Jon W Chin – Analytics, Social Media & SEO/SEM

I’m sure many of you have heard of Klout score – its a measure of your online twitter influence and now it covers Facebook as well (less than the business page you are managing).

Its a pretty decent tool to measure influence – simple and pleasing to the eye (read: easily understandable) – the latter a plus point when you present to clients. I’ve used it in various aspects to measure the engagement and influence level of a campaign – didnt use Klout per se but its method of scoring i.e the scale from 1 to 10 and it settles pretty well.

An interesting measure is the influence metric – it measure the type of “people” you are attracting in twitter.

My personal influence is as below and I found it rather “convincing” – my intent is to share and learn from other in a defined community that I am interested in. Looks like it works (in a way).

What are your thoughts on Klout? How do you find it?

Keen to hear.

Share on Facebook

Online gaming has no doubt grown over the years. Think Farmville, My Cafe, Mobster and all. These games had people’s logging in their Facebook accounts and iPhone just to ensure that their items they have cooked does not expire.

This is evident that games play a role in many people’s life. And now McDonalds sees this as an opportunity and decides to enter this space. They created a “1 day campaign” online game on Farmville whereby players will be able to grow their farm twice as fast with all the McDonalds rewards.

Looks like marketers – you want their attention and grow your brand affinity – one of the ways are online gaming. Leverage them. Interesting space here and I am of the view it has alot of potential. Other than communicate on social space, the other activity is to have fun i.e. play games.

The question now is hmm…how does it read into my business objective? Dont get carried away by all these crazes – ultimately as a brand owner – you need to answer that very question. By having this game, how does it serve my business objective?

Share on Facebook

Google replaced its GAP certification program with the Google Adwords Certification Program and gave agencies 6 months to retake the exam.

From an agency’s point of view, I personally feel that cert is of less “value” as they have reduced the entry requirements – the total ad spent has been reduced significantly. So in a way, this program is easier to achieve for companies in its quest to get the Google Partner Certificate.

Nevertheless, I still had to take the exam to ensure that I am properly trained and have the experience

Ok I passed the exam and I am individually certified. Woohoo! Always nice to have additional certificates hanging around, especially from Google.

There you go. (For verification: Google Certification Program Verification)

Jon Chin Google Certification Program

Share on Facebook

News has it that brands are buying Facebook Ads (great growth) in order to drive traffic to their Facebook Page (read: secure “Likes” – sorry today this metric is a something that clients seems to be fixated about).

As a marketer, what should you choose? Impressions or Clicks?

Literature in the main have suggested that if you want to brand awareness choose Impressions, if you want call to action – choose “clicks”

So what really works? . I will give a generic answer – it depends.

For me, both impressions and CPC has worked well. A recent campaign (1 month campaign) that I ran, I started with CPC and then moved on to Impressions.

It is when I moved to Impression, the stats went ballistic, my CTR was higher than usual and the social conversion increased whilst paying less. The CPC price was approx USD$0.60 and for CPM I was paying USD0.11 & Average CPC of USD0.04. Juxatpose that with the CPC I was getting at the outset i.e USD0.60. A savings of USD0.64! (of course the clients was all smiles) – better CTR and all.

Curious me decided to find out why is this the case, after much testing – one of the variables that helped was the rotation of ads – and the image of the ad. It played a big role. I did 3 ads with the same ad text but different images – the clicks were vastly different and of course results were as well.

In this particular 1 month campaign, it seems that impression had worked well – as you know there are many variables that affect the effectiveness of an ad. For the sake of brevity I’m only going to touch on 2 variables for this campaign 1) Ad image – That had significant bearing on the effectiveness and conversion. Lesson is play with multiple ads – do the neccessary testing and you can save a bundle and get much better results and 2) Clear CALL TO ACTION (CTA) – Putting the work – Join US or Like US had an impact.

I came across this mathematic formulae (Source: http://www.searchabilityinc.com/2009/03/15/facebook-ads-cpm-vs-cpc/)

Mathematically speaking, the formulae below is saying what is the condition that a CPC model would be more effective than a CPM model.  Ultimately according to the author if the following expression holds true:

I*CPC*CTR < (I/1000)*CPM, where

I = impressions

CPC = minimum CPC bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CPM = minimum CPM bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CTR = target audience’s propensity to click on your ad (fancy way of saying click-thru rate)

The expression could be satisfied if CPC and CTR are low or if CPM is high.

Well looks totally wicked. The formulae could very well work for you.

So is this a science or an art? Well my ‘answer” to them is, the questions is flawed to begin with, its to what extent this is science and to what extent this is art.

Keen to hear what successes you managed for your campaigns.

Share on Facebook