webqem blog

These days social networks like facebook have brought people together to connect, share and discover new things and ideas. And since the beginning film and tv have captivated and brought audiences together. Now Ooyala Social is bringing these worlds together, allowing publishers to harness the power of social to grow their audiences.

Powered by the same core technology that runs Ooyala Everywhere, Ooyala Social enables publishers to grow audiences, boost engagement and drive revenue on the world’s biggest social network.

Built-in social features promote sharing and content discovery. And Facebook Connect-based authentication ensures viewers enjoy seamless viewing, whenever and however they connect. With Ooyala Social, users can:

• Share videos with friends and family, and chat while viewing
• Discover what their friends like and recommend
• Watch on nearly every kind of screen and device
• Rent or buy videos easily with Facebook credits

Facebook is just one piece to the growing social TV phenomenon. Ooyala envisions a future where video viewing, content discovery and engagement all have a connected social dimension—a future that’s enabled by Ooyala’s backend social API integration. Social meets big data, meets HD-quality video on all devices.

One of the first publishers to take the plunge with Ooyala Social, is one of our favorite movie studios – Miramax. The guys that brought you classic films such as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Good Will Hunting and Clerks – are now available to rent right within Facebook. You can even view them on any other device like a smartphone, tablet or connected TV.

For all you footy fans out there, we are excited to announce the launch the OPSM AFL and NRL Sponsorship Facebook game application ‘Team Colours Countdown’!

Off the back of an incredibly successful ‘Colour Match Countdown’ application, the game was repurposed to provide a competition mechanic around the OPSM sponsorship of AFL and NRL umpires and referees.

Players have the chance to win Grand Finals packages including tickets, flights and accommodation, priority seating and after parties.

webqem has been managing AdWords campaigns for a number of clients over the past four years, in financial, retail, health, and software markets.

For the last few months we have been running paid advertising campaigns at Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, observing striking differences between the three platforms. A major factor would be due to the different levels of targetting possible.

Each platform does allow a measure of targetting, as follows:

AdWords campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 20km radius around Sydney),
• by language
• by network (eg Google search, search partners, or display network partners)
• by device (eg desktops, phones with browsers, mobile carrier or operating system)
• by keyword
• by placement (for the display network)
• by demographic/gender (if available for display network)

Facebook campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 10 miles around specific cities)
• by age, gender, relationship status, language, education level, workplace, birthday
• by interest.

LinkedIn campaigns can be targeted by three of geography,company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. Note that interests cannot be specified with LinkedIn.

Each platform allows bidding by CPC or CPM, and we tested both for each platform.
We compared the results of advertising a new online retail site providing hire services across the three platforms.

LinkedIn’s lack of targetting by interest or keyword left it lagging in third place, with the lowest click through rate, and by far the highest cost per click. LinkedIn’s suggested price for the demographic we targeted was over $4/click. LinkedIn visitors typically stayed on site for less than 30 seconds, and converted poorly.

Facebook provided the lowest cost-per-click – around 2/3 the cost of AdWords visitors. Facebook visitors tended to stay on site for around a minute, but only 10% came back for a return visit. They also converted very poorly. CPC advertising was clearly better than CPM advertising on Facebook for our client, with a much higher effective click through rate.

AdWords was a clear winner, with excellent click-through-rates, high pages per visit, low bounce rate, and solid conversion rate. The cost-per-click was acceptable, with the highly targeted campaign having excellent quality scores and numerous keywords with double-figure click through rates.

It does have to be said that organic traffic also performed outstandingly, with a high time on site, and double the conversion rate of the paid traffic. This was true for both Google and Yahoo, although Google provided 30 times the amount of traffic as Yahoo.

Google Adword’s ability to target an audience by keyword at a time when they are actively searching for infomation made it the best performer by a long way, for return on investment.

However as a branding platform for a new site, Facebook did provide a cost-effective method for a large number of impressions.

Here are illustrative figures from Google Analytics:

Fantastic 16 min video from TED earlier in 2009 here.

Working in the internet space means sometimes new ideas, technologies, paradigms creep upon us bit by bit and, while we ‘get it’, sometimes it can be helpful to step right back and put things in context.

This talk certainly does that, placing SM within the context of the history of human communication and punching home its significance…

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html