IST402Google Online Marketing Challenge

Jim Jansen

College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University

jjansen@ist.psu.edu

Quiz!

Scenario: You are the owner of a small-medium size business (SMB) with an online retail shop (select a Website that you are familiar with that provides either a product or a service). With the Website of this SMB in mind, answer the following questions.

Note: A SMB typically has between 10 and 100 employees, inclusive.

Go to ANGEL, Lessons tab -> In-class Exercises -> Search Engine Marketing Exercise

The Quiz!

1. What is a visitor to your Website worth?

2. When a visitor comes to your Website, what do you want them to do?

Each visitor has both potential costs and benefits – dollarize each visit!

The goal of each visit is some type of convert.

The Quiz!

3. How would a potential visitor find your Website?

4. What would bring a potential visitor to your Website?

More than 75 percent of people use search engines as an entry point (Nielsen)

Expression of a need - informational, navigational, transactional. (Jansen, Booth, Spink 2008)

The Quiz!

5. What sites are your Website’s competitors?

These sites are also dollarizing each visit, trying to convert each visitor, leveraging search, and trying to bring visitors to their Website!

Part of your overall campaign to achieve these goals should be sponsored search (a.k.a, keyword advertising)!

TAs

• Brooke Randel (Ad and English; Senior)

• Mitch Rukat (IST; Junior)

• Krishna Makadia (IST; Senior)

Course Milestones

1. Form a team and select leader (start today)2. Select a SMB (formally begin on lesson #4)3. Set-up AdWords account (start lesson #2)4. Learn key factors of keyword advertising5. Pre-campaign report (before Spring Break)6. Campaign (starts 28 March; runs for 3

weeks)7. Post campaign report (end of April)

Google Online Marketing Challenge Overview

8

Jamie MurphyDepartment of MarketingBusiness SchoolUniversity of Western Australiajmurphy@biz.uwa.edu.au

Lee HunterProduct ManagerGoogle Incleehunter@google.com

What is it?• Background

• Collaborative partnership between Google and Academics

• Timeline• Spring 2008:

o 8,000+ students from 47 countries participated

• Spring 2009:o 10,000+ students from 57 countries

participated

• Overview• Student teams receive $200 credit for AdWords• Work with local businesses to devise effective

online marketing campaigns• Implement these marketing campaigns• Student teams submit two written reports• Evaluation by Google (select 15)• Reports evaluated by academics• Winners flown to Google Headquarters (15 top,

then one from each region and one global)

The Google Scoring Algorithm

• Did not want to just look at conversions (i.e., sales or converts)

• Final algorithm incorporates 30 different signals in 5 categories

• Performance • Account structure• Tool and feature usage• Advertiser savviness• Budget management

• Algorithm was extensively tested and refined each time

10

Score

Scoring Results: Histogram of Scores from 2008 Challenge

• 1,620 student groups were scored

• Results close to normal distribution

• Needed to narrow down to 150 for manual scoring by Google experts

Mean: 11.4

Median: 9.5

Min: 0.3

Max: 27.1

Std Dev: 4.8

How has Penn State Done?

• Spring 2008, fielded 5 teams - 1 team in Top 15 and winning the Americas Region, two teams in Regional Semi-Finalists (i.e., the Top 50 in each region), one team Strong Campaign (i.e., the top 10% of teams), and one team disqualified• Spring 2009, fielded 10 teams – 3 teams in Top 15 and 7 teams as Regional Semi-Finalists

Winner of the Americas Region 2008!

• This year – honestly, I don’t care. We’ll going to focus on course learning objectives (i.e., learning techniques of keyword advertising).

Let’s get going

• Step one, skills survey

• Go to ANGEL

• Lessons tab ->In-class exercises -> Interests, Skills, and Motivation Survey

Let’s set the stage for

Keyword Advertising

Jim Jansen

College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University

jjansen@ist.psu.edu

The Power of Search and the Web

Sources: comScore, U.S., Feb. ’06, Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, Nov. ‘05

• Search is the top online activity

• Search drives over 5 billion monthly queries in the U.S.

• Online activity has a huge impact on people’s daily lives:– 70 minutes less with

family

– 30 minutes less TV

– 8.5 minutes less sleep

Analysis of Search Marketplace comScore Core Search Report* July 2009 vs. June 20098 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

Share of Searches (%)

Core Search Entity Jun-09 Jul-09 Point

Change Total Core Search 100.0% 100.0% NA Google Sites 65.0% 64.7% 0.4 Yahoo! Sites 19.6% 19.3% -0.4 Microsoft Sites 8.4% 8.9% -0.3 Ask Network 3.9% 3.9% 0.2 AOL LLC 3.1% 3.1% 0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Top Global Web Properties Ranked by Total Unique Visitors (000)* May 2008

Total Worldwide, Age 15+ - Home and Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix

Property Total Unique Visitors (000)

% Reach

Google Sites 643,809 75.5 Microsoft Sites 572,016 67.1 Yahoo! Sites 514,831 60.3

Wikipedia Sites 263,120 30.8 AOL LLC 252,394 29.6

eBay 247,791 29.0 Fox Interactive Media 169,301 19.8

Amazon Sites 159,281 18.7 Apple Inc. 140,380 16.5

CNET Networks 133,480 15.6 Ask Network 127,769 15.0

FACEBOOK.COM 123,851 14.5 Adobe Sites 107,361 12.6

Time Warner - Excluding AOL

98,000 11.5

WordPress 96,394 11.3 Viacom Digital 86,546 10.1 Baidu.com Inc. 80,201 9.4 TENCENT Inc. 77,885 9.1

Glam Media 77,391 9.1 New York Times Digital 77,172 9.0 * Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes

and access from mobile phones or PDAs

Analysis of Online Traffic

The Power of Keyword Advertising

• Online advertising $ are increasing faster than

any other medium.

• The search model is aligned with the consumer

need – pull vs push • Lowest acquisition cost of any medium – online

or offline• Low barriers to entry – cost, bias, knowledge

Keyword Advertising and Search Engines

• Web search engines require significant revenue streams! to support the free access that these search engines provide every day to millions of customers.

• Primary business model for these search engines is sponsored links, which advertisers pay for.

• These sponsored links appear on search engine results pages when users enter certain key phrases as queries.

• The search engines provide the overall mechanism for this sponsored search process to occur.

• Sponsored search is a multi-billion industry. AOL, Google, and Yahoo! receive substantial portions of their revenue from sponsored search.

Analysis of Online Advertising• In 2008, Google earned ~$22 billion; more than 90% of this revenue came from keyword advertising (Google 2008).

Non-sponsored results

Sponsored results

Sponsored Search Elements

1. Advertiser (or Provider) 2. Advertiser Content 3. Advertiser Bids

4. Search Engine 5. Search Engine Review Process 6. Search Engine Keyword and Content Index 7. Search Engine User Interface 8. Search Engine Tracking

9. Searcher

Jansen, B. J. and Mullen, T. (2008) Sponsored search: An overview of the concept, history, and technology, International Journal of Electronic Business.

The Sponsored Search Process

The Sponsored Search Process

Let’s Look at the Search Engine Advertising Platform

keywords control bids

Similar functionality on all major platforms

Course T-shirts

$500! for course!

Thanks, IST!

$500! for course!

Thanks, Smeal!

Course T-shirts

Our shirt from Spring 2008

Our shirt from Spring 2009

We need a t-shirt for Spring 2010!; volunteer(s)

Let’s talk admin

Syllabus Review

1. Syllabus – stable (on ANGEL)

2. Calendar, subject to change (on ANGEL)

3. Lessons (on ANGEL)

4. Daily Log (on ANGEL; last 5 minutes of class)

5. Typical Lesson (short lecture; exercise and hands on)

6. Guest speakers – as available

Thank you!… and see you next lesson!

Jim Jansen

College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University

jjansen@ist.psu.edu