in the UK, when they rst set up their ofce in Singapore in 2007. Here I had the opportunities to work with the global / regional brands on Performance Media marketing. After a few years, I came back to Vietnam to cofound a digital agency from scratch.

Section 2

Who this book is for?

This ebook is about Digital marketing in Vietnam, written for the following audiences: Fresh Graduates who are looking for opportunities in Digital Marketing Industry Digital marketing professionals with 2-3 years of experience in one specic area of digital Traditional Marketers/Account Managers who want to learn more about Digital Marketing Traditional agency owners in Vietnam International agencies who want to explore Vietnam International providers who want to understand more about the local market Why I am writing this ebook in English and not Vietnamese? While its true that writing in Vietnamese would reach a wider

audience. However, it is my rm belief that if you want to excel in Digital marketing, language skill is something you have to master, English is a necessity. Also the majority of the reference materials referred to in this book are in English.

Section 3

How this book is structured?

Overview
This is the summary of all the topics being covered in this book.

Next we look at the agency world to understand who the big players are. Then we discuss about the potential of Digital marketing in Vietnam. Before learning more about any subject, it may be helpful to look at the career path, what your options will be like if you master the subject. Next we talk about different ways that you could learn Digital Marketing.

Part 2
This is it. At this part, we deep dive into Digital Analytics, Owned Media (including desktop assets, mobile assets and social assets), Paid Media (Display and Search). At the end there is a chapter on general principles to build a good digital strategy.

Part 1
For the rst 4 chapters, we are going to review the digital marketing landscape in the US, China, Singapore and Vietnam. It is important to understand where we are and where Digital marketing stands in the marketing mix in Vietnam.
4

Digital marketing overview

A quick overview of the digital spend across more mature markets like US, China, Singapore and of course Vietnam.

Section 1

$36.6B was the Digital marketing spend in the US in 2012

According to IAB, the internet advertising revenue in the US grew 15% in 2012 compared to 2011. Total revenue for 2011 was $31.74 Billions. Search marketing and Display media (Display banner, Rich Media, Video Ads, Sponsorship) are still the most popular ad formats, which contributed nearly 78% of the spend in 2012. Coming from a much smaller base, Mobile marketing spend increased close to 111% in 2012 to command 9% of the spend. Internet advertising spend outpaced all other advertising formats except for Broadcast Television. Reading the denition of Display Banner ad format and Sponsorship ad format, one would guess that Facebook ads were counted in this category. Search marketing naturally includes paid search ads, contextual targeting text ads, paid inclusion and search engine optimization. One thing stood out was that if a much more matured market like the US saw a revenue increase of more than 15%, one would expect markets like Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia or Vietnam to increase at a much faster pace to be worthy of investment.
6

Below is the advertising format share of revenue over time.

Well, the US is many years ahead of Vietnam so one thing is by looking at this, we could make an educated guess of how things will pan out in this region. Of course you have to consider the different in internet usage behavior amongst other things.

As you can see, Search Engine Marketing remains stable over time. The same with Display Banner. Mobile is on a rapid rise, while Digital Video is increasing but at a much slower pace. Rich Media percentage is dropping rather rapidly together with Classied. If you want to read the full report, please refer to http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landsc ape/adrevenuereport Why is it important to understand this?
7

Section 2

China landscape dominated by locals

There are over 500 million Chinese internet users (according to CNNIC) double that of the US. However, the penetration rate is quite low, at 38.3%, suggested that there is huge room for growth.

Source: CNNIC Doing Search Marketing in China is of course different from other markets since Google/Yahoo are not the dominant search engines there but Baidu. Baidu Search Engine Result Page is signicantly different compared to Google. Popular Internet services in China are mostly dominated by local players, not International players like what is happening in many other countries. We have Baidu for Search, Sina Weibo for Social, Tmall instead of Amazon etc...

Source: CNNIC China As for mobile internet users, the number is getting huge as well.

According to article from Adage, GroupM China estimated an increase of 40%+ for Online spend in China in 2012. This seems to be consistent with other reports from iResearch. Detailed reports on the break down of ad spend for each ad format are currently not available to China. This is not surprising since
8

data transparency in China lags far behind that of the US, UK or other mature markets. The main reason I include something about China in this ebook so that if you are tasked with developing a Digital marketing strategy in China, please be aware that it is very different from the West, from Singapore or Vietnam. If nothing else, the size of the market alone makes it a completely different game. From technology and digital marketing standpoint, I would think that China model would be more suitable to Vietnam as compared to Western models.

Section 3

Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011

From Campaign Asia and PwC, digital marketing is expected to grow between 8% - 13% per year from 2012 to 2017. Search Marketing contributed about 35% of the total online spend while display commanded about 50%. The rest went to Classied and Directories. From an agency perspective, Singapore is the HQ for many international agencies. Many regional companies plan their regional budget out of Singapore as well while letting individual country level to decide how they would want to do with these budget. Of course how much control the local team has over their marketing budget would vary widely from one company to the next. In my humble opinion, Singapore is a highly competitive marketplace with more agencies than clients to serve. Also the local market is small so local spend is limited as compared to other markets in the region.

According to report by IAB Singapore, the online spend in Singapore surpassed US $100m mark for the rst time for the year end 2011. I couldnt nd the public report for 2012 so we have to make do with 2011 data. Online spend was at about 8% of the total advertising market, which makes advertising market around $1.25B. While the percentage of online spend vs total advertising market for Singapore is higher than that of Hong Kong, the number is considerably lower compared to US (18%), UK (33%), Australia (19%), Japan (21%). This suggests that there is again a huge room for growth. The annual growth rate for Online spend in Singapore during the past 2 years stayed at around 20%+, which was only on par with the growth rate of the US and UK. This is, in my opinion, a disappointing growth rate because Singapore started from a very small base.

10

Section 4

Digital marketing in Vietnam

A slow drive thus far but the pace is picking up
It has been a long and slow drive for Digital marketing in Vietnam. The growth rate was nothing like what marketers hoped for. The total market size in 2011 according to VAA (Vietnam Advertising Association) and TNS was between US $725m - US $1b. It would be safe to say that the overall market size is around $1b (+-15%). 2012 was a very difcult year for the Vietnamese economy as a whole and advertising industry was severely affected as well. 2013 so far seems to be a good year for Digital marketing since marketing budget is being shifted from traditional channels to Digital.

Digital marketing spend is between 510%

Overall the consensus amongst digital marketers in Vietnam is that the percentage of online spend is between 5%-10% of the total advertising budget. FMCG is the industry that spends the most online. Leading FMCG brands would spend on average $30k - $150k for digital channel alone for a 2-4 month campaign depending on the scale and the marketing objectives. Finance industry has not been as active as FMCG when it comes to digital marketing. However, some international banks started to heavily invest in digital marketing. As for ad formats, since the dawn of the internet in Vietnam, Display Banner has always had the majority share of the ad spend. While email marketing is one of the most effective channels when done correctly, the use or rather misuse of it in Vietnam has given email marketing a bad name. The same situation happened with SMS marketing, too much spam has given SMS marketing a very bad reputation. Search Engine Marketing only started to be used more often in the past 2-3 years with some success, more popular amongst SMEs as compared to MNCs or big local brands.

11

In 2011, it was social media which became talk of the town. For 2012 it was Mobile marketing. 2013 is the year of social media, mobile marketing, content marketing again. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions in the market place, there is no authoritative industry body that could provide good enough case studies, proper best practices to guide social media or mobile marketing. IAB Vietnam was born but died shortly after that. Technically we have Vietnamese Advertising Association (VAA) and Ho Chi Minh Advertising Association (HAA), however, the information available online is very limited from these associations. I did not come across any reliable research browsing through the two sites. The sites content are poorly maintained as well. To explain the low spend for Digital marketing, TNS regional MD for Vietnam & Malaysia Ralf Matthaes wrote in one report Vietnam has literally grown up in the Age of the shifting media landscape.These early adopters are not relying on TV necessarily for their product information, but rather going online and creating blogs to become Brand friends and champions. Unfortunately due to the conservative nature of both international and local companies, many opportunities are being missed and agencies are having major difculties convincing their client base that new media mediums play an integral, albeit none integrated role in mass communication.

Hopefully by 2021, when todays young users are running these companies, advertisers will nally follow consumer sentiment.

12

Potential in Vietnam
Vietnam has the largest online population in Southeast Asia, with time spent online exceeds 2 hours daily in big cities.

Section 1

31M Internet users in Vietnam

Online penetration rate of 33%

It is of no secret that the current online penetration rate in Vietnam is around 33%, with more than 31 million internet users out of about 90 millions people (data from the Ministry of Information and Communication). Online penetration in big city like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh is more than 50%. From volume point of view, we have more internet users in Vietnam than any other countries in Southeast Asia except Indonesia. Our internet population is bigger than population of Australia and New Zealand combined. Another report from comScore 2013 South East Asia Digital Future in Focus showed that Vietnam had more internet users than any other countries in Southeast Asia (age 15+, at home and at work only). In Vietnam, we still have a large population of users using internet cafe.

1. Online penetration rate is at 33% 2. Time spend online is around 2 hours daily 3. Research online 4. Smartphone proliferation 5. E-commerce is growing strong

Time Spend Online exceed 2 hours daily

According to research done by Cimigo, on average internet users in Vietnam spend about 2 hours online everyday. That is a
14

huge number. From media channel perspective, time spent online right now is second only to TV. Time spent online outweighs Print, Magazine or other channels.

Smartphone proliferation
From Thanh Nien newspaper, Simon Kemp, managing director of the We Are Social ofce in Singapore, as of August (2012), smartphone penetration in the country was 16 percent. Another study done by Ericsson ConsumerLab showed that the smartphone penetration rate in Vietnam was expected to jump from 16% in Aug 2012 to 21% in early 2013. Reports from Accenture showed that Smartphone sales are expected to grow in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand at compound annual growth rates of 37 percent, 31 percent, and 27 percent, respectively, from 2011 through 2016. As this trend continues, the total time spent online across multiple screens by consumers in Vietnam is going to increase rapidly. More time spent online means less time spent for other channels like TV, newspaper, radio, out of home etc...

Research online, buy ofine/online

In big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh, it is very typical for consumers to research online before making their decision online. For example, before sending kids to day care school, moms ask friends and relatives for recommendation of course, but they also visit webtretho and search online to see what other parents are saying about a particular school.

E-Commerce started to pick up pace again

E commerce is vital to the development of digital marketing. You may ask why? It is because marketers need to quantify the Return on Investment of their marketing spend per activity. Right now, while the overall picture is quite complex with different attribution model like Across different online channels, From
15

Online to Store (ofine), Across multiple screens (computer, smartphone, tablet); it is my personal guess that once we Ecommerce is growing quickly in Vietnam, the digital spend will skyrocket. From VECITA, TechinAsia and Thanh Nien Newspaper The latest report from VECITA, the Vietnam E-Commerce and Information Technology Agency, states that Vietnams e-commerce sales hit $700 million ($354 million of that registered ofcially on VECITA) at the end of 2012. By the same report, VECITA predicts that this number will reach $1.3 billion by 2015. This is already huge and fast growing.

Digital marketing spend potential

From comScore 2013 South East Asia Digital Future in focus According to ZenithOptimedia's Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, APAC is already the largest advertising market outside North America. Internet ad expenditure is set to overtake that of newspapers by the end of 2014. By 2015, online advertising will account for 21.9% of all adspend

16

Agency world in Vietnam

This section covers the agency landscape in Vietnam

Digital agency world in Vietnam

I would like to list down as many as I could different Digital agencies operating in Vietnam. The barrier to entry for Digital Marketing agency is low so there areliterallyhundred of agencies in Vietnam, from one man shop to 100-200 hundreds of employee. Note: My comments (if any) about these agencies are strictly coming from my limited understandings and may not be the true reection. Overtime, these observations may be wrong since many things could change. Please note that the below categorization is far from correct because majority of the agencies claim that they are doing everything and they are all full service agencies. Also agency could change from time to time as well. The purpose of me putting a list together so that you could have a broader view of the agency world in Vietnam.

18

Section 1

Big Agency Group in Vietnam

WPP with 23 ofces in HCM, 6 in HN
WPP group has a strong presence in Vietnam, if not the strongest presence among international agency groups in Vietnam. With 23 ofces under the group in Ho Chi Minh alone, WPP group does cover a lot of ground. However, they dont own 100% of these agencies I guess. Many of the agencies below are not Digital agencies but since it belongs to WPP, I just put them here for reference. The below are from WPPs own website: Asatsu - DK Bates G2 Grey GroupM

JWT Kantar Media Kantar Worldpanel Maxus MEC MediaCom Millward Brown Vietnam Mindshare Ogilvy & Mather Ogilvy Public Relations OgilvyAction OgilvyOne Worldwide TNS TNS Media Who Digital Wunderman
19

 Xaxis Y&R 6 ofces in Hanoi: JWT-G Landor Associates Ogilvy & Mather Ogilvy Public Relations Smart Media TNS From Digital capabilities point of view, in my 2 cent, only OgilvyOne (essentially Who Digital team) and GroupM have some digital capabilities in-house. While GroupM mostly do media planning and buying, limited Search Engine Marketing work, OgilvyOne mostly do strategy & production work & Social Media. From my limited knowledge, Y&R and Wunderman handle Coca cola and Nokia accounts. However these clients normally just adapt regional campaigns to Vietnam. Nokia is going downhill fast so we havent seen much buzz from their online initiatives this year 2013.

Update from Mina Menon: Y&R and Wunderman operate under one YR Group umbrella in Vietnam and have ofces in Hanoi as well. Together, we have all the digital capabilities of a fulledged Wunderman ofce, and the integrated marketing ones of a Y&R ofce. Apart from Nokia, our clients include Emirates, Colgate-Palmolive, Ovaltine, Nutifood and Ford. Of these, Nokia, CP and Ford are global alignments, the rest are local relationships creating campaigns locally. Coca-Cola has a roster of agencies in Vietnam that they work with depending on the project and Wunderman is one of them

20

Section 2

Other Agency Groups

Omnicom Group
Until 2013, Omnicom didnt have a strong presence in Vietnam I guess. However it seems that starting this year, 2013, Vietnam has received more focus from Omnicom Media and the digital team is having more specialists compared to previous years. Focus Asia OMD Vietnam XPR-Campaigns Group

1. Omnicom Group 2. Publicis Group 3. Interpublic 4. Havas 5. Aegis 6. Dentsu

PHD Vietnam (TNHH qung co Phng Cch Method Advertising) BBDO DDB TBWA: Biz\Tequila, Focus, TBWA\Vietnam, Vira OMG

Publicis Group
There are ve ofces in Vietnam, all in Ho Chi Minh City according to the Group website: ZenithOptimedia Vietnam
21

 Starcom MediaVest Vietnam Publicis Vietnam Saatchi & Saatchi Vietnam Leo Burnett Worldwide Vivaki Vietnam Performics. This would be the main Digital arm for Publicis Group in Vietnam. From what I heard while Performics doesnt have a big team, they handle some of the bigger digital account in Vietnam and their capability in Search Engine Marketing is quite good. They are one of the few agencies in Vietnam using Marine I guess. They outsourced Social media, production and other work to other agencies.

UM - Curiosity works: media services, communication planning

Havas
MPG Vietnam Mai Thanh company

Aegis
Globally, the agency has ve brands under the group namely: Carat IProspect Isobar Posterscope Vizeum As for presence in Vietnam, from my limited understandings there arent much at this point. While this may change in the future, the coverage is less than desirable compared to GroupM or Vivaki. Aegis probably has two afliates in Vietnam, one is VMC, which is Carats partner and another one is Emerald Marketing, which is Isobars partner. Its unclear, however, that there is any invest22

Interpublic
Draftfcb Initiative: media services, communication planning Lowe + Partners: Advertising, CRM/Direct. Lowe outsourced the majority of their digital work out, they play the role of the brand agency and project management only.

ment from Aegis into these two companies or their relationship is at independent partner level.

Dentsu
Dentsu has Dentsu Alpha, Dentsu Media and Dentsu Vietnam. However, they still outsource majority of the digital work out like Social media marketing, production, search engine marketing etc.. And mostly do media planning in-house. Dentsu completed their acquisition of Ageis globally not too long ago so its unclear what would be Dentsus strategy for Digital marketing in Vietnam.

Other Japanese/Korean agencies

There areHakuhodo,Chuo Senko or Asatsu DK, Daiko Vietnam. However I dont think they do a lot of digital work in-house also. CyberAgents,Mediba and a few other companies set up their rep ofces and invested in a few local agencies.

23

Section 3

Local agencies, ad networks and others

TV Plus 5i Media Youth Advertising 365 Days Advertising

Media agencies
Dat Viet Media TKL ADT Golden Media Goldsun Group Mekong communication: through their ofcial partnership with Cheil Wordwide, I guess you could consider them strongly related. Mekong has partnership with other companies like Emerald and DNA as well but I havent heard any ofcial announcement, just rumor from the street. FS communication

Ad Network
Innity Admax Ambient Ad micro Pixel Moore

Search Engine Marketing agencies

These are Google Small and Medium Business (SMB) partners: Clever Ads VCCorp - Ad micro Nova Ads
24

For Google certied partners, you could nd them using Google Partner Search There are so many Google Certied Partners in Vietnam now so I wont list down any names here. It is important to note that Google welcomes any agencies who want to be Google certied partners as long as they have at least one employee who is a current Google Qualied Individual and the media spend for 3 consecutive months with Google is more than US $10k. If you want to nd out who is Google qualied individuals in Vietna, please use this link. You could search for qualied individual from each country and based on different certications (search advertising, Display advertising, reporting and analysis, Google Analytics qualied individual etc)

Thietkeweb

Social media / PR agencies

Click Media: it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well under way to be acquired by GroupM. It makes sense because Unilever represents a big part of GroupM/Mindshare media business in Vietnam and Click Media and Sofresh are doing Social media + Production work for Unilever as well. King Bee Media E Brand AVC Edelman Le & Associates OhYeah Communications

Search Engine Optimization Agency

I am reluctant to put together this list because from my limited experience I dont think our capability in this area is strong in Vietnam. Anyway, I put some names here based on comments from some guys: % % % % manseo (previously known as lamseo) Vinalink

Production
Sofresh: it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well under way to be acquired by GroupM. It makes sense because Unilever represents a big part of GroupM/ Mindshare media business in Vietnam and Click Media and Sofresh are doing Social media + Production work for Unilever as well.

25

It would be interesting, however, to see over time whether the relationship and status of the core Sofresh team would be like Who Digital and OgilvyOne. There are not that many people from the core Who Digital team at OgilvyOne after 2 years from what I heard. Glass Egg Sutrix Media Time Universal Splash Interactive Media Gurus HD Digital Ozerside April Digital Itsy Bits Mobile Application

TNS Effective Measure: (they no longer have anyone based in Vietnam) AC Nelsen

Brand Strategy
Left Brain Connector Red Brand Builder Phibious Purple Asia Ambrand Ambrosia Vietnam Brandtalk WildFire Collaborative

Market Research
Cimigo comScore Kantar Media

Mobile marketing (mostly SMS marketing)

Gapit Idee
26

 Viet guys Mobile Solution Services MSS VHT So Smart (part of Goldsun Focus Media) Fibo sms

eBrand Edge Marketing River Orchid IDM Vietnam FPT Media Maro Media Ringier StormEye Creative Vietbuzz Ad D Square IMS (Integrated Marketing Solution) Emerald G2 Asia Pacic

Integrated agencies
Notch: many people from Notch left and set up a couple of agencies (DNA, Echo etc). Notch recently joined with RiverOrchid group to form a new entity as well. Golden Digital: from what I heard, Tony Truong, which was one of the founding members of Golden Digital left the company not too long ago. Quo Global Climaxi IO Media: the majority of the previous core team left to join other agencies Cheil Vietnam: through their partnership with Mekong Communication I guess these two companies are strongly linked. Buzz Digital

Outsourcing agencies
Pyramid consulting Studio 60

27

Section 4

Jack of all trades, Master of none

Generalist are common
Jack of all trades, master of none. This is the common problem with the majority of Digital agencies in Vietnam. Everyone is saying they are offering full digital services from strategy, creative to execution, from Search engine marketing to Email marketing to Social Media etc However, the plain cold truth is that we do not have enough specialists in Vietnam for so many rms to offer everything in-house. Besides, It does not make business sense to have every thing in-house as well because the overall budget is often quite small. This generalist approach from the agency is partly because big clients often want to work with a few contacts and ideally only one or two rms.

Agency could differentiate itself by becoming a specialist in a particular service, going after certain verticals, only working with other agencies as a sub contracts and many other ways. It is important to take note of the client segment (SME, MNC, local clients) that an agency serves i.e. how many percentage of its clients are small and medium businesses and how many percentage are MNCs/big local brands. Agencies who serve SMEs (small and medium enterprises) or SMBs (small and medium businesses) are not sufciently equipped to work with MNCs or big local brands. The business development or the Director of the agency may paint very appealing pictures. However they are not the one who carry out the execution. SME world and MNC world are miles apart. The nature of SME agencies is that under normal circumstances they only employ relatively junior employees because SMEs objectives, budget, decision-making, working culture are not that complex. SMEs do not often work with complex marketing plan that involves multiple channels (ofine and online) or having their own creative agency, PR agency etc English uency is another major concern facing specialists from SME agencies and even bigger agencies. Next would be communication skill and I am talking about the basic communi-

28

cation skill so that both parties would be able to understand each other in English/Vietnamese. Another point worth mentioning is the difference between working with government-owned rms, private rms and foreign rms in Vietnam. While relationship plays an important role everywhere in Vietnam, with government-owned rms, that is even more prominent. The sales cycle for government-owned rms is hence very long, anywhere from 3-12 months. Working culture in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh is very different from each other as well. Generally sales cycle in Ha Noi is longer compared to Ho Chi Minh (2-3 times longer on average). The majority of MNCs are in Ho Chi Minh so they set the working scene in Ho Chi Minh as compared to government-owned rms setting the scene in Hanoi.

29

Digital Marketing Career

There are many choices from working for agencies, direct clients, technology vendors, publishers, or even your own company!

There are a couple of options for you.

Agency Side
From the previous chapter, you would know many types of agencies and a few names in each category already. In general, you could go deep and narrow, becoming a specialist like Search Engine Marketing Specialist, Media Planner, Social Media Expert or go wide and shallow, following the account management path, or business development. In many agencies, the account manager or project manager, would be the interface between the client and the operation team inside the agency. Beside project management skill and client service skill, I think it would be better if the account manager understands digital marketing and different channels within digital. They would do a much better job that way. In any cases, for most agencies, you would start from entry level to senior executive, to manager, senior manager, director, vice president etc... Below is an example of a job description (JD) from agency side. Head of Paid Media The Head of Paid Media is responsible for managing all the day to day Paid Digital media planning and buying for the agency. This includes Premium Portal Buy, Ad Networks, Google & Ya-

hoo Paid Search, Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, and Mobile Ads (as well as all other paid media channels that emerge over time). The Head of Paid Media manages, mentors and motivated the junior paid media staff and leads by setting a strong example. Key Responsibilities: Lead and manage media planning and buying aspects for agency clients. Negotiate best rates, bonus inventory etc from media partners. Monitor delivery of campaigns from beginning to end to ensure that all paid media campaigns are achieving the established campaign KPIs. Manage all nancial closure of media planning and buying activities with the nance department directly and with the media partners. Develop clear, concise digital media reports for all active campaigns. Provide campaign optimization, recommendations based on a strong analytical foundation with data from different analytics tools.
31

 Develop and constantly update best practices in the areas of digital ad serving and performance monitoring. Provide management and training to the junior staff. From Salary range point of view, there is no benchmark. You could try to look at the salary survey published by TalentNet or any other head hunting rms. However Digital Marketing is a niche eld and I havent come across a good salary survey for digital yet. From my own experience, there are some guidelines below: Generally the pay in Ho Chi Minh would be 1.2 - 1.5 times the same level in Hanoi. Entry level (executive): $250-$400 Senior executive (minimum 2-4 years of experience): $350 $800 Manager level: $900 - $1500 Senior manager level: $1500 - $3000 Director: $3000 - $5000

The main point here is that there are demand for digital specialists across segments. Working on the client side (from what I was told) is signicantly different in comparison to the agency side. For one thing you will only work with one client, your own company. You will be asked to come up with the request for proposal, media brief to brief the agency, or come up with marketing plan for the whole year etc... Sales target is something you will be pressured with for any campaigns that you want to run internally or with external agencies. If you work for publishers or technology vendors, you could play the role of either business development or account manager or operation (account optimization like Google, Yahoo). If you are from business development/ account manager side, your job would be to develop the relationship, understand the needs of agencies, direct clients and propose a suitable plans/ technologies to them. However, since your option is limited to the products that your company sells, the plan that you come up with wont vary much. Of course, there are outliners like Zing or Google where Zing starts to become a full service agency and Google offerings span across Search, Display and Video. From salary point of view, it really depends on the type of organization that you join.

Client Side & Publishers & Technology Provider

The truth is I have never worked in the client side or publisher or technology provider so the below is rather limited.

32

How to learn Digital Marketing

On the job training is one of the best way to learn Digital marketing because of the lack of professionals and too many myths or misunderstandings in the marketplace.

Marketing before Digital

In my opinion, many people get it the other way around. Its not about the digital tactics, the tools or any fancy, over-hyped new medium, rst it is about a Solid Marketing Strategy that either brings in sales or increase brand awareness. No amount of hard work, of new tools, new channels would save a campaign from the wrong strategy and poor market understanding. It just so happens that there are many internet users and the amount of time they spend online is signicant so marketers could reach/engage them potentially more efciently. There are so many books on marketing so I am not going into too many details here.

Where do they live? What kind of education do they have? How much expendable income could they afford? Are they married? Do they have kids? Watch out for any biases you may have or trying to target a too generic audience. For example, more often than not, you do NOT want to target all countries in the world for your Paid Search Program. Similarly, it is unlikely that you want to target all areas (rural and urban areas, mountainous area and big cities) in Vietnam for your campaign. As for insights, there are many insights about the target audience that you want to know. How do they often buy your product? Where can they buy it? What factors inuence their behavior? What are the barriers you face in persuading them to try your product/ to think differently about your products/ to even stop for a sec and see/ read what you have to offer? Could Digital channel inuence the behavior somehow? How do your customers often know about new brands, new products in your industry?
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Consumer Insights are key

Always start with consumer insights and never forget them along the way during brain storming or brain writing, strategy planning, KPI setting, media planning and buying, execution, optimization and reporting. Do eld work, try the product out, go to the store, experience it. If you never bought milk powder for a 6 month old baby, go and ask people who do. We need to understand who our consumer is: How old they are? Are they male/female?

 How do they want to communicate with brands? We have a whole section on Digital Analytics, which covers tools that could help you get some insights about your target audience or your competitor, market place.

EQVN AIIM INET Etc... I will not be able to recommend any school publicly because it is subjective. My advice to you if you want to go down this road is to audit their classes at least 1 or 2 sessions before committing your money. It is of my personal belief that no matter which school you choose, it is all up to you to get the most out of it and self learning is far more important. Of course, if your purpose is just to get a paper saying that you participated in a digital marketing course then just go ahead and choose any school.

Where to learn?
There are a couple of options for you. If you are still in the university, you could check to see if your school offers any courses in Digital marketing. Universities in Vietnam, especially International Universities (RMIT for example) start to cover digital marketing materials in their generic marketing course. Some major local universities start to offer courses in digital marketing as well. I have never audited any of these courses so I would not be able to comment on them. I would imagine it is not easy to nd GOOD lecturers with real life experience who could teach digital marketing courses though. If your university doesnt offer digital marketing course or you are fresh graduate or you are working, you could sign up for night classes at different schools like:

Self Learning & On the Job Training

Since we do not have many professionals working in the industry, the chance that you nd good lecturers with real life experience is quite smaller I think. Coupling with the fact that not many professionals who are good at what they do, could teach well or want to teach, I think Self Learning and On the Job training is the best option at this point in time. Because of this reason, I try to include as many reference links in this ebook as possible so that you could learn more if you
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BMG International Education Vietnam Marcom

want to. Try to read in English as much as you can because I have seen enough misleading, wrong information in Vietnamese when it comes to our new eld.

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Section 1

Challenges while learning Digital Marketing

ogy evolves and new platform emerges. There are new technologies, better way to do things happening everyday especially with the internet so reading regularly is a necessity. However dont try to embark on the hottest trends just yet, please be sure that the fundamentals are right and your strategic plan is in place. Going faster using a wrong map will only get you to the WRONG destination faster.

Too many myths & misunderstanding

To me, knowing something wrong and believing it to be true is much worse than not knowing. It is because if you think you know something, you will go ahead and do it the way you understand, which could bring very bad results. Besides, you may try to teach this or pass this along to someone else, which is even more dangerous. Digital marketing is too new in Vietnam so there are no authoritative gures yet, everyone is an expert in something. My only advice for this is that do not believe everything that you are told. Develop a healthy habit of double checking by looking at other trusted sources online and ofine.

Things are changing way too fast

Yup this is a real challenge faced by digital marketers. What you just learnt may change drastically and quickly as technol37

The big picture

One way to look at the complex world of Digital Marketing is to understand Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media

Section 1

Owned, Paid and Earned Media

The ecosystem is vast and complex. If you want to see how What Will Be Discussed In This Chapter complex it is, just look at a few LumaScape, you could see that the supply chain from Advertiser to end consumer included many steps. The screenshot below was taken from Display Lu1. The complex world of Digital Marketing mascape, which highlights the Display Ecosystem and you 2. Owned what is it about and it stage of could see soMedia: many companies participating in what different the includes? journey.

3. Earned Media: what is it about and what it includes? 4. Paid Media: what is it about and what it includes?

If you go from left to right, rst, marketers would work with agencies. These agencies would then work with their trading desks. The trading desks may employ retargeting technology, tag management from other companies. They may then work with Demand Side Platform and Ad Exchange. The next player in the food chain is Ad networks, Supply Side Platforms and then individual publisher. Finally the ads are shown to consumer and track the performance.

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Multi Screen is a fact now

From consumer point of view, they have so many choices now between different screens like never before.

site/Mobile App, You Tube Channel, Facebook Fanpage, Twitter account, Facebook App etc... When it comes to things that you own, you have great control over the medium and you could build/update/change them as frequently as you like. To do this well, more often than not, you need marketing understandings, technical (coding), user experience (or User interface) specialist, content marketing,

Paid Media: it includes your usual suspects like banner ads, rich media ads, paid search, sponsorship, facebook like ads, PR articles on Online Newspaper etc... Earned Media: this is about other people/blogs/fanpages/ forums/newspaper that talk about your brand, your products without you paying them, your EARNED media. You could include organic trafc from search engine in this as well.

There are basically so many ways for advertiser/ brands to reach/engage/sell to consumers and consumers could response, comment, Like/ Unlike, voice out their opinion about certain brands on their desktop/tablet/smart phone. Could it be Instagram? Vine? Linkedin? VnExpress? Zing Mp3? Google, Yahoo, Facebook? One way to categorize all of these is by looking at them from: Owned Media: these are properties/ digital assets that you own like your website, microsites, your company Blog, Mobile

Owned Media
Your platforms in the multi screen world. PC assets: Website Campaign microsite

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 E-commerce Platform Mobile assets Mobile site Mobile native app Social Media assets: Facebook fanpage You Tube Channel Corporate blog Twitter account Instagram account Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr CRM assets: CRM platform EDM program

Mobile marketing Social Network Ads Online PR Video marketing Email marketing Forum seeding

Earned Media
Key Opinion Leader/Hot Blogger outreach Word of mouth marketing Social mentions Virality SEO

Paid Media
Display banner Search Engine Marketing
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PC Assets
Detailed discussion of website, microsite, the normal development plan and user experience

Section 1

Getting the basics right

In Vietnam, when it comes to Digital marketing, people often talk about different channels like Search Marketing, Social media etc...and often overlook one very important key component which is their website/microsite. There are so many books/articles/blog posts on how to create a great websites already. So I wont try to reinvent the wheels. Instead, I will list down a few things that Vietnamese web masters/marketers/agencies often miss/forget. A pretty looking website/microsite is needed, however it has to be user friendly and useful as well. Of course the role of the website in the whole marketing strategy is different from industry to industry, from one company to the next. However, a few straight forwards questions should be asked like: 1. Who is the target audience of the website?

2. Why do you need a website/microsite? What role does it play in our marketing, sales, customer service plans? 3. What is your business value proposition and how well the website conveys it? 4. What do you expect visitors do while they are on your site? 5. How do you know if your website is a success? i.e. how do you translate from business goals to measurable KPIs? 6. Are you ready for a mobile world? Lets go deeper in each of the questions, one by one.

Why your site exists?

This simple question may not be that easy to answer thoughtfully and comprehensively. To answer it, we probably have to answer another question rst: who the target audience is? And research the customer insights. For the purpose of this discussion, I would exclude sites like online newspaper etc...and zoom in on a few purposes only: To introduce the company and what it does basically the products/services introduction

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 To launch a new promotion To promote a new event To be the content hub so that interested users could go and nd authentic information. To sell online/Encourage Direct Response from users Etc...

What is your business value proposition?

Why consumers should choose you over your competitors? What are your products/ services unique selling points? What role the website/microsite has in conveying these unique selling points? Why should user visit your website again? I know it sounds really basic these type of questions, but you would be surprised what these basic questions can help you. For example, we know that for a real estate project, location is one of the key considerations (if not THE key). Conveying the location of your project should be one of the most important elements of the site. However, it is not common to see how they could be done in a sub optimal way. Asking visitors to read and imagine the location instead of looking at a map is not the optimal experience. Further more, the color of the text on a blue sea background does not make it easy to read.

What do you expect visitors to do on your website?

The more specic the answer is, the better it is for you and your users. The call to action should be visible on the homepage and important pages.

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If you expect someone to call you, then your hotline should be prominent on as many pages as possible. If you ask people to sign up or give their personal information, what will you give them in return? What do they get by lling out the form on your site? Important content should be featured clearly, above the fold i.e. if you expect site visitors to nd your store locations then including a simple map (Google Map is advised) is a necessity. Generally, people are interested in themselves and their needs so unless your users are looking for a job or trying to see if they should invest in your company or the like, About us section, Press Release should not be positioned as important as products/services.

Are you ready for a mobile world?

You could use this tool from Google to understand how your website looks like on mobile device. Or you could visit your site on smartphone and tablet to see it in action? More about this in the Mobile assets chapter.

How do you know if your website is a success?

This is when we translate the business objectives into SMART metrics/outcomes. Not all the business outcomes that you want to use for the website could be measure easily. However, many of them can and that is one of the bigger advantages of Digital. Please read the section about Web Analytics for more details.

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Section 2

Development plan

production manager (coding side), digital producer, digital strategist, paid media team, earned media team or any other departments that may be involved in this project. The purpose of having this is to make sure everyone is on the same page and know the latest changes/ conrmation from the clients in comparison to the version used for pitching. A proper creative brief could be useful at this point to cover things like: Background: for those people that are not involved in the pitching process to have an overview. Target audience: clarify any differences compared to the pitching materials Objectives: What are the objectives of the campaigns? Well, many people from sales/account/client service team would know the answer to these questions by heart, especially those that are involved in the pitching process. However, the real question is whether all of your other teams know? The production team, the creative team, any other teams that will actually work on the delivery of the project should know this upfront, from the beginning. Also from the pitching state to the implementation state, more often than not, client wants to change certain things, add in certain aspects that may add to the call to actions.
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I do not mean to reinvent the wheel, however I dont think the process of developing a website/microsite as part of the campaign is well practiced in Vietnam even though many people would say that they know them already. I have come across many people (who dont have a strong owned media or paid media background) make mistakes that are hard to rectify later on or they simply drive creative team or production team crazy when they do project management since they dont really understand how it should work. The process below is by no mean perfect or rigid or you have to follow blindly step by step. My aim is to touch on some fundamental steps that should not be ignored.

Kick off meeting

It is a good point in the journey to have a kick off meeting between business development team/account/client service team and creative team (Digital art director, Designer), copywriter,

 Mood and tone Key message, Unique selling points Key benets Reasons to believe Call to actions Overall Schedule including timeline for creative, production, analytics, seo, testing More on creative brief is at the last chapter on Digital strategy.

If there are any earned media elements, people may put KPI likes the number of like/share/comments per inuencer post, the number of views per topic on forum etc...

Domain, Hosting and other technical requirement

It would be better to discuss this upfront with the client and have your production team fully understand the requirement as well. It is even better to have all of these documented and have the client signs on it. It is NOT good enough that the account team/ project management team have this information and not sharing with anyone else. Domain name is rather straight forward. Everyone needs to agree on what domain to be used. Normally there would be three scenarios: The campaign would run on a subdomain of the main corporate site i.e. campaignX.abc.com.vn where abc.com.vn is the corporate domain. The campaign runs on a sub folder of the main corporate site i.e. abc.com.vn/campaignX The campaign runs on a separated domain like campaignX.com.vn

Conrm KPIs for the site

Some of the most common KPIs that I have seen are: Visits to the site Overall bounce rate Number of people sign up to play certain games on the site Number of photos, videos uploaded Number of people who join the contest Revenue

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The decision depends largely on the role of the corporate website in the long term and of the specic campaign in discussion. If you want your corporate website trafc report looks good, the rst two options are the way to go. Please try to stay away from lengthly, wordy campaign domain like domain with 5 words (or 20-character length). No one is going to remember it or type it back correctly. Besides, it would be good at this stage to cover technical aspects like server spec, server environment (Windows based or Linux based etc...), programming language for the backend (PHP, .Net, Java), database requirement (if any). For the front end, HTML 5 is getting increasingly popular in comparison to ash. So unless there is a very strong reason why you should use 100% ash for the front end, I would strongly recommend against that for many reasons including mobile site friendliness, SEO, etc... Screen resolution is important as well. For now in Vietnam in 2013, one common screen resolution for desktop/ laptop is 1280 x 1024. However this depends on your target audience and their devices so please check carefully. Screen resolution would affect how much visitors could see on the screen without having to scroll up/ down, left/right.

Information Architect (site map) & wireframe

Normally, the Strategist & design team would start rst and they would develop the detailed site map & wireframe. However, I think we would need additional member(s) with experience in User Experience, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Analytics team to join in this stage as well because users should be at the center of everything we do with the website/microsite so user experience specialist plays a key role. Search Engine Optimization expert would be able to contribute with the site map & wireframe as well to make sure that it is search engine friendly. More often than not, people care about the look and feel, the mood and tone and completely forget about information architect or wireframe. This leads to missing key call to actions or users would have to go through hoops to do what we want them to do. Unoptimized wireframe would result in bad design and bad user experience because wireframe represents the skeleton and design is the esh. It is important also that not only the agency but the client needs to conrm the information architect and the wireframe before actual design/coding. Because when the design is done and then someone wants to add in/ remove certain elements of the site map, it would create a lot of rework.
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Also based on the information architect, the SEO team should be able to start working on keyword research, keyword distribution per section, per page etc... If you ever wonder what a wireframe looks like, below are a couple of example

This example is taken from http://www.hitreach.co.uk/perfect-web-page/ There is another software that is quite alright for generating wireframe called http://www.balsamiq.com/download Disclaimer: I am not related to either hitreach or balsamiq in anyway. Another wireframe example is below

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for approval. The reason is because we want to test the style, look and feel with the client/ decision maker rst. After the homepage is conrmed, the style is conrmed then it wont be too difcult to design other sub pages. Also client may ask agency to come back with two different concepts for the homepage to choose from. Some creative directors/ art directors are alright with coming up with two options, some only want to offer one option at a time because they want to spend all of their effort in one design. I have to repeat this but It is important however to note that its better to design the homepage or one additional main page rst and send them quickly to the client to get approval on art direction rather than designing every page and then send them for approval. If it turns out that the art direction is not what the client wants, the latter approach would mean lots of efforts wasted. If responsive web design is needed, one should be mindful of the requirement of responsive design regarding the wireframe and design. More on responsive design at the chapter about Mobile assets. Double checking the actual design against responsive web design principle at this stage is not a bad idea if responsive design is a requirement because many interface is not suitable for responsive design. I wont go too deep into design revision because managing this process is an art, not exact science.

Actual Design
More often than not the homepage and may be one other page would be designed rst and send to the client/ decision maker

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Just make sure that unless there is a damn good reason for it, after the wireframe is conrmed or the design is conrmed, we move on and dont come back to change the wireframe or changing the design at production phase. Any major changes would mean double work and cost may increase.

Rand Fishkin posted a beautiful, simple post on how to choose a suitable CMS for your site (from a SEO perspective). So unless your own CMS could meet these criteria, just use one of the free open source CMS. And please do NOT use the lame excuse that open source CMS is not secure. Come on this is 2013, not 1990. Technically many agencies would start working on production after the design is conrmed, if you are tight on timeline, you could always start to work on the backend, database, CMS in parallel with the design. However, the project manager needs to be capable in this case. Before the site is ready for internal testing, please check the loading speed of the site to make sure that it is on par with other websites in Vietnam. The latest report from Google showed that an average site in Vietnam would take around 2.3 seconds to load. Generally making your site as fast as possible is not only great for user experience but also for SEO purpose. Google loves fast loading sites and so do the users. 15 seconds is kind of my limit and then I am gone. Google offers this great tool to check how your site performs speed wise and how to make it faster. It is called PageSpeed Insights. Below is the screenshot when I run the test on my blog www.chandlernguyen.com, the score was 86/100 which is not bad.
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Production
Since the choice of technology, programing language are conrmed during the rst few steps in the process, there should not be any changes at this stage. Technical SEO needs to be taken care of at this stage like Content Management System (CMS) features to support SEO. Some time in Vietnam, there are cases where developers prefer to use their own Content Management System because they are familiar with it (or its their own) and could replicate from one client to the next easily. However I think that is often a very bad idea, we need to leverage as much as possible on these very capable, FREE, open sourced CMS. Some examples are Wordpress, Drupal, Mambo, Magento etc... For the majority of microsites, campaign based websites in Vietnam, one of the free open source CMS would be more than what you actually need and they have great plugins to go with them as well.

If you do not have time to read through the article, here are some highlights from it: An ideal web page should do all the following: Be hyper-relevant to a specic topic (usually a product or single object) Include subject in title tag Include subject in URL Include subject in image alt text Of course the loading speed would depend on where you locate the server as well because international bandwidth in Vietnam is very limited so if your server is overseas, be prepared for long loading time. Specify subject several times throughout text content Provide unique content about a given subject Link back to its category page Link back to its subcategory page (If applicable) Link back to its homepage (This is normally accomplished with an image link showing the website logo on the top left of a page.) Keyword research needs to be done to decide what exact term we should use to describe the subject/ main topic of the page. More on this under the chapter about search engine marketing.

On page optimization (SEO)

I would argue that even with a 2-3 month microsite, you would still need to do On Page optimization. For those who do not know what on page optimization is, it simply means optimize different factors within your website to improve your natural ranking on Google Search Result Page. Again seoMOZ has an excellent article to cover the basics named on page factors.

Tracking code (Analytics) set up

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More details about goals, conversions in Digital Analytics chapter so you could read more later on. Many websites in Vietnam are using Google Analytics and many clients prefer using Google Analytics so I would write this section using Google Analytics as example. Depending on what domain or sub domain or sub folder you would want to use for the microsite, you would then need to set up slightly differently in your Google Analytics account (using different proles) The important thing is set something up so that you could monitor trafc separately for this microsite. Goals/conversions should be used as well. Normally you should dene any action that you want user to take as a conversion like sign up for an account, join the contest, play games etc... After set up, please do testing carefully to make sure that the code is working ne by taking the action and see if Google Analytics records the correct conversion. I cant stress this enough because people often do NOT test after setting up goals and then later on arguing over wrong data. Google Webmaster set up should be done at this stage as well.

The production team should test the site with multiple browsers, using multiple versions of a particular browse like Internet Explorer or Chrome or Safari. The site should be tested with smartphones/tablets as well to ensure it functions as planned. Different test cases could be developed and you could read more about testing here. It is very important to test the key call to actions that you want user to take, put yourself in user shoes and see if they could complete the tasks without bugs. For example, if you want user to sign up for a contest, try the sign up function yourself. Try to input wrong data and see what error message is sent back to you. Test each page by clicking on every single link and every single clickable image to make sure it functions as plan. If there is a video on the site, try to click on the video to see how long it would take to load the video. If there is a game, try to play the game yourselves and record all the bugs.

Internal Test & Fixing Bug

This stage is crucial before launching the site.

Client test
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It is important that the client tests every function carefully and sign off on them via email or on paper before the site is launch. You may hear the term UAT at this stage, which stands for User Acceptance Test. It will be very risky not having client to conrm by email or sign off on paper before launching the site because when users start to come in and experience the site, if there are any major bugs, the complaints would start to come in very quickly. Normally agency would need to guide the client a bit in their testing as well to make sure that they do test all main functions. Having a list of all the Urls/functions for the client to check off could be useful.

Launch
More often than not, since the microsite is part of the bigger marketing campaign with some promotions/ activities to engage users on the site, soft launch could be difcult. The main reason is that you want to synchronize the communication message across channels. On the rst day of the campaign, there should be lots of paid media channels running, pumping users to the site so please monitor your site/ server carefully to ensure no down time.

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Section 3

User experience
I have come across so many websites (including my own), so many forms, so many contests that I will be of absolute lost trying to complete certain critical tasks. Because of these experiences, Ive always wanted to learn more about User Experience, not just for website but how to bring good overall experience of a product/ service to users/customers. And they said that the best way to learn is to teach so while bearing in mind the risk of sounding too ignorant and a complete amateur when it comes to user experience, I put together some materials on this subject. Recently I came across this watch from Casio. FYI I almost bought it. It is one of the classic Casio G Shock watches. It looks quite cool and actually looks better when you wear it. However I didnt buy eventually because as a watch, I cant look at the analog watch and gure out what time it is. Being able to show what time it is, is THE basic functionality of a watch. Dont get me wrong, I think many people would buy this

watch because of its design and I saw a number of pedestrians wearing it actually. Everyone is different.

Insufcient attention from marketers in Vietnam

I have to say user experience is an area that doesnt receive sufcient attention from the digital agencies, marketers in Vietnam in general. While it is not new, it seems like everyone is looking for a beautiful design and not necessary a user-friendly site. Also, the agency may say they care about user experience during pitching, however, it may not happen during the execution phase. (duh!) Lack of time is the common excuse, lack of budget from the client is another common one. Lack of expertise might be another reason as well. The truth is there are not that many user experience professionals in Vietnam.
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User Experience is hard or is it just common sense?

User experience is hard because it requires so many disciplines to come together. From Jodie Moule point of view, it requires: interaction design, human factors engineering, industrial design, psychology, anthropology (anthropology denition ishere),sociology, computer science, graphic design, cognitive science. There are many factors that inuence the experience of an user with a product/ service as well: % % % % % % % % % % Usefulness Usability Learnability Aesthetics: does it look nice? Emotions

have website/microsite, Facebook fanpage, You Tube Channel etc Not only that users use desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets to access these properties so we need to ensure a pleasant experience duringthe entire user journey, from the beginning, when they rst come in contact with us, what do they after that and then where they would go when they nish. Foramateur, a lot of stuff for User Experience should be easy and common sense. It comes from an understanding, a focus on users need while designing, building a product/service/website.Dont make me think by Steve Krug is probably one of the best, easy to read book for amateur like myself. The title of book simply summarizes it all for us, doesnt it?Our job is NOT to make users having to think too much just to use the website/application.Everything should be natural, obvious to users especially the key call to action. If you want to go further and conduct usability test yourself, Steve Krug has another good, simple to read book called Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems Amazon has one section about best sellers in User Experience and Website Usability so you could check that out as well.

By the way Jodie Moule wrote a good book titledKiller UX Design.The Killer UX Design is quite applicable if you are working in an agency because the author writes from an agency angle. Jodie didnt just talk about User Experience on the web alone, she discussed generally about all the touch points that you may have online/ofine with your users/ customers. This is a powerful concept to note because more often than not, under Owned Media Channel alone, we would

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Because there are so much materials on this subject already so I dont want to reinvent the wheel here. I would strongly recommend you pick up a few books on User Experience and read them. However, I also understand that some of you do not want to read too much and just want some practical tips that make your life easier. So here is the checklist of basic things that you should look at

Speed Maters
As you could see from Google report, the average loading time for a site in Vietnam is around 2.5 seconds so if the site takes like 15 secs to load, something is not right. User doesnt want to wait when it comes to the internet and 20 secs is a long time online.

There are many articles on how to make your site faster, including articles from Google. I dont care how beautiful, useful, rich your website is, if it takes 30 seconds to load the site, I am NOT interested. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you could look at the page speed report under Content category.

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First Impression Counts

Could you easily understand what the site is about? Which site it is? Which section/page of the site you are on? Is it obvious to you what you could do from where you are now? If it takes you too long (like 20 secs) just to nd out where you are, what you could do here/ how to start, the information architecture of the site might be too confusing or the design is too complicated. If there are terms in the main navigation that you are unsure what it means, then its probably not user-friendly enough. While its true that certain site requires user with domain knowledge to use because they are highly technical. However, my challenge to those site owners is: Would you want more business?, Would you want more business from people who are NOT your customer previously, new customers? So making things as simple as possible for people to understand is of paramount importance to attract these new customers. The overarching principle here is again Dont make me think.

Where Am I? Where Could I Go From Here?

To help user understand where they are on the site, what options do they have at this level, we could use breadcrumb and other design cues. If you dont know what breadcrumb is, please refer to the screenshot below:
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comes to online, if I cant immediately nd what I am looking for, I would use the search function. Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce site has a very robust search function, which makes life very easy to users.

Also, it is important that users could search the site if they get lost. This is a very important function. However, I am ashamed that my site the search function is not very good! In my opinion, the internal search function is no longer an option but a necessity (of course if your site has only two pages, you probably wont need search function). Internal search function is the search button that allows users to search for stuff on your site. A real life analogy would be if you cant nd what you are looking for or get lost in a department store, you have two options: You look up at the signs to understand where you are and look for the areas where you want to go. i.e. look at main navigation You ask any store assistant near by about how to nd thejewelrysection or kid section etc this is the equivalent of the search function when it comes to online. I am often very lazy and always ask the store assistant so when it

Basic Accessibility Issues

Text to background contrast: Text should be easy to read, and have enough contrast with the background like black text

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on a white or slightly grey background. Please do not try to use dark blue text on a black background or blue background etc The example below doesnt have good text to background contrast besides other stuff like trying to explain a location using words?

We could spend a lot of time discussing this point. Essentially it is about the more important thing is, the higher they need to be on the page. Important content should be above the fold.

Another thing would be font size and spacing. I would argue that anything less than size 10 is not easy to read on the web. May be I am getting old but I will not waste time trying to read small text.

The above is LITERALLY the above the fold part of a landing page after I click on the banner on vnexpress. If you are a user, what do you think? Also, the more important headline should be in bigger font compared to less important one. Please look at the below screenshot and guess which information it is trying to convey i.e. which is the important information
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Clear Visual Hierarchy

from this map? The context of this screenshot is that it is the location of a real estate project. Could you see the project anywhere on the map? I couldnt nd it after like a minute looking at the map, under the Location menu.

Site ID needs (logo) to be clearly stated and more often than not, it is on the top of the page. It is at the top left corner or top center location more than top right corner. Have you seen the site logo on the top right corner before? Company logo should link back to the homepage Make clear which part is clickable: by convention, blue & underlined text is clickable (even blue text only in some case). Dont use self invented icon without text to support it. This is applicable to self invented abbreviation as well. It may make you sound cool because you use some newly invented abbreviation but it is NOT good for business. If people dont understand something and you are NOT there to answer their questions (its online remember?), then it just turns people off. Site search should be on top centered position or top right position.

Things that are related to each other logically should be close together physically. It is like how you would arrange merchandise in a supermarket. You dont see sh and dry food mixed together in one section, do you?

Ability To Complete Key Actions

This is consider the most important aspect of all. If user could successfully complete what you want them to do easily, without hiccup, you are a star! If user cant do/ fulll what they want from your side, you are doomed no matter how pretty your side is.

Following Convention Is Important

Some of the conventions are:

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List down the top 3-5 key actions you want users to do while they are on your site. Then write 3-5 scenarios that match these key actions so that if you ask someone else to complete these tasks, they would have the background information. This should be easy and almost anyone from marketing to IT to sales could make the list. NOW test this list with someone who is NOT from marketing team, creative team, sales or IT team. Basically what I am looking for is either you test it with your target audience, or since your target audience would tend to be quite wide, you could test it with anyone who is NOT involved in building, designing, maintaining the site. It is to be hoped that you wont be as surprised as I was in many occasions. Some examples are below: If you want to invite people to a party/event that you organize, its best not to direct them to your PR news page or put your ofine brochure online. I came across brochure type landing page, in which users have no clue how to register. They have to scroll down for about 5 pages to see a very small call to action at the bottom about register here for your free tickets. If you are a fast food chain and you want users to the site to call you and order, your PHONE number should be visible on the homepage and on as many pages as suitable. Dont try to hide it somewhere else.

Some Other Small Things

So I would include a few common mistakes for website/ microsite that I have seen so far here so that you could watch out for them: Sign up form with only 1 eld for password, no eld to retype password?? Sign up form that asks way too many personal information without good reasons. Sign up form that once you click the submit button and there is something wrong, everything is gone and you have to retype everything! Come on its 2013 and users should NOT have to retype all elds in the form just because something is wrong. Retyping the password or CAPTCHA is understandable but not everything like name, email, etc Status bar while uploading a photo or video: with the relatively slow internet connection in Vietnam, it is very important that if we ask user to upload something, we should have a status bar running so that user know that it is in progress, or failed or how much more time they need to wait?

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 Auto play video with sound ON: I know as a marketer, we want people to watch our video, especially if it takes thousands of dollars to produce. However in my opinion, auto play video with sound ON is a big NO NO. As a user, my rst reaction has always been to turn off that video and sound no matter what i.e. I dont bother to wait and watch to see what the video is about. Location without map: more often than not, we would have locations of our ofces, our stores, our restaurant on the website and we want users to visit them. However just listing down the address without the map is sub optimal. Google Map is pretty accurate and easy to do so just tuck it in there so that user knows how to get to your store/your restaurant etc The listing of stores below to me is sub optimal.

This one is much better. It has detailed address, phone number, map etc

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 Logo that is NOT clickable! This really kills me. It is a very common habit that people would click on the logo and expect to go back to the homepage. Having a logo and it is NOT clickable just sends the message that you do NOT care about your users.

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Section 4

Reference

A couple of good resources

Dont make me think by Steve Krug Some Slightly Irregular: http://someslightlyirregular.com/ Killer UX design by Jodie Moule Helpful usability checklist from Dr. Peter J. Meyers 25 point website usability checklist Software to create wireframe Balsamiq How to choose the right CMS platform from Rand Fishkin Page Speed Insights by Google Is the web getting faster by Google SEO on page factors by Moz Google Webmaster
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Mobile Assets
Different options for brands (including mobile site, responsive design website, native application) are discussed with their pros and cons.

Section 1

Post PC era is here

The Post-PC era is here Lorem Ipsum

iPad, iPhone and other smartphones/tablets have helped to usher in the new digital era, the POST PC era. With Apples 1. Post PC era is here earning results, many analysts conrmed again that the post PC era is here. (read WSJ article rate Apple Reafrm 2. Smartphone penetration inEarnings Vietnam Post-PC Era, or About that post-PC era...Steve Jobs was 3. right). There are some interesting data from TNS Global like From a device ownership point of view, while developed countries still rely on PCs, in emerging markets the smartphone dominates.

And we are using more and more data with smartphone with nearly a third globally used more.

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From the chapter on the potential of Digital marketing in Vietnam, you already see that the smartphone penetration is forecasted to be 21% in early 2013 in Vietnam.

The above graph shows the share of time spent on PC/Laptop from comScore. However I dont see much difference for smartphone with social networking, services and news are the three biggest categories from time spent point of view. In conclusion, having a presence on mobile devices in no longer an option. In the next sections, we will discuss in details what options are for brands.

What do people do on their smartphones?

According to Vietnam Telecommunications Authority (VNTA) and VNNIC, there are about 3.3 million 3G users in Vietnam.

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Section 2

Mobile options for Brands

So with millions of smartphone users, using their phone Lorem Ipsum every day, what we could do to take advantage of it? For ever-increasing numbers of consumers, across markets, 1. Multi screen & connected world income levels and demographics, the mobile phone is the de2. World wide statistics vice and the communications channel closest to their hearts. It 3. Vietnam statistics is by denition intimate and personal, carried everywhere, used throughout thebased day and customised through taking and 4. Emerging trends on consumer insights saving personal photos, downloading music, adding wallpapers, 5. Gomo - is your website mobile friendly? creating shortcuts and, increasingly, through the selection of 6. Mobile App - iOS or Android? apps and functions. From TNS Global Key Insights Mobile Life. Because of this, smartphone represents a major opportunity for brand to have an intimate, one on one relationship with its customers. From owned medium point of view, we would have options like developing a mobile site, a native mobile app or leverage on existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

With mobile site, you cant take advantage of different functions like access to photo album, camera, videos, contacts and others. The experience is not likely to be as rich/interactive as with native mobile app. However the good thing is a mobile site is platform agnostic i.e. it could run on both iOS, Android or Windows. As for Native App, you could build really complicated app with rich experience, beautiful graphics, 3D images etc... However, it is very important to know that you would likely have to create different versions of the same app for iOS, Android, Windows Mobile or any other operating systems.

Is your current site mobile friendly?

To answer this question, you could try to visit your own site on a smartphone or you could use this tool GomoMeter from Google. It is essentially the same thing where you could see how your site looks like on a smartphone. If your site made of ash, then you would NOT be able to see anything on iPhone (or any iOS devices like iPad, iPod Touch) because iOS doesnt support ash. If you use the tool from Google, after entering your site URL into the tool, it would show you how the site looks on a smartphone. Next if you choose the category that most ts your site, and answer a few respective questions, the tool will give you

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some hints on how to optimize your mobile site. Questions they ask could be like: Do you see broken images or missing content? Can you read the text without zooming or scrolling side to side? Can links and buttons be clicked with a thumb? Are videos, games or other animations visible? Are visuals and tone consistent with other marketing materials? By answering these questions and knowing how much time your mobile site takes to load, I guess you could have a very rough idea of how your mobile site performs and what area you should look into to improve the site. Again the above list is very basic and there are many other things else to examine to know whether your site is mobile friendly.

Responsive web design (RWD or Responsive Design) is relatively new so there is still a long way to go for designer and developer to master this concept and bring it to life beautifully. There are many examples of a responsive design website like http://mashable.com/, http://www.bostonglobe.com/ or my own blog uses theme that supports responsive design. I havent come across many sites in Vietnam that implements Responsive Design. From Think Insights with Google, they wrote Responsive web design (RWD) enables you to optimize your site experience across different screen sizes without creating multiple websites. By using exible templates, CSS media queries, and JavaScript events, a responsive web design can respond to the viewport size of a device, adjusting images, template layout and content visibility. You can even harness novel device capabilities such as dragging, swiping and other user-gestures recognized by touch devices. All of these CSS and JavaScript techniques can be layered onto a single le of HTML content, delivered to all devices. Example from Mashable to feature responsive web design in case you are not sure what it is:

Mobile friendly site

In Vietnam, when it comes to developing a mobile site, from a technical point of view, there are a couple of options for you:

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This is the normal screen size for desktop (I am using Macbook Pro and the resolution is best scaled), you notice that the title of the article on the right hand side Google Glass Photographer Makes Picture Taking Awkward. If you look at the highlighted portion, you could see the article has title in 2 lines and some descriptions below. Now take a look at the below picture for iPad screen size. If you want to replicate this, you just need to reduce the size of the browser window.

Because of the smaller screen size, the article title now appears in 4 lines, we dont have space for the article description anymore. However as you could see, the layout is responsive and our view is still optimal. The layout doesnt break and you could still read the content easily. The last example is the smartphone screen size for the same Mashable site. As you can see, the layout completely change to cater to the small screen size. You see only the New section on the homepage. The main navigation reduces to the button at the top left hand corner. If you want to go to other sections, you have to click that button.
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Dynamically serving different HTML on the same URL When a customer visits your website, its possible for your webserver to detect what kind of device theyre using and present a custom page (HTML + CSS) on the same URL. These custom pages can be designed for any kind of devicemobile phones, tablets, desktop computers and even Smart TVs. Detecting the user's device and changing the content you serve requires some customization (e.g. stylesheets) that need to be maintained on a per-device basis. Separate mobile Urls Another option to customize user experience based on device type is to build a separate site for mobile trafc, independent of your original desktop site. The browser detects if a visitor is on a mobile device and redirects them to the mobile-optimized version of your site (e.g. m.vnexpress.net). A dedicated mobile site allows you to tailor the site specically for mobile users and is often independently built and hosted.

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This solution is quite commonly used in Vietnam. Some of the biggest news portals in Vietnam use this type of implementation like VnExpress, Vietnamnet (2013).

site with responsive design is much cheaper in comparison to native apps. If you ask for how much cheaper exactly for mobile site vs native app, again my answer would be that depends. I would estimate the ratio to be between 3-20 times more expensive to have a native app depending on functionality as well. Besides the fact that it takes less money to build, mobile site has the advantage of reach, compatibility across platforms, browser. User could nd the mobile site pretty easily just by searching on Google. For responsive web design site, it inherits all the above advantage of the mobile site, plus it offers much better user experience across devices due to custom layouts. If you want to update your Responsive web design (RWD) site, you could do so via CMS quite easily. The changes would be live on users browser instantly without approval from third party like the case of Apple AppStore. Both normal mobile site and RWD site have some very big disadvantages like: Many of them cant function without internet connection ( From my limited understanding, there are some Web Apps that offer ofine mode)

Mobile friendly site or native mobile app?

From budget point of view, the option with lowest budget would be to have a separated mobile site i.e. separate mobile URLs. Responsive Web Design would be more expensive generally in comparison to the mobile site. And of course, building a mobile

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 They cant access users personal data on the phone itself, the camera, calendar, photo stream, accelerometer etc... (This might change in the future) They generally dont offer as rich user experience as native app since complicated animation, games, reporting, calculation etc...couldn't be implemented easily. Push capabilities: If you want your mobile site (web app) to run on the background and send you notications, it is not possible at this point The ease of monetization: with Google Play and Apple App Store or other marketplace, it is much easier to market native app and reach a massive audience that may pay to download your native app, or purchase in app items. For mobile site, subscription model seems to be amongst the few choices available for monetization. One big disadvantage of native app is that in order to provide best user experience, the app needs to be customized/built for each platform i.e. one version for iOS and another version for Android. This would mean development cost is higher for native app. Maintenance cost is higher as well. Mobile site disadvantages are native app advantages naturally. However be aware that native app is just like social media asset or a website, once you build it, you need to spend money to

promote it to your users and maintain it afterwards. So I would not recommend developing an app just for a 2 month campaign and then stop supporting it after that.

Native app development ow

If you want to build a native mobile app, the general ow is like this: Ideation: this includes the app concept, key functionalities. Normally it would be better to think about the long term benets of the app (for both users and for the brand), not just for a campaign burst (1-2 months) because the cost of building an app, promoting it for user to download is not small. Business analysis: analyze the requirements and suggest suitable technology solution, foundation framework for each operating system, Wireframe, Design: Just like creating a website, wireframe is critically important for an app because it is the foundation of the user interface. If there is anything logically wrong with the wireframe, or anything missing, user experience would be affected severely. The screen ow would explain how the animation would function. With the screen ow, client would be able to visualize how to use the app, what happens when a button is touched.
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 Database, CMS and API: this stage is about designing the database, coding the CMS and API according to the requirement. You could code the CMS and API using php or Java or .Net, its up to you. Please note that your normal web production team could handle this part, they just need to produce the API according to requested. Programming to connect the front end of the app with the database, CMS and API: at this stage you would need to program using Apple/Android SDK, with languages like Objective C for iOS , etc. The next question you should consider would be whether you should develop the native app on Android or iOS or Windows?

one thing it is much easier to nd a crack version of Android app.

Android or iOS or Windows?

One main thing to consider is the marketshare between iOS and Android amongst your target audience. Clearly Windows is NOT a common platform so your choice would be between Android or iOS. My recommendation would be if you have the budget, you should go for both. If you want to monetize your app, using payment via the ofcial store then iOS is the way to go. Users that use Apple App is much more likely to pay for something vs Android because for

From App Annie you could see that iOS Store revenue is like 4 times more than Google Play on a monthly basis. If you need to choose one platform then it all depends on your target audience and their smartphone choices. As marketer, we have to follow our users and sh where the sh are.

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Section 3

Reference

Some great resources below:

Google Think Insights: http://www.google.com/think/ Econsultancy Mobile: http://econsultancy.com/vn/blog/topics/mobile Our Mobile Planet: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en-gb/

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10

Social Media Assets

In depth discussion of options for brands on social media from general guidelines to Facebook fanpage to measurement.

Section 1

What is Social Media?

There are many denitions of Social Media. This one is from Wikipedia: Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.[1] Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein dene social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content."[2] Furthermore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify usergenerated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals. In short, to me Social media are communication channels between people. If we look at social media from this angle you

could see that social media is not new. It has been around for a long time since we had our rst chat messenger, or our rst message board. Why now people use Facebook so much, I guess its because of its functionalities and other things. Since it is primarily about communication channels between people, when you participate in social media, you should behave as you should to another human beings. Do to others as you would have them do to you

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Section 2

Facebook domination in Vietnam

19M Facebook users in Vietnam

There are quite a number of social networks in Vietnam. However, none is as popular as Facebook. With more than 19M users in Sept 2013, Facebook reaches 60% of the internet users in Vietnam and about 22% of the whole Vietnam population. The growth rate is even more impressive, back in May 2013, Facebook only had 14M users. From the graph below from comScore report 2013 South East Asia Digital Future in Focus, you could see that Zing Me is declining fast. This is inline with my impression. There are simply not many people who use Zing Me around, even youngsters. They may use Zing ID, which is across all of Zing products like Zing Mp3 etc... None of the people I know use Zing Me. I dont have reliable data to show how many Zing Me users there are in Vietnam. Zing published some data on its own but I doubt their gures are accurate.

Total time spent on Facebook is 20 times more than Zing Me by Vietnamese users

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Other social networks/platforms

From wearesocial, Twitter is estimated to have about 1.8M users in Vietnam. This seems to be accurate since I have friends who are on Twitter but I dont see many of them. Again from comScore report, You Tube has more than 11M monthly unique visitors and Linkedin has about 1.1M. Instagram, Pinterest, Four Square should have less users in comparison to Twitter in Vietnam. I havent found third party data sources yet. Lets not forget mobile rst networks like Zalo, Line, KakaoTalk (each has about 3 million users), or Viper (with more than 3M users in Vietnam as well) and more traditional forums like Eva.vn (4.7M monthly unique visitors), Vn-Zoom (4.2M visitors), Tinhte.com (3.5M), WebTreTho (2.4M).

In Apr 2013, Vietnamese users spent 4.8 Billion minutes on Facebook, about 20 times more then the closest Zing Me.

Facebook users demographics is quite representative of the internet users in Vietnam as well.
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Section 3

Channel Recommendation
Long term platforms
My recommendation is: For long term platform Facebook is the way to go even with the Youth Segment vs Zing Me. You shouldnt spread your focus and investment between multiple platforms. You Tube is THE platform for Video content. Its the second biggest search engine in the world, and in Vietnam as well. You could feature your brand personality much better using video. Forum is still very big in Vietnam. We have forums for moms, for parents, for youth, for IT enthusiasts, for technology enthusiast in general etc... At least what you should do on these forums would be to listen to what people are saying about your brand, your product/ service.

Then it is quite common for brands to do forum seeding, using inuencers like Moderators/Admins or user with large thanks, large network of friends. However, you need to be very careful about doing it ofcially or unofcially and make sure that you understand the code of conduct in each forum before you jump in. The ow of engaging forums could be like the below: You could start with listening, then after you identify inuencers in these forums, you could start to recruit them to be part of the forum seeding or others. You should empower these inuencers with latest updates about your products/ services, promotions, marketing campaigns etc... Going into too much details about inuencer outreach is out of the scope of this ebook. I will discuss more on the next book.

Google Plus: Besides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benets, I dont see any other major benets of maintaining a Google Plus page for your brand in Vietnam at this point. However since SEO is kind of big deal, it might be helpful to just mirror your strategy for Facebook on Google Plus.
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You should have +1 button anywhere that you put the Facebook Like button. Doing it this way, you could minimize the investment on Google Plus. Hangout is another useful function to do video conferencing with up to 10 people as well. Skype call quality is not that great recently so I think you should try Hangout.

the use of these tools could be experimented with. I dont recommend these for long term at this point also.

Other platforms
With massive promotional campaigns using traditional TVC even, Zalo, Line and Kakao Talk have gathered between 1-3 million users for each network. These are 100% mobile and primarily would be for Youth, below 25 year old I think. These networks, however, are still early stage so you can NOT set up a brand prole yourself (you have to work with them direct to set up) or their advertising system is not that robust yet so I would NOT recommend using these channels for Small and Medium Businesses. Even with big brands or MNCs, you could experiment with these but I dont think its time to build a long term presence here yet. Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, Instagram,Flickr have been in Vietnam for a while. However, the usage is pretty limited so again for a particular niche segment and for tactical campaigns,
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Section 4

Guiding principles

From process point of view, a typical listening process would be like the below:

Listen rst
I know this sounds really textbook like but listening is key. While I have been saying this for a while now, only during the past 12 months that I think brands started to really pay attention to this. Why do you need to listen to what is being said online? Well, there are many benets to it like: Understand consumer insights: it could be helpful for content optimization in the context of social assets, develop better engagement activity campaigns. Competitive Intelligence Feedback for ofine marketing initiatives Key inuencer identication Product development support Great customer support
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1. Objectives: At this step you start to dene what it is that you want to monitor and get insights about? Remember the tools are just tools, they wont be able to provide any insights if you dont have a proper set up. Common monitoring and analysis objectives include: Monitor generic brand mentions/ buzz and compared that with competitors Monitor specic product lines with sentiment analysis in comparison with competitors respective products/services Reputation management: early crisis detection and inuencing sources identication. 2. Set up & prepare: At this stage, what you need to do or ask your consultants/ vendors to do is to set up a structure that cover all angles that you want to monitor For example, if you are Samsung, may you care about your Smartphone lines, your Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4. For Galaxy S4, you may care about what people talk about the design, the price, the functionality etc...

One thing that people often forget is that its always good to monitor VIPs of your company like the founder name, CEO name, your PR manager, spoke person etc... You need to make sure that the structure you set up allow meaningful comparison between yourself and competitor respective aspects. 3. Monitor using automated tools There are plenty of tools out there for you to choose from. Many of these tools are covered under the Chapter about Digital Analytics later on. The key is before committing your budget to any tools, do proper testing and use the demo account to make sure that it suits your objectives. 4. Analysis and report This is the key step. The tools is useless without analysts to use it, report, analyze and recommend next step. Making actionable insights from hundreds of mentions per day is no small feat so make sure you have a competent agency to help you or have someone in-house to do this critical task. From budget point of view, my recommendation is this, if you have $100 to spend on the whole online monitoring/ listening,
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make sure that you spend $90 on great analyst and $10 on the tool itself. If you want to detect crisis early, it may be helpful to set up automatic alert when you have negative mentions coming in quickly. 5. Recommendation Besides basic information like the share of volume of mentions, basic sentiment analysis, the recommendation would depend largely on your objectives. If your objective is to understand the audience reaction to your marketing campaign, you should look at the buzz over time, from before launch, to launch and after launch. Try to overlay this graph with your paid media spend to see if there is any correlation. Ideally if you spend more money with paid media, you should expect more mentions. 6. Engagement strategy This is the natural step after what you have been doing. If the analysis is good, it should prompt you to take certain actions to improve your campaigns/ your brand etc... May be you identify a few key inuencers that you need to develop an inuencer outreach programs with them?

May be you identify a few news sites that constantly mention about your brand and you need to reach out to them? Or you realize that people have some issues with one of your products features and they are trying to nd solution online. Or you realize that people have been talking a lot about your recent videos on Facebook yay! And so you decide to push it further by reallocating money from other channels to facebook ads to leverage on the viral uplift?

Think and act like your customers

I have seen times and again marketers treating Facebook, Twitter, You Tube or other social networks as promotional channels. Ask yourself this, while you are watching movies on TV, do you enjoy being interrupted by TV commercials? People do NOT primarily use Facebook to keep updated on your company latest promotions. We wish that they do, but the cold hard truth is that they use Facebook to connect with other friends, sharing their life moments amongst other things. So the trick is to balance and put your customers needs rst. I would NOT recommend going like 50%-50% between the

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content that people love and your promotional message, that is way too much. What do your customer often do on social media? What do they like to interact with? Generate as much ideas as you like and may be test them out? (Theres nothing wrong with testing, continuous optimization for online initiatives point of view, so dont be afraid to experiment).

bit to t in the online world but you shouldnt change it completely compared to ofine.

Bring your brand personality to social

This is easier said than done, I realize that. However it is crucial that you stay honest, transparent, authentic and unique. Do you know why? Its because there are lots and lots of information out there. Eric Smith from Google used to say Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Every 2 DAYS! So if what you say is not Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, in a Story (SUCCESs principles according to Chip Health in his book Made to stick) your chance of getting notice is slim at best. The good news is if you are not a brand new company, your brand likely has a personality ofine already. The job is to bring that to Social media, may be you need to customize it a

Invite your existing customers, prospective customers/staff/vendors to become your fans/ followers on social network
Dave Kerpen said it best in Likeable Social Media book: As part of your strategy to grow your fan base/community/ your followers on social network, it is recommended to tap in your existing customers base, your staff, your vendors. Develop a strong value proposition why your customer should Like you, Add you in Circle, Follow your brand on social networks? Could it be about share the feedback? Getting a discount? To show support? To get a freebie? To be updated on future activities? Etc... Once you develop your value proposition, its time to include links to your social assets in as many places as possible like: Your website Your email signature
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 Your name card Your marketing materials Your sales materials Ask your call center agents to invite people to join at the end of the conversation Etc...

With constructive feedback/complaints, its best to reply quickly to say that you acknowledge the issue and try to take things private. It could be the case that after verication, it is indeed your staff fault or your product has certain issue, its alright to say you are sorry and you will work to resolve the issue. Of course it would be ideal to plan in advance guidelines, protocol to handle different scenarios that you could think of, even go as deep as the sample responses that you could use. This guidebook/ protocol could come from your commonly asked questions list, your call center script or similar sources. Of course the social media team needs to customize these responses a bit so suit the brand tone of voice and personality on social media. Also, its equally important that you do NOT forget to reply to GOOD comments as well. Be creative in your thank you messages. It might be good to include in a few words to ask users to spread the good words about your brand if you nd it appropriate. One time I wrote something like this on the wall of one of the brand guys, Just want to say that your staff at Hai Ba Trung store in Hanoi is great. They made a mistake with my order today but the way they handled it was delightful!. My intention
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Response quickly to both bad and good comments

Customer replies, message on social network is the new comment card now. So think twice about deleting any bad comments. from Likeable Social Media book. Of course if the comments are in violation of the law, politically sensitive, disrespectful to others, troll attack, you could hide those comments or consider deleting them. They are without merit or otherwise in violation of the law. Troll attack is something like you s**** or F**** you, people leaving vulgar comments without any support or they just continuously post non sense on your page.

here is that I wanted to compliment the way their staff handled their mistake and I had a positive experience. This is the reply from the brand Thank you for bringing your concern to our attention. Your feedback is extremely valued as it is important in every opportunity for us to address customers needs and emphasize our commitment to provide total quality experience. Rest assured that we would look into this matter and conduct proper investigation. Feel free to write us for other inquiries or assistance. We look forward to another opportunity of serving you. Thank you for your continued patronage to XYZ Brand Regards, This sounds too much like a template and textbook answer to me without any personality. I would expect just a simple reply to say that they understand and thank me for my patience with the staff or something, not using the whole template.

For example, I went to a local restaurant the other day to have lunch, the restaurant was very very crowded. As a result, we waited for 15 mins and didnt receive any services (not even water). Of course we were upset and left the restaurant, we met the manager and complained about the service. The manager appeared to be very calm and understanding, listened to our frustration and then gave us a 20% discount card and said that: she totally understood that we might not want to go back to the restaurant again, however, if we decided to go later on, this was a 20% discount card on the total bill value that we could use next time. Ok ,that might not be the best customer service that I have received but it is not bad. Next time I may actually think of going back to the restaurant again. Another example was when I visited an Apple reseller store in Singapore. I noticed a very nice Apple Ad with beautiful scenery on it. I asked the staff if they knew what the app was. All of them didnt know. However, they told me that if you left my email address with them, they would ask the manager and send the app name to me. I hesitated a bit but gave them my email address. I didnt expect them to follow up at all to be honest. However to my surprise and delight, they DID. After a few hours, I received a lovely email from them telling me what the app name was and other relevant information about the ad. Mind you I only bought $30 screen protector from that store but
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Surprise and Delight your customers

I think the same ofine principles hold true when it comes to social media.

I was impressed with their service. Next time when I am near by I will surely walk in again to buy from them. The same could happen online, on your social assets. A customer may ask you a slightly more difcult question to answer, or have an issue that needs to be followed up, go extra miles for him/her, surprise and delight your customer! I am not sure about you but I tend to stay very loyal to brands that have great customer service.

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Section 5

Facebook fanpage

Facebook fanpage as part of the customer service that you offer You want to do it because the majority of your target audience is on Facebook Increase brand awareness and brand love

Why you want to have a fanpage?

Since Facebook is THE main mass social platform right now, its natural that when you think of social media assets, your rst thought is a Facebook fan page. I would recommend Facebook as the rst and main platform as well because of its reach, functionality and well developed advertising offering. So how do you get started? Well before you do anything, you need to think about how Facebook fanpage will t in your overall marketing strategy, and what exactly your objectives would be for your fanpage? More often than not, you will come back with things like: Engagement with your customer on social media

Build community etc... If you just stop there, I would advise to put in something related to your company bottom line because at the end of the day, brand awareness, brand love is good but you have to link what you are doing back to the bottom line, to revenue. Otherwise it will be a waste of resources (money, time, efforts).

Set up
From the conrmed objectives, its time to think about your fanpage set up, your overall strategy, brand personality on facebook and your tone of voice. Setting up a Facebook fanpage is actually pretty easy. You could use this link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/ or if you have any questions, try this link:
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http://www.socialbakers.com/resource-center/795-article-how-to -create-an-ofcial-facebook-page or do a simple google search. Once you have your page, it is important that you select the short URL very carefully. It could be your domain name, your ofcial name or you have to follow the global rules set by your Head Quarter. The prole photo is often needed to follow the brand guideline as well. However you could be creative when it comes to cover photo. In fact you could change the cover photo as often as you like. I dont recommend changing it too often though because you have to think if you actually provide any values to your fans by changing to a new cover photo? If the answer is just to look fresh, I would not change it more than once per month, just for the sake of being fresh/new. Putting in detailed milestones shows fans that you are serious about your social media efforts and this is an opportunity to showcase your brand heritage as well. Now, when it comes to Facebook tab, it really depends on your overall objectives and your immediate objective of the month. If you do not have a website and want to use Facebook fanpage as the main platform for everything online, obviously you need to have some places to introduce about your products/ services, your locations/promotions etc...

How many Facebook users are in your target audience prole?

It is the goal of almost every brand to have a big fan base and high level of engagement. How many fans you should have depends on your target audience, your demographics and your marketing objective. You could easily nd out how many Facebook users are within your target audience by trying to create a new ad, once you put in the country/city, the age group, gender, education level, family status etc... Facebook would tell you how many users it has within that group. You could go as far as putting in interest.

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How to get fans?

I often consider using Interests to further zoom in the target audience as well. However, it is not like everyone declares what they like with Facebook so if your audience pool is too small, you need to reconsider this option. Under advanced settings, you could select many options I am a strong believer in quality vs quantity so getting the right fans is all that matters. It doesnt matter much if you have 100k fans but they are not within your target audience so none of them engage with your content/facebook posts and then slowly your posts wont even appear on their news feed anymore. So how to get fans within the target audience? Well as mentioned previously, you should start by encouraging your existing customers, your staff, your vendors etc... to become fans on your page. Develop a strong value proposition for them.
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Secondly its time to include the link to your Facebook fanpage to as many places (online/ofine) as you could, from company website, email signature, sales materials like brochures, name card, EDM templates etc.... Thirdly you could consider using Facebook ad options.

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As you could see from the picture above, it is pretty straight forwards. After clicking on creating a new ad, Facebook gives you three options: Objective 1: Get more Pages Likes Objective 2: Promote Page posts or Advanced Options. The advanced option is nothing more than just more options for objective 1 or 2. Naturally you would choose Get more Page Likes option. An ad from Facebook has four elements as you could see from the screenshot: Title Description Image Landing View In a way, creating Facebook ad is similar to Google Ads. Basic rules in writing good ad copy for Google apply here as well I think. You should do A/B testing using different variations to test

which one works better in driving more likes (fans) at lower cost. More over, you could use sponsored stories to promote these ads as well. Sponsored stories is super powerful because what appears on your news feed is that some or many of your friends like/interact with certain fan pages and Facebook is asking you if you want to like this page also. It is kind of word of mouth marketing. One ofine example is that when you see a TV ads and at the top left corner you notice that your friend Joey already likes this TVC, the chance of you interacting with it would be much higher. Fourth you could run a campaign, develop a Facebook app to get fan or using your actual posts (content) to get fan. While running different campaigns, its useful to remember that the more complex you make it for someone to like your page, the less likely that they are going to do it. And its always good to consider how to generate the viral effect for your campaign while avoiding the so called prize hunter in Vietnam.

Facebook content
Content would have a big impact on how engaged your community would be. Before going into how to develop good content strategy and actual weekly post for your page, it is useful to note the followings:
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 Every time you post something, only a percentage of your total fans will see your post in their news feed. Duh! what do you mean by that Chandler? Well it simply means if you have 10,000 fans on your page, every time you post a new status/ album/link/photo etc..., only around 1,600 fans would see your post on average (16%). Damn, why is that so? well it is simply because let say each person has an average of say 130 friends on Facebook and they like 3-5 fanpages. If only half of those 130 friends and fanpages post once per day, you end up having 60 - 70 posts on your news feed per day. And believe me, you will probably have some friends that like to post twice, three times or may be 10 times per day. If Facebook displays everything from everyone that you have connection with on your News Feed, it will contain a lot of junks. So how Facebook decides which content to put on your News Feed and it has to customize that to each individual user in more than 1 Billion user base? The formula that Facebook uses is called EdgeRank. Wikipedia has a page about EdgeRank. If you do a search on Google, you will nd more than 600,000 results about Facebook EdgeRank. While Facebook didnt disclose the exact formula of its EdgeRank, different people have different explanation. It is similar to

SEO, Google doesnt disclose fully how its algorithm works, however it reveals enough so that professionals could make educated guess. Mashable has a beautiful explanation about Facebook EdgeRank called What is Facebook EdgeRank and Why does it matter? It is recommended that you take a look at the link above. A quick summary of the formula is below:

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It is critical to understand this formula so that you could post content on Timeline according to this to make sure you maximize the chance of your post getting on to users news feed.

So now we know that we need to have relevant content that our fans want to engage with, with the proper format, post daily and at the right time, the next logical question is how to develop Good content strategy? Well a good content strategy needs to answer the ask, match the overall objectives of the social media activities, showcase the brand personality, unique tone of voice but at the same time be relevant/useful to our target audience. For example, a good content strategy for Mead Johnson would need to establish Mead Johnson as a leader in brain development/mental development and create meaningful connection with moms as well. There are basically two ways to create daily posts: you either create them or curate them.

Content Creation
I would recommend two great books on this subject again, they are: Contagious Why Things Catch on by Jonah Berger Made to Stick by Chip Health and Dan Health While different authors use slightly different words to describe their secrets, the overall theme is pretty similar between these two books.
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Jonah Berger talked about STEPPS: Social Currency Triggers Emotions Practical Value Public Story Chip used SUCCESs: Simple Unexpected (similar to Social Currency) Credible Concrete Emotion Story Some of the great examples used by both authors included: Will it blends You Tube Channel Dove Evolution

Parisian Love Mentos National Night video for Singapore Shucking Corn - Clean Ears every time I would strongly encourage you to read the two books above.

Content Curation
Well curating content, (whether it is a nice photo, a relevant infographics, or a video) is something that you would probably do a lot when you manage a fanpage. After you have your content strategy and content buckets, you need to develop different content angles. These angles need to match with the content buckets and the overall content strategy of course. The key is where to nd great and relevant content? Its not as hard as you think it is. Relevant sources of content could come from books, trade magazines, websites, newspaper, related fanpages etc... There are quite a number of great content sources if you just do simple google search related to your vertical. It is important, however, to plan different content buckets and content angles accordingly so that you dont spend too much time on certain areas and neglect the rest.
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Share Content On Facebook

There are some guidelines on posting/sharing content on Facebook as taken from Mashable below: Posts between 100 and 250 characters get 60% more likes/ comments/shares Be visual: posting photo albums, photos, video get 180%, 120% and 100% more engagement Post daily: 96% of your fans wont come back to your page so posting daily is a must to reach them Be timely: post when you audience is online to get a higher EdgeRank and better chance of being seen.

get audience with the objective of driving protable customer action. - denition from Content Marketing Institute. Content marketing is advocated by Rand Fishkin from Moz.com as well. The argument is about doing traditional link building or Content marketing for Search Engine Optimization. Personally I support Content marketing but it is hard work so you need to prepare enough resources if you want to embark on this road.

Content Marketing
What we just discussed above Content creation and Content curation are all part of the buzz word Content Marketing. Again there are already lots of articles about this topic. In fact, at the time of writing this book, doing a simple search for Content marketing on Google returns more than 670M results. Wikipedia has a section about this as per usual. Basically what this is about is Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly dened and understood tar98

Section 6

Measuring success
Just like any marketing activities, with social media your ultimate goal should be revenue besides Reach and Engagement. If you have a great campaign but it doesnt generate any uplift in revenue over short, medium or long term, then what s the use? Reach Engagement Revenue (Bottom line)

Actual Reach vs Total number of fans. This could be measured as a percentage. Viral uplift Fan growth is easy to know. Facebook insights could give you that gure over time.

Reach
To understand how many people you reach via your social media assets, there are many metrics we could use, depending on which social platform you use. For Facebook what you could measure over time are: Fan growth/Total Fans over time

From the screenshot above, you could see daily organic likes, paid likes, Unlikes and Net Likes. For Actual Reach per post, we could calculate average reach per post (average unique impression per post) and then divide it by the total number of fans. For example, if the total impressions for 10 posts is 100,000, then average reach per post is 10,000.

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If the average number of fans per day during the duration is 40,000 then our reach rate is 25% (10,000/40,000). Tracking Reach rate over time could be useful to understand how well your content is performing according to Facebook EdgeRank. Viral uplift could be used to measure the additional, viral impressions you receive from your fans network, because fans like/ share/comment on your posts. Viral uplift could be calculate as percentage of the total impressions for all of your posts during a particular period. Facebook insights raw data include viral impression.

On Twitter: Amplication = # of Retweets Per Tweet On Facebook, Google Plus: Amplication = # of Shares Per Post Applause rate: On Twitter: Applause Rate = # of Favorite Clicks Per Post On Facebook: Applause Rate = # of Likes Per Post On Google Plus: Applause Rate = # of +1s Per Post

Engagement rate
People dene engagement differently for different platform. Avinash wrote a beautiful piece about this. Its called Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplication, Applause, Economic Value In this piece, Avinash talked about three key metrics when it comes to engagement on social media. They are: Conversation Rate = # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post Amplication Rate: Personally I think we may need to calculate the above metrics by percentage because obviously, if you have a bigger fan base, your absolute number may be bigger. The below is suggested metrics that you could use:
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Metrics Fans Impressions Posts Comments Like Share Average Impression/ Post Conversation rate Amplication rate Applause rate Reach rate Conversation rate (%) Amplication rate (%) Applause rate Engagement Rate (%)

Denition Average daily number of fans Total number of unique impressions generated by posts during the period Total number of posts Total number of comments for all posts Total number of likes for all posts Total number of shares for all posts Average Unique number of fans see a post Average number of comments per post Average number of shares per post Average number of likes per post Average percentage of fans reached with any one post (Avg Imp/Fans) Average percentage of fans who comment on any one post Average percentage of fans who share on any one post Average percentage of fans who like on any one post Average percentage of fans who like/share/comment on any post

Examples 12,000 200,000 60 7,000 10,000 2,000 3,333 116.6 33.3 166.6 3,333/12000 = 28% 116.6/12,000 = 0.96% 33.3/12,000 = 0.27% 166.6/12,000 = 1.38% (116.6+33.3+166.6)/12,000 = 2.63%

Engagement rate is sum of Conversation rate, amplication rate and applause rate.
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The above table could look intimidating. Personally I would recommend tracking these metrics over time to see the trend. Reach rate, conversation rate, amplication rate and applause rate (%) are critical factors to see if your fans really engage with your content. Like (applause) is considered the easiest to achieve in comparison to comment (conversation) and the hardest is share (Amplication). If you want to have great viral uplift, you need to track these metrics. Example of these graphs could be like the ones below:

Reach&Rate&
60%# 50%# 40%# 30%# 20%# 10%# 0%# Reach#Rate#

With reach rate of about 40%+ on average, if you are not using ads, that means your content is doing very well. Remember, the average is around 10%. Graphical example of engagement rate, applause rate, conversation rate, amplication rate over time shown in this graph below.

1* Se p# 2* Se p# 3* Se p# 4* Se p# 5* Se p# 6* Se p# 7* Se p# 8* Se p# 9* Se p# 10 *S ep # 11 *S ep # 12 *S ep # 13 *S ep #

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3.00%$

2.50%$

2.00%$ Applause$Rate$ 1.50%$ Conversa>on$Rate$ Amplica>on$Rate$ 1.00%$ Engagement$Rate$

0.50%$

0.00%$ 1)Sep$ 2)Sep$ 3)Sep$ 4)Sep$ 5)Sep$ 6)Sep$ 7)Sep$ 8)Sep$ 9)Sep$ 10)Sep$ 11)Sep$ 12)Sep$ 13)Sep$

Over two weeks period, the overall engagement rate uctuates around 2%+. First off, this is a high engagement rate from my experience in Vietnam. The peak around 9 Sept is worth investigated more. Since this is just an example and without other information, there is not much that we could analyze here.

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Bottom line
Just like any activities, we need to somehow match what we spend (time, efforts, money) with the revenue generated or total economic value. We shouldnt treat social media any difference. Another way to think about this is to think about what metrics do you use to measure a media campaign? Reach, visit, conversions? e commerce transactions? goals? Well we could do exactly the same with social media. The reach is quite straight forwards looking at the number of fan and the total number of impressions. For other metrics like visits, conversions, goals, e-commerce transactions, Google Analytics could provide quite a lot of information. You should look at Trafc sources>Social like the screenshot below. At one glance, Google Analytics shows you how many visits you have from social media, how many conversions come from social networks and the value of those conversions. Yay! Now you could go back and tell your boss that the company spends $100 on social media and actually get $150 in return!

If you want to, you could go further and quantify the visits, value coming from each social media platform that you participate in! Powerful isnt it? You could start to see the value of YouTube, or

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blogger or Linkedin with your goals, your bottom line.

you could explore the rest of the reports under Social category in Google Analytics yourself, I hope.

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Section 7

Reference

Ad Age Viral Video Chart: http://adage.com/section/the-viral-video-chart/674 Portent (Ian Lurie): http://www.portent.com/blog/

Some of the great resources:

Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen Made to Stick by Chip Health Contagious: Why Things Catch on by Jonah Berger Engagement from Scratch: http://www.engagementfromscratch.com/buy.html AllFacebook - the unofcial Facebook Blog: http://allfacebook.com/ Facebook News Room: http://newsroom.fb.com/ Inside Facebook : http://www.insidefacebook.com/ Mashable: http://mashable.com/ Seth Godin Blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ Copyblogger: http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/
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Digital Analytics
Do you want to track and measure the performance of your site, your campaign, your application? How about knowing what is being said about your competitors online?

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Section 1

What is Digital Analytics

It used to be Web Analytics. However, with the proliferation of smartphone since 2007, it would be better to use the term Digital Analytics. What Digital Analytics is and why it is important? Well it is simply because marketers/brand managers/sales managers need insights. Insight could come from intuition (like our brilliant leader Steve Jobs) or it could come from the right type of data. For the web or mobile, marketers have an opportunity to obtain a great amount of data unavailable in the ofine world about their users behavior. However data overload or data puke seem to be a much bigger issue rather than not having enough data or no data at all. In this section, i aim to go through the following parts: What is Web Analytics? Why is it important?

How different web analytics tools work ? How to have an effective Web Analytics strategy? Overview of Google Analytics Reference materials

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Section 2

Denition

Since the birth of iPhone in 2007, users worldwide have been increasingly rely on their smartphones to access the internet. Together with hundred thousands of different apps created by brands, the need to collect, measure, analyze trafc through smartphone, tablets, smart tv is increasing. So the industry is now using the term Digital Analytics to include analytic data from smartphones & tablets as well. In Vietnam, while smartphone & tablet penetration is increasing, Analytics is still very new so for the purpose of this chapter, we only talk about Web Analytics. Before going any further, lets talk about the importance of Web Analytics: Its important because it could help to answer many questions like: How much money do you make from your online marketing campaign? How many people sign up to become your members from the search engine marketing program? Which digital marketing initiatives are working as planned and which one are not? How does client evaluate the performance of an agency?
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Digital Analytics Lorem Ipsum

On Wikipedia, we could nd the denition for Web Analytics as followed: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, 1. Whatand is Digital Analytics? analysis reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing usage. 2. Why Web Analyticsweb is important? and Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring web trafc but can be used as a tool for business and market research, and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a web site. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how trafc to a website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge trafc and popularity trends which is useful for market research.

 Even very detailed things like why the media owner reports 10,000 clicks to the banner but Google Analytics only shows me 4,000 visits? Where does the rest go? Which of my product benets resonate more with the target audience? With suitable Web Analytics technologies/tools, one could know a lot about the marketplace, the competition, behavior of its own website users, demographics of fans on the fanpage. The fact that its related to technology requires whoever reading the reports to have certain degree of understanding of how these tools work to understand what the data actually means.

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Section 3

Different Analytics Tools

Overview
There are basically two types of tools, one is onsite web analytics tool and the other one is off-site tool. Onsite tools show you what happen on your website/microsite/ Social Assets/native smartphone app, your platforms and they can only track users when they land on your platforms. Platform like Facebook has its own Facebook Insights, which could give some data. Off-site tools could give you data & insights beyond your website, including your competitor website, buzz about your brand on forums, blogs, market demand from a particular market/ region etc... Please note that these offsite tools, in turn, could NOT give you insights into your own platforms.

1. Onsite Tools: Javascript based tool 2. Offsite Tools: 1. Competitive Intelligence 2. Listening tools/platforms

Onsite, Javascript-based Tools

For onsite tool, the most commonly used method now is javascript tracking tool, which means a few lines of javascript code need to be put on every page of the website/microsite that marketers want to track. In Vietnam, people often use Google Analytics. However, there are many different onsite tools available like: Enterprise tools: Omniture SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics, WebTrends
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 Mid tier tools: Unica, XiTi, NedStat, ClickTracks Free tools: Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics Enterprise tools are often bought at the global or regional level and pass down to the local team. Majority of these tools are not actively used by local team. Many agencies (even international agencies in Vietnam) do not actively use these tools either or use them at a very basic, limited level as well. Of course there are some exceptions. Samsung Vietnam, ANZ Vietnam are using Omniture. HSBC is using WebTrends. How do I know this? You could nd out about this quite easily by looking at the source code of the site. These javascript tracking code is often put at the bottom. An example from Samsung Vietnam source code below (you could see this by viewing the source code of the web page that you are visiting).

Paid Enterprise tools or Free Google Analytics?

One question people may ask is that why we need to use Enterprise (expensive tools) while we can use free tools like Google Analytics? Well there are two main reasons i think: With Enterprise tools, you own your data and you could do whatever you want with it. If you want to integrate the data into another system you build or with a third party system, you could. If you want to tweak the data somehow, you could
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do that as well. This could change in the future when Google allows exporting data out of their system. Regular support: since Google Analyticss a free tool, if you have any questions about Google Analytics, online help section is your best friend. With paid tool, they often come with access to dedicated account manager (this is NOT free), one that could help you to navigate the sea of data or answer any questions you may have. In Vietnam context, wed better stick with Google Analytics because we dont have many professional analysts to use these Enterprise tools effectively. (well we dont even have enough digital marketing professional in the rst place!)

Data from Search Engine: Google keyword tool, Google Trends, Google Display Planner. There is also platform specic reporting tool that allows the owner to see statistics of whats happening on their property like Facebook Fanpage Insights, You Tube channel insights. It could provide a lot of data for you. In a way these tools should belong to onsite tool because you only know about users who interact with your properties. However, to make things simpler, i put them separated. Part of what you should monitor for Facebook fanpage is already discussed in the previous chapter about Social Media Assets. For smartphone app analytics, there are many services like Flurry Analytics, Localytics etc...

Offsite tools
For offsite tools/technologies/services, there are many types: Panel based measurement: comScore, compete, Effective Measure, Cimigo. comScore is probably the most famous technology in this category with global coverage across multiple territories and languages. IPS based measurement: Hitwise. Listening tools/platforms: Radian6, Brandtology, Alterian SM2 etc...

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Section 4

Free offsite tools

Google keyword planner

Its not ideal but Google Keyword Planner tool could provide some valuable insights. Update Sept 2013: Google Keyword Tool no longer offers the external version i.e. you have to have an Adwords account if you want to use this tool from now on. The interface of Google Keyword tool could change from time to time so the below screenshot may not be the most updated version. In essence, Google Keyword Planner is a free tool offered by Google, which helps users know how much search volume a certain keyword has on average across desktop & mobile devices in a certain location.

Lorem Ipsum 1. Google Keyword Tool 2. Google Trends

More details about how to use Google Keyword Tool will be covered in the Search Marketing section. Using a tool like this one could compare his/her brand with competitor brand in term of search volume to see how popular each
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brand is. Or one could investigate the demand for a certain product/service in certain geolocation.

Google Trends
Again this is a free tool. You could use it as it is or login using your Google account to use it and see additional information.

Its pretty straight forward to use. 1. You could start by typing in just one topic of interest or multiple topics separated by comma. 2. Each topic of interest would be represented by one line. Each line will have a different color. 3. While looking at world wide data, from 2004 until now as a time frame may be useful sometimes, more often than not you need to change the location to specic country/city of interest to yield actionable insights.

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4. Both location/duration and other options could be found on the right hand side menu. The interface is pretty intuitive.

Put exact phrases in quotes: "table tennis" Put a minus sign before a word you don't want: wimbledon -tennis Regional interest: Numbers represent search volume relative to the highest point on the map which is always 100. Click on any region/point to see more details on the search volume there. Related terms > Top Searches: Top searches refers to search terms with the most signicant level of interest. These terms are related to the term you've entered; if you didn't enter in a search term, the top searches will be related to the category or country/territory you've chosen.

Let me explain a couple of denitions to make sure that we are on the same page: Interest over time: Numbers represent search volume relative to the highest point on the chart, which is always 100. In other words, this number is not absolute number and you should pay more attention to the trend or the difference between two points relatively. Search terms: To compare up to 5 searches, separate them with commas: "table tennis", squash, handball. To nd any of several terms, separate them with plus signs: tennis + squash.

Related terms > Rising Searches: Rising searches highlight searches that have experienced signicant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. So if you're comparing data for a search term during 2006, the time period serving as the basis of comparison is 2005. Similarly, if you're comparing searches for that term during May of 2006, the basis of comparison is April of 2006. In Vietnam for example, iphone is enjoying a healthy lead vs Samsung galaxy for the past 12 months. Even if you dont see the line for Samsung Galaxy went up much during Samsung Galaxy product launch event, its mainly
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because in relation to iphone the uplift was small. So if you really want to see, you can exclude iphone and just look at samsung galaxy alone.

5. Another point worth mentioning is that for a new product launch, Google Trends may not have the latest data so you need to wait for a while. If after a couple of months, you havent seen much of an improvement, that means your product launch campaign didnt generate enough buzz and people were not searching for more information about the product. 6. For brand manager, looking at this graph over the course of 1-4 years could show interesting trends as well.

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Section 5

Paid Offsite Tools

comScore
comScore has a range of products/services: Audience Analytics Advertising Analytics Digital Business Analytics Mobile Operator Analytics

1. comScore 2. Hitwise

It works based on Panel-based methodology which simply means comScore would recruit internet users to join its panel. User would need to answer questionnaire so that comScore understand who would be using a particular computer at home or at work. After installing a special software on the computer, the software would monitor every online activity from that computer. comScore does include data from other sources as well. By knowing who would be using that computer from the questionnaire, looking at users behavior and other reliable independent reports about the total internet landscape in a location, comScore would be able to project upwards to the full online population in a certain location. comScore products could be used for various purposes, especially media planning in Vietnam and/or campaign evaluation. You could read more about each product from comScore site.
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Just to give one example, if you are looking to target male, age 25-30 in Vietnam, who like cars, comScore would be able to give you a list of sites in Vietnam that your target audience frequently visits and the likelihood of you nding them there. After running a campaign, using Campaign Reach/Frequency report, you should be able to know how much of your target audience you actually reach. Besides the paid products, comScore often publishes reports/ whitepapers on various different topics related to Digital activities. Look under Insights on the website and you could lter by country, tag, author, by keyword since there are many reports. Excerpt from the report Introduction of Online Video Measurement service in Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines Across the Asia-Pacic region, video viewing penetration ranged from 66.9 percent in Indonesia to a high of 89.8 percent in Vietnam, as both broadband access and content availability factored into online video viewing adoption. Vietnam (89.8 percent reach), Hong Kong (88.7 percent reach), Singapore (84.5 percent reach), Japan (83.7 percent reach) and New Zealand (83.4 percent reach) all saw online video penetration exceed the global average. You Tube is the number one video viewing, sharing site in Vietnam with more than 13 million unique viewers.

Detailed trafc information about a particular site could be found using comScore as well: site unique visitors
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 average time on site average pageview/visit demographics of visitors whether my sites audience also visits my competitors site? if yes how many percent is the overlapping? The beauty of the data is that you can compare almost any insights with your competitors/your category so that you can have better overall picture. If you want to have more information about their products, feel free to contact comScore directly.

Search Intelligence with some noteworthy data like: Search terms to a website or industry, Search engine results page (SERP) rank reports etc... Consumer Segment and AudienceView: report like Online Behavior of your target audience could be obtain, what they do, which site they visit etc... Conversion Intelligence for example: Benchmarking website conversion rates against key competitors and identify top acquisition strategies Ad effectiveness for example Proling beyond demographics by matching your visitor proles to advertisers target audiences to discover new opportunities One signicant drawback for Hitwise is that i am not sure if they have data in Vietnam. Its likely that they dont have data for this market. However the parent company Experian does have an dedicated site for Vietnam at http://www.experian.com.vn/index.html I often use the free dashboard data from Hitwise in certain country like the one for Singapore or Hong Kong. If has some useful information like Search Engine market share by volume of searches.

Hitwise
Hitwise works differently compared to comScore. Before Hitwise was bought by Experian, Hitwise used data from ISP (your local internet service provider). All of the trafc you are using has to go through your ISP or at least thats what happen for normal users so by partnering/being able to use data from ISP, Hitwise is able to get plenty of information about trafc to each site, how much of that trafc comes from search etc... Hitwise could aggregate and segment data to provide: Competitive Intelligence

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Or top websites

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Every month, there is an Industry spotlight which Hitwise will gives detailed data on that industry from top websites, top search terms in that industry, top upstream trafc etc... This month it is Community - Humanitarian for Singapore

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Section 6

Listening tools
While these tools are part of the Paid offsite tools, I want to dedicate a new section for them because they are becoming more and more important with the mass adoption of social media. Why do we need listening tools in the rst place? Its because there are so many conversations, mentions, so many LIKEs, share, comments, tweets, happening in an interconnected world and some of them are about brands. Also with more and more blogging platforms entering the marketplace like blogger, wordpress, tumblr etc..., more and more people are empowered to produce/publish their own point of view. Under the chapter about social assets > guiding principles, I mentioned briey about the benets of online listening/ monitoring like:

Understand consumer insights: what consumers are saying about your brands, your product, pricing strategy, product design, product features etc... Competitive Intelligence: how many mentions your competitors have vs yourself? are they good/bad mentions? what do consumers like about your competitorss products? Feedback for ofine marketing initiatives: understand reaction to your product launch, customers feedback, concern. Key inuencer identication Product development support Great customer support Crisis management: Brands need a tool that can help them/ alert them for any negative mentions/news being discussed/ commented/shared before things are out of control. Great customer support: Satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the most common type of sentiment your customers will express about your brand online. Social media listening tools will not only allow you to nd those comments quickly, but to respond timely, helping to stop bad press from spreading farther. Product development support
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 Sentiment Analysis: understand how consumers feel about your product/service, what they like/dislike. Some of the more popular tools in the US and Europe include: Alterian , ASOMO, AT Internet, Attentio, BrandsEye, Brandwatch, Cymfony, Infegy (Social Radar), Market Sentinel, Meltwater Group, Onalytica, Radian6, Sentiment Metrics, Sysomos, Visible Technologies. In this region, technologies like Brandtology, JamiQ, SocialBakers, Cimigo, Buzz Metrics from AC Nielsen, Boomerang seem to be quite popular as well. Lets go through some of the more popular tools out there:

One huge disadvantage for Radian6 is that it doesnt include many Vietnamese sources in its database so the amount of mentions it can capture for Vietnamese is very limited. Also sentiment analysis for Vietnamese (from what I heard) is of poor quality.

Radian6
This is a well rounded tool/service with lots of functions. They can listen to multiple channels and automate a lot of the listening, analyzing phase, giving you more actionable insights. Then you could use the engagement console to engage, response if you will to those conversations/comments or just ag it for further analysis. They could listen to conversation happening on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Google Plus, Pinterest, Linkedin, blogs, forums and other social platforms of course. The company was bought by SalesForce not too long ago for $326 million. With Radian6 and SalesForce combined, one could expect social CRM offering from SalesForce to be up at a much higher level. Then there is Marketing Cloud, which (from SalesForce marketing materials), the rst unied Social Marketing suite.

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It can Listen at social scale. Create compelling social presences. Connect with customers. Align sales, service and marketing. Amplify your content. Track campaign ROI. Drive real business results. (from SalesForces Press Release). They sell different services/packages like: Analysis Dashboard Insights Engagement Console Professional service etc... It is an Enterprise tool so do not expect it to come at a cheap monthly pricing. If i am not mistaken, the minimum should be in the range of $600+/month. It has both Analytics module (called Analytics Pro) and Engagement module (called Builder Pro) as well. Below is the pricing plan for Analytics Pro.

SocialBakers
This tool is known and used somewhat in Vietnam by clients and agencies. It may be because the entry price is very low and a free 14 days trial.

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With Analytics Pro, you could know more detailed information about any fanpage that you are interested in or twitter prole or You Tube channel. It is useful when you want to check out competitors fanpage or when you are preparing for a client pitch and you want to understand how the existing clients fanpage is doing.

Recommended tools for Vietnamese market

I get this request quite often. People often ask me if I could recommend any tools that are suitable for Vietnamese market. My response to that is: Please read the later section about an effective Analytics strategy, work out what exactly that you are trying to do and the potential benets rst before considering any tools. Do you actually have someone (in-house or outsource) that could read/analyse and make recommendations based on the mentions? If you just want to monitor your competitor Facebook fanpages, You Tube channel then Social Bakers is the way to go. If you are looking for a more holistic listening tool, then you could consider Brandtology, Buzz Metrics (from AC Nielsen), Boomerang (Vietnamese local tool), Cimigo listening service etc... I would not recommend Radian6 at this stage due to the lack of local coverage. If you want a tool to detect potential crisis early, then you need a tool that could provide close to real time data (delay of
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a couple of hours is ne). Whether you have to pay extra to get near real time data or not, it depends on each tool. Sentiment analysis for Vietnamese: right now as far as I know, majority of the tools that offer sentiment analysis in Vietnamese use a combination of tools and human because doing sentiment analysis for Vietnamese is hard work and the machine algorithm is very far from 100% correct (may be around 30-40%?).

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Section 7

Effective Analytics Strategy

Asking the right business questions

Always start with business questions, trying to understand what it is that your company is trying to achieve with the existing/new website/microsite/marketing campaigns. Answers like Increasing brand awareness, more sales are too generic in nature and we probably need to dig deeper. We wouldnt recommend starting with looking straight into some standard reports/dashboards yet because they may ll with jargons you dont understand or dont nd valuable. Knowing the average page per visit alone doesnt help sales manager one bit. Or knowing average pageview per visit increases 20% over the past 1 month alone doesnt help you make any kind of decision. Does that mean our brand awareness increase 20% over the past 1 month? No, a page view by itself is just a page view. We suffer from too much data, data with no meaning, no actionable insights after reading them rather than the lack of data so please do NOT start looking straight at some sample dashboards. Take your time and think deeper about what business issues you are trying to solve running this digital campaign or building this website? For example, who our target audience is? How do we know if the right target audience is visiting our site?

1. Asking the right business questions 2. 90/10 rule 3. Business Objectives to SMART KPIs 4. Data authenticity 5. It should belong to Marketing 6. One dashboard for each level 7. Segmentation is the key 8. Trend is what to look out for 9. Benchmarking

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 What do we want visitors to know about our brand when they are on the site? How do we know if visitors read/understand the message that we want them to? Could visitors nd what they are looking for easily on your site? How do you measure this qualitatively? How does online visit affect ofine store trafc? How do we know which marketing initiative is working better than the other? Which product line is working better on the website? How can we increase our prospective sales lead database using the website? Could customers who want to order something from us do so easily? Where do we put our hotline? Our menu? Can we increase our overall revenue by 10% in the next 3 months using online channels? After listing down some business questions that you want to answer, let put yourself in the shoes of the visitors and visit your company website/microsite. I know you probably visit your company website/microsite hundreds of time but lets do it at least one more time.

What do you see on the homepage? How do you feel? Could you fulll/nd what you want? Do you see the sign up button? How easy it is for you to sign up? (Please refer to the section about User Experience under PC Asset Chapter for more information). The next step is to translate these business questions into key performance indicator or KPIs.

90/10 rules
If you want to have a completely solid, effective analytics strategy, please read Avinash Kaushiks blog or read his book Web Analytics an hour a day. Everything I ve learnt about Web Analytics, I learnt from reading his blog & his book. Digital analytics association has a recommended reading list as well. What he recommend (and I nd it to be true) is to follow the 90/ 10 rule. Only 10% of your time (effort) and budget should be spent on choosing the right tool. 90% should be spent on getting the right analysts in place (or hire an agency to do this). An Analyst job is not easy. Of course, he/she needs to be able to create pretty graphs, or skillful at using spreadsheet (creating pivot tables, using different functions etc...). However, those are
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just the basics and more often than not we could nd many junior people who could do that stuff. The more important thing is the ability to recommend actionable business insights based on the company strategy, business situation, marketplace, competition. To do so, the analyst needs to have a broader understanding of the whole business operation, not only from the online marketing plan, but the overall marketing strategy, sales performance, customer services etc... For simplicity sake, in Vietnam context Google Analytics as an onsite tool would be powerful enough for the majority of companies. There will be some exceptions of course but their percentage is small. Of many free tools, Google Analytics seems to be most frequently used in Vietnam so familiarity is there. Enterprise tool like Omniture, WebTrends et... would cost quite a bit in Vietnam context and the time/human resource taken to implement these tools is substantial. After having a paid Enterprise tool, the company would need to send some staffs for training as well, which may not be that productive since people tend to move quickly from one company to the next in Vietnam.

The KPIs need to be related as directly as you can to the business questions you have. For example: Revenue coming from online channels? Growth of sales lead via online channels? Visit to store as a result of digital channels? If your target audience is in Ho Chi Minh city one of the KPIs can be how many unique visitors from Ho Chi Minh visit the site monthly? How many new visitors from Ho Chi Minh do you acquire monthly? Then you should go deeper in different trafc sources to understand which trafc source/campaign drive visitor from Hanoi or Hue to your website? So that you can consider pausing them. If you launch a new car and you want people to register to test drive it, then you may want to track which trafc source brings the highest number of sign ups. You KPIs could be: How many unique visitors see the landing page with the new car?
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Business Objectives to SMART KPIs

You can not optimize what you cant measure. So after listing down all of the business questions that you want to answer, its time to create SMART KPIs.

 The cost per new visitor to the landing page? Conversion rate from visit to sign up? The cost per sign up? If you have 2 important messages that you want to bring across to your audience then it may be worth to see how many unique visitors actually read your two important pages? How do they come to those pages and where do they go after these page? These reports are readily available on Google Analytics. Your KPIs could be: Loading speed of the special landing page The number of unique visitors who visit the landing page and stay for at least 1 minute Bounce rate on the special landing page

Secondly, properly implement the tracking code: Tag all pages on your website Put tracking codes at the bottom of the page (by putting the tracking code at the bottom, you can be sure that the page is fully loaded, user could see all of the content before Google Analytics counts it as one visit). Tracking code should be inline. They shouldnt be inside some fancy tables or frames etc... If you have multiple sub domain, consider different proles carefully If there is a cross domain issue i.e. users are redirect to another domain while they take some action on your site like e commerce function, please set up cross domain tracking properly Dene and properly set up conversion tracking/goals settings Use code to track onclick function if you want to. Be aware of redirects of any kind because they will mess up your trafc source analysis. Testing is KEY

Data authenticity
First you need to make sure that you understand how the analytics tool measures your KPIs. It should be pretty straight forwards and standard with Google Analytics and some of the bigger tools. However, each tool may dene things differently.

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Test and re-test the data to make sure what you see on the report is actually correct. Please test as many scenarios as possible. For example, you may want to test when someone search for a keyword on Google, see the site on the Search Engine Result Page, click on it and take some actions. The report should properly record the keyword that user uses, trafc source as organic trafc date of the visit, the action taken. Test with email marketing, banners, with directly enter the site. Test booking and see if the revenue data is being captured correctly, the items in the shopping basket are being recorded. The more time you spend testing now, the better it will be later on because wrong data is worse than no data. If your site uses ash, special codes need to be generated to track actions embedded in ash le. The same goes with Video. Consider the default cookie length in case you have special need Less than 10% difference in terms of visit is ok. No measurement is perfect so when you test or look at the report, if the difference between the numbers from two different tools or from two different sources is less than 10%, try to live with it. You may want it to be perfect but hey, in the ofine world, 10% accuracy is gold and i doubt 10% is the case in Vietnam.

It should belong to Marketing

Many companies have the IT department (locally or IT team from Head quarter) sending out monthly standard website statistics to the marketing team. To me its a waste of resources because IT team does not know about all of the marketing activities happening so they would not be in the best position to pull relevant reports To analyze you have to zoom into each channel, do segmentation like crazy and run custom report. Standard reporting wont do you much good So I am a big believer in training the Marketing team to be able to use the interface, and nd information they need on their own.

One dashboard for each level

Each position/level in a company has different need for information/data. Director level would be more interested in top line data, revenue data or the like. However, the marketing executive doing SEO would be interested in keyword ranking, trafc from brand terms vs non brand terms etc... So having separated dashboards for different levels/functions is of paramount importance. It will hopefully solve the issue of
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NOT reading the reports. Come on after you spend so much time with the reports, people do not even read them??? How could it be? Well i know its sad but its true and its happening all the time. People often only read reports when their boss asks them, when they have to authorize a payment or something of the sort.

In my humble opinion, trend is vitally important. Sometimes trend is even more important than the actual value at a particular point in time. They provide the overview, which is crucial in recommending next step. When you look at a report, different time frames will give you very different pictures/insights. For example, the all time cost per sales is at $2 and your campaign has been running for 1 year. However for the past 3 months, your cost per sales has been going up and now it is at $3.50 (nearly double the all time value)! To avoid noises and to arrive at the insights faster, sometimes it helps by viewing graphs in different time unit (daily, weekly, monthly). Also many tools allow you to do Compare to past which is the comparison of two different time frames on the same graph. This is a powerful function if used correctly because you want to compare apple to apple, taking into consideration the seasonal factors and all. It is often better to view two related parameters in one graph as well. For example, I would look at the number of clicks delivered daily and the average cost per click to see if things are really going well for Paid Search. If the line for daily number of

Segmentation is crucial
This idea is not new. Its basically mean you dont look at the aggregate number and try to make decision for next step. What needs to be done is to dig deeper, separate each channel, each trafc source and examine them one by one. The behavior of visitors in Ho Chi Minh may be very different from Hanoi for your website even so it may be good to analyze them separately. For example, if you know the overall website bounce rate is 50%, theres nothing much you could do. However, if you know that the bounce rate from paid search, to a specic landing page is 50% and there is a call to action on that page, now you are on so something. You may want to change the keyword, ad text or landing page to ensure consistency.

Trend is what to look for

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clicks going up and average cost per click going down then we are in good position.

Micro conversion
Even if your website do not offer e commerce or your sales cycle is very long, your sales happens ofine, you could still measure the effectiveness of the website/online campaigns using micro conversions. Micro conversions are things that visitors on your site do and they are of some value to you. For example, if a visitor see your location page, it is of some value because unless they want to visit you or interested in what you have to offer, they will not see where you are. In order for people to buy from you, they have to read your product page for example, then anyone who stays and reads your product pages for 2 mins may be a micro conversion. Same with sign up to become a member. Think of this the same way as fan for your fanpage, if someone likes your fanpage, you could continue to communicate to them in the future, so someone sign up, the value is even bigger because its often harder for user to sign up in comparison to like your fanpage.

Benchmarking
Context is everything. A number in silo means little. You could do internal benchmarking or external benchmarking, which is entirely up to you. External benchmarking may be hard at rst because its not easy to nd reliable third party data to benchmark against. For example, if your report says your sales revenue increased 10% over the last month, that may make you feel great. However, data from the industry shows that your nearest competitors increased their sales by 50% last month then your 10% may not be that great any more. Internal benchmarking could be done by comparing different time frame, segmenting and looking at individual data over time, comparing different product lines/microsites/sub domains etc...

Goal tracking & Conversion tracking

It goes without saying that you should implement goal tracking/ conversion tracking using the Analytics tool that you are using.

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Section 8

Google Analytics Overview

First of all you could learn about Google Analytics all by yourself using materials prepared by Google themselves. You could take the exam Google Analytics Individual Qualication and become a certied Google Analytics Individual. The list of those qualied individuals in Vietnam could be found here. Google even has the materials in Vietnamese so it would be quite easy for anyone who wants to learn. However, please note that the exam is in English, not Vietnamese. Its an online exam so you need a debit/credit card to pay for the exam ($50). It is important that you go through at least the following materials under Google Analytics Learning Center: First step Interpreting reports

Please watch this to learn about direct trafc source, referral trafc etc... Also note the way Google Analytics calculate time on page and time on site. Fundamentals Take note of visits not associated with correct sources Why data may not appear in campaign report Goals in Google Analytics In-depth analysis: Event tracking and virtual pageview: to track interaction within Flash, interaction with video player, download a pdf le, etc... Multi Channel Funnel report: the effect of multiple channels on conversions.

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Section 9

Reference

A couple of great resources

Avinash Kaushik: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ Google Analytics Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/ Google Analytics Academy for beginner. comScore Insights Press Release: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases Luna Metrics: http://www.lunametrics.com/ Junk Chart: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/ Digital Analytics Association: http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/ Adobe Digital Marketing Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing Web Trends Blog: http://blogs.webtrends.com/
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Display Advertising
This Chapter covers some of the basics of Display Advertising like: how to plan a display campaign, reporting and optimization, and detailed information about Google Display Network, Facebook Ads.

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Section 1

What is Display Advertising?

Display advertising (online) is simply about showing different ONLINE ad formats to targeted audience with the purpose of branding or direct response. Via single property purchase (websites, app, in game), ad networks or demand side platforms, advertisers could reach target consumers across desktop, laptop, smartphones and tablets. Since almost all of you have seen some kind of banners or video ads before, I will go quickly in this section and only highlight a few key points: How to plan a display campaign? Targeting options Ad formats Pricing options Report & Optimization
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Section 2

How to plan a Display Campaign

Campaign Objectives
It goes without saying that the objectives for media should be inline with the overall objective of the campaign. If the overall campaign has a centralized concept and key visual then it is probably necessary that the media plan need to follow that concept and key visual as well. The concept may dictate the ad format and execution as well. Campaign objectives will affect the creatives, targeting, pricing options.

1. Campaign objectives 2. Target audience online behaviors? 3. Right audience, Right message at the Right Time? 4. Ad Format 5. Consider the landing page 6. Estimated Performance

Basically there are two types of broad objectives (other objectives could fall under these two types): Branding: brand & product awareness, engagement Sales (direct response)

Where to nd and reach the target audience?

The next step is to nd out where and how to reach the target audience most effectively, across multiple screens (desktop, mobile, tablet) There are tools that could help us to do this like comScore, or Google Display Planner. Be aware that the data may not be correct so you need to apply common sense.
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On each screen, there are a number of activities that people often do from emailing, using instant messenger/messenger app, reading news, conducting research, playing games, reading forums etc... Generally there are a couple of options available: Manually select multiple ad positions in single sites/single applications across computer, tablet and smartphone. Use self served, auction-based ad network/social ad platform like Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, Twitter ads (not available in Vietnam yet), Linkedin Ads. Work with representatives from Ad Networks to nd suitable reach and targeting/options like: Admicro, Admax, Innity, Ambient Digital, Novanet, CleverNet. All of these networks have ofces in Vietnam. Some other networks for mobile platforms only like Vserv, Inmobi, So Smart etc... Use Demand Side Platform: this is new to Vietnam. I will go through it briey later on. Of course you could ask media agencies to help you come up with a display plan for you. They would use a combination of the options above and give you the nal proposed plan. I dedicate separated sections just for Google Display Network, Facebook Ads individually.

Right Audience
How to make sure that the plan reach the right audience? Well one way is by looking at the site demographics. But how do you know the site demographics for each site that you are interested in. If you want to do this manually, you could only investigate a limited number of sites (10-20 sites), probably covering the top sites only. If you use tools like comScore or Google Display Planner or TNS, they could give you much more information for Vietnam market. Google Display Planner, however, is mainly used to generate plan for Google Display Network. Right now, most of the ad networks except one or two could ONLY provide demographics information like age and gender, no marital status, education degree etc... Alternatively, you could use content as the indication of intent from the target audience. The logic behind is that if you are Adidas, you may want to reach people who are reading sports section in VnExpress. Because they are reading sports section, you assume that they are into Sports. If you select and contact individual sites directly, the amount of admin, coordination could be quite a lot so you should consider using ad network. Ad networks just do topic targeting based on the section of the site for example, sports section, news section, business section
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or based on the entire site content (if the site is dedicated to economy so it falls under business). For example you could choose Women channel from Ambient Digital or Innity to target moms. Google Display Network could do one step further and provide sub topic targeting based on actual content on the page using contextual targeting. More about this later on. You could target people based on their interest as well. This is done via some ad networks. Basically what they do is that they track users across multiple sites using cookies and then based on visit history, they could know if certain user likes football more than baseball for example. Then advertiser who want to sell football jersey could use interest targeting to display ads to these people. Many ad networks allow you to target users based on city level as well for example Google Display Network so that you dont waste your budget. Audience overlapping is a key issue that you need to be aware of especially if you run on multiple ad networks. To me, you should try to think strategically about this to ensure that budget is used optimally and we reach our objectives.

More often than not, you would try to sync the timing for Display with other activities. For example, before the campaign launches, you may decide to run some teaser; the week when it launches, you will have many of the banners start at the same time. Normally there are a couple of ways to schedule display besides syncing the schedule with other activities. Even distribution:

Increasing spend/trafc over time:

Right Time
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Decreasing spend/trafc over time:

With this option, you could select the day of the week, the time that you want to run your ads. Not all ad networks could be super exible about this but many of them are. Many ad networks allow you to control the number of times that an user would see your display message. This is called frequency capping. It could be used to make sure that we could optimize the total number of impression bought.

Right message
In pulse: The message used in your display media should be inlined with the campaign message for sure. At the same time, due to variety of options, you could try something creative here. Normal ad formats are: Text ads: Text ads are easy to generate and maintain. On smartphone, it could come with click to call, or click to download, click to show direction option as well so you could choose depending on your objective. Static image ad: basically it is a picture with words if you want to add them in. Animated image ad: it could be in ash or HTML5. Normally publishers or ad networks would provide the size that they allow to run for specic locations.

More over, if you manually try to contact individual sites, asking them to allow you to display ads only from 9am to 12pm on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday only, the answers from these publishers are probably No. However you could do this with ad network.

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Banner size is one key issue in Vietnam because top publishers using different sizes from each other so if you want to book across sites, you have to resize banners so many times. Just look at examples of banner sizes from VnExpress (price list & banner size)

Some other publishers like Yahoo or Zing have been following IAB standards. Of course banner size on smartphone will be different from desktop and tablets due to smaller screen size. Video ads: Video ads could be promoted alone, in the position of image banners or show before/after video on You Tube. or from 24h (price list & banner size) Rich Media Ads: with this type of ads basically it allows for user interaction with the banner. User could initiate the ban-

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ner take over of the page, play the game on the banner, and many other things. You could view many Rich Media ad examples from Rich Media gallery from DoubleClick, or Creative Zone by Media Mind.

Different Target Audience, Different Creative Execution

It is important that we use the suitable creative execution with each target audience segment of our campaigns. For example, a campaign targeting moms and kids need very different banner ideas to be attractive to each segment. Build complete audience personas and think how you could bring the campaign message to them creatively. Another point to note is that we often run multiple creative versions. Each version could have multiple sizes. Why we need multiple versions: because we want to test which creative execution is performing better in real time. Also with different We need multiple sizes because ad network would automatically optimize which creative size works best.

If you buy on a x cost basis then you would know how many advertisers are in rotation with you during a given period already. With ad network, normally since you do not have the budget to buy 100% of the market share of the whole vertical or category, more often than not you would have a small share of voice for a particular channel i.e. if your SOV is 10%, your ads will only appear 1/10 of the time, and you will see other ads. A bigger share of voice (SOV) would mean that your ads appear more frequently. Generally you would try to avoid having a too small share of voice or buy too little impressions/clicks because just like TVC, if you ad only shows for like 1 sec on TV, no one is going to see it. With most ad networks in Vietnam, a couple of million impressions per month is really small.

Budget and costing options

Common options in Vietnam to buy display banner include: Cost per duration (CPD): among the few top publishers, this is one of the most frequently used options. Cost per thousand impression (CPM): CPM for animated banner is often cheaper than Rich Media or Video Ads. Different vendors may charge more for additional targeting options like Yahoo would charge more if you want to narrow the targeting based on gender and age.
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Share of Voice (Share of Impression)

This concept is critical for ad network.

If you care more about people seeing the ads or interacting with the ads, you could use this option with frequency capping. Cost per click (CPC): you should use this option if your goal is to bring more visits to your sites. A couple of fancier, less frequently used options include: Cost per acquisition (CPA): acquisition could be dened as a sales or a sign up. You only pay when there is a conrmed acquisition. You could consider this option if the CPA is right and the volume is worth it. The reason this option is not used frequently in Vietnam because the majority of publishers and ad networks dont want to use this option. They would rather buy based on CPD or CPM or at most CPC. Cost per Engagement (CPE): this is a pretty novel idea because dening Engagement alone is tricky. Anyway, some examples used by the ad network offered this option include time spent on site, pageviews etc... If the ad network allows for bid adjustment, then you could try it. Basically bid adjustment allow you to increase/decrease your standard bid price for certain audience, on certain screen.

Total estimated impressions Estimated Unique impressions (this could be used as a proxy to calculate Reach) Share of voice (share of impression) Estimated click through rate Estimated number of clicks CPM CPC (even if you buy based on Cost per Duration, you could still calculate backwards to derive at CPC) Total cost If your objective is branding, you may want to put in Frequency as well. Even if you buy on a Cost per Duration basis, you should still have these numbers because to be honest, unless your banner is in a good position (above the fold normally), users may not see it so you need to rely on click through rate and clicks to understand clearly whether people engage with your campaign. Based on your idea/concept and the creative execution (ad format), you may estimate additional metrics like: Interaction with banner: banner click, game play etc...
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Estimated Performance
Basic estimated metrics when it comes to Display Plan are below:

 Video views Visit to the site: please note that there will be a drop off from clicks reported by publishers and visits recorded by Google Analytics to the site. The drop off in some cases could be quite large like 30-35%. If your goal is direct response, or more often than not in Vietnam, your promotion include some games that users could play, or a contest then your estimated metrics should be: Sign up/sales leads: the estimated number of people who sign up/ll out a form Game Play: the estimated number of times users play your game Contestants: the estimated number of people joining the contest. Revenue if applicable View-though conversions: many ad network allows the use of third party ad serving/tracking, which provides additional conversion data like view through conversion tracking. A Viewthrough Conversion happens when a customer sees an image or rich media ad, then later completes a conversion on your site. This is different from a Click-through Conversion, which happens when a customer had previously clicked on

an ad and then completed a conversion on your site. (from Google help section) Please note that we are talking about the whole display plan estimation so you need to be very careful and not simply sum all statistics across multiple channels, without overlapping issue consideration.

Landing page consideration: loading time and relevancy

This is very important and you shouldnt leave it out at this stage. Please be sure of the content of the page match the message on the ads and the target audience. If your landing page takes more than 10 seconds to load, please x it before running the campaign.

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Section 3

Google Display Network

Comprehensive training materials from Google
For those who dont know, Google Display Network (or GDN) is a network (ad network) of Google sites and partner sites, mobile sites, mobile apps etc... It includes sites like: You Tube, Gmail, Zing, Nhaccuatui. HaiVL, bongda.com.vn and many other sites. Google has comprehensive materials to learn about Google Display Network solutions. I would recommend you to visit them and read them carefully Display Ads on Google Display network Display Ads on You Tube Display Ads on Mobile devices

Using Google Display network, you not only could advertise to different cities in Vietnam, in Vietnamese or English but you could also advertise to different countries in the world, using local languages. There are a couple of must-read sections like: Value of display advertising on Google Display network (if you are completely new). Different targeting options offered by Google Display network including: contextual targeting, placement targeting (select individual site/ad position), combination of placement targeting and contextual targeting, interest based targeting, topic based targeting, location, demographic and time targeting Google built in remarketing capability for both Search and Display so you could reach out to different audiences seamlessly. As for media purchase options, you could choose Cost per Click (CPC) pricing, Cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) or Cost-per-acquisition (CPA). How to Optimize your campaign

Google Display Ad Planner Tool

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Basically this is a tool that could help you in your planning stage. The tool is built within Google Adwords platform so you have to have an Adwords account in order to use it. As per usual, Google has a good help section, showing you how to use this tool. Please read directly from Google about Display Planner. For example, if you are interested in a single site, you could use Search by placement function

It would be interesting to see Sites also visited to understand audience overlapping if you choose to advertise on both sites. Alternatively, you could specify an audience that you want (in terms of demographics, interest, sites they may visit etc...) and the tool gives you back some suggestions (alert, the data is not completed yet).

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course you should compare the cost per view across other options like using Facebook ads, put it on Clip.vn etc... However, from my experience, You Tube ads is reliable and has low Cost per View. Also since all of the views will be counted as You Tube Video views so you could showcase easily how many views your video gets, which may not be available if you use other platforms. To understand more about You Tube TrueView Ads, please watch this video You Tube TrueView Ads: Only Pay when Viewers Watch.

Display Ads on You Tube

Without a doubt, You Tube is the largest video sharing platform in the world and in Vietnam as well. There are plenty of ad format supported by You Tube including text, banner, video ads across multiple positions. Please read more about You Tube ad format here. More importantly You Tube allows you to buy on CPM, CPC and CPV (Cost per View) basis. If you have a video and you want to promote it to more people in a particular position, You Tube is a great option to use. Of

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Section 4

Facebook ads

Using Facebook Ads to get more fans

As briey mentioned under the Chapter about Social Media Assets, Facebook ads could help you to Get more Fans or Increase Engagement with your Fan page post. To have an overview understanding of what the platform could help you with, please read this section Advertise on Facebook or the section about Facebook for Business If you are familiar with Google Adwords system, especially Google Display Network then Facebook Ad Platform shouldnt be an issue. While the ad format, its position on the page (right hand side or in the news feed etc...) take some time to learn, the rest is quite similar with Google. If you want to get more Likes for your page, you should use the option Get more Page Likes like the example below: You could use advanced targeting options provided by Facebook, to carefully select who should be exposed to your ads and like your page. This was talked about in the previous chapter already so I wont repeat it here again. In short, after you select different targeting options, Facebook would automatically suggest to you a bid price that is suitable.
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Of course you dont have to follow it and bid higher or lower as you wish. One thing to note is that the current average Cost per Click (2013) for Facebook Like Ad in Vietnam is relatively cheaper than other countries, its between $0.1 - $0.2. Of course this is subject to change any time in the near future.

Increase post engagement

As you read from the previous Chapter about only 10%-16% of your fans would see your posts on the news feed, increasing post viewership and post engagement using Paid Ad is something you need to understand well. This is how Facebook is making its money. You have the option to choose which particular post you want to promote and how much money, together with other audience targeting options you want to use. Please note that you should always use Sponsored Stories because it is powerful to see next to the ad how many of your friends already like/comment it. You could either automatically promote the latest post on your fanpage with x budget per post, or you could wait a bit to see which post has the highest organic reach, like, comment, share rate and then use paid ad to promote it even more. Those with
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high organic reach, like/comment/share rate means it resonates better with your fan, and probably your target audience as well. Another option is to use Boost Post directly from your fanpage. Upon putting in the budget that you want to use to promote this post, Facebook would estimate for you how many people you could potentially reach.

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Driving trafc back to your site/ microsite

You could certainly do this by various ways such as: a. Directly put the URL on the Destination URL of the Ads: b. Post a status/note about the content of the landing page that you want to promote, and then promote that post using Facebook Ads. This is driving trafc to your page indirectly, however, it has the added benets of increasing engagement for your Facebook posts. If you use option a, you could see something like the screenshot below: The same principles apply (A/B testing, mixing the different elements of the ads together to test which one works better)

How to buy it?

Just like Google Adwords platform, you could either do it yourself or you could hire an agency to do it for you. Using your own credit card to pay Facebook directly. However, please be mindful that you are running ads for your company, you would need to pay withholding tax to Vietnamese Tax Authority because Facebook does not have an ofce in Vietnam yet.
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As for agency, there are many agencies ,big or small that could help you to advertise on Facebook. Guidelines on how to choose an agency is not within the scope of this section so I will not mention any agency names.

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Section 5

Real Time Bidding

advertised. The winner is alerted by the publisher and allowed to place its ad on the page. The remarkable thing about this entire process is how fast and how often it takes place. The entire series of to-and-fro communication between publisher and advertisers takes place in 300-500 milliseconds, causing no visible delay to the user. This process is repeated for every ad slot on a page. If this is something that you consider too imaginative, please have a look at the following companies, they are already participating heavily in it. They may have multiple roles in the process, not just what got listed down below. Google with DoubleClick (Exchange) and Google Invite (DSP), Admeld (SSP). DSP% DSP% DSP% DSP% DSP% DSP% DSP% AD Buyer%http://www.adbuyer.com/ Brand Screen% http://www.brandscreen.com/ DataXu% http://www.dataxu.com/ EfcientFrontier% InviteMedia% MediaMath% http://www.efrontier.com/

Real time bidding, Demand Side Platform (DSP), Supply Side Platform (SSP)
Real time bidding (RTB) is a hot topic in display media world these days. It has been used quite often recently in more mature markets. In Singapore, many agencies are buying media via DSP. You could read more about RTB from wikipedia. A user heads to a page on a publishers website, causing it to start loading. In the same instant the publisher sends out a bid request to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers saying, Weve got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets bids from different advertisers, which then analyses to gure out the highest bidder and the brands being

http://www.invitemedia.com/ http://www.mediamath.com/ http://www.thetradedesk.com/

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The Trade Desk%

 DSP% DSP% DSP% DSP%

Triggit%

http://triggit.com/

SSP Open Adstream

Turn%http://www.turn.com/ X + 1% XA.net% http://www.xplusone.com/ http://www.xa.net/

Exchange%

Ad Brite% http://www.adbrite.com/

Exchange% Ad ECN% http://advertising.microsoft.com/exchange Exchange% Exchange% Exchange% Exchange% Exchange% Exchange% Exchange% SSP% SSP% SSP% Adap-tv% http://adap.tv/ Adjug% http://www.adjug.com/

Mobclix% http://www.mobclix.com/ OneScreen% OpenX% http://www.onescreen.com/

http://www.openx.org/ http://www.opera.com/

Opera software% Right Media%

http://rightmedia.com/

PubMatic% http://www.pubmatic.com/ ReviNet% http://www.revinet.com/ Rubicon% http://www.rubiconproject.com/

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Section 6

Tracking different media campaigns

Use Google Analytics to Track Display Campaigns

What you are after is to have a consolidated interface about all of your display trafc and be able to evaluate them at the same time. Google Analytics or any javascript onsite tracking tools (Site Catalyst, WebTrend, DoubleClick) could do this. They could record the last trafc source before user visits your website.

1. URL tool builder 2. View-through conversion

What you need to do is to customize the URL of your banner a bit. Each tool will require you to customize the URL slightly differently but it will follow the same logic. I will explain in details for Google Analytics since it is more commonly used in Vietnam.

URL Builders - Add Custom Campaign Parameters To Your URL

You could see step by step explanation from the online tool or the screenshot below Website URL is the URL of your landing page. For campaign source: you could put in the actual publisher name that your banner will run like VnExpress, 24h or the like.
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 Campaign medium: banner/email/ etc... Campaign name: this could be the name of your promotion so that when you look at Google Analytics report, you could see performance for different promotions easily. Lets put in christmas2012 Press Generate URL and you would have a link like this: http://www.example.com/banner?utm_source=vnexpress&utm_ medium=banner&utm_campaign=christmas2012

There are best practices for URL builder as well, please nd them here. If you understand the principles, you could apply them in many different cases like tracking trafc from QR code. Well you could put Campaign source as qrcode for example and then use QR code generator for the special URL with custom campaign parameters. Every time someone visits your landing page through that QR code, Google Analytics would recognize the campaign parameters and give you the stats you need for just the QR code portion of your overall marketing campaign.

Post Impression tracking

Google Adwords Conversion Tracking could track View through conversion (or Post Impression conversion). You may ask what View through conversion is? Well from Google Adwords help section Additional conversions that came from people who saw your display ad but didn't click on it, and then later visited your site and completed a conversion. You could read more from here. Technically an ad impression helps to generate awareness, to raise curiosity. Without the awareness you may not even know what you want to search for. Hence being able to track conver159

sions generated by post impression (users who are exposed to banner ads) would be very helpful to understand the full picture. For example, how does user know that they need to search for A Class car from Mercedes if they dont even know that the car is launched in Vietnam? Brands need to use Display Media, PR and other channels to generate that awareness so that later on, people may come online and search for the car. If you use third party ad serving, then you could track view through conversion across channels as well. If you happen to use DFA (DoubleClick for Advertiser), then oodlight tag is often used to track conversion data together with post impression activities coming from the ad served by DoubleClick. There are many other third party ad serving technologies as well. MediaMind is something you could consider as well for Vietnam market. However, just like DoubleClick, MediaMind ad serving is not free to use.

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Section 7

Reporting and Optimization

Basically at this stage, you would have the estimated performance done in the planning stage so at least you should start tracking those key metrics to understand how the campaign is performing. 1. Impressions Google actually has some sound advices about this here. They 2. Click advise that:

Display Network, like day part targeting, location targeting and especially desktop/laptop targeting vs mobile and tablet targeting. If you campaign landing page does NOT optimize for mobile phone, please do NOT allow ads to run on mobile platforms.) Check Setup Consistency: If you notice a large number of clicks but little or no conversions, check your ad creative and your landing page to make sure they are well-matched. For example, if you are a furniture store that is selling sofas, be sure that your landing page directs users to the section of your website that features sofas instead of sending them to the general furniture homepage. You should also verify that your conversion code is set up correctly. Try generating a conversion yourself and then check your account to see if the conversion was recorded. Again the advice from Google regarding the checking of conversions should be done before the campaign launch, and then monitor closely after the launch as well. Ok so now may be after 1 week and you need to do weekly reporting, and you start to realize some of the things below: a. Click and Visit difference: One of the rst thing you would notice is that there is probably a huge difference between the number of clicks reported by the
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3. Click through rate

Week 1 of Campaign Launch

4. Visitors
Immediate Monitoring: Check within a day after you launch 5.your Reach new campaign to make sure it's active and accruing impressions and clicks.

6. View-through conversion

Your Targeting : Within two to three days, check the 7.Correct Uplift in Search if any Networks tab to exclude sites and add negative keywords to correct straight-forward cases of poor targeting matches. An example of poor targeting would be "bra" ads appearing on sites about "Bra, Italy." (From Chandler: you could check for correct targeting across channels as well, not just for Google

publishers and the number of visits reported by Google Analytics. Well, if the difference is less than 10%, then you are ne. I am talking about 30% - 40% difference and normally the number of visits is lower. Lets talk about the easy case, the less than 10% difference rst. I would often present is that when it comes to measurement in the ofine world like how much circulation a particular newspaper has, or how many readers it has, the degree of accuracy is not 90% but everyone seems alright. If we are alright with 90% accuracy (or less) for the ofine world, we shouldnt expect too much for online. As for the huge difference, you could read more about the difference between clicks and visits from Google Analytics Help section. It is true that some publishers would inate the number of clicks articially (its sad but true). However, the majority is not I hope. Many times, the discrepancy is because: There is no Google Analytics tracking code on the landing page The site loading speed is too slow or the ad server response is too slow.

The site is made of ash and Google Analytics tracking code is not implemented correctly. Some other technical errors. b.Click, CTR, CPC, Bounce Rate: Assuming that your tracking is correct, you start to receive trafc information for each ad placement that you run, you could group them into channel rst like: Google Display as one channel, Facebook Ads, Ambient Network, Yahoo etc... You will immediately notice the differences in Click through Rate (CTR) and Cost per Click (CPC) across channels. Some seem better than others. When you look at reports from Analytics, you would see that the bounce rates for different channels are very different as well. If your goal is just trafc at the cheapest cost, I would recommend going ahead, optimizing channels based on CPC, volume of trafc and Bounce Rate. A bounce rate of say 50% is generally not good. You should wait to have enough data though and to avoid any sudden uctuation on a daily basis so may be start optimizing in week 2 or 3 only? c.Other metrics like conversion, revenue: If you have number of sign ups, registration, game play, contestants as metrics then optimizing for those metrics should be the
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key priorities, not CPC or CTR. You could easily calculate conversion rate (number of conversions by the number of clicks), cost per conversion. From there optimization could be done for each channel, each campaign, each ad, each keyword. Using report from Google Analytics, you should know how many conversions there are from each channel. The logical way is to shift budget from those that are not performing well, to those that are performing. Going beyond last click attribution is not within the scope of this book so I wont go further than this. You could certainly read more here if you want to. An example of what you could see from Google Analytics is below:

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Section 8

Reference
IAB Ad Unit guideline: http://www.iab.net/ad_unit DoubleClick Rich Media Gallery: http://www.richmediagallery.com/ Mediamind Rich Media Gallery: http://creativezone.mediamind.com/ Google Display Network: https://support.google.com/adwords/certication/?hl=vi#topic =20318 Google Think Insights Display: http://www.google.com/think/ad-types/display.html Facebook ad guide: https://www.facebook.com/business/connect Ambient Ad Network: http://ambientdigital.com.vn/ Innity Ad Network: http://www.innity.com/

Komli Ad network: http://www.komli.com/sea/ InMobi Ad Network: http://www.inmobi.com/advertise/ Vserv Mobile Ad Network: http://www.vserv.mobi/ Ad Exchanger: http://www.adexchanger.com/ Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/vn/topics/advertising

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Search Marketing
Paid Search and SEO are not new in Vietnam. However, many people do not know when to use them or how they work properly. This chapter attempts to answer these questions, together with suggestions on how to evaluate the performance of these channels.

13

Section 1

Demand capture channel

Overview What We Will Discuss In This Section
Search engine has become an integral part of our daily lives. We use it as one of the ways to navigate the internet, whenever 1. Overview we dont remember something (movie name, URLs), nd information etc... 2. What is Search Engine Marketing? According to comScore, the number of unique searchers using 3. Users behavior computer at home and work in Vietnam increased 13% year on 4. Right audience year. Google is the dominant search engine in SouthEast Asia and in the world except for China, Russia, Japan, Taiwan and a few other territories. Google is so ubiquitous in Vietnam that when talking about Search Engine or Search Engine Marketing, most people only think of Google and Google Adwords (except for those working for Yahoo Vietnam I suppose). The data below from comScore conrms the Google Share of Total Searches in Vietnam exceeds 96%.

5. Right time 6. Paid Search specic benets 7. SEO specic benets

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use the short form SEM to imply Paid Search only. I will use the term Paid search in this ebook to talk about Pay per Click Search Marketing. Before going deeper into the nuts and bolts of Paid Search and SEO, it would be helpful to remember that Paid Search and SEO should be viewed from a marketing standpoint. Many people get lost in how Paid Search or SEO work technically and forget what is more important is how Paid Search and SEO work together with other marketing channels in your overall marketing plan. We will discuss this in more details in the next section about When to use Paid Search or SEO. So for the purpose of this ebook, we only discuss Google Adwords program. However, please note that other platforms may work in similar ways, whether it is Microsoft Adcenter or Baidu platform. If you are interested in search engine market share across different territories, you can refer to my post Search Engine Market Share Back to Search Engine Marketing. It actually has many benets and its a big industry. Lets look at the US for example, Search Engine Marketing commands nearly 50% of all the spend for Online marketing. Its similar in other mature markets.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing includes both Paid Search (Pay per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). However, in Vietnam and may be in the region (Southeast Asia) as well, people
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At this point some of you may ask what about qualied Company? I heard about Google partners before, what does it mean? Well Google has a couple of different programs for reseller/ qualied partners for Google Adwords: SMB program or the reseller program: Google set up this programs to help agencies who primarily work with Small and Medium Businesses (SMB or another word is SME). If you are a SMB certied partner, it simply means that your company meets the requirements from revenue & operation stand point to serve Small and Medium Businesses. Premier SMB partners may not have the necessary skills/teams to serve bigger clients/accounts (MNC clients or bigger brands). I use the word may not because every company is different and you have to judge for yourselves. To nd out which company is a Premier SMB partner in certain market, please go to Find your local SME partners. You can change the territory of interest at the bottom right hand corner. Google Certied Partner: From Googles landing page about the program It's a globally recognized stamp of approval which showcases knowledge of the latest AdWords tools and best practice techniques and will enable you to effectively manage AdWords campaigns.
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For countries like Vietnam, however, the per centage is much smaller due to various reasons. Human resource, trust, evangelists, lack of market leaders are just a few. As for learning about Google Adwords, Google has a comprehensive both text and video based training program. You should check out Adwords Certication Help and Learn With Google. You could become a qualied Google Adwords Professional bypassing two exams: the fundamental exam and one of the three advanced exams (Search, Display or Reporting). As a certied Google Adwords Professional, you would possess the necessary skills to manage Google Adwords accounts/campaigns. This is,however, just the rst step in your Digital career if you choose.

To meet the requirements for this program, you company needs to employ a couple of certied Google Adwords Professionals and your monthly spend with Google has to hit a certain benchmark. To nd out, which company is the local Google Certied Partner in your territory, please use this link Any company could join either the Google Certied Partner program or the Premier SMB program (if suitable) so if a company claims that they are the exclusive Google representative in a certain territory, in my humble opinion, that claim is false. Google recently introduced Google Partners, which would replace Google Certied Program I suppose.

What represents your need at that particular moment in time? Its the phrase you type into the search box or Search Term (Keyword). With Search Engine Marketing we can target the right audience because you could choose to target people based on their need represented by search terms (keywords). By selecting the keywords, you know what type of audience you are attracting and whether they have the need to use your product/services. Intent triumphs demographic data in my opinion. Because even if you are 80 years old and you still want to buy a bicycle, and search for buy bicycle in Singapore and I would want my ads to appear in front of you if I sell bicycles.

Search Engine Marketing Benets

Right Audience
Have you ever visited Google for leisure? Like instead of watching video on You Tube or listening to music, you go to Google to have fun, to relax? The answer will be no most of the time. You use search engines because you have an information need and you expect to nd the answer using search engines.

Right Time
The ads ONLY appear when people are searching, advertisers have the opportunity to target customers at the precise moment when they indicate their needs. From Google Learning Center about Paid Search: Your ad is displayed to people who are already searching for the kinds of products and services you offer. So those people are more likely to take action.

Cost Effective

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I am not using the word cheap but rather cost effective because the budget for paid search or SEO could be hundreds of thousands more millions depending on your objectives. With Paid Search, you only pay for when someone clicks on your ads and organic search trafc is free. Technically its not free because you need to hire someone (in-house or outsource to help with SEO so there is cost there).

You could test different ad texts with the same keyword at the same time. You could change ad text as many times as you like with no additional cost as well unlike traditional media. If you are not sure what ad text looks like, below is one example:

Google Adwords benets

Besides the common benets of Search Engine Marketing above, Google Adwords program offers additional benets as below: Budget control: From Google themselves With cost-perclick (CPC) bidding, youre charged only when someone clicks your ad, not when your ad appears. There are a variety of bidding options you can choose from. You decide how much or little you want to spend monthly, and youll never be charged more than that amount. Theres no minimum spending commitment. Easy to set up and manage: anyone can sign up online for an Adwords account and has his/her ads live on Google within 1 hour. This is how ad could appear on the page i.e. either on top position or Others (side or bottom of the page) An example of the ad is below

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 Location targeting, time targeting: You could target your ads based on different locations like different big provinces in Vietnam (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Da Nang etc...) or local territories in many countries. You could decide when to run the ads, which time of the day, which day of the week. You could advertise overseas in California, New York or Sydney from Vietnam, not having to contact agencies or Google in the US or Australia. Reporting & tools: you can log in and see how your campaign performs 24/7 with standard statistics like how many times the ad appear (impressions), how many times people click on them, the average cost per click, the total cost etc... If you have conversion tracking on or ecommerce tracking, you would know which keyword brings you the conversion/the sales. There are many other benets but the above are the most basic. I would encourage you to check out the Adwords learning center for more information.

The rst aim of doing SEO is to get your website rank higher on search engine result pages for targeted keywords. By doing so, you would expect people to visit your site more from search engines. Improve branding and awareness You could reach out to people who are interested in your services but do not know about you yet. Numerous studies have been carried out to understand the brand lift from doing SEO. Improve user experience on your site Since doing SEO means structuring your content in a better, more logical/user friendly/crawler friendly way user could have better experience on your site. By doing so you may expect a better conversion rate from your visitors as well. Brand protection Optimize your PR plan/articles, actively involve in link building over long term can help you to dominate the rst page of the Search Result Page. By doing this, you could avoid negative articles about your brand getting more trafc from curious readers through search engine. Better landing page, lower cost per click for Adwords

Search Engine Optimization benets

Increase visibility & natural search trafc:

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If you are running Paid Search and doing SEO at the same time, by improving your landing page you can help to increase quality score for Google Adwords and decrease your bid price on Paid Search, increase your average position. There could be so many other benets related to ecommerce because trafc from search engine often converts quite well compared to other trafc sources. The main reason is that visitors from search engines are people with specic need in mind already.

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Section 2

When to use it?

This is the key because both Paid Search and SEO are not new in Vietnam. However, the use of Search Marketing in Vietnam is still quite limited. For sure it is growing but of course not at the rateWhen that was expected 1. to use PPC? a couple of years ago.
2. When to use SEO? I will try to answer this question by going through some scenar-

Unfortunately Google no longer offers the external version so you have to sign in using your Google account to use this tool.

ios: 3. PPC or SEO?

4. Product launch 5. Event

Bank needs more credit card leads

If you are a bank and you want to have more people signing up 6. FMCG Marketing campaign with microsites for your credit card application. Should you use Paid Search?
7. Evergreen campaign

To answer this question, rst lets try to understand the demand for products/services in Vietnam. 8. nancial Promotional campaign
9. Branding &dedicated awarenesstool campaign Google has a that can help us to understand the

average monthly search volume from Vietnam for any topic that 10. Lead generation we are interested in. Its called Keyword Planner.
11. Crisis

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 In this example, you can start by putting in phrases like the tin dung or putting in your landing page and indicate your product category. Under targeting select the suitable values like Location: Vietnam Language: English and Vietnamese. This is the interface language of Google/browser that you are using.

The result shows that for the keyword the tin dung (credit card), there are on average 1,600 exact match searches per month in Vietnam. Please note that unlike the previous Google Keyword Tool, which showed search volume for broad match by default, the new Keyword Planner shows EXACT match search volume by default.

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It is vitally important to understand keyword matching options so please have a read at Google Learning Center Using keyword matching options Please note that if we consider broad match keyword, for the tin dung, you could expect the volume to be more than 100k. The search volume shown under Avg. monthly searches column is the monthly average taking the data from the last 12 months so it is not the search volume for last month and it will not be the search volume when you start your campaign especially if you are in category like Whisky that is often used for gift during Tet holidays or similar products. You could click on the trafc simulator to understand the monthly search volume over the last 12 months.

are interested in a certain product/service and actively looking for more information about it. Back to our scenario, if you are marketing manager of a bank and you know that there are people looking for information about the tin dung (credit card), the visa (visa card) etc... on Google every month, not targeting these people is kind of waste. Because while they are searching for more information about anything related to credit card, they either nd your bank offers or they nd someone else. For example, this is the screenshot for me when i search for the tin dung visa (visa credit card)

Similarly you could use this tool to understand the search volume for any other topics, keywords in any markets that Google offers. This is a great way of knowing how many people
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Even though the campaign is running 24/7, the beauty of Paid Search is that your ads ONLY appear if people search for the keywords that you choose i.e. they are looking for credit card information and you are only charged when they like what you offer and click on the ads. Should you stop the ads for certain days of the week, i would say no if you have enough budget because this is on demand marketing. As for SEO, it is a MUST.

Product launch
You are going to launch a new product (non Fast Moving Consumer Good FMCG type) and its going to be a massive campaign with TVC, Print, Out of Home, Online Banners, PR news with a big event at the end. Example could be launching a new car, new phone, new TV etc... Should you use Paid Search or SEO? Well I would assume that since you are using Online Banners, you have a website/microsite ready. There are a couple of things you should do in my opinion: Implement basic SEO onsite optimization for your landing page. Rand Fishkin wrote a beautiful post about this a visual
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In summary, for this scenario Bank needs credit card leads I would recommend an evergreen campaign for Paid Search with some budget allocated for tactical campaigns and at the same time invest in SEO. Evergreen Paid Search targeting brand terms, generic terms related to credit card, credit card application, lifestyle benets terms Separate campaigns for seasonal campaigns/promotion targeting specic type of card could be set up for easy budget control and performance evaluation.

guide to keyword targeting and on page optimisation. He included a checklist there already so I wont repeat it here. I would even encourage you target brand terms, slogan of the campaign and all related terms of your products using Paid Search. What could be worse than spending massive amount of money to launch a product to let people know about it (raise awareness) and when they are curious, search for it online, they couldnt nd any relevant/ofcial information. I come across this problem time and again in Vietnam and it is a painful situation. Believe me if your launch campaign is successful, people will search for the new product/service online using brand terms or other related terms. Use Google keyword tool to understand if people are searching for your product/service online. I am talking about generic, category terms, not necessary your brand. If they are, I would go with a full Paid Search campaign, not only covering brand terms for the new product but also generic category terms as well, product benets terms etc... You dont have to run the Paid Search campaign for a long period of time if you are unsure and this is the rst time that you try, just make sure the campaign is live during the product launch period.

Optimize your PR article to make sure they are SEO friendly as well. I am talking about online PR articles, not ofine. If the article is optimized well, not only its lifecycle can be longer since people may be able to nd it on Google when they search for your new product, but it will help you later for online brand reputation management also. If you cant do a whole lot here, please consider doing the bare minimum: keyword (targeted term) in the main title of the article include the keyword once in meta description (if possible) include keyword once prominently near the top of the article repeat 2-3 times variably in the copy below keyword in the ALT tag of the image used in the article If the product is a key product, and there are people searching for your category on Google, its best to spend some efforts/money with SEO for longer term as well. How much money you want to spend for SEO depends on search volume, users behavior for your category and of course your own budget.

3-month promotional campaign for FMCG

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You are the marketing manager of a FMCG brand (Fast Moving Consumer Good) like green tea or milk or toothpaste, you are going to have a 3-month campaigns with a microsite, some online games/competition, some activities on Facebook, forum seeding, some online banners and of course a massive ofine campaign. Should you use Paid Search or SEO? Well there are many variables in this case. While FMCG products are not generally searched for online but you need to make sure that at least if people search for your campaign name on Google, either by Paid Search or SEO, you have to be there, ideally on the top position. The same goes with your key message, your slogan even. Do not assume that when people search for your campaign brand name, your dedicated microsite would show up at position 1 for natural results. More often than not, these microsites are made of Flash and Google has a hard time understanding Flash. Almost all production agencies in Vietnam, for this kind of campaign, they do not make your Flash Microsite SEO friendly at all. They may say that they do but its not happening due to expertise issue, lack of clients request issue, time issue etc... So when you search for your campaign name, a very high chance that you do not nd your microsite on page 1 of the search engine result pages.

More over, even with HTML microsite production agencies may not make it SEO friendly for brand terms as well. Its very common and I have seen it time after time. Traditionally in Vietnam, FMCG companies would run campaigns for 3 months and then moving on to the next. Many times they have the campaign microsite shutdown after 3 months. In my humble opinion, it is a waste to do it that way. Hence, even for a 3 month microsite, I would still recommend SEO with some onsite and offsite work to make sure that the microsite is found using brand terms + campaign key message + some key products/concepts. The rest should be the responsibility of Paid Search if you want to have more trafc from Search Engine. Again this is different from one sub category to the next and it depends on each campaign as well. What you need to ask yourselves when considering Paid Search campaign is that whether your microsite offers any values to users if they come from search engine? If user has a particular information need, is the content on your microsite uniquely valuable enough to make user satised and not bouncing back to the search result page after visiting your site? Please dont try to buy super generic, one word keyword that is your industry like the keyword music entertainment or game etc... And of course do check the search volume.
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Just remember, your goal is not just to get visitors to your site through search engine, your goal should be whatever the business objective of the campaign that you are running so for that to happens there must be a relevancy factor between the keywords that you plan to use, the landing page content and your overall campaign.

People talk about it on Facebook, forums and other channels. When you search using generic keywords about your brand on Google, you nd multiple articles talking about the issue. You type in the product name and multiple links appear in the results as well. Because of this, you may be thinking whether SEO could help to push DOWN those bad articles and push UP those PR articles that you paid for? First of all, the way Vietnamese marketers handle PR crisis (real or not) is very different from the WEST. Rarely that we publish ofcial information on the corporate website to clarify our stand in the crisis. However, in the event that we do, I would recommend an immediate Paid Search targeting all relevant keywords to the crisis and also onsite optimization for the landing page with ofcial information. Secondly, depending on how you want to tackle this crisis holistically, SEO could be used. However, please consider carefully the impact of what you are trying to do with SEO against your overall objective. For what I describe above, the crisis is of medium to big scale and many of your customers probably know about it already. If your CEO is arrested and charged with some illegal trading activities then may be you should consider thinking of something actually helpful and meaningful to your
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Year end party

Your brand is going to have a super big year end party in one of the hottest locations in town for the New Year. Should you use Paid Search or SEO to promote it? Well that depends on whether you want to have a website for this event or not. If this is a regular yearly event, it may make sense to invest in a proper website. If you decide to use only social media assets for this campaign then Paid Search or SEO cant be used. Similar analogy could be made if you decide to have a microsite.

PR crisis
The scenario is like this: There is a crisis about your brand, your CEO or your product. News reports this and they run several online articles.

customers/share holders than trying to manipulate Google search results pages. Your customers could read articles about the scandal on the homepage of some of the most popular newspapers in town, they dont need to search on Google for it. I would strongly advise against hiring an agency or a freelancer in this case to set up bogus sites with domains similar to your company website, include useless information on those sites and do aggressive/spammy link building or similar scheme to push DOWN bad article about your crisis from page 1 of the Google Search Result Page. First of all you may have to pay a high price and the effect is very limited because people are still using social networks to talk about it, newspapers still publish articles about it. You accomplish nothing by doing this.

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Section 3

How Paid Search works?

Ad rank and quality score

This part is for people who are new to Adwords and do not know how ad rank is being calculated. There is no special favor from Google because certain agencies are closer to Google than you. There is no special relationship between yourself and Google that would affect negatively or positively your ad ranking. So if you have been told these, you may want to read on as well. Ofcially from Google Now let's suppose that multiple advertisers use the same keyword to trigger their ads or want their ads to appear on the same websites. How does Google determine whose ads will appear and in which order? It's done automatically, based on what we call Ad Rank. Your Ad Rank is based on a combination of your bid (how much you're willing to spend) and your Quality Score (a measurement of the quality of your ads, keywords, and website). Depending on where your ad shows and the type of targeting that you use, the formula for Ad Rank can vary a bit, but it always incorporates bid and Quality Score. There is no mystery that ads appear on top of the natural results would normally receive higher click through rate, more clicks compared to ads on Other positions. (By the way, click through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks to the
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1. Ad rank and Quality Score 2. Ad text & ad extension 3. Actual paid Cost per Click

number of ad impression.) However there is no guarantee that your ads will always appear on the Top position. From Google on How Adwords chooses top ads: An ad's position on the page is based on two things: your bid and your Quality Score (together, this is known as Ad Rank). To be eligible for a top spot, your Ad Rank needs to meet a minimum threshold. The minimum Ad Rank required to appear above search results is generally greater than the minimum Ad Rank to appear beside search results. As a result, the cost-perclick (CPC) when you appear above search results could be higher than the CPC if you appear beside search results, even if no other advertisers are immediately below you. Although you may pay more per click, top ads usually have higher clickthrough rates and give you access to certain ad extensions (like sitelinks) and other features available only in top ad positions. As always, youre never charged more than your max CPC bid. Ads at the top of a page generally have the following qualities: High relevance: The ad text, keywords, and landing page are relevant to people who click the ad. Good performance over time: The ad consistently generates clicks. Competitive bids: The ad's bid is competitive with other advertisers and exceeds the top of page bid estimate.

We can only show up to three ads at the top of a search results page. Because Quality Score and thresholds are recomputed on every page, ads can sometimes appear in a top spot on one page and then again in a side spot on the following page. The ad rank is counted from left to right, top to bottom. On the left side, there could be anything from 0 to maximum 3 ads. For Other Spots, there could be maximum 8 ads.

Another example just to make the point clear

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Google Chief Economist Hal Varian explains more about the Auction, Ad Rank and Quality Score in this video Search Advertising with Google: Quality Score explanation So the ad rank formula is this: Ad rank = CPC x Quality Score CPC stands for Cost per Click or the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay per click. For example:

Advertisers

CPC $0.2 $0.4 $0.1 $0.5

I am not going into the issue of which ad position is better. Google ofcially conrmed that Conversion rates dont vary much with ad position. This is of course about the same ads in different positions, not ads from two different advertisers.

Quality Score 8 3 8 2

Ad rank 1.6 1.2 0.8 1.0

Position 1 2 4 3

A B C D

Why Include Quality Score In The Formula For Ad Rank?

The main reason is that just like natural search results, Google wants ads to be highly relevant to end users as well. Without relevancy and accuracy, there will not be Google in the long term because users will try another search engine.

For more information about Quality Score, please check out here. Quality score is per keyword basis so every keyword in your account has a quality score for Search. The lowest score is 0 and the highest is 10. The Ad Rank is calculated every time a

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keyword user types in triggers your ad so it can change from time to time. The Quality Score is affected by the followings ( I simply copy this part from Google site) Your keyword's past clickthrough rate (CTR): How often that keyword led to clicks on your ad. This is the biggest factor because if user decides to click on an ad more often, that means they are telling Google that this ad is more relevant to what they are searching for. Your display URL's past CTR: How often you received clicks with your display URL Your account history: The overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account The quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your page is Your keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ads Your keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for Geographic performance: How successful your account has been in the regions you're targeting

Your ad's performance on a site: How well your ad's been doing on this and similar sites (if you're targeting the Display Network) Your targeted devices: How well your ads have been performing on different types of devices, like desktops/laptops, mobile devices, and tablets you get different Quality Scores for different types of devices So in short, you need to try to have the Quality Score as high as you can and the actual CPC you have to pay will be lower, you will have better position, your minimum rst page bid will be lower, you have more chances to be on the Top position etc...

Ad text
Google already has the full explanation here. They even have best practices for creating text ads. There are more and more ad extensions that Google allows. You have to read more about each type and their availability in each territory, each category.

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Below is an example of ad sitelinks:

Actual paid Cost per Click

Example of location extension The question is if you bid $0.2 per click for certain keyword, how much you actually pay Google if your ad is clicked on? Well rst of all, your actual CPC could be maximum 20% higher than $0.2. Google may allow up to 20% more clicks in a day than your daily budget species. We call this overdelivery. Overdelivery can help make up for days when trafc is slow and your ads don't get as much exposure. However, in a given billing period, you're never charged more than the average number of days in a month (roughly 30.4) times your daily budget. For more, please read here. But do you have to pay $0.2 every time? As it turns out, the answer is No. Example of Call Extension To read the full version from Google, please refer to here.
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In Adwords auction, you will only pay enough to beat the advertiser just below you. Lets go through one example together:
Advertiser A B C Max CPC $0.3 $0.4 $0.2 Quality Score 7 4 9 Ad Rank 2.1 1.6 1.8 Position 1 3 2

So how much Advertiser A pays? Well the advertiser just below A is C and he has Ad rank of 1.8 so Advertiser A would pay: 1.8/7 + $0.01 = $0.27 Advertiser C would pay: 1.6/9 + $0.01 = $0.19 The actual CPC you pay could be found under average CPC column on the Adwords interface.

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Section 4

How SEO works?

How Search Engine Works

For a detailed explanation of how search engine works, you can refer to the Free Beginner Guide to SEO by seoMoz or Google ofcial video on You Tube How Search Works This section is for people who are completely new to SEO. If you have basic or immediate level of understandings of SEO, please refer to the reference section where i list down some useful resources.

1. How Search Engines work? How Search Engine sees your site? 2. What does Google care about? 3. Personalize search 4. Google Guidelines 5. Should search engine believes what you say on your site? (vote, link) 6. Common myths 7. Reference

Search Engine needs to do a couple of things well and fast: Send the crawler (spider) out to index the Internet (this isn not small feat because millions of pages are being created and removed every hour of every day 24/7/365. Somehow understand, categorize and put the data back in the database Every time someone puts a search query in, looking up in the database to nd most relevant & important results are return them in lighting fast manner.

How Search Engines see your website?

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Search engine doesnt see a website as we human do because they dont have eyes or ears. For example, for a site like Yahoo Singapore, this is what the majority of us see the site:

From the source code, search engine has to nd out which part is important and which part to ignore etc... There are tools like Lynx (recommended by Google) or other similar tools that helps you to understand how search engine sees at your site. Search Engines still have limitations trying to understand images, music, videos or any rich media experiences compared to

However Search Engine can only look at the source code of the site so they look at this:

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just plain text. This is the technology limitation right now so we have to help search engines understanding our site. Well you may say that you should be free to code your site in whatever way that you want and its search engine job trying to make sense of it. Its somewhat true and search engines are trying hard to understand as much as they can about different websites, coded in different languages. Its just that trafc from search engine often represents an important part of the site overall trafc so it makes economic sense to help rather than playing wait and see. To see how Google index your site, please use this command site:yourdomain and put this into the search box on Google. For example, if I want to know how Google index my site I would type in the search box site:chandlernguyen.com Below is the result:

What does Google care about?

If you were Google founders/CEO, what would you care about? Every time I ask this question in class, the answer I get back is money, money and money. I havent tested asking this question outside of Vietnam so I dont know how people from different territories would respond.
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Yes money/cash ow is important to any publicly listed company. But I guess that is not what Google founders/CEO care most about. If you want to read Google mission & corporate culture, please have a look here. There could be many things that Google founders care about, but I guess one very important thing is making sure that Google continues returning useful, relevant results to users search queries in lighting fast manner. The query could be input by text or voice or predictive i.e. Google gives you the answer before you even ask. Google doesnt want you to have to wait 20 seconds to receive your answer and it doesnt want you to struggle through a list of unrelated results to nd what you want either. It wants you to be able to nd what you are after right from the top rst few results it gives back. I hates it when the description on the natural result page looks like what you are looking for, you click on it but end up at a page with little or no information about the subject of interest. Its all about making sure user is happy using Google to nd whatever thing they want across the globe, in multiple local languages. Because of this, content of a website is of paramount important to Google (or doing SEO for that matter). You

need to have uniquely valuable content. Think of it more like from Content Marketing angle. Focus on the users rst and Google will follow, not the other way around.

Personalized Search
For a comprehensive picture about this, you can read Danny Sullivan series: Of Magic Keywords & Flavors Of Personalized Search At Google Google Now Personalizes Everyones Search Results Googles Results Get More Personal With Search Plus Your World This is not new if you have been working in search engine marketing industry long enough. However, to many the idea that when they search on Google, they would see different results individually seems relatively new. The fact is for years, Google has customized the search results based on your location, it could be country/city level (i.e. if you search for dentist in Ho Chi Minh, you would see different search results in comparison to the US). Moving beyond that Google has been for some time now personalize the search result based on your search history, your
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sharing on Google Plus, your social connections on Google Plus and other signals as well. After you enter a keyword and then click on a natural result, the next time if you search for that keyword again there is a chance that the particular link you click on last time would have a higher ranking (Google puts a note below that link to indicate the last time you visited it).

at your search behavior over time to personalize the search result page that best suits you. Personalized Search is not a bad thing. Its a great thing to user because the natural result page would be a better t to your need the majority of the time. Imagine having your clothes custom made every time you wear them so that it would t your body better. So one of the implications of Personalized Search is that if you see your website ranks high on the search result page for certain keywords, dont be too happy just yet. You need to check it again using private browsing mode for refox or incognito window for Chrome.

Google Guidelines for web masters

Google has developed a Webmaster Academy. It has four sections: Beginner webmasters Experienced webmasters Tips for businesses If you are logged in to gmail or other google services and do a search, your search history is being captured. Google will look Webmaster tools

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You should also read Google Webmaster Guidelines, which includes best practices for Google to nd, crawl and index your site. These guidelines are all you need if you are brand new to SEO. Its easy to read, easy to understand and most importantly its from Google so you know you can trust the content 100%. For optimizing images, please read Image publishing guidelines You could nd videos, examples there which is fantastic. If you have videos on your site, please follow the Video best practices. For Rich snippets, Google has guidelines for you as well. Please pay special attention to the Quality Guidelines, which indicate what you should or shouldnt do. If you are trying something against these guidelines, you may face penalty from Google, which means your site is banned. Because the guidelines are important so i repeat the basic principles here: Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?" Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your eld. AVOID the FOLLOWING TECHNIQUES: Automatically generated content Participating in link schemes Cloaking Sneaky redirects Hidden text or links Doorway pages Scraped content Participating in afliate programs without adding sufcient value Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
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 Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware Abusing rich snippets markup Sending automated queries to Google If you use these techniques and you see good SEO results, well these results may be short lived or worse you will be banned i.e. no more trafc from Google. So i would think twice about doing them.

selves. Normally people say all kind of things about themselves and majority of them are good (myself included!). So how does company decide whether what you say about yourself is true and can be trusted? They ask for reference sources from other people that work with you, study with you etc... A similar analogy apply here when it comes to outside links to a web page. Each outside link can be considered one vote to a particular page, a reference letter about a particular topic of interest. In many cases, what your former manager, former colleagues say about how you perform at work normally would carry more weight compared to your personal friends who dont work with you. The same applies to outside links. Outside links from trusted sources, sources with relevant experience about the same topic (keyword in consideration) would carry more weight compared to outside links from random, generic newly created pages or from pages that you own (even under different domains). To understand better about organic link building, please watch the video from Matt Cuts. You could also check out other posts on seoMoz about link building as well. Its good to read again this chapter from the be193

Content & Link Building

The ofcial note from Google is this One key element of creating a successful site is not to worry about Google's ranking algorithms or signals, but to concentrate on delivering the best possible experience for your user by creating content that other sites will link to naturallyjust because it's great. For those who are brand new to SEO, you may ask what link building is or how it is important? Well since the beginning of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders) started using outside links from other sites to a particular website & how important those links are to determine how important (authoritative) a site is. One real life example is that when you apply to a company, you would submit your resume, which is what you say about your-

ginner guide by seoMoz as well Chapter 7 Growing Popularity and Links. Please do NOT focus 100% on PageRank, it is just one of more than 200 signals being used by Google. There is a growing discussion about traditional link building technique vs content marketing. Rand Fishkin has a few things to say on this topic SEO's Dilemma - Link Building vs. Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday Another way to look at link building is that you do not need to be perfect in link building, what you need is to be better than the other 10 sites whose positions are 1 to 10 for your targeted keywords. So before embarking on a comprehensive link building program, its always good to check out competition and see how they are doing. A couple of tools that can really help in that would be: Open site explorer (short form OSE) Majestic SEO

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Section 5

SEO cheat sheet

Overview
After the section above, if you need a quick cheat sheet about SEO, here it is:

How search engine work?

Why we need to do SEO?

I would go into each topic one by one now

Why people use search engines?

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How to do SEO?

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197

Guiding principles

Where we are?

Onsite Optimization Offsite Optimization

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The cheat sheet is arranged as a mind map and could be downloaded here.

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Section 6

Working process for PPC and SEO

Paid Search working process
The below is the normal working process

Search Engine Optimization working process

Objec&ves) Repor&ng)&) Analysis) Consumer) Analysis)

Osite)Link) Building)
Objec&ves)

Compe&tor) Analysis)

Op&miza&on)

Keyword) Selec&on)

Onsite) Op&miza&on)

Site)Audit) Quick)Wins)

Report)

Compe&tor) Analysis)

It is quite straight forwards these two processes so I wont explain each item one by one here.
Bid) Management) Ad)copy) Development)

However, if you have further questions, feel free to contact me for answers.

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Section 7

Performance Evaluation

General principles
One common question people ask would be how they know if their campaign (Paid Search or SEO) is going well? This question should be asked in the beginning during the planning phase. If you are running the campaign half way and you are asking this question, chances are what you nd may not be what you expect. My approach to this question would be:

1. Paid Search: impression, click, click through rate, average cpc, bounce rate 2. SEO: average ranking, trafc from organic search, trafc from brand vs non brand terms, bounce rate 3. Conversion 4. Goals 5. E commerce

First lets go back to the beginning your overall marketing objectives, why did you choose to use Paid Search or SEO in the rst place? Next is to translate these business objectives into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Which metrics would represent the KPIs? Can these metrics be measured with the reports from Google Adwords/Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tool or other tools that you are using? We should be using all of these tools for our Paid Search and SEO campaigns. If the objective is brand awareness then unique visitors (Reach) and Frequency may be of interest to you.

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How to measure Reach and Frequency with Paid Search or SEO? Well with Search Engine Marketing you know whether you are hitting the right target audience based on keywords they use. Second, you could easily measure the number of unique visitors to your site and how many times they visit. I know it is not perfect using the proxy like the above. However, its better than nothing.

In Vietnam, most people care only about trafc (click, cpc, quality score) when they run paid search campaign because e commerce is still not popular. However, I think sign ups (or other micro conversions) should be a MUST especially if you have competition on your site and people need to sign up to join the game/ contest etc... Bounce rate is something that you want to look at as well. However, when interpreting the value of bounce rate on the landing page, you need to be careful. If the intention on the landing page is that visitors read the information and there is nothing else for them to do, the high bounce rate is normal. However, if you expect visitors to at least read something else, or take some actions then a bounce rate of 60% or 70% is not alright. A bounce rate of that value in this case simply means visitors are not nding what they are looking for on your landing page. So either you have to review your keyword (search term) and ad text to see if they are highly relevant to the landing page and NOT over promising.

Basic Paid Search Metrics

From Google Online Help, they have the following sections: Return on investment (ROI): for an ecommerce site, this would mean revenue vs cost for Google Adwords. If you use conversion tracking or Google Analytics, you would know which campaign drives the sales, which keyword & ad text brings the conversion. Impression, Click, Click through Rate, Average CPC would be important metrics to watch out for as well. Measuring trafc to your website Measuring brand awareness Measuring sales and conversions You could read Performance, protability and growth from Google as well.

Basic SEO Metrics

Normally people would care about rankings for targeted keywords.

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I would avoid, however, evaluating SEO strictly from a ranking point of view. The fact that your website ranks number one for some keywords do not mean much to you (especially if the keyword is too generic like travel discount) because it does not say anything about sales, about user experience (they may dislike you after landing on your page and realize that they couldnt nd the information they are looking for) or brand awareness. So recommended metrics are: Keyword rankings over time Trafc from organic search: visit, new visitors. You may want to split the trafc into branded terms and non branded terms. Bounce rate: A high bounce rate for trafc from natural search is something you should be worried about because it means people visit the landing page by searching on Google and then leave immediately without looking at another page on your site or take any actions. Conversions & Goals Revenue (if applicable) Competitive rankings (using keyword ranking tool)

Also we should avoid choosing keywords that are too generic in nature as targets to do SEO. Keywords like travel or discount have very limited exact match search volume i.e. not many people search like that on Google. Normally people would search for travel deals to Nha Trang or discount hotel in Da Nang for example. Have any doubt? Try to imagine yourself searching for those keywords, what would you be looking for?

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Section 8

Common Myths
There are a number of myths, outright manipulations in Vietnam and I only list down a few below:

That is absolutely NON SENSE. The organic results are not for sales, Google has been saying this since the beginning of the company. Another way to look at this is that: if let say it was true i.e. by spending lots of money with Google Adwords, you could have higher rankings on organic search results, imagine what would happen? Well one thing for sure is that sites from big brands would dominate the search engine result pages and there are no spaces for the little guys, for independent bloggers etc... At least no spaces left on the rst page. And if Google started to earn money that way, the search results would be become worse and worse, users would simply turn away and use another search engine. Short term gain, long term pain! So not only from moral standpoint but from business standpoint, it makes sense to provide the best, unbiased search results as well.

Special relationship with Google

I have heard this many times. Some people say that because a certain agency/person has special relationship with Google, they somehow manage to inuence the ad rank so that the ads only appear on the top position. Well i hope by reading what is said on Google help section above and understand the ad rank formula, you know now that ad rank is decided by algorithm, not human relationship.

Spending money with Google Adwords will help to improve ranking on natural search result page
In other words, the natural/organic search results could be bought by paying money indirectly to Google via Adwords.

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Special software that automatically improved ranking by posting on hundreds of forums.

First of all (and this is not limited to this kind of software above), if there was a software that can automatically boost your natural ranking on search result page, you would not be the rst one to use it. Vietnamese agencies would not be the rst one to develop it or use it. Hence, any advantages you may have over other websites will be relatively 0. Its just like if everyone is wearing 10cm high heel shoes, the net result is that the relative difference between everyone height is the same. Secondly, it is very unlikely that such a software works simply because if it is that easy to manipulate the organic Google search results, then Google would not become what it is today, surpassing Yahoo, Bing and many other search engines. Thirdly like it or not, we are late comer to the Internet party and so whatever we think of using, other people in other countries probably thought about it long time ago. Our infrastructure, our software engineers are not as good as those from mature markets so I wont try to do something weird/spamming, hoping the ranking would improve. It the ranking did improve, it would be short lived.

Keyword in the domain is the key factor

To answer this myth, please read the following from Matt Cutts We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that were giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldnt necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it. You can refer to the video How important is it to have keywords in a domain name If you are not convinced yet, please read another article by Danny Sullivan The EMD Update: Like Panda & Penguin, Expect Further Refreshes to Come

5 common SEO mistakes:

Google explains the most 5 common mistakes that people make about SEO. It is useful to watch the video. Mistake #1: working on SEO before your site has a value proposition i.e. why an user select your site in the search results

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 Mistake #2: segmented approach (i.e. no communication between marketing, business development and seo teams, working on SEO in a silo) Mistake #3: wasting time and energy on Time-consuming workarounds rather than following new best practices or researching new features. Mistake #4: Caught in SEO trends (i.e. instead of focusing on the users, trying to give them the best user experience and hopefully bring you more conversion, webmaster builds site for search engines). Mistake #5: Slow iteration (Agile SEO cycles)

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Section 9

How much does it cost?

This is always a topic that has so much misunderstandings and misconception because just like in any developing markets, people try so many funny ways to package their offering.

cost you $1000 for example without telling you how many clicks you could get, I recommend that you stay away. There are a couple of common ways that agencies would charge for their Paid Search service: 1. Flat fee per month: Some agency could use this model if the client has limited budget or the budget is too big :D For example, the agency could quote that they would charge you a xed $300/month to manage your account. 2. Management fee as a percentage of the media spend This is probably the most common model. The percentage fee could be any number from 5% to 40%, depending on each deal. There is no legal limit nor ofcial guideline from Google unless you are an ofcial reseller. Common percentage is between 10%- 20% in Vietnam. For example, if you estimate that your monthly budget is $10,000, then the agency would charge say 15% management fee or $1,500/month.

1. Different Costing model for Paid Search: at fee, I am in no position to judge which one is good/fair and which man hours, guarantee click, performance one% is fee, not. All I can is to remind you of the fundamental princibased ples so that you could judge for yourselves. 2. SEO: at fee, man hours, project keyword Search Engine Marketing is demand driven based, so it all depends on endbased, users, how they search and (no how ranking, they select which link to 100% guarantee no pay). click on.

Paid Search
Paid Search or Pay per Click works on a per click basis i.e. you are charged only when someone clicks on the ads, you are not charged based on keywords, a x amount per month or any similar ideas. Its pay per click. So if someone comes to you and say that if you want to buy 5 keywords per month, it would

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The actual management fee amount could depend on the actual spend for that month or a xed amount per month based on the estimated monthly spend at the beginning of the campaign. 3. Guarantee number of clicks with xed budget (arbitrage) This model is very common in Vietnam as well. Basically the agency would say that with the budget of say $2,000, they would deliver about 20,000 clicks to your website. How the agency could come up with the 20,000 clicks gure? This should be based on the estimated monthly search volume, the estimated cost per click. Basically, the agency would factor their fee already ($400 in this example), their spend with Google could be something like $1,600 only. 4. Performance based scheme This is quite popular in oversea markets but not in Vietnam. Basically the client and the agency would agree on a low base fee and then a fair performance based bonus on top: The base fee is 5% with the Return on Ad Spend of 8:1 If the Return on Ad Spend increase to say 10:1, the bonus fee would be another 4% etc... (please note that the numbers here are for illustration purpose only) or it could be something like this:

The base Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is $10 For any reduction on the Cost per Acquisition, the agency would split 40-60 with the client. For example: if the actual cost per acquisition at the end of the month is $8, or saving of $2/acquisition. The total number of acquisitions is say 2000. The total amount of saving is $4000 so the agency fee is 40% of $4000 or $1,600. 5. Man hours: This model is not very common in Vietnam for Paid Search. Basically the client would indicate the scope of work and the agency would then quote the number of man hours. The total fee would be the number of man hours multiplies by the hourly rate.

Search Engine Optimization Costing

With SEO, agencies could work on a at fee per month or quote the number of man hours similar to Paid Search. How does the agency come up with the costing per month? It probably depends on: Scope of work Keyword difculty
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 Target market Target ranking after a period of time Some agencies even go as far as guarantee performance i.e. rankings or trafc otherwise the client doesnt have to pay. Some agencies would split onsite optimization and offsite optimization into two parts and charge differently. Some agencies would split the initial 3-4 months of intense work for both onsite & offsite optimization to bring the rankings to the required level and the on going maintenance, then charge at different levels for each phase. As for the actual number, there is no guideline or limit also. Since SEO is a service, think of it as a chef preparing a meal for you, it could be $0.5 per noodle bowl or it could be $100 per bowl, it all depends on the level of services. For SEO, if your current ranking, current site needs a lot of technical work, then the cost will be higher. If your CMS fully support SEO, there is very little technical SEO that needs to be done, then the project fee may be smaller. The same goes with the current ranking.

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Section 10

Reference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRx7AMb6rZ0 Inside Adwords Blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/ Yahoo Search Marketing: http://advertising.yahoo.com/article/search-advertising.html Yahoo Search Marketing Blog: http://advertising.yahoo.com/blogs/advertising/ Bid Management Tools: Kenshoo: http://www.kenshoo.com/ Marine Software: http://www.marinsoftware.com/ DoubleClick Search: http://www.google.com/doubleclick/advertisers/solutions/se arch-management.html

General Search Engine Marketing reference:

Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/ MediaPost SearchMarketing Daily: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/search-marketing-dail y/#axzz2gkSznVr7 John Battelles Search Blog: http://battellemedia.com/

Paid Search specic:

Google Partners Program: https://www.google.com/partners/ Learn with Google:http://www.google.com/ads/learn/all-topics.html Google Adwords Editor http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

Search Engine Optimization:

Facts about Google and Competition: http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.ht ml The beginner guide to SEO by Moz: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

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 Webmaster Help from Google: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en& answer=1050724 Search Engine ranking factors survey from seoMoz: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors Webmaster Tool Help http://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com Aaron Walls SEO book: http://www.seobook.com/ Matt Cutts Blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ Michael Gray: GrayWolfs SEO blog: http://graywolfseo.com/ SEO by the sea: http://www.seobythesea.com/ Web Master World: http://www.webmasterworld.com/

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Digital Strategy
Digital strategy is a complex topic. This chapter tries to summarize common 3-6 months campaign types in Vietnam.

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Well this is probably the most difcult chapter of them all. I have to say I have limited experiences in this area so feel free to drop me any feedback on this. I am in no position to comment/judge on the success of different digital campaigns publicly so in this chapter, I will include some key pointers so that you could judge for yourself the value of different digital strategies. Since Digital Strategy is vast and complex. For the purpose of this chapter, we will ONLY talk about Digital strategy in the context of a 3-6 months campaign.

Process of developing a Digital Strategy for a 3-6 month CAMPAIGN from research, ideation to execution and optimization. Yup I dont want to stop at ideation or campaign planning alone because what we are after is the end result. Also what is discussed below is mainly from the agency perspective so you may need to change it a bit if you work in a client. If your brief indicates that it is ONLY a media plan so please refer to Chapter on Display Media and Search Marketing.

A good strategy is just the beginning

I have seen enough not optimal execution to say that a good strategy is really just the start. From what presented during the pitching between agency and client to what is being executed, there is a very big gap. Reasons for this are plenty, from constraints from client to budget, duration for campaign preparation etc... Also, a good idea could be executed poorly or the optimization is not being done regularly/properly during the course of the campaign. So what I am trying to cover in this chapter?

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Section 1

Brief

What is the main objective of the campaign? Please specify Business Objectives and Communication Objectives What are the key actions we want target audience to take as a result of this campaign?

Target Audience

Must have components

If you do a google search on creative brief or marketing brief, there are thousands of sites that talk about this. Basically we all talk about some of the key elements below:

Who is our target audience? Demographics, Income level, Location, preferences (if any related to devices used) Target audience insights (if available):

Campaign Message And Creative

What is the single most important fact or promise that we must communicate about this product? Proposition?

Brand/Marketplace/Campaign Background
Information about the brand, brand mission, product category, the particular product in this brief, market condition, competition Competitors offering, marketing, positioning in the market? Describe any comparative advantages the brand/product has? Any key issues & challenges / Opportunities that the brand is facing?

Reason To Believe
Product features and benets that support the above message we are trying to convey

Campaign Overall Plan

Key ofine/online channels if available? Key ofine activities if any?

Campaign Objectives

Measuring Success
KPIs and results desired?
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Lessons Learnt From Past Communications / Activities?

Please provide insights and key learnings from the past campaigns. What are the KPIs and methodology for assessing past campaign performance?

Budget And Campaign Duration

Mandatories
What MUST we include / consider in our agency proposal? (please include any legal restrictions etc)

Timeline And/or Pitching Process

Deadline to send back/present proposal by the agency. Information about the Pitching process (if any) like rst round submission, second round presentation etc...

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Section 2

Research

It may be helpful to look around other Southeast Asia/Asia countries to understand how the brand implement its strategy in those countries. etc...

Competitive analysis The company & the brand in brief

If the brief is not clear enough, you may need to do additional research to nd out more about the company: When the company was found (when the company opened in Vietnam)? Its main value proposition How the company sells its products? via retailed chains, supermarket? reseller? How many store does it have? How could prospective customers buy the product/service? Looking back at the previous marketing strategies, campaigns may help as well. What/How do consumers talk about the company/industry online? Listening tool may be helpful here. It is important to try the above steps again with the main competitors to understand the market place better.

Aha moment!
The key is to understand the audience insights or putting yourself in the audiences shoes. Understand the purchasing funnel (sales cycle) is critical to a successful digital strategy. What would motivate them to do what we want them to? Similarly, you could think about barriers that may discourage them not doing the desired action? Research could be done ofine or online, using many tools that mentioned in previous chapter from Google Keyword tool, to Google Display Planner, Listening Tool, Analytics tool, etc...

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If you have never used the product/service before, it would be helpful to try out yourself or at least interview a bunch of people who do. Visit the ofine store is necessary to understand how the customer would experience if you drive them to store from online. If the landing page, website being used for the campaign is available, please visit them and try to complete what you want visitors to do.

Check campaign objectives again?

It would be good at this stage to re-look at the campaign objectives again to see if it still makes sense with what you nd in the Research stage.

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Section 3

Ideation
If you do a simple Google Search for brainstorming technique or ideation technique you could see millions of results online with things like no killing of ideas; going for quantity, not quality at rst so I wont go into too much details here. I would highlight a few common approaches in Vietnam when it comes to campaign idea. However, before this step, you need to map out your overall strategy. An overall strategy is your way to achieve the business objectives set in the brief. One example could be if your goal is to sell expensive cars, you know that in order to sell, the audience need to understand the unique selling points, whether its functional or emotional (social status) based etc... They need to see the car, test drive it, feel excited etc... So your overall strategy would be developed into three phases: surprising teaser online, the reveal moment, ofine event, etc...

Photo Contest
This is probably the most popular type of campaign in Vietnam for the past 1-2 years. Basically the ow is like this: The photo contest is often wrapped around a creative or brilliant idea. The main idea could be about showcasing the love for your child, showing your pioneering spirit by showing yourself with a high end car, about showing your free spirit lifestyle, your love for football, you want to show that you support the environment, the love from husband to wife or whatever. Then what the advertisers/agencies would want participants to do is to take pictures/submit pictures of themselves, of the topic of interest in the campaign etc... on either a microsite or facebook or Instagram. The brand may ask participants to tag the brand Fanpage in your facebook picture or include the hashtag in Instagram etc... Some agencies/brands would want to use the webcam to take their photo etc... Some require participants to take the photo together with the product, some require participants to upload the pictures into
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brand related frame so that the photos will have brand elements every time it is shared on social media. Some photo contests require users to join the activation ofine and take photos there to upload online. Advertisers may ask participants to include together with the photos a few lines Winning criteria: Participants need to ask others to vote for them either on Facebook, website, or whatever medium. In order to vote, users have to have a Facebook account, Instagram account, website account or sign up via smartphone etc... By forcing users to sign up, brands hope to gather some database as well in the process. Organizer may reserve the top prizes for a panel of judges. Many many brands and agencies have been using photo contests. It is almost like if you cant think of anything else to do, a photo contest is something you can try. A few things to note about Photo contest: General audience in Vietnam has been very familiar with this type of contests so theres good and bad to that.

Prize hunter is the winner of almost 90% of these contests if the only winning criteria is the number of online Like/Vote. These prize hunters are very likely NOT your target audience or even they are, its unlikely that they will appreciate your idea/concept etc... What do I mean by Prize hunter? I mean professional hunter who either sets up a big network of Facebook accounts that they could use to Like their photo or they use Facebook Like Exchange website like chiaselike.net to ask others to help them. These methods are technically not illegal because they are Real facebook accounts who are used to like the photo in the contest. However the purpose of the campaign to promote certain concept of course is not achieved by top winner is a prize hunter. An average photo contest with attractive prizes like the latest phone, latest camera or something of enough monetary value ($1500 - $3000) would attract generally about 300 - 1000 participants on average. Knowing that prize hunters will participate in your contest, you could make it more fair to your target audience by doing a lucky draw amongst the top 10-20 participants or use a credible panel of judges.

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Limit one user with unique ID number to sign up only once wont help much because the prize hunters could use ID from their family members etc...

They win this either by playing really hard or more often than not hacking these games. Because the budget for producing these games is not big so we shouldnt expect much from security point of view as well. (even iOS 7, the most advanced mobile operating system, produced by Apple is commonly hacked as well). However, we need to avoid the obvious loopholes. Because prize hunters hack these games, you often nd that the top 3 or top 5 guys get like 5-10 times or 20 times more points than the average players. If you use lucky draw amongst the top 3-5 to select the winner, then you may nd that one prize hunter signs up under different names for 3-5 accounts to ensure that they would win. Game contest effectiveness in conveying the idea/concept is limited as it appeals mostly to youngsters only. Since the game is likely not great (due to budget and lack of professional game strategy), its likely that ofce worker will only play these games once or twice unless the prize is very attractive.

Online Game contest

This is quite popular in Vietnam as well. Basically as the name suggests, advertisers would ask the agencies to create a game/ series of games to be hosted on the website/microsite/facebook and participants need to sign up and play in order to win prizes. Again these online games are used to illustrate a concept, a form of edutainment or something similar. What advertiser hopes for (and the agency sells) is that by playing the game, participants would learn something about the brand or being educated about something of value to the brand. These games are often made of ash. A few things to note: As you could expect, neither the advertiser or the agency are professional game developer so these games wont be too great or addictive. Also these games are for short campaigns only so they last normally 2-3 months only. These games are prone to hacking quite easily. Prize hunters often win this type of contest as well.

Video contest
This type of contest is not that popular in comparison to the other two types discussed above because it requires user to do

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a lot more to participate. User has to produce a video, which is considered quite a lot of work locally. The ow could be similar to the photo contest with slight difference like the platform that videos are uploaded could be the website or the brand You Tube channel. The winning criteria could be based on voting, video views etc... The number of participants in this type of contest is often lesser compared to photo contest because it requires more effort from user.

The idea is that by inviting target audience to share their advice/experiences on related subjects, hopefully the target product/service would be incorporated in that advice or story. At the same time since all of the sharing will be about a particular topic, it will help to raise awareness about that topic and build the association between your product and the topic. Some examples could be: Share your ideas of how to take macro shot (for camera brand) in three angles Share your advice of how to keep the toilet clean Share your story of how your husband enjoys cooking for you Share your experience when you rst have your baby etc... Winning criteria for this type of contest could be either by voting (again) or by advertisers selection. Either way, unless your request is creative enough and you have a good media campaign behind this, your results would be similar to other type of contests discussed above.

Sharing ideas contest

For the lack of a better expression, I use the term Sharing ideas contest. During the brainstorming process, from functional benets of the product/service like helping you to cook better, taking better photo, producing fresh air, cleaning your hand etc... we could explore other emotional benets by asking the audience to participate. So from there the advertiser/agency starts a contest around sharing your ideas of how to clean your hand properly, how to cook for your family, take care of your baby or write about your experience of having the xyz emotional benets etc...

Inuencer as the key hook

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One common way is to select a suitable Key inuencer (normally a prominent celebrity, whose prole ts the brand & the campaign) and build the campaign around him/her. He/she will be the face of the campaign, or brand ambassador if you may. Basically the advertiser/agency hope that due to the celebrity status, the target audience would be inuenced accordingly. Famous celebs could attract quite a lot of newspapers themselves so brands or advertisers often create a PR campaign using them as well. Another way is to invite these inuencers to write, upload, talk about your campaign on their blog, facebook fanpage or even participate in these campaigns as participants. Moderators, admins of popular forums or those that have popular facebook fanpages are often invited to write their reviews about products/services and publish on their forums/fanpage/ blog etc...

build new hospitals, saving poor kids, raise money to do heart surgery for the poor etc... Another type is about organizing mass walking, dancing or doing something to raise awareness about an issue of interest. Through CSR campaigns, Brands hope to position themselves as good guys, good citizen, good neighbor in the community etc... and of course this will help to push sales as well.

Viral clip
This is proposed/thought of quite often by agencies and brands. However, the cold truth is that most clips are not viral, especially when they talk in promotional ways. Advertiser/agency often thinks of using celebrity, shock factor, fun factor to help. Normally for this type of campaign to work, not only the creative idea/concept needs to be suitable (followed SUCCESs or STEPPs formula), we need a well thought out media strategy and a good enough budget as well.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign

I dont think I need to talk too much about this type of campaigns. Advertisers/agencies use it quite often as well. Basically its about if consumer buy/use the product/service, they help to save the environment, contribute money to educational fund,

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Section 4

Evaluation
Evaluation of ideas is not a simple task and I am certainly not the expert in this subject. So I will repeat here again the principles presented by two great authors: Chip Heath and Jonah Berger. These principles, hopefully could help you a bit in evaluation of different ideas generated in the ideation stage. But rst, lets review all of the ideas with the overall business objectives in mind rst.

stress the word ALL because unless it does, it may not be the best idea to present to the client/your team. The idea may be cool but it may not help you to achieve your goals.

SUCCESs and STEPPs

First, with Jonah Berger in his book Contagious: Why things catch on. Jonah also wrote for Google on Google Think Insights about the same subject From Complacent to Contagious: Where is Your Brand on the Spectrum? His STEPPs principles are: Social currency: People want to be smart, cool and savvy. That motivates us to share and engage with things. Triggers: Stimuli prompt people to think of related things Emotion: we care, we share Public: monkey sees, monkey do principle Practical value: People like to help others. If your content can save time, or money, or improve their health, theyll spread the word.

Business objectives
You could start by reviewing your overall strategy and see if the idea would t into that overall strategy or not. One way to go about doing this is to use the So what test. You assume that the idea(s) are carried out, SO WHAT? How does that impact the target audience? helping you achieving your objectives? At the end of the day it is about whether the idea/concept could help us to achieve ALL of our business objectives? I have to

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 Story People dont just share information, they share stories Secondly, with Chip Heath, his principles are somewhat related to what Jonah Berger mentioned. Chip wrote Made to Stick They are: Simple Unexpected Credible Concrete Emotional Story. There are many useful case studies in these two books so I strongly encourage you to read them.

Technically many ideas are possible to deploy, it is just the mater of resources (money, preparation time, expertise in house or out source) etc... It may be good to have someone with technical background to be part of this process so that he/she could provide feedback from the technical point of view.

Reality check
You would want to check the feasibility of implementing the idea at this stage because if it is going to be too expensive to execute, too time consuming (in other words, not feasible), then it is of little use. If you still like the idea, you may want to tweak it a little bit to make it more doable.
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Section 5

Campaign Development
Paid, Owned and Earned Media
Once your overall strategy is conrmed and you need to develop a full campaign around it. It may be helpful to think of the campaign development across your Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media. For Owned Media, it would be helpful to decide based on the overall strategy and idea if you need PC assets, mobile assets or social assets or a combination of them. Spreading your resources (budget, human resource) too thin across multiple properties may not be the best idea. With Paid media, depending on your owned assets and where you want to drive the trafc/interaction to, you could start to choose the placements, audience targeting methods, pricing options etc...

A quick note, if you have a video and you want to make it viral, beside the creative idea followed the guideline suggested by Jonah Berger or Chip Heath, you would need to support the initial spreading of the video via You Tube TrueView ads, using Pay per View (PPV) pricing option. Please take note of the Paid Media estimated trafc/views vs the total KPI of the campaign. You need some experience to account for organic uplift in trafc, the halo effect of your different activities as well i.e. the sum is bigger than the parts. It is typical in Vietnam to use forum seeding or inuencer seeding on Facebook. You normally pay for this in Vietnam so its not really Earned Media, but rather fall under Paid Media. Of course, if you promote your message well using social media or online PR, people would start to view, LIKE, Share, comment and you get your Earned Media that way.

Timeline and KPIs

Before you could present your strategy/ideas to the client/your boss, you would need to have some estimated KPIs in place. Instead of repeating whatever numbers in the brief, this time round you put in your estimated KPIs based on the proposed strategy/concept. Of course your overall estimated KPIs need to be at least equal or bigger the required KPIs in the brief.

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It is not good at this stage to come back and say that the KPIs in the brief are unrealistic because you should raise this up front, during the research stage already. At this stage, again the minimum you need to commit is what is required or renegotiated based on the feedback from research stage. Next it is the estimated timeline. This is quite straight forwards. Basically it is about listing down all relevant tasks and taking into consideration which tasks could be done in parallel, which ones need to be done in sequence. Normally Owned Media/Paid Media/Earned Media preparation could be done in parallel.

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Conclusion

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It is just part 1
Writing about Digital Marketing in Vietnam is hard. Not only that the industry is changing too fast, there is no authoritative gure in the market place so I cant refer to many materials in English in the market place. Many of what I write here will be obsolete in the next 6-12 months or even shorter. However I hope that some of the key concepts described in this book could last slightly longer than that. As mentioned in the introduction chapter, this is only part 1 so you will see many missing pieces. I do not want to write part 2 yet because I want to make sure the book is of value to its target audience. There is no use in trying to do something that is of value to no one :) Besides it is already 230 pages long and I am not sure how many of you will nd it useful enough to read until this page :) I expect this of course. Hence, I publish this book in ebook format so that It could be updated easily, building on the feedback received from the audience. If you nd this book too elementary, I am sorry for that. It is my intention to write this book as an introductory book for those who have relatively limited experience with Digital marketing. Last but not least, I have to thank my family (my mother, my father and especially my wife and kid), who has been incredibly supportive. I spent quite some time writing this book and they have been nothing but encouraging. I cant nish this book without their help. Also I need to thank former colleagues, friends who have helped to review the book, given comments, designed the cover page :) Cheers, Chandler Nguyen P.S: if you have any comments/questions, feel free to email them to me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

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