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 l ocals 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 Guid ing 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 Tool s Paid Offsite Tools Listening Tools Effective Analytics Strategy Google Analyti cs 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 Netwo rk 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 1

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, Cl ub Med Asia Paci c in hotels and resorts; Apple in 13 countries, Avis in car renta l, Citibank regional account, HSBC, ANZ, Standard Chartered to local banks in Vi etnam like Techcombank, ACB, Vietnam Airlines, Tan Hiep Phat Group, Mead Johnson , Sapporo beer etc...Some of the clients are from dark market industries like Toba cco (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 limi ted so many things in this book could be wrong/ debatable. This is partly why I publish this book as an ebook so that from reader's comments, I could quickly make changes. Feel free to share your comments/feedback through chandlerblog@gmail.c om About Chandler Nguyen I was lucky. I found what I love to do early in life. In 2003/2004, a friend int roduced Google Adwords to me. I still remember, the rst ever book that I read on this subject was The De nite Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall. Initially I started as an af liate marketer without even knowing what it was, a friend needs s ales leads and I used Adwords to generate them. After that I worked for an agenc y 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 ba sis per keyword. Then I moved to a regional agency started in the UK, when they r st set up their of ce in Singapore in 2007. Here I had the opportunities to work w ith the global / regional brands on Performance Media marketing. After a few yea rs, I came back to Vietnam to cofound a digital agency from scratch. 2

Section 2 Who this book is for? This ebook is about Digital marketing in Vietnam, written for the following audi ences: Fresh Graduates who are looking for opportunities in Digital Marketing In dustry Digital marketing professionals with 2-3 years of experience in one speci c area of digital Traditional Marketers/Account Managers who want to learn more a bout Digital Marketing Traditional agency owners in Vietnam International agenci es who want to explore Vietnam International providers who want to understand mo re about the local market Why I am writing this ebook in English and not Vietnam ese? While it's true that writing in Vietnamese would reach a wider audience. However, it is my rm belief that if you want to excel in Digital market ing, language skill is something you have to master, English is a necessity. Als o the majority of the reference materials referred to in this book are in Englis h. 3

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 mor e about any subject, it may be helpful to look at the career path, what your opt ions will be like if you master the subject. Next we talk about different ways t hat you could learn Digital Marketing. Part 2 This is it. At this part, we deep dive into Digital Analytics, Owned Media (incl uding 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 dig ital 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 ar e and where Digital marketing stands in the marketing mix in Vietnam. 4

2 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 co mpared to 2011. Total revenue for 2011 was $31.74 Billions. Search marketing and Display media (Display banner, Rich Media, Video Ads, Sponsorship) are still th e most popular ad formats, which contributed nearly 78% of the spend in 2012. Co ming 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 de nition of Disp lay Banner ad format and Sponsorship ad format, one would guess that Facebook ad s were counted in this category. Search marketing naturally includes paid search ads, contextual targeting text ads, paid inclusion and search engine optimizati on. 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/Mala ysia/Indonesia or Vietnam to increase at a much faster pace to be worthy of inve stment. 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 co urse 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 togethe r with Classi ed. 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 th at of the US. However, the penetration rate is quite low, at 38.3%, suggested th at 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 signi cantly different compared to Google. Popu lar Internet services in China are mostly dominated by local players, not Intern ational players like what is happening in many other countries. We have Baidu fo r 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 fr om 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 ma rkets. 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 not hing else, the size of the market alone makes it a completely different game. Fr om technology and digital marketing standpoint, I would think that China model w ould be more suitable to Vietnam as compared to Western models. 9

Section 3 Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011 From Campaign Asia and PwC, digital marketing is expected to grow between 8% - 1 3% per year from 2012 to 2017. Search Marketing contributed about 35% of the tot al online spend while display commanded about 50%. The rest went to Classi ed and Directories. From an agency perspective, Singapore is the HQ for many internatio nal agencies. Many regional companies plan their regional budget out of Singapor e as well while letting individual country level to decide how they would want t o 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 o pinion, Singapore is a highly competitive marketplace with more agencies than cl ients to serve. Also the local market is small so local spend is limited as comp ared 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 couldn't nd the public report for 2012 so we have to make do with 2011 data. Online spend was at about 8% of t he total advertising market, which makes advertising market around $1.25B. While the percentage of online spend vs total advertising market for Singapore is hig her 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 h uge 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 r ate of the US and UK. This is, in my opinion, a disappointing growth rate becaus e 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 r ate was nothing like what marketers hoped for. The total market size in 2011 acc ording to VAA (Vietnam Advertising Association) and TNS was between US $725m - U S $1b. It would be safe to say that the overall market size is around $1b (+-15% ). 2012 was a very dif cult year for the Vietnamese economy as a whole and adverti sing 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 percentag e 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 averag e $30k - $150k for digital channel alone for a 2-4 month campaign depending on t he scale and the marketing objectives. Finance industry has not been as active a s FMCG when it comes to digital marketing. However, some international banks sta rted to heavily invest in digital marketing. As for ad formats, since the dawn o f the internet in Vietnam, Display Banner has always had the majority share of t he ad spend. While email marketing is one of the most effective channels when do ne correctly, the use or rather misuse of it in Vietnam has given email marketin g 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 amon gst 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 Mobi le marketing. 2013 is the year of social media, mobile marketing, content market ing again. While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions in the market plac e, there is no authoritative industry body that could provide good enough case s tudies, proper best practices to guide social media or mobile marketing. IAB Vie tnam was born but died shortly after that. Technically we have Vietnamese Advert ising 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' c ontent are poorly maintained as well. To explain the low spend for Digital marke ting, TNS regional MD for Vietnam & Malaysia Ralf Matthaes wrote in one report Vi etnam has literally grown up in the Age of the shifting media landscape.These ea rly adopters are not relying on TV necessarily for their product information, bu t rather going online and creating blogs to become Brand friends and champions. Unfortunately due to the conservative nature of both international and local com panies, many opportunities are being missed and agencies are having major dif cult ies convincing their client base that new media mediums play an integral, albeit none integrated role in mass communication. Hopefully by 2021, when today's young users are running these companies, advertise rs will nally follow consumer sentiment. 12

3 Potential in Vietnam Vietnam has the largest online population in Southeast Asia, with time spent onl ine 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 Digi tal Future in Focus showed that Vietnam had more internet users than any other co untries in Southeast Asia (age 15+, at home and at work only). In Vietnam, we st ill have a large population of users using internet cafe. 1. Online penetration rate is at 33% 2. Time spend online is around 2 hours dail y 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 seco nd 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 of ce in Singapore, as of August (2012), smartphone penetration in the country was 16 percent. Another study done by Ericsson ConsumerLab showed that the smartphone pen etration rate in Vietnam was expected to jump from 16% in Aug 2012 to 21% in ear ly 2013. Reports from Accenture showed that Smartphone sales are expected to grow in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand at compound annual growth rates of 37 perce nt, 31 percent, and 27 percent, respectively, from 2011 through 2016. As this tre nd continues, the total time spent online across multiple screens by consumers i n Vietnam is going to increase rapidly. More time spent online means less time s pent for other channels like TV, newspaper, radio, out of home etc... Research online, buy of ine/online In big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh, it is very typical for consumers to res earch online before making their decision online. For example, before sending ki ds to day care school, moms ask friends and relatives for recommendation of cour se, but they also visit webtretho and search online to see what other parents ar e 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 marketi ng spend per activity. Right now, while the overall picture is quite complex wit h different attribution model like Across different online channels, From 15

Online to Store (of ine), Across multiple screens (computer, smartphone, tablet); it is my personal guess that once we Ecommerce is growing quickly in Vietnam, th e 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 Vietnam's e-commerce sales hit $700 million ($354 million of that registered of cially on VECITA) at the end of 2012. By the same report, VECIT A 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 ZenithOpt imedias Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, APAC is already the largest advertis ing market outside North America. Internet ad expenditure is set to overtake tha t of newspapers by the end of 2014. By 2015, online advertising will account for 21.9% of all adspend 16

4 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 a reliterallyhundred of agencies in Vietnam, from one man shop to 100-200 hundreds o f employee. Note: My comments (if any) about these agencies are strictly coming from my limited understandings and may not be the true re ection. Overtime, these observations may be wrong since many things could change. Please note that the b elow categorization is far from correct because majority of the agencies claim t hat they are doing everything and they are all full service agencies. Also agenc y could change from time to time as well. The purpose of me putting a list toget her 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 of ces 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 of ces under the group in Ho Chi M inh alone, WPP group does cover a lot of ground. However, they don't own 100% of t hese agencies I guess. Many of the agencies below are not Digital agencies but s ince it belongs to WPP, I just put them here for reference. The below are from W PP's own website: Asatsu - DK Bates G2 Grey GroupM JWT Kantar Media Kantar Worldpanel Maxus MEC MediaCom Millward Brown Vietnam dshare Ogilvy & Mather Ogilvy Public Relations OgilvyAction OgilvyOne Worldwide TNS TNS Media Who Digital Wunderman 19

 Xaxis Y&R 6 of ces in Hanoi: JWT-G Landor Associates Ogilvy & Mather Ogilvy Publi 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 cap abilities in-house. While GroupM mostly do media planning and buying, limited Se arch Engine Marketing work, OgilvyOne mostly do strategy & production work & Soc ial Media. From my limited knowledge, Y&R and Wunderman handle Coca cola and Nok ia accounts. However these clients normally just adapt regional campaigns to Vie tnam. Nokia is going downhill fast so we haven't 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 of ces in Hanoi as well. Together, we have all the digital capabi lities of a full edged Wunderman of ce, and the integrated marketing ones of a Y&R o f ce. 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 a gencies 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 didn't have a strong presence in Vietnam I guess. However it s eems that starting this year, 2013, Vietnam has received more focus from Omnicom Media and the digital team is having more specialists compared to previous year s. 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\Tequil cus, TBWA\Vietnam, Vira OMG Publicis Group There are ve of ces in Vietnam, all in Ho Chi Minh City according to the Group webs ite: 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 Pub licis Group in Vietnam. From what I heard while Performics doesn't 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 V ietnam 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 t here aren't 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 af lia tes in Vietnam, one is VMC, which is Carat's partner and another one is Emerald Ma rketing, which is Isobar's partner. It's unclear, however, that there is any invest2 2 Interpublic Draftfcb Initiative: media services, communication planning Lowe + Partners: Adv ertising, CRM/Direct. Lowe outsourced the majority of their digital work out, th ey 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 ou tsource majority of the digital work out like Social media marketing, production , search engine marketing etc.. And mostly do media planning in-house. Dentsu co mpleted their acquisition of Ageis globally not too long ago so it's unclear what would be Dentsu's strategy for Digital marketing in Vietnam. Other Japanese/Korean agencies There areHakuhodo,Chuo Senko or Asatsu DK, Daiko Vietnam. However I don't think they do a lot of digital work in-house also. CyberAgents,Mediba and a few other compa nies set up their rep of ces 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 of cial partnership with Cheil Wordwide, I guess you could consider them str ongly related. Mekong has partnership with other companies like Emerald and DNA as well but I haven't heard any of cial 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 - A d micro Nova Ads 24

For Google certi ed partners, you could nd them using Google Partner Search There a re so many Google Certi ed Partners in Vietnam now so I won't list down any names he re. It is important to note that Google welcomes any agencies who want to be Goo gle certi ed partners as long as they have at least one employee who is a current Google Quali ed Individual and the media spend for 3 consecutive months with Googl e is more than US $10k. If you want to nd out who is Google quali ed individuals in Vietna, please use this link. You could search for quali ed individual from each country and based on different certi cations (search advertising, Display advertis ing, reporting and analysis, Google Analytics quali ed individual etc) % % Thietkeweb Social media / PR agencies Click Media: it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well u nder 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 Sofre sh 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 do n't think our capability in this area is strong in Vietnam. Anyway, I put some nam es here based on comments from some guys: % % % % manseo (previously known as lams eo) 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 a re not that many people from the core Who Digital team at OgilvyOne after 2 year s from what I heard. Glass Egg Sutrix Media Time Universal Splash Interactive Me dia 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 Vie tnam 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 S mEye Creative Vietbuzz Ad D Square IMS (Integrated Marketing Solution) Emerald G 2 Asia Paci c Integrated agencies Notch: many people from Notch left and set up a couple of agencies (DNA, Echo et c). Notch recently joined with RiverOrchid group to form a new entity as well. Go lden Digital: from what I heard, Tony Truong, which was one of the founding memb ers of Golden Digital left the company not too long ago. Quo Global Climaxi IO M edia: the majority of the previous core team left to join other agencies Cheil V ietnam: through their partnership with Mekong Communication I guess these two co mpanies 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 o f 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 n ot have enough specialists in Vietnam for so many rms to offer everything in-hous e. 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 servi ce, going after certain verticals, only working with other agencies as a sub con tracts 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 c lients are small and medium businesses and how many percentage are MNCs/big loca l brands. Agencies who serve SMEs (small and medium enterprises) or SMBs (small and medium businesses) are not suf ciently equipped to work with MNCs or big local brands. The business development or the Director of the agency may paint very a ppealing 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 n ormal circumstances they only employ relatively junior employees because SMEs' obj ectives, budget, decision-making, working culture are not that complex. SMEs do not often work with complex marketing plan that involves multiple channels (of ine and online) or having their own creative agency, PR agency etc English uency is a nother major concern facing specialists from SME agencies and even bigger agencies . Next would be communication skill and I am talking about the basic communi28

cation skill so that both parties would be able to understand each other in Engl ish/Vietnamese. Another point worth mentioning is the difference between working with government-owned rms, private rms and foreign rms in Vietnam. While relations hip plays an important role everywhere in Vietnam, with government-owned rms, tha t 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 ver y different from each other as well. Generally sales cycle in Ha Noi is longer c ompared to Ho Chi Minh (2-3 times longer on average). The majority of MNCs are i n Ho Chi Minh so they set the working scene in Ho Chi Minh as compared to govern ment-owned rms setting the scene in Hanoi. 29

5 Digital Marketing Career There are many choices from working for agencies, direct clients, technology ven dors, 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 busines s development. In many agencies, the account manager or project manager, would b e the interface between the client and the operation team inside the agency. Bes ide project management skill and client service skill, I think it would be bette r if the account manager understands digital marketing and different channels wi thin digital. They would do a much better job that way. In any cases, for most a gencies, you would start from entry level to senior executive, to manager, senio r manager, director, vice president etc... Below is an example of a job descript ion (JD) from agency side. Head of Paid Media The Head of Paid Media is responsi ble for managing all the day to day Paid Digital media planning and buying for t he agency. This includes Premium Portal Buy, Ad Networks, Google & Yahoo Paid Search, Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, and Mobile Ads (as well a s all other paid media channels that emerge over time). The Head of Paid Media m anages, 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 medi a partners. Monitor delivery of campaigns from beginning to end to ensure that a ll paid media campaigns are achieving the established campaign KPIs. Manage all n ancial closure of media planning and buying activities with the nance department directly and with the media partners. Develop clear, concise digital media repor ts for all active campaigns. Provide campaign optimization, recommendations base d 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 a t the salary survey published by TalentNet or any other head hunting rms. However Digital Marketing is a niche eld and I haven't come across a good salary survey fo r digital yet. From my own experience, there are some guidelines below: Generall y 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 Dire ctor: $3000 - $5000 The main point here is that there are demand for digital specialists across segm ents. Working on the client side (from what I was told) is signi cantly different in comparison to the agency side. For one thing you will only work with one clie nt, 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 campaig ns that you want to run internally or with external agencies. If you work for pu blishers or technology vendors, you could play the role of either business devel opment 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 an d 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 won't vary much. Of course, there are outliners like Zing or Google where Zing sta rts to become a full service agency and Google offerings span across Search, Dis play and Video. From salary point of view, it really depends on the type of orga nization that you join. Client Side & Publishers & Technology Provider The truth is I have never worked in the client side or publisher or technology p rovider so the below is rather limited. 32

6 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 market place.

Marketing before Digital In my opinion, many people get it the other way around. It's 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 a mount of hard work, of new tools, new channels would save a campaign from the wr ong strategy and poor market understanding. It just so happens that there are ma ny internet users and the amount of time they spend online is signi cant so market ers could reach/engage them potentially more ef ciently. There are so many books o n 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 inc ome could they afford? Are they married? Do they have kids? Watch out for any bi ases 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 Pa id 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 camp aign. As for insights, there are many insights about the target audience that yo u want to know. How do they often buy your product? Where can they buy it? What factors in uence 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 in uence the be havior somehow? How do your customers often know about new brands, new products in your industry? 34 Consumer Insights are key Always start with consumer insights and never forget them along the way during b rain storming or brain writing, strategy planning, KPI setting, media planning a nd buying, execution, optimization and reporting. Do eld work, try the product ou t, 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: Ho w 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 t arget audience or your competitor, market place. EQVN AIIM INET Etc... I will not be able to recommend any school publicly becaus e it is subjective. My advice to you if you want to go down this road is to audi t 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 t o 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 ma rketing 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 c ould check to see if your school offers any courses in Digital marketing. Univer sities in Vietnam, especially International Universities (RMIT for example) star t to cover digital marketing materials in their generic marketing course. Some m ajor local universities start to offer courses in digital marketing as well. I h ave 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 w ho could teach digital marketing courses though. If your university doesn't 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. Coupli ng 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 t he best option at this point in time. Because of this reason, I try to include a s many reference links in this ebook as possible so that you could learn more if you 35 BMG International Education Vietnam Marcom

want to. Try to read in English as much as you can because I have seen enough mi sleading, wrong information in Vietnamese when it comes to our new eld. 36

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 i s a necessity. However don't try to embark on the hottest trends just yet, please be sure that the fundamentals are right and your strategic plan is in place. Goi ng 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 no t 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 m ay try to teach this or pass this along to someone else, which is even more dang erous. Digital marketing is too new in Vietnam so there are no authoritative gure s 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 of ine. Things are changing way too fast Yup this is a real challenge faced by digital marketers. What you just learnt ma y 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 7

Section 1 Owned, Paid and Earned Media The ecosystem is vast and complex. If you want to see how What Will Be Discussed I n This Chapter complex it is, just look at a few LumaScape, you could see that t he supply chain from Advertiser to end consumer included many steps. The screens hot below was taken from Display Lu1. The complex world of Digital Marketing mas cape, which highlights the Display Ecosystem and you 2. Owned what is it about a nd 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 i t about and what it includes? If you go from left to right, rst, marketers would work with agencies. These agen cies would then work with their trading desks. The trading desks may employ reta rgeting 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 n etworks, Supply Side Platforms and then individual publisher. Finally the ads ar e shown to consumer and track the performance. 39

Multi Screen is a fact now From consumer point of view, they have so many choices now between different scr eens like never before. site/Mobile App, You Tube Channel, Facebook Fanpage, Twitter account, Facebook A pp 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 t his well, more often than not, you need marketing understandings, technical (cod ing), user experience (or User interface) specialist, content marketing, Paid Media: it includes your usual suspects like banner ads, rich media ads, pai d 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 traf c 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 o pinion about certain brands on their desktop/tablet/smart phone. Could it be Ins tagram? 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 prop erties/ 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 40

 E-commerce Platform Mobile assets Mobile site Mobile native app Social Media ass ets: 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 Fo rum seeding Earned Media Key Opinion Leader/Hot Blogger outreach Word of mouth marketing Social mentions Virality SEO Paid Media Display banner Search Engine Marketing 41

PC Assets Detailed discussion of website, microsite, the normal development plan and user experience 8

Section 1 Getting the basics right In Vietnam, when it comes to Digital marketing, people often talk about differen t channels like Search Marketing, Social media etc...and often overlook one very important key component which is their website/microsite. There are so many boo ks/articles/blog posts on how to create a great websites already. So I won't try t o reinvent the wheels. Instead, I will list down a few things that Vietnamese we b masters/marketers/agencies often miss/forget. A pretty looking website/microsi te is needed, however it has to be user friendly and useful as well. Of course t he role of the website in the whole marketing strategy is different from industr y to industry, from one company to the next. However, a few straight forwards qu estions 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 h ow 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? Let's 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 comprehensi vely. To answer it, we probably have to answer another question rst: who the targ et audience is? And research the customer insights. For the purpose of this disc ussion, I would exclude sites like online newspaper etc...and zoom in on a few p urposes only: To introduce the company and what it does basically the products/s ervices introduction 43

 To launch a new promotion To promote a new event To be the content hub so that i nterested users could go and nd authentic information. To sell online/Encourage D irect Response from users Etc... What is your business value proposition? Why consumers should choose you over your competitors? What are your products/ s ervices 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 th ese basic questions can help you. For example, we know that for a real estate pr oject, 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 si te. 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 i s 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 speci c the answer is, the better it is for you and your users. The call t o action should be visible on the homepage and important pages. 44

If you expect someone to call you, then your hotline should be prominent on as m any pages as possible. If you ask people to sign up or give their personal infor mation, 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 m ap (Google Map is advised) is a necessity. Generally, people are interested in t hemselves and their needs so unless your users are looking for a job or trying t o see if they should invest in your company or the like, About us section, Press Re lease 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. N ot all the business outcomes that you want to use for the website could be measu re 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. 45

Section 2 Development plan production manager (coding side), digital producer, digital strategist, paid med ia 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 pag e and know the latest changes/ con rmation from the clients in comparison to the v ersion 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 c ompared to the pitching materials Objectives: What are the objectives of the cam paigns? 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 pi tching process. However, the real question is whether all of your other teams kn ow? The production team, the creative team, any other teams that will actually w ork 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 th e call to actions. 46 I do not mean to reinvent the wheel, however I don't think the process of developi ng 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 ma ny people (who don't have a strong owned media or paid media background) make mist akes that are hard to rectify later on or they simply drive creative team or pro duction team crazy when they do project management since they don't really underst and 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 step s that should not be ignored. Kick off meeting It is a good point in the journey to have a kick off meeting between business de velopment team/account/client service team and creative team (Digital art direct or, Designer), copywriter,

 Mood and tone Key message, Unique selling points Key bene ts Reasons to believe Ca ll to actions Overall Schedule including timeline for creative, production, anal ytics, seo, testing More on creative brief is at the last chapter on Digital str ategy. If there are any earned media elements, people may put KPI likes the number of l ike/share/comments per in uencer 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 product ion 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 agr ee on what domain to be used. Normally there would be three scenarios: The campa ign would run on a subdomain of the main corporate site i.e. campaignX.abc.com.v n 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 separa ted domain like campaignX.com.vn Con rm KPIs for the site Some of the most common KPIs that I have seen are: Visits to the site Overall bo unce rate Number of people sign up to play certain games on the site Number of p hotos, videos uploaded Number of people who join the contest Revenue 47

The decision depends largely on the role of the corporate website in the long te rm and of the speci c campaign in discussion. If you want your corporate website t raf c 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-charac ter 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, serv er environment (Windows based or Linux based etc...), programming language for t he 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 strong ly recommend against that for many reasons including mobile site friendliness, S EO, etc... Screen resolution is important as well. For now in Vietnam in 2013, o ne common screen resolution for desktop/ laptop is 1280 x 1024. However this dep ends on your target audience and their devices so please check carefully. Screen resolution would affect how much visitors could see on the screen without havin g 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 An alytics 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 pl ays a key role. Search Engine Optimization expert would be able to contribute wi th the site map & wireframe as well to make sure that it is search engine friend ly. 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 mi ssing 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 e xperience because wireframe represents the skeleton and design is the esh. It is impo rtant also that not only the agency but the client needs to con rm the information architect and the wireframe before actual design/coding. Because when the desig n is done and then someone wants to add in/ remove certain elements of the site map, it would create a lot of rework. 48

Also based on the information architect, the SEO team should be able to start wo rking 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://ww w.balsamiq.com/download Disclaimer: I am not related to either hitreach or balsa miq in anyway. Another wireframe example is below 49

for approval. The reason is because we want to test the style, look and feel wit h the client/ decision maker rst. After the homepage is con rmed, the style is con rm ed then it won't be too dif cult to design other sub pages. Also client may ask agen cy to come back with two different concepts for the homepage to choose from. Som e 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 it's better to design the homepage or one additional main page rst and s end them quickly to the client to get approval on art direction rather than desi gning every page and then send them for approval. If it turns out that the art d irection is not what the client wants, the latter approach would mean lots of ef forts wasted. If responsive web design is needed, one should be mindful of the r equirement of responsive design regarding the wireframe and design. More on resp onsive design at the chapter about Mobile assets. Double checking the actual des ign against responsive web design principle at this stage is not a bad idea if r esponsive design is a requirement because many interface is not suitable for res ponsive design. I won't go too deep into design revision because managing this pro cess is an art, not exact science. Actual Design More often than not the homepage and may be one other page would be designed and send to the client/ decision maker 50 rst

Just make sure that unless there is a damn good reason for it, after the wirefra me is con rmed or the design is con rmed, we move on and don't come back to change the wireframe or changing the design at production phase. Any major changes would m ean 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 cri teria, 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. Techn ically many agencies would start working on production after the design is con rme d, 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 we bsites 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 fas t as possible is not only great for user experience but also for SEO purpose. Go ogle loves fast loading sites and so do the users. 15 seconds is kind of my limi t and then I am gone. Google offers this great tool to check how your site perfo rms 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 sc ore was 86/100 which is not bad. 51 Production Since the choice of technology, programing language are con rmed 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 wit h it (or it's their own) and could replicate from one client to the next easily. H owever I think that is often a very bad idea, we need to leverage as much as pos sible on these very capable, FREE, open sourced CMS. Some examples are Wordpress , Drupal, Mambo, Magento etc... For the majority of microsites, campaign based w ebsites 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 fr om it: An ideal web page should do all the following: Be hyper-relevant to a spec i c topic (usually a product or single object) Include subject in title tag Includ e subject in URL Include subject in image alt text Of course the loading speed w ould depend on where you locate the server as well because international bandwid th in Vietnam is very limited so if your server is overseas, be prepared for lon g loading time. Specify subject several times throughout text content Provide un ique content about a given subject Link back to its category page Link back to i ts 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 pa ge.) 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 ab out search engine marketing. On page optimization (SEO) I would argue that even with a 2-3 month microsite, you would still need to do O n 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 natu ral 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 52

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 Googl e 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 dif ferently in your Google Analytics account (using different pro les) The important thing is set something up so that you could monitor traf c separately for this mic rosite. Goals/conversions should be used as well. Normally you should de ne any ac tion that you want user to take as a conversion like sign up for an account, joi n the contest, play games etc... After set up, please do testing carefully to ma ke sure that the code is working ne by taking the action and see if Google Analyt ics records the correct conversion. I can't stress this enough because people ofte n 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 tas ks 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 i s sent back to you. Test each page by clicking on every single link and every si ngle clickable image to make sure it functions as plan. If there is a video on t he site, try to click on the video to see how long it would take to load the vid eo. 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 53

It is important that the client tests every function carefully and sign off on t hem via email or on paper before the site is launch. You may hear the term UAT a t this stage, which stands for User Acceptance Test. It will be very risky not h aving client to con rm by email or sign off on paper before launching the site bec ause 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 clie nt to check off could be useful. Launch More often than not, since the microsite is part of the bigger marketing campaig n with some promotions/ activities to engage users on the site, soft launch coul d be dif cult. The main reason is that you want to synchronize the communication m essage across channels. On the rst day of the campaign, there should be lots of p aid media channels running, pumping users to the site so please monitor your sit e/ server carefully to ensure no down time. 54

Section 3 User experience I have come across so many websites (including my own), so many forms, so many c ontests that I will be of absolute lost trying to complete certain critical task s. Because of these experiences, I've always wanted to learn more about User Exper ience, not just for website but how to bring good overall experience of a produc t/ service to users/customers. And they said that the best way to learn is to te ach so while bearing in mind the risk of sounding too ignorant and a complete am ateur when it comes to user experience, I put together some materials on this su bject. 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 lo oks better when you wear it. However I didn't buy eventually because as a watch, I can't look at the analog watch and gure out what time it is. Being able to show wh at time it is, is THE basic functionality of a watch. Don't get me wrong, I think many people would buy this watch because of its design and I saw a number of pedestrians wearing it actuall y. Everyone is different. Insuf cient attention from marketers in Vietnam I have to say user experience is an area that doesn't receive suf cient attention fr om the digital agencies, marketers in Vietnam in general. While it is not new, i t 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 t hat many user experience professionals in Vietnam. 55

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 de nition ishere),sociology, computer science, graphic design, cognitive science. There are many factors that in uence the experience of an user with a product/ service as we ll: % % % % % % % % % % Usefulness Usability Learnability Aesthetics: does it look ni ce? Emotions have website/microsite, Facebook fanpage, You Tube Channel etc Not only that user s use desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets to access these properties so we n eed to ensure a pleasant experience duringthe entire user journey, from the begin ning, when they rst come in contact with us, what do they after that and then whe re they would go when they nish. Foramateur, a lot of stuff for User Experience sh ould be easy and common sense. It comes from an understanding, a focus on user's n eed while designing, building a product/service/website.Don't 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, doesn't it?Our job is NOT to make u sers having to think too much just to use the website/application.Everything shou ld be natural, obvious to users especially the key call to action. If you want t o go further and conduct usability test yourself, Steve Krug has another good, s imple to read book called Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to F inding 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 f rom an agency angle. Jodie didn't just talk about User Experience on the web alone , she discussed generally about all the touch points that you may have online/of in e with your users/ customers. This is a powerful concept to note because more of ten than not, under Owned Media Channel alone, we would 56

Because there are so much materials on this subject already so I don't want to rei nvent 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 wa nt 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 Viet nam is around 2.5 seconds so if the site takes like 15 secs to load, something i s not right. User doesn't want to wait when it comes to the internet and 20 secs i s a long time online. There are many articles on how to make your site faster, including articles from Google. I don't 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 inst alled on your site, you could look at the page speed report under Content catego ry. 57

First Impression Counts Could you easily understand what the site is about? Which site it is? Which sect ion/page of the site you are on? Is it obvious to you what you could do from whe re 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 s ite 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 it's probably not u ser-friendly enough. While it's true that certain site requires user with domain k nowledge to use because they are highly technical. However, my challenge to thos e 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 attra ct these new customers. The overarching principle here is again Don't 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 don't know what breadcrumb is, please refer to the screenshot below: 58

comes to online, if I can't immediately nd what I am looking for, I would use the s earch function. Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce site has a very robust sea rch 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 functi on 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 won't need search function). Internal search function is the search button that a llows users to search for stuff on your site. A real life analogy would be if yo u can't 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 assis tant near by about how to nd thejewelrysection or kid section etc this is the equiva lent of the search function when it comes to online. I am often very lazy and al ways ask the store assistant so when it Basic Accessibility Issues Text to background contrast: Text should be easy to read, and have enough contra st with the background like black text 59

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 doesn't have good te xt 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 conte nt should be above the fold. Another thing would be font size and spacing. I would argue that anything less t han size 10 is not easy to read on the web. May be I am getting old but I will n ot 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 im portant 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 60 Clear Visual Hierarchy

from this map? The context of this screenshot is that it is the location of a re al estate project. Could you see the project anywhere on the map? I couldn't 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 t op right corner. Have you seen the site logo on the top right corner before? Com pany logo should link back to the homepage Make clear which part is clickable: b y convention, blue & underlined text is clickable (even blue text only in some c ase). Don't 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 us e some newly invented abbreviation but it is NOT good for business. If people do n't understand something and you are NOT there to answer their questions (it's onlin e remember?), then it just turns people off. Site search should be on top center ed position or top right position. Things that are related to each other logically should be close together physica lly. It is like how you would arrange merchandise in a supermarket. You don't see s h 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 co mplete what you want them to do easily, without hiccup, you are a star! If user can't do/ ful ll what they want from your side, you are doomed no matter how pretty yo ur side is. Following Convention Is Important Some of the conventions are: 61

List down the top 3-5 key actions you want users to do while they are on your si te. Then write 3-5 scenarios that match these key actions so that if you ask som eone else to complete these tasks, they would have the background information. T his should be easy and almost anyone from marketing to IT to sales could make th e 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 w ith your target audience, or since your target audience would tend to be quite w ide, you could test it with anyone who is NOT involved in building, designing, m aintaining the site. It is to be hoped that you won't 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, it's best not to direct them to your PR news page or put your of ine brochure online. I came across brochure type landing page, in which u sers 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 yo u and order, your PHONE number should be visible on the homepage and on as many pages as suitable. Don't 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 s o 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 person al 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 it's 2013 and users should NOT have to retype all elds in the f orm just because something is wrong. Retyping the password or CAPTCHA is underst andable but not everything like name, email, etc Status bar while uploading a pho to 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 tim e they need to wait? 62

 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 op inion, auto play video with sound ON is a big NO NO. As a user, my rst reaction h as always been to turn off that video and sound no matter what i.e. I don't bother to wait and watch to see what the video is about. Location without map: more of ten than not, we would have locations of our of ces, our stores, our restaurant on the website and we want users to visit them. However just listing down the addr ess 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 resta urant etc The listing of stores below to me is sub optimal. This one is much better. It has detailed address, phone number, map etc 63

 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 y our users. 64

Section 4 Reference

A couple of good resources Dont make me think by Steve Krug Some Slightly Irregular: http://someslightlyirreg ular.com/ Killer UX design by Jodie Moule Helpful usability checklist from Dr. Pet er J. Meyers 25 point website usability checklist Software to create wireframe Bal samiq How to choose the right CMS platform from Rand Fishkin Page Speed Insights b y Google Is the web getting faster by Google SEO on page factors by Moz Google Webm ster 65

Mobile Assets Different options for brands (including mobile site, responsive design website, native application) are discussed with their pros and cons. 9

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 digit al era, the POST PC era. With Apple's 1. Post PC era is here earning results, many analysts con rmed again that the post PC era is here. (read WSJ article rate Apple Reaf rm 2. Smartphone penetration inEarnings Vietnam Post-PC Era, or About that pos t-PC era...Steve Jobs was 3. right). There are some interesting data from TNS Glo bal 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. 67

From the chapter on the potential of Digital marketing in Vietnam, you already s ee that the smartphone penetration is forecasted to be 21% in early 2013 in Viet nam. The above graph shows the share of time spent on PC/Laptop from comScore. Howeve r I don't see much difference for smartphone with social networking, services and news are the three biggest categories from time spent point of view. In conclusi on, having a presence on mobile devices in no longer an option. In the next sect ions, 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 ab out 3.3 million 3G users in Vietnam. 68

Section 2 Mobile options for Brands So with millions of smartphone users, using their phone Lorem Ipsum every day, w hat we could do to take advantage of it? For ever-increasing numbers of consumers , across markets, 1. Multi screen & connected world income levels and demographi cs, the mobile phone is the de2. World wide statistics vice and the communicatio ns channel closest to their hearts. It 3. Vietnam statistics is by de nition intim ate and personal, carried everywhere, used throughout thebased day and customise d through taking and 4. Emerging trends on consumer insights saving personal pho tos, downloading music, adding wallpapers, 5. Gomo - is your website mobile frie ndly? creating shortcuts and, increasingly, through the selection of 6. Mobile A pp - iOS or Android? apps and functions. From TNS Global Key Insights Mobile Lif e. 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 a pp or leverage on existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. With mobile site, you can't take advantage of different functions like access to p hoto 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 m obile site is platform agnostic i.e. it could run on both iOS, Android or Window s. As for Native App, you could build really complicated app with rich experienc e, beautiful graphics, 3D images etc... However, it is very important to know th at you would likely have to create different versions of the same app for iOS, A ndroid, 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 doesn't support ash. If you use the tool from G oogle, after entering your site URL into the tool, it would show you how the sit e 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 69

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 zoom ing or scrolling side to side? Can links and buttons be clicked with a thumb? Ar e videos, games or other animations visible? Are visuals and tone consistent wit h other marketing materials? By answering these questions and knowing how much ti me your mobile site takes to load, I guess you could have a very rough idea of h ow your mobile site performs and what area you should look into to improve the s ite. 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 s till a long way to go for designer and developer to master this concept and brin g 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 them e that supports responsive design. I haven't come across many sites in Vietnam tha t implements Responsive Design. From Think Insights with Google, they wrote Respons ive web design (RWD) enables you to optimize your site experience across differe nt screen sizes without creating multiple websites. By using exible templates, CS S media queries, and JavaScript events, a responsive web design can respond to t he viewport size of a device, adjusting images, template layout and content visi bility. You can even harness novel device capabilities such as dragging, swiping and other user-gestures recognized by touch devices. All of these CSS and JavaS cript techniques can be layered onto a single le of HTML content, delivered to al l 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: 70

This is the normal screen size for desktop (I am using Macbook Pro and the resol ution 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 hi ghlighted portion, you could see the article has title in 2 lines and some descr iptions 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 don't have space for the article description anymore. However as you could see, t he layout is responsive and our view is still optimal. The layout doesn't break an d you could still read the content easily. The last example is the smartphone sc reen size for the same Mashable site. As you can see, the layout completely chan ge to cater to the small screen size. You see only the New section on the homepa ge. The main navigation reduces to the button at the top left hand corner. If yo u want to go to other sections, you have to click that button. 71

Dynamically serving different HTML on the same URL When a customer visits your w ebsite, it's possible for your webserver to detect what kind of device they're 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 e ven Smart TVs. Detecting the users device and changing the content you serve re quires 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 traf c, independent of your original desktop site. The browser detects if a visitor is on a mobile dev ice and redirects them to the mobile-optimized version of your site (e.g. m.vnex press.net). A dedicated mobile site allows you to tailor the site speci cally for mobile users and is often independently built and hosted. 72

This solution is quite commonly used in Vietnam. Some of the biggest news portal s 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 eas ily 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 experie nce 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 b e live on user's browser instantly without approval from third party like the case of Apple AppStore. Both normal mobile site and RWD site have some very big disadv antages like: Many of them can't function without internet connection ( From my li mited understanding, there are some Web Apps that offer of ine mode) Mobile friendly site or native mobile app? From budget point of view, the option with lowest budget would be to have a sepa rated 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 73

 They can't access user's personal data on the phone itself, the camera, calendar, ph oto stream, accelerometer etc... (This might change in the future) They generall y don't offer as rich user experience as native app since complicated animation, g ames, reporting, calculation etc...couldnt be implemented easily. Push capabili ties: If you want your mobile site (web app) to run on the background and send y ou noti cations, it is not possible at this point The ease of monetization: with G oogle 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 ap p, or purchase in app items. For mobile site, subscription model seems to be amo ngst 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 custom ized/built for each platform i.e. one version for iOS and another version for An droid. This would mean development cost is higher for native app. Maintenance co st is higher as well. Mobile site disadvantages are native app advantages natura lly. However be aware that native app is just like social media asset or a websi te, once you build it, you need to spend money to promote it to your users and maintain it afterwards. So I would not recommend de veloping an app just for a 2 month campaign and then stop supporting it after th at. 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 bene ts 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, wirefra me is critically important for an app because it is the foundation of the user i nterface. If there is anything logically wrong with the wireframe, or anything m issing, user experience would be affected severely. The screen ow would explain h ow the animation would function. With the screen ow, client would be able to visua lize how to use the app, what happens when a button is touched. 74

 Database, CMS and API: this stage is about designing the database, coding the CM S and API according to the requirement. You could code the CMS and API using php or Java or .Net, it's up to you. Please note that your normal web production team c ould 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 yo ur target audience. Clearly Windows is NOT a common platform so your choice woul d 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 of cial store then iOS is the way to go. Users that use Apple App is much more lik ely to pay for something vs Android because for From App Annie you could see that iOS Store revenue is like 4 times more than Go ogle Play on a monthly basis. If you need to choose one platform then it all dep ends on your target audience and their smartphone choices. As marketer, we have to follow our users and sh where the sh are. 75

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.thinkwithgo ogle.com/mobileplanet/en-gb/ 76

10 Social Media Assets In depth discussion of options for brands on social media from general guideline s to Facebook fanpage to measurement.

Section 1 What is Social Media? There are many de nitions of Social Media. This one is from Wikipedia: Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, a nd exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.[1] Andrea s Kaplan and Michael Haenlein de ne social media as "a group of Internet-based app lications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 , and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content."[2] Furthe rmore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highl y interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-crea te, discuss, and modify usergenerated content. It introduces substantial and per vasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individu als. In short, to me Social media are communication channels between people. If w e 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 Faceb ook so much, I guess it's because of its functionalities and other things. Since i t 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 78

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 popu lar 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 user s. 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 im pression. There are simply not many people who use Zing Me around, even youngste rs. 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 don't 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 79

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 don't 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 h ave less users in comparison to Twitter in Vietnam. I haven't found third party da ta sources yet. Let's not forget mobile rst networks like Zalo, Line, KakaoTalk (ea ch has about 3 million users), or Viper (with more than 3M users in Vietnam as w ell) and more traditional forums like Eva.vn (4.7M monthly unique visitors), VnZoom (4.2M visitors), Tinhte.com (3.5M), WebTreTho (2.4M). In Apr 2013, Vietnamese users spent 4.8 Billion minutes on Facebook, about 20 ti mes more then the closest Zing Me. Facebook users demographics is quite representative of the internet users in Vie tnam as well. 80

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 shouldn't spread your focus and investment betw een multiple platforms. You Tube is THE platform for Video content. It's the secon d 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 Vietn am. We have forums for moms, for parents, for youth, for IT enthusiasts, for tec hnology 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/ se rvice. Then it is quite common for brands to do forum seeding, using in uencers like Mode rators/Admins or user with large thanks, large network of friends. However, you ne ed to be very careful about doing it of cially or unof cially and make sure that you understand the code of conduct in each forum before you jump in. The ow of engag ing forums could be like the below: You could start with listening, then after y ou identify in uencers in these forums, you could start to recruit them to be part of the forum seeding or others. You should empower these in uencers with latest u pdates about your products/ services, promotions, marketing campaigns etc... Goi ng into too much details about in uencer outreach is out of the scope of this eboo k. I will discuss more on the next book. Google Plus: Besides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) bene ts, I don't see any other major bene ts 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 mirro r your strategy for Facebook on Google Plus. 81

You should have +1 button anywhere that you put the Facebook Like button. Doing it t his way, you could minimize the investment on Google Plus. Hangout is another us eful 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 don't recommend these for lon g term at this point also. Other platforms With massive promotional campaigns using traditional TVC even, Zalo, Line and Ka kao 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 netw orks, however, are still early stage so you can NOT set up a brand pro le yourself (you have to work with them direct to set up) or their advertising system is no t that robust yet so I would NOT recommend using these channels for Small and Me dium Businesses. Even with big brands or MNCs, you could experiment with these b ut I don't think it's time to build a long term presence here yet. Twitter, Pinteres t, Foursquare, Instagram,Flickr have been in Vietnam for a while. However, the u sage is pretty limited so again for a particular niche segment and for tactical campaigns, 82

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 be ing said online? Well, there are many bene ts to it like: Understand consumer insi ghts: it could be helpful for content optimization in the context of social asse ts, develop better engagement activity campaigns. Competitive Intelligence Feedb ack for of ine marketing initiatives Key in uencer identi cation Product development s upport Great customer support 83

1. Objectives: At this step you start to de ne what it is that you want to monitor and get insights about? Remember the tools are just tools, they won't be able to provide any insights if you don't have a proper set up. Common monitoring and anal ysis objectives include: Monitor generic brand mentions/ buzz and compared that with competitors Monitor speci c product lines with sentiment analysis in comparis on with competitor's respective products/services Reputation management: early cri sis detection and in uencing sources identi cation. 2. Set up & prepare: At this sta ge, what you need to do or ask your consultants/ vendors to do is to set up a st ructure that cover all angles that you want to monitor For example, if you are S amsung, 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 it's always good to monitor VIPs of you r 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 t ools There are plenty of tools out there for you to choose from. Many of these t ools 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 a ccount to make sure that it suits your objectives. 4. Analysis and report This i s 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 p er 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 re commendation is this, if you have $100 to spend on the whole online monitoring/ listening, 84

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 y ou have negative mentions coming in quickly. 5. Recommendation Besides basic inf ormation like the share of volume of mentions, basic sentiment analysis, the rec ommendation would depend largely on your objectives. If your objective is to und erstand 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. Ideall y if you spend more money with paid media, you should expect more mentions. 6. E ngagement strategy This is the natural step after what you have been doing. If t he analysis is good, it should prompt you to take certain actions to improve you r campaigns/ your brand etc... May be you identify a few key in uencers that you n eed to develop an in uencer outreach programs with them? May be you identify a few news sites that constantly mention about your brand an d you need to reach out to them? Or you realize that people have some issues wit h one of your product's 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 chan nels 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 ot her social networks as promotional channels. Ask yourself this, while you are wa tching 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. W e wish that they do, but the cold hard truth is that they use Facebook to connec t with other friends, sharing their life moments amongst other things. So the tr ick is to balance and put your customers' needs rst. I would NOT recommend going li ke 50%-50% between the 85

content that people love and your promotional message, that is way too much. Wha t 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? (There's nothing wro ng with testing, continuous optimization for online initiatives point of view, s o don't be afraid to experiment). bit to e. t in the online world but you shouldn't change it completely compared to of in

Bring your brand personality to social This is easier said than done, I realize that. However it is crucial that you st ay honest, transparent, authentic and unique. Do you know why? It's because there are lots and lots of information out there. Eric Smith from Google used to say Ev ery two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civili zation 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 per sonality of ine 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 yo ur 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 recommend ed to tap in your existing customers' base, your staff, your vendors. Develop a str ong value proposition why your customer should Like you, Add you in Circle, Foll ow 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 activitie s? Etc... Once you develop your value proposition, it's time to include links to y our social assets in as many places as possible like: Your website Your email si gnature 86

 Your name card Your marketing materials Your sales materials Ask your call cente r agents to invite people to join at the end of the conversation Etc... With constructive feedback/complaints, it's best to reply quickly to say that you acknowledge the issue and try to take things private. It could be the case that after veri cation, it is indeed your staff fault or your product has certain issue , it's alright to say you are sorry and you will work to resolve the issue. Of cou rse it would be ideal to plan in advance guidelines, protocol to handle differen t scenarios that you could think of, even go as deep as the sample responses tha t you could use. This guidebook/ protocol could come from your commonly asked qu estions list, your call center script or similar sources. Of course the social m edia team needs to customize these responses a bit so suit the brand tone of voi ce and personality on social media. Also, it's equally important that you do NOT f orget 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 word s 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 87 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 cours e if the comments are in violation of the law, politically sensitive, disrespect ful 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 an d I had a positive experience. This is the reply from the brand Thank you for bri nging your concern to our attention. Your feedback is extremely valued as it is important in every opportunity for us to address customer's needs and emphasize ou r commitment to provide total quality experience. Rest assured that we would loo k into this matter and conduct proper investigation. Feel free to write us for o ther 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 pati ence 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 resta urant was very very crowded. As a result, we waited for 15 mins and didn't 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 g o 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 ,tha t 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 e xample 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 didn't know. However, they told me that if you left my e mail 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 didn't expect them to follow u p 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 prot ector from that store but 88 Surprise and Delight your customers I think the same of ine 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 wa lk in again to buy from them. The same could happen online, on your social asset s. A customer may ask you a slightly more dif cult question to answer, or have an issue that needs to be followed up, go extra miles for him/her, surprise and del ight your customer! I am not sure about you but I tend to stay very loyal to bra nds that have great customer service. 89

Section 5 Facebook fanpage Facebook fanpage as part of the customer service that you offer You want to do i t because the majority of your target audience is on Facebook Increase brand awa reness and brand love Why you want to have a fanpage? Since Facebook is THE main mass social platform right now, it's natural that when you think of social media assets, your rst thought is a Facebook fan page. I woul d recommend Facebook as the rst and main platform as well because of its reach, f unctionality 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 f or your fanpage? More often than not, you will come back with things like: Engag ement with your customer on social media Build community etc... If you just stop there, I would advise to put in somethin g related to your company bottom line because at the end of the day, brand aware ness, brand love is good but you have to link what you are doing back to the bot tom line, to revenue. Otherwise it will be a waste of resources (money, time, ef forts). Set up From the con rmed objectives, it's time to think about your fanpage set up, your ove rall 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: 90

http://www.socialbakers.com/resource-center/795-article-how-to -create-an-of cialfacebook-page or do a simple google search. Once you have your page, it is impor tant that you select the short URL very carefully. It could be your domain name, your of cial name or you have to follow the global rules set by your Head Quarter . The pro le 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 don't recommend changing it too often though because you have to think if you actually provide any values to your fans by cha nging to a new cover photo? If the answer is just to look fresh, I would not cha nge it more than once per month, just for the sake of being fresh/new. Putting i n detailed milestones shows fans that you are serious about your social media ef forts and this is an opportunity to showcase your brand heritage as well. Now, w hen it comes to Facebook tab, it really depends on your overall objectives and y our immediate objective of the month. If you do not have a website and want to u se Facebook fanpage as the main platform for everything online, obviously you ne ed to have some places to introduce about your products/ services, your location s/promotions etc... How many Facebook users are in your target audience pro le? It is the goal of almost every brand to have a big fan base and high level of en gagement. How many fans you should have depends on your target audience, your de mographics and your marketing objective. You could easily nd out how many Faceboo k users are within your target audience by trying to create a new ad, once you p ut in the country/city, the age group, gender, education level, family status et c... Facebook would tell you how many users it has within that group. You could go as far as putting in interest. 91

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 yo ur audience pool is too small, you need to reconsider this option. Under advance d settings, you could select many options I am a strong believer in quality vs q uantity so getting the right fans is all that matters. It doesn't matter much if y ou have 100k fans but they are not within your target audience so none of them e ngage with your content/facebook posts and then slowly your posts won't even appea r on their news feed anymore. So how to get fans within the target audience? Wel l as mentioned previously, you should start by encouraging your existing custome rs, your staff, your vendors etc... to become fans on your page. Develop a stron g value proposition for them. 92

Secondly it's time to include the link to your Facebook fanpage to as many places (online/of ine) as you could, from company website, email signature, sales materia ls like brochures, name card, EDM templates etc.... Thirdly you could consider u sing Facebook ad options. 93

As you could see from the picture above, it is pretty straight forwards. After c licking 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 advan ced option is nothing more than just more options for objective 1 or 2. Naturall y you would choose Get more Page Likes option. An ad from Facebook has four elemen ts 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 go od ad copy for Google apply here as well I think. You should do A/B testing usin g different variations to test which one works better in driving more likes (fans) at lower cost. More over, yo u 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 y our friends like/interact with certain fan pages and Facebook is asking you if y ou want to like this page also. It is kind of word of mouth marketing. One of ine 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 differen t campaigns, it's 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 it's always go od 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 g oing into how to develop good content strategy and actual weekly post for your p age, it is useful to note the followings: 94

 Every time you post something, only a percentage of your total fans will see you r post in their news feed. Duh! what do you mean by that Chandler? Well it simpl y 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 fri ends that like to post twice, three times or may be 10 times per day. If Faceboo k displays everything from everyone that you have connection with on your News F eed, 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 t han 1 Billion user base? The formula that Facebook uses is called EdgeRank. Wiki pedia has a page about EdgeRank. If you do a search on Google, you will nd more t han 600,000 results about Facebook EdgeRank. While Facebook didn't disclose the ex act formula of its EdgeRank, different people have different explanation. It is similar to SEO, Google doesn't disclose fully how its algorithm works, however it reveals eno ugh so that professionals could make educated guess. Mashable has a beautiful ex planation about Facebook EdgeRank called What is Facebook EdgeRank and Why does i t matter? It is recommended that you take a look at the link above. A quick summa ry of the formula is below: 95

It is critical to understand this formula so that you could post content on Time line according to this to make sure you maximize the chance of your post getting on to user's news feed. So now we know that we need to have relevant content that our fans want to engag e with, with the proper format, post daily and at the right time, the next logic al question is how to develop Good content strategy? Well a good content strateg y needs to answer the ask, match the overall objectives of the social media activi ties, 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 devel opment/mental development and create meaningful connection with moms as well. Th ere are basically two ways to create daily posts: you either create them or cura te 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 over all theme is pretty similar between these two books. 96

Jonah Berger talked about STEPPS: Social Currency Triggers Emotions Practical Va lue 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 Ea rs 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 an d the overall content strategy of course. The key is where to nd great and releva nt content? It's 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 s earch related to your vertical. It is important, however, to plan different cont ent buckets and content angles accordingly so that you don't spend too much time o n certain areas and neglect the rest. 97

Share Content On Facebook There are some guidelines on posting/sharing content on Facebook as taken from M ashable 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% m ore engagement Post daily: 96% of your fans won't come back to your page so postin g daily is a must to reach them Be timely: post when you audience is online to g et a higher EdgeRank and better chance of being seen. get audience with the objective of driving pro table customer action. - de nition fro m Content Marketing Institute. Content marketing is advocated by Rand Fishkin fr om Moz.com as well. The argument is about doing traditional link building or Con tent marketing for Search Engine Optimization. Personally I support Content mark eting 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 t he buzz word Content Marketing. Again there are already lots of articles about thi s topic. In fact, at the time of writing this book, doing a simple search for Con tent 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 m arketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly de ned 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 doe sn't generate any uplift in revenue over short, medium or long term, then what `s th e use? Reach Engagement Revenue (Bottom line) Actual Reach vs Total number of fans. This could be measured as a percentage. Vi ral 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 Faceb ook 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, Unlike s 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 numbe r of fans. For example, if the total impressions for 10 posts is 100,000, then a verage reach per post is 10,000. 99

If the average number of fans per day during the duration is 40,000 then our rea ch 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 rece ive 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 you r posts during a particular period. Facebook insights raw data include viral imp ression. On Twitter: Ampli cation = # of Retweets Per Tweet On Facebook, Google Plus: Ampli c ation = # of Shares Per Post Applause rate: On Twitter: Applause Rate = # of Fav orite Clicks Per Post On Facebook: Applause Rate = # of Likes Per Post On Google Plus: Applause Rate = # of +1s Per Post Engagement rate People de ne engagement differently for different platform. Avinash wrote a beauti ful piece about this. It's called Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Ampli cati on, Applause, Economic Value In this piece, Avinash talked about three key metric s when it comes to engagement on social media. They are: Conversation Rate = # o f Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post Ampli cation 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 sugges ted metrics that you could use: 100

Metrics Fans Impressions Posts Comments Like Share Average Impression/ Post Conv ersation rate Ampli cation rate Applause rate Reach rate Conversation rate (%) Amp li cation rate (%) Applause rate Engagement Rate (%) De nition Average daily number of fans Total number of unique impressions generate d 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 pos ts 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 perce ntage of fans reached with any one post (Avg Imp/Fans) Average percentage of fan s who comment on any one post Average percentage of fans who share on any one po st Average percentage of fans who like on any one post Average percentage of fan s 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, ampli cation rate and applause rate. 101

The above table could look intimidating. Personally I would recommend tracking t hese metrics over time to see the trend. Reach rate, conversation rate, ampli cati on rate and applause rate (%) are critical factors to see if your fans really en gage with your content. Like (applause) is considered the easiest to achieve in comparison to comment (conversation) and the hardest is share (Ampli cation). If y ou 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 y our content is doing very well. Remember, the average is around 10%. Graphical e xample of engagement rate, applause rate, conversation rate, ampli cation rate ove r 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 # 102

3.00%$ 2.50%$ 2.00%$ Applause$Rate$ 1.50%$ Conversa>on$Rate$ Ampli ca>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 oth er information, there is not much that we could analyze here. 103

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 shouldn't treat soc ial 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 co mmerce 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-com merce transactions, Google Analytics could provide quite a lot of information. Y ou should look at Traf c 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! N ow you could go back and tell your boss that the company spends $100 on social m edia 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 isn't it? You could s tart to see the value of YouTube, or 104

blogger or Linkedin with your goals, your bottom line. you could explore the rest of the reports under Social category in Google Analytic s yourself, I hope. 105

Section 7 Reference Ad Age Viral Video Chart: http://adage.com/section/the-viral-video-chart/674 Por tent (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: Wh y Things Catch on by Jonah Berger Engagement from Scratch: http://www.engagement fromscratch.com/buy.html AllFacebook - the unof cial Facebook Blog: http://allface book.com/ Facebook News Room: http://newsroom.fb.com/ Inside Facebook : http://w ww.insidefacebook.com/ Mashable: http://mashable.com/ Seth Godin Blog: http://se thgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ Copyblogger: http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/ 106

Digital Analytics Do you want to track and measure the performance of your site, your campaign, yo ur application? How about knowing what is being said about your competitors onli ne? 11

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 Analyt ics is and why it is important? Well it is simply because marketers/brand manage rs/sales managers need insights. Insight could come from intuition (like our bri lliant 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 un available in the of ine 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 n o 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 108

Section 2 De nition Since the birth of iPhone in 2007, users worldwide have been increasingly rely o n their smartphones to access the internet. Together with hundred thousands of d ifferent apps created by brands, the need to collect, measure, analyze traf c thro ugh smartphone, tablets, smart tv is increasing. So the industry is now using th e 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 An alytics. Before going any further, let's talk about the importance of Web Analytic s: It's important because it could help to answer many questions like: How much mo ney 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 mark eting initiatives are working as planned and which one are not? How does client evaluate the performance of an agency? 109 Digital Analytics Lorem Ipsum On Wikipedia, we could nd the de nition for Web Analytics as followed: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, 1. Whatand is Digital Analytics? analysis repor ting 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 traf c but can be used as a tool for business and market research, and to ass ess and improve the effectiveness of a web site. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advert ising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traf c to a website changes after th e 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 gaug e traf c 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 bene ts resonate more with the target audience? With suitable Web Analytics technologies/tools, one could know a lot about the marketplace, th e competition, behavior of its own website users, demographics of fans on the fa npage. The fact that it's related to technology requires whoever reading the repor ts to have certain degree of understanding of how these tools work to understand what the data actually means. 110

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/m icrosite/ 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 da ta & 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 i nto your own platforms. 1. Onsite Tools: Javascript based tool 2. Offsite Tools: 1. Competitive Intellig ence 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 w ebsite/microsite that marketers want to track. In Vietnam, people often use Goog le Analytics. However, there are many different onsite tools available like: Ent erprise tools: Omniture SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics, WebTrends 111

 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 no t 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 usin g Omniture. HSBC is using WebTrends. How do I know this? You could nd out about t his quite easily by looking at the source code of the site. These javascript tra cking code is often put at the bottom. An example from Samsung Vietnam source co de 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 too ls) while we can use free tools like Google Analytics? Well there are two main r easons i think: With Enterprise tools, you own your data and you could do whatev er you want with it. If you want to integrate the data into another system you b uild or with a third party system, you could. If you want to tweak the data some how, you could 112

do that as well. This could change in the future when Google allows exporting da ta out of their system. Regular support: since Google Analytics's 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 answ er any questions you may have. In Vietnam context, we'd better stick with Google A nalytics because we don't have many professional analysts to use these Enterprise tools effectively. (well we don't even have enough digital marketing professional in the rst place!) Data from Search Engine: Google keyword tool, Google Trends, Google Display Plan ner. There is also platform speci c reporting tool that allows the owner to see st atistics of what's 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 t ools 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. Pa rt of what you should monitor for Facebook fanpage is already discussed in the p revious chapter about Social Media Assets. For smartphone app analytics, there a re many services like Flurry Analytics, Localytics etc... Offsite tools For offsite tools/technologies/services, there are many types: Panel based measu rement: comScore, compete, Effective Measure, Cimigo. comScore is probably the m ost famous technology in this category with global coverage across multiple terr itories and languages. IPS based measurement: Hitwise. Listening tools/platforms : Radian6, Brandtology, Alterian SM2 etc... 113

Section 4 Free offsite tools Google keyword planner It's not ideal but Google Keyword Planner tool could provide some valuable insight s. 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 bel ow screenshot may not be the most updated version. In essence, Google Keyword Pl anner is a free tool offered by Google, which helps users know how much search v olume a certain keyword has on average across desktop & mobile devices in a cert ain 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 c ompetitor brand in term of search volume to see how popular each 114

brand is. Or one could investigate the demand for a certain product/service in c ertain 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. It's pretty straight forward to use. 1. You could start by typing in just one topi c of interest or multiple topics separated by comma. 2. Each topic of interest w ould 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 s ometimes, more often than not you need to change the location to speci c country/c ity of interest to yield actionable insights. 115

4. Both location/duration and other options could be found on the right hand sid e menu. The interface is pretty intuitive. Put exact phrases in quotes: "table tennis" Put a minus sign before a word you d ont want: wimbledon -tennis Regional interest: Numbers represent search volume relative to the highest point on the map which is always 100. Click on any regio n/point to see more details on the search volume there. Related terms > Top Sear ches: Top searches refers to search terms with the most signi cant level of intere st. These terms are related to the term youve entered; if you didnt enter in a search term, the top searches will be related to the category or country/territ ory youve chosen. Let me explain a couple of de nitions to make sure that we are on the same page: I nterest 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, separa te them with plus signs: tennis + squash. Related terms > Rising Searches: Rising searches highlight searches that have ex perienced signi cant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. So if youre comparing data for a search term during 2006, the time period serving as the basis of comparison is 2005. Similarly, if youre compari ng searches for that term during May of 2006, the basis of comparison is April o f 2006. In Vietnam for example, iphone is enjoying a healthy lead vs Samsung gal axy for the past 12 months. Even if you don't see the line for Samsung Galaxy went u p much during Samsung Galaxy product launch event, it's mainly 116

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 Trend s may not have the latest data so you need to wait for a while. If after a coupl e of months, you haven't seen much of an improvement, that means your product laun ch campaign didn't generate enough buzz and people were not searching for more inf ormation about the product. 6. For brand manager, looking at this graph over the course of 1-4 years could show interesting trends as well. 117

Section 5 Paid Offsite Tools comScore comScore has a range of products/services: Audience Analytics Advertising Analyt ics Digital Business Analytics Mobile Operator Analytics 1. comScore 2. Hitwise It works based on Panel-based methodology which simply means comScore would recr uit 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 m onitor 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 que stionnaire, looking at user's behavior and other reliable independent reports abou t 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 c ould be used for various purposes, especially media planning in Vietnam and/or c ampaign evaluation. You could read more about each product from comScore site. 118

Just to give one example, if you are looking to target male, age 25-30 in Vietna m, 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 shou ld be able to know how much of your target audience you actually reach. Besides the paid products, comScore often publishes reports/ whitepapers on various diff erent topics related to Digital activities. Look under Insights on the website a nd you could lter by country, tag, author, by keyword since there are many report s. Excerpt from the report Introduction of Online Video Measurement service in T aiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines Across the Asia-Paci c region, video viewing penetration ranged from 66.9 percent in Indonesia to a high of 89.8 perc ent in Vietnam, as both broadband access and content availability factored into online video viewing adoption. Vietnam (89.8 percent reach), Hong Kong (88.7 per cent 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 m ore than 13 million unique viewers. Detailed traf c information about a particular site could be found using comScore as well: site unique visitors 119

 average time on site average pageview/visit demographics of visitors whether my site's audience also visits my competitor's site? if yes how many percent is the ove rlapping? The beauty of the data is that you can compare almost any insights wit h 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 co mScore directly. Search Intelligence with some noteworthy data like: Search terms to a website or industry, Search engine results page (SERP) rank reports etc... Consumer Segmen t 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 ident ify top acquisition strategies Ad effectiveness for example Pro ling beyond demogr aphics by matching your visitor pro les to advertisers' target audiences to discover new opportunities One signi cant drawback for Hitwise is that i am not sure if th ey have data in Vietnam. It's likely that they don't have data for this market. Howe ver 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 Hitwis e 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 Exp erian, Hitwise used data from ISP (your local internet service provider). All of the traf c you are using has to go through your ISP or at least that's what happen for normal users so by partnering/being able to use data from ISP, Hitwise is ab le to get plenty of information about traf c to each site, how much of that traf c c omes from search etc... Hitwise could aggregate and segment data to provide: Com petitive Intelligence 120

Or top websites 121

Every month, there is an Industry spotlight which Hitwise will gives detailed da ta on that industry from top websites, top search terms in that industry, top up stream traf c etc... This month it is Community - Humanitarian for Singapore 122

Section 6 Listening tools While these tools are part of the Paid offsite tools, I want to dedicate a new s ection 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? It's bec ause there are so many conversations, mentions, so many LIKEs, share, comments, twee ts, happening in an interconnected world and some of them are about brands. Also with more and more blogging platforms entering the marketplace like blogger, wo rdpress, tumblr etc..., more and more people are empowered to produce/publish th eir own point of view. Under the chapter about social assets > guiding principle s, I mentioned brie y about the bene ts 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 I ntelligence: how many mentions your competitors have vs yourself? are they good/ bad mentions? what do consumers like about your competitors's products? Feedback f or of ine marketing initiatives: understand reaction to your product launch, custo mer's feedback, concern. Key in uencer identi cation Product development support Great customer support Crisis management: Brands need a tool that can help them/ aler t them for any negative mentions/news being discussed/ commented/shared before t hings are out of control. Great customer support: Satisfaction or dissatisfactio n is the most common type of sentiment your customers will express about your br and online. Social media listening tools will not only allow you to nd those comm ents quickly, but to respond timely, helping to stop bad press from spreading fa rther. Product development support 123

 Sentiment Analysis: understand how consumers feel about your product/service, wh at they like/dislike. Some of the more popular tools in the US and Europe includ e: Alterian , ASOMO, AT Internet, Attentio, BrandsEye, Brandwatch, Cymfony, Infe gy (Social Radar), Market Sentinel, Meltwater Group, Onalytica, Radian6, Sentime nt Metrics, Sysomos, Visible Technologies. In this region, technologies like Bra ndtology, JamiQ, SocialBakers, Cimigo, Buzz Metrics from AC Nielsen, Boomerang s eem to be quite popular as well. Let's go through some of the more popular tools o ut there: One huge disadvantage for Radian6 is that it doesn't include many Vietnamese sourc es in its database so the amount of mentions it can capture for Vietnamese is ve ry limited. Also sentiment analysis for Vietnamese (from what I heard) is of poo r quality. Radian6 This is a well rounded tool/service with lots of functions. They can listen to m ultiple channels and automate a lot of the listening, analyzing phase, giving yo u 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 a nalysis. They could listen to conversation happening on Facebook, Twitter, You T ube, Google Plus, Pinterest, Linkedin, blogs, forums and other social platforms of course. The company was bought by SalesForce not too long ago for $326 millio n. With Radian6 and SalesForce combined, one could expect social CRM offering fr om SalesForce to be up at a much higher level. Then there is Marketing Cloud, wh ich (from SalesForce marketing materials), the rst uni ed Social Marketing suite. 124

It can Listen at social scale. Create compelling social presences. Connect with c ustomers. Align sales, service and marketing. Amplify your content. Track campai gn ROI. Drive real business results. (from SalesForce's Press Release). They sell d ifferent 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 En gagement module (called Builder Pro) as well. Below is the pricing plan for Anal ytics 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. 125

With Analytics Pro, you could know more detailed information about any fanpage t hat you are interested in or twitter pro le or You Tube channel. It is useful when you want to check out competitor's fanpage or when you are preparing for a client pitch and you want to understand how the existing client's fanpage is doing. Recommended tools for Vietnamese market I get this request quite often. People often ask me if I could recommend any too ls 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 t hat you are trying to do and the potential bene ts rst before considering any tools . Do you actually have someone (in-house or outsource) that could read/analyse a nd 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 consid er Brandtology, Buzz Metrics (from AC Nielsen), Boomerang (Vietnamese local tool ), Cimigo listening service etc... I would not recommend Radian6 at this stage d ue 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 126

a couple of hours is ne). Whether you have to pay extra to get near real time dat a 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 Vietnam ese use a combination of tools and human because doing sentiment analysis for Vi etnamese is hard work and the machine algorithm is very far from 100% correct (m ay be around 30-40%?). 127

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 c ampaigns. Answers like Increasing brand awareness, more sales are too generic in n ature and we probably need to dig deeper. We wouldn't recommend starting with look ing straight into some standard reports/dashboards yet because they may ll with j argons you don't understand or don't nd valuable. Knowing the average page per visit alone doesn't help sales manager one bit. Or knowing average pageview per visit in creases 20% over the past 1 month alone doesn't help you make any kind of decision . Does that mean our brand awareness increase 20% over the past 1 month? No, a p age 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 da ta 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 aud ience 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 S MART 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. B enchmarking 128

 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 vis itors nd what they are looking for easily on your site? How do you measure this q ualitatively? How does online visit affect of ine store traf c? How do we know which marketing initiative is working better than the other? Which product line is wo rking better on the website? How can we increase our prospective sales lead data base using the website? Could customers who want to order something from us do s o easily? Where do we put our hotline? Our menu? Can we increase our overall rev enue 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 yo ur company website/microsite hundreds of time but let's do it at least one more ti me. What do you see on the homepage? How do you feel? Could you ful ll/ nd what you want ? Do you see the sign up button? How easy it is for you to sign up? (Please refe r to the section about User Experience under PC Asset Chapter for more informati on). 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 rea d Avinash Kaushik's blog or read his book Web Analytics an hour a day. Everything I `v e 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 (ef fort) 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 Analy st 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 functio ns etc...). However, those are 129

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 b usiness 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 over all marketing strategy, sales performance, customer services etc... For simplici ty 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 b ut their percentage is small. Of many free tools, Google Analytics seems to be m ost frequently used in Vietnam so familiarity is there. Enterprise tool like Omn iture, WebTrends et... would cost quite a bit in Vietnam context and the time/hu man 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 co mpany 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 vi a online channels? Visit to store as a result of digital channels? If your targe t audience is in Ho Chi Minh city one of the KPIs can be how many unique visitor s from Ho Chi Minh visit the site monthly? How many new visitors from Ho Chi Min h do you acquire monthly? Then you should go deeper in different traf c sources to understand which traf c source/campaign drive visitor from Hanoi or Hue to your w ebsite? So that you can consider pausing them. If you launch a new car and you w ant people to register to test drive it, then you may want to track which traf c s ource brings the highest number of sign ups. You KPIs could be: How many unique visitors see the landing page with the new car? 130 Business Objectives to SMART KPIs You can not optimize what you can't measure. So after listing down all of the busi ness questions that you want to answer, it's 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 bri ng 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 Analy tics. Your KPIs could be: Loading speed of the special landing page The number o f unique visitors who visit the landing page and stay for at least 1 minute Boun ce rate on the special landing page Secondly, properly implement the tracking code: Tag all pages on your website Pu t 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 b e inline. They shouldn't be inside some fancy tables or frames etc... If you have multiple sub domain, consider different pro les 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 De ne and properly set up conversion tracking/goals settings Use code to track on click function if you want to. Be aware of redirects of any kind because they wi ll mess up your traf c 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 Analyt ics and some of the bigger tools. However, each tool may de ne things differently. 131

Test and re-test the data to make sure what you see on the report is actually co rrect. Please test as many scenarios as possible. For example, you may want to t est when someone search for a keyword on Google, see the site on the Search Engi ne Result Page, click on it and take some actions. The report should properly re cord the keyword that user uses, traf c source as organic traf c date of the visit, the action taken. Test with email marketing, banners, with directly enter the si te. Test booking and see if the revenue data is being captured correctly, the it ems in the shopping basket are being recorded. The more time you spend testing n ow, 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 yo u have special need Less than 10% difference in terms of visit is ok. No measure ment is perfect so when you test or look at the report, if the difference betwee n the numbers from two different tools or from two different sources is less tha n 10%, try to live with it. You may want it to be perfect but hey, in the of ine w orld, 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) sen ding out monthly standard website statistics to the marketing team. To me it's a w aste of resources because IT team does not know about all of the marketing activ ities happening so they would not be in the best position to pull relevant repor ts To analyze you have to zoom into each channel, do segmentation like crazy and run custom report. Standard reporting won't do you much good So I am a big believ er in training the Marketing team to be able to use the interface, and nd informa tion they need on their own. One dashboard for each level Each position/level in a company has different need for information/data. Direct or level would be more interested in top line data, revenue data or the like. Ho wever, the marketing executive doing SEO would be interested in keyword ranking, traf c from brand terms vs non brand terms etc... So having separated dashboards for different levels/functions is of paramount importance. It will hopefully sol ve the issue of 132

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 it's sad but it's true and it's happening all the time. People often only read reports when their boss as ks 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 i mportant than the actual value at a particular point in time. They provide the o verview, which is crucial in recommending next step. When you look at a report, different time frames will give you very different pictures/insights. For exampl e, 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 ar rive at the insights faster, sometimes it helps by viewing graphs in different t ime unit (daily, weekly, monthly). Also many tools allow you to do Compare to pas t 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 appl e, 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 th ings are really going well for Paid Search. If the line for daily number of Segmentation is crucial This idea is not new. It's basically mean you don't look at the aggregate number and try to make decision for next step. What needs to be done is to dig deeper, sep arate each channel, each traf c source and examine them one by one. The behavior o f 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 over all website bounce rate is 50%, there's nothing much you could do. However, if you know that the bounce rate from paid search, to a speci c landing page is 50% and there is a call to action on that page, now you are on so something. You may wan t to change the keyword, ad text or landing page to ensure consistency. Trend is what to look for 133

clicks going up and average cost per click going down then we are in good positi on. Micro conversion Even if your website do not offer e commerce or your sales cycle is very long, y our sales happens of ine, you could still measure the effectiveness of the website /online campaigns using micro conversions. Micro conversions are things that vis itors on your site do and they are of some value to you. For example, if a visit or 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. I n order for people to buy from you, they have to read your product page for exam ple, then anyone who stays and reads your product pages for 2 mins may be a micr o conversion. Same with sign up to become a member. Think of this the same way a s fan for your fanpage, if someone likes your fanpage, you could continue to com municate to them in the future, so someone sign up, the value is even bigger bec ause it's 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 benc hmarking or external benchmarking, which is entirely up to you. External benchma rking may be hard at rst because it's not easy to nd reliable third party data to be nchmark against. For example, if your report says your sales revenue increased 1 0% over the last month, that may make you feel great. However, data from the ind ustry shows that your nearest competitors increased their sales by 50% last mont h then your 10% may not be that great any more. Internal benchmarking could be don e by comparing different time frame, segmenting and looking at individual data o ver time, comparing different product lines/microsites/sub domains etc... Goal tracking & Conversion tracking It goes without saying that you should implement goal tracking/ conversion track ing using the Analytics tool that you are using. 134

Section 8 Google Analytics Overview First of all you could learn about Google Analytics all by yourself using materi als prepared by Google themselves. You could take the exam Google Analytics Indiv idual Quali cation and become a certi ed Google Analytics Individual. The list of tho se quali ed individuals in Vietnam could be found here. Google even has the materi als in Vietnamese so it would be quite easy for anyone who wants to learn. Howev er, please note that the exam is in English, not Vietnamese. It's an online exam s o you need a debit/credit card to pay for the exam ($50). It is important that y ou go through at least the following materials under Google Analytics Learning C enter: First step Interpreting reports Please watch this to learn about direct traf c source, referral traf c etc... Also n ote the way Google Analytics calculate time on page and time on site. Fundamenta ls Take note of visits not associated with correct sources Why data may not appe ar in campaign report Goals in Google Analytics In-depth analysis: Event trackin g and virtual pageview: to track interaction within Flash, interaction with vide o player, download a pdf le, etc... Multi Channel Funnel report: the effect of mu ltiple channels on conversions. 135

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Section 9 Reference A couple of great resources Avinash Kaushik: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ Google Analytics Blog: http://a nalytics.blogspot.com/ Google Analytics Academy for beginner. comScore Insights Press Release: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases Luna Metrics: htt p://www.lunametrics.com/ Junk Chart: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/ Digital Anal ytics Association: http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/ Adobe Digital Mar keting Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing Web Trends Blog: http://blo gs.webtrends.com/ 137

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 G oogle Display Network, Facebook Ads. 12

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 singl e property purchase (websites, app, in game), ad networks or demand side platfor ms, advertisers could reach target consumers across desktop, laptop, smartphones and tablets. Since almost all of you have seen some kind of banners or video ad s 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 Re port & Optimization 139

Section 2 How to plan a Display Campaign Campaign Objectives It goes without saying that the objectives for media should be inline with the o verall objective of the campaign. If the overall campaign has a centralized conc ept and key visual then it is probably necessary that the media plan need to fol low that concept and key visual as well. The concept may dictate the ad format a nd execution as well. Campaign objectives will affect the creatives, targeting, pricing options. 1. Campaign objectives 2. Target audience online behaviors? 3. Right audience, R ight message at the Right Time? 4. Ad Format 5. Consider the landing page 6. Est imated Performance Basically there are two types of broad objectives (other objectives could fall u nder these two types): Branding: brand & product awareness, engagement Sales (di rect 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 effect ively, across multiple screens (desktop, mobile, tablet) There are tools that co uld help us to do this like comScore, or Google Display Planner. Be aware that t he data may not be correct so you need to apply common sense. 140

On each screen, there are a number of activities that people often do from email ing, using instant messenger/messenger app, reading news, conducting research, p laying games, reading forums etc... Generally there are a couple of options avai lable: Manually select multiple ad positions in single sites/single applications across computer, tablet and smartphone. Use self served, auction-based ad netwo rk/social ad platform like Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, Twitter ads (no t available in Vietnam yet), Linkedin Ads. Work with representatives from Ad Net works to nd suitable reach and targeting/options like: Admicro, Admax, Innity, Am bient Digital, Novanet, CleverNet. All of these networks have of ces in Vietnam. S ome 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 brie y lat er 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 th e nal proposed plan. I dedicate separated sections just for Google Display Networ k, Facebook Ads individually. Right Audience How to make sure that the plan reach the right audience? Well one way is by look ing 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 onl y 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, th ey could give you much more information for Vietnam market. Google Display Plann er, however, is mainly used to generate plan for Google Display Network. Right n ow, most of the ad networks except one or two could ONLY provide demographics in formation like age and gender, no marital status, education degree etc... Altern atively, you could use content as the indication of intent from the target audie nce. The logic behind is that if you are Adidas, you may want to reach people wh o are reading sports section in VnExpress. Because they are reading sports secti on, you assume that they are into Sports. If you select and contact individual s ites directly, the amount of admin, coordination could be quite a lot so you sho uld 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 141

or based on the entire site content (if the site is dedicated to economy so it f alls under business). For example you could choose Women channel from Ambient Digi tal or Innity to target moms. Google Display Network could do one step further a nd provide sub topic targeting based on actual content on the page using context ual 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 t hat 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 tar geting to display ads to these people. Many ad networks allow you to target user s based on city level as well for example Google Display Network so that you don't waste your budget. Audience overlapping is a key issue that you need to be awar e of especially if you run on multiple ad networks. To me, you should try to thi nk 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 act ivities. For example, before the campaign launches, you may decide to run some t easer; 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 sync ing the schedule with other activities. Even distribution: Increasing spend/traf c over time: Right Time 142

Decreasing spend/traf c over time: With this option, you could select the day of the week, the time that you want t o 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 u sed 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 camp aign message for sure. At the same time, due to variety of options, you could tr y 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 clic k to download, click to show direction option as well so you could choose depend ing 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 spe ci c 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 w ith ad network. 143

Banner size is one key issue in Vietnam because top publishers using different s izes from each other so if you want to book across sites, you have to resize ban ners 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 c ourse banner size on smartphone will be different from desktop and tablets due t o smaller screen size. Video ads: Video ads could be promoted alone, in the posi tion 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 f or user interaction with the banner. User could initiate the ban144

ner take over of the page, play the game on the banner, and many other things. Y ou could view many Rich Media ad examples from Rich Media gallery from DoubleCli ck, 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 aud ience segment of our campaigns. For example, a campaign targeting moms and kids need very different banner ideas to be attractive to each segment. Build complet e audience personas and think how you could bring the campaign message to them c reatively. 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. Als o with different We need multiple sizes because ad network would automatically o ptimize which creative size works best. If you buy on a x cost basis then you would know how many advertisers are in rota tion 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 parti cular channel i.e. if your SOV is 10%, your ads will only appear 1/10 of the tim e, and you will see other ads. A bigger share of voice (SOV) would mean that you r ads appear more frequently. Generally you would try to avoid having a too smal l 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 th an Rich Media or Video Ads. Different vendors may charge more for additional tar geting options like Yahoo would charge more if you want to narrow the targeting based on gender and age. 145 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 co uld 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 fan cier, less frequently used options include: Cost per acquisition (CPA): acquisit ion could be de ned as a sales or a sign up. You only pay when there is a con rmed a cquisition. 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 don't want to use this option. They would r ather buy based on CPD or CPM or at most CPC. Cost per Engagement (CPE): this is a pretty novel idea because de ning Engagement alone is tricky. Anyway, some exampl es used by the ad network offered this option include time spent on site, pagevi ews etc... If the ad network allows for bid adjustment, then you could try it. B asically bid adjustment allow you to increase/decrease your standard bid price f or 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 I f 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 becaus e to be honest, unless your banner is in a good position (above the fold normall y), 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 met rics like: Interaction with banner: banner click, game play etc... 146 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 cl icks 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 di rect response, or more often than not in Vietnam, your promotion include some ga mes that users could play, or a contest then your estimated metrics should be: S ign 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 estim ated number of people joining the contest. Revenue if applicable View-though con versions: many ad network allows the use of third party ad serving/tracking, whi ch provides additional conversion data like view through conversion tracking. A V iewthrough Conversion happens when a customer sees an image or rich media ad, th en later completes a conversion on your site. This is different from a Click-thr ough Conversion, which happens when a customer had previously clicked on an ad and then completed a conversion on your site. (from Google help section) Pl ease note that we are talking about the whole display plan estimation so you nee d 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 shouldn't leave it out at this stage. Please be sur e of the content of the page match the message on the ads and the target audienc e. If your landing page takes more than 10 seconds to load, please x it before ru nning the campaign. 147

Section 3 Google Display Network Comprehensive training materials from Google For those who don't know, Google Display Network (or GDN) is a network (ad network ) of Google sites and partner sites, mobile sites, mobile apps etc... It include s sites like: You Tube, Gmail, Zing, Nhaccuatui. HaiVL, bongda.com.vn and many o ther sites. Google has comprehensive materials to learn about Google Display Net work solutions. I would recommend you to visit them and read them carefully Disp lay 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 i n Vietnam, in Vietnamese or English but you could also advertise to different co untries in the world, using local languages. There are a couple of must-read sec tions like: Value of display advertising on Google Display network (if you are c ompletely new). Different targeting options offered by Google Display network in cluding: contextual targeting, placement targeting (select individual site/ad po sition), combination of placement targeting and contextual targeting, interest b ased 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 148

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 t o use this tool. Please read directly from Google about Display Planner. For exa mple, if you are interested in a single site, you could use Search by placement fu nction It would be interesting to see Sites also visited to understand audience overlappi ng 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 visi t etc...) and the tool gives you back some suggestions (alert, the data is not c ompleted yet). 149

course you should compare the cost per view across other options like using Face book 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 g ets, which may not be available if you use other platforms. To understand more a bout You Tube TrueView Ads, please watch this video You Tube TrueView Ads: Only P ay 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 includi ng 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 an d CPV (Cost per View) basis. If you have a video and you want to promote it to m ore people in a particular position, You Tube is a great option to use. Of 150

Section 4 Facebook ads Using Facebook Ads to get more fans As brie y 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 hav e an overview understanding of what the platform could help you with, please rea d this section Advertise on Facebook or the section about Facebook for Business If y ou are familiar with Google Adwords system, especially Google Display Network th en Facebook Ad Platform shouldn't be an issue. While the ad format, its position o n 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 p age, you should use the option Get more Page Likes like the example below: You cou ld 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 p revious chapter already so I won't repeat it here again. In short, after you selec t different targeting options, Facebook would automatically suggest to you a bid price that is suitable. 151

Of course you don't have to follow it and bid higher or lower as you wish. One thi ng to note is that the current average Cost per Click (2013) for Facebook Like A d in Vietnam is relatively cheaper than other countries, it's 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 usin g Paid Ad is something you need to understand well. This is how Facebook is maki ng its money. You have the option to choose which particular post you want to pr omote and how much money, together with other audience targeting options you wan t 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 b udget per post, or you could wait a bit to see which post has the highest organi c reach, like, comment, share rate and then use paid ad to promote it even more. Those with 152

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 Po st 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 po tentially reach. 153

Driving traf c 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 l anding page that you want to promote, and then promote that post using Facebook Ads. This is driving traf c to your page indirectly, however, it has the added ben e ts of increasing engagement for your Facebook posts. If you use option a, you co uld see something like the screenshot below: The same principles apply (A/B test ing, mixing the different elements of the ads together to test which one works b etter) 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 dire ctly. 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 d oes not have an of ce in Vietnam yet. 154

As for agency, there are many agencies ,big or small that could help you to adve rtise 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. 155

Section 5 Real Time Bidding advertised. The winner is alerted by the publisher and allowed to place its ad o n the page. The remarkable thing about this entire process is how fast and how o ften it takes place. The entire series of to-and-fro communication between publi sher and advertisers takes place in 300-500 milliseconds, causing no visible del ay 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 c ompanies, they are already participating heavily in it. They may have multiple r oles in the process, not just what got listed down below. Google with DoubleClic k (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/ Ef cientFrontier% 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 agenc ies are buying media via DSP. You could read more about RTB from wikipedia. A use r heads to a page on a publisher's website, causing it to start loading. In the sa me instant the publisher sends out a bid request to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers saying, We've got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Je rsey, 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?W ithin 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.co m/ 156 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% htt p://www.rubiconproject.com/ 157

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 traf c and be able to evaluate them at the same time. Google Analytics or any jav ascript onsite tracking tools (Site Catalyst, WebTrend, DoubleClick) could do th is. They could record the last traf c 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 sa me logic. I will explain in details for Google Analytics since it is more common ly 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 be low 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 o r the like. 158

 Campaign medium: banner/email/ etc... Campaign name: this could be the name of y our promotion so that when you look at Google Analytics report, you could see pe rformance for different promotions easily. Let's put in christmas2012 Press Generat e URL and you would have a link like this: http://www.example.com/banner?utm_sour ce=vnexpress&utm_ medium=banner&utm_campaign=christmas2012 There are best practices for URL builder as well, please nd them here. If you und erstand the principles, you could apply them in many different cases like tracki ng traf c 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 Analyt ics 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 G oogle Adwords help section Additional conversions that came from people who saw y our display ad but didnt click on it, and then later visited your site and comp leted a conversion. You could read more from here. Technically an ad impression h elps to generate awareness, to raise curiosity. Without the awareness you may no t 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 b e very helpful to understand the full picture. For example, how does user know t hat they need to search for A Class car from Mercedes if they don't 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 vie w through conversion across channels as well. If you happen to use DFA (DoubleCl ick for Advertiser), then oodlight tag is often used to track conversion data tog ether with post impression activities coming from the ad served by DoubleClick. There are many other third party ad serving technologies as well. MediaMind is s omething you could consider as well for Vietnam market. However, just like Doubl eClick, MediaMind ad serving is not free to use. 160

Section 7 Reporting and Optimization Basically at this stage, you would have the estimated performance done in the pl anning stage so at least you should start tracking those key metrics to understa nd 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 desk top/laptop targeting vs mobile and tablet targeting. If you campaign landing pag e does NOT optimize for mobile phone, please do NOT allow ads to run on mobile p latforms.) Check Setup Consistency: If you notice a large number of clicks but l ittle or no conversions, check your ad creative and your landing page to make su re they are well-matched. For example, if you are a furniture store that is sell ing sofas, be sure that your landing page directs users to the section of your w ebsite that features sofas instead of sending them to the general furniture home page. 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 conve rsion was recorded. Again the advice from Google regarding the checking of conver sions 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 repo rting, and you start to realize some of the things below: a. Click and Visit dif ference: One of the rst thing you would notice is that there is probably a huge dif ference between the number of clicks reported by the 161 3. Click through rate Week 1 of Campaign Launch 4. Visitors Immediate Monitoring: Check within a day after you launch 5.your Reach new campa ign to make sure its 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 straig ht-forward cases of poor targeting matches. An example of poor targeting would b e "bra" ads appearing on sites about "Bra, Italy." (From Chandler: you could che ck for correct targeting across channels as well, not just for Google

publishers and the number of visits reported by Google Analytics. Well, if the d ifference is less than 10%, then you are ne. I am talking about 30% - 40% differe nce and normally the number of visits is lower. Let's talk about the easy case, th e less than 10% difference rst. I would often present is that when it comes to me asurement in the of ine world like how much circulation a particular newspaper has , or how many readers it has, the degree of accuracy is not 90% but everyone see ms alright. If we are alright with 90% accuracy (or less) for the of ine world, we shouldn't 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 s ection. It is true that some publishers would in ate the number of clicks arti ciall y (it's sad but true). However, the majority is not I hope. Many times, the discre pancy 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 cor rectly. Some other technical errors. b.Click, CTR, CPC, Bounce Rate: Assuming th at your tracking is correct, you start to receive traf c information for each ad p lacement that you run, you could group them into channel rst like: Google Display as one channel, Facebook Ads, Ambient Network, Yahoo etc... You will immediatel y notice the differences in Click through Rate (CTR) and Cost per Click (CPC) ac ross channels. Some seem better than others. When you look at reports from Analy tics, you would see that the bounce rates for different channels are very differ ent as well. If your goal is just traf c at the cheapest cost, I would recommend g oing ahead, optimizing channels based on CPC, volume of traf c and Bounce Rate. A bounce rate of say 50% is generally not good. You should wait to have enough dat a though and to avoid any sudden uctuation on a daily basis so may be start optim izing 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 optimi zing for those metrics should be the 162

key priorities, not CPC or CTR. You could easily calculate conversion rate (numb er of conversions by the number of clicks), cost per conversion. From there opti mization could be done for each channel, each campaign, each ad, each keyword. U sing report from Google Analytics, you should know how many conversions there ar e 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 attributi on is not within the scope of this book so I won't 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: 163

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://creative zone.mediamind.com/ Google Display Network: https://support.google.com/adwords/c erti cation/?hl=vi#topic =20318 Google Think Insights Display: http://www.google.c om/think/ad-types/display.html Facebook ad guide: https://www.facebook.com/busin ess/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: ht tp://www.adexchanger.com/ Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/vn/topics/advert ising 164

Search Marketing Paid Search and SEO are not new in Vietnam. However, many people do not know whe n to use them or how they work properly. This chapter attempts to answer these q uestions, 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 o f the ways to navigate the internet, whenever 1. Overview we don't remember someth ing (movie name, URLs), nd information etc... 2. What is Search Engine Marketing? According to comScore, the number of unique searchers using 3. User's behavior co mputer 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 ubiqu itous in Vietnam that when talking about Search Engine or Search Engine Marketin g, most people only think of Google and Google Adwords (except for those working for Yahoo Vietnam I suppose). The data below from comScore con rms the Google Sha re of Total Searches in Vietnam exceeds 96%. 5. Right time 6. Paid Search speci c bene ts 7. SEO speci c bene ts 166

use the short form SEM to imply Paid Search only. I will use the term Paid searc h in this ebook to talk about Pay per Click Search Marketing. Before going deepe r into the nuts and bolts of Paid Search and SEO, it would be helpful to remembe r that Paid Search and SEO should be viewed from a marketing standpoint. Many pe ople 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 channel s in your overall marketing plan. We will discuss this in more details in the ne xt section about When to use Paid Search or SEO. So for the purpose of this eboo k, we only discuss Google Adwords program. However, please note that other platf orms may work in similar ways, whether it is Microsoft Adcenter or Baidu platfor m. If you are interested in search engine market share across different territor ies, you can refer to my post Search Engine Market Share Back to Search Engine M arketing. It actually has many bene ts and it's a big industry. Let's look at the US for example, Search Engine Marketing commands nearly 50% of all the spend for Onlin e marketing. It's similar in other mature markets. What is Search Engine Marketing? Search Engine Marketing includes both Paid Search (Pay per Click) and SEO (Searc h Engine Optimization). However, in Vietnam and may be in the region (Southeast Asia) as well, people 167

At this point some of you may ask what about quali ed Company? I heard about Googl e partners before, what does it mean? Well Google has a couple of different prog rams for reseller/ quali ed partners for Google Adwords: SMB program or the resell er 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 cert i ed partner, it simply means that your company meets the requirements from revenu e & operation stand point to serve Small and Medium Businesses. Premier SMB part ners may not have the necessary skills/teams to serve bigger clients/accounts (M NC clients or bigger brands). I use the word may not because every company is diff erent 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 ca n change the territory of interest at the bottom right hand corner. Google Certi e d Partner: From Google's landing page about the program Its 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 . 168 For countries like Vietnam, however, the per centage is much smaller due to vari ous reasons. Human resource, trust, evangelists, lack of market leaders are just a few. As for learning about Google Adwords, Google has a comprehensive both te xt and video based training program. You should check out Adwords Certi cation Hel p and Learn With Google. You could become a quali ed Google Adwords Professional b ypassing two exams: the fundamental exam and one of the three advanced exams (Se arch, Display or Reporting). As a certi ed Google Adwords Professional, you would possess the necessary skills to manage Google Adwords accounts/campaigns. This i s,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 certi ed Google Adwords Professionals and your monthly spend with Google has to hit a certain benchmark. To nd out, which company is the local Google Certi ed Par tner in your territory, please use this link Any company could join either the G oogle Certi ed Partner program or the Premier SMB program (if suitable) so if a co mpany claims that they are the exclusive Google representative in a certain terr itory, in my humble opinion, that claim is false. Google recently introduced Goo gle Partners, which would replace Google Certi ed Program I suppose. What represents your need at that particular moment in time? It's the phrase you t ype into the search box or Search Term (Keyword). With Search Engine Marketing w e 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 nee d 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 se arch for buy bicycle in Singapore and I would want my ads to appear in front of yo u if I sell bicycles. Search Engine Marketing Bene ts 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 w ill 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, to target customers at the precise moment when oogle Learning Center about Paid Search: Your lready searching for the kinds of products and le are more likely to take action. Cost Effective 169 advertisers have the opportunity they indicate their needs. From G ad is displayed to people who are a services you offer. So those peop

I am not using the word cheap but rather cost effective because the budget for p aid 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 traf c is free. Technically it's 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 co uld change ad text as many times as you like with no additional cost as well unl ike traditional media. If you are not sure what ad text looks like, below is one example: Google Adwords bene ts Besides the common bene ts of Search Engine Marketing above, Google Adwords progra m offers additional bene ts as below: Budget control: From Google themselves With c ost-perclick (CPC) bidding, you're charged only when someone clicks your ad, not w hen 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 you'll never be char ged more than that amount. There's no minimum spending commitment. Easy to set up a nd 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. eithe r on top position or Others (side or bottom of the page) An example of the ad is b elow 170

 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 tra cking, you would know which keyword brings you the conversion/the sales. There a re many other bene ts but the above are the most basic. I would encourage you to c heck out the Adwords learning center for more information. The rst aim of doing SEO is to get your website rank higher on search engine resu lt pages for targeted keywords. By doing so, you would expect people to visit yo ur 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 you r content in a better, more logical/user friendly/crawler friendly way user coul d have better experience on your site. By doing so you may expect a better conve rsion rate from your visitors as well. Brand protection Optimize your PR plan/ar ticles, actively involve in link building over long term can help you to dominat e the rst page of the Search Result Page. By doing this, you could avoid negative articles about your brand getting more traf c from curious readers through search engine. Better landing page, lower cost per click for Adwords Search Engine Optimization bene ts Increase visibility & natural search traf c: 171

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 decr ease your bid price on Paid Search, increase your average position. There could be so many other bene ts related to ecommerce because traf c from search engine ofte n converts quite well compared to other traf c sources. The main reason is that vi sitors from search engines are people with speci c need in mind already. 172

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 cou ple of years ago. 2. When to use SEO? I will try to answer this question by going through some sce narUnfortunately Google no longer offers the external version so you have to sign i n 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 S earch? 7. Evergreen campaign To answer this question, rst let's try to understand the demand for products/servic es in Vietnam. 8. nancial Promotional campaign 9. Branding &dedicated awarenesstool campaign Google has a that can help us to u nderstand the average monthly search volume from Vietnam for any topic that 10. Lead generatio n we are interested in. It's called Keyword Planner. 11. Crisis 173

 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 th e suitable values like Location: Vietnam Language: English and Vietnamese. This is the interface language of Google/browser that you are using. The result rage 1,600 e previous fault, the 174 shows that for the keyword the tin dung (credit card), there are on ave exact match searches per month in Vietnam. Please note that unlike th Google Keyword Tool, which showed search volume for broad match by de new Keyword Planner shows EXACT match search volume by default.

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 t he monthly average taking the data from the last 12 months so it is not the sear ch volume for last month and it will not be the search volume when you start you r 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 traf c simula tor to understand the monthly search volume over the last 12 months. are interested in a certain product/service and actively looking for more inform ation 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 peo ple is kind of waste. Because while they are searching for more information abou t anything related to credit card, they either nd your bank offers or they nd some one else. For example, this is the screenshot for me when i search for the tin du ng 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 knowi ng how many people 175

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 wha t you offer and click on the ads. Should you stop the ads for certain days of th e week, i would say no if you have enough budget because this is on demand marke ting. 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 it's going to be a massive campaign with TVC, Print, Out of Home, Online Banne rs, PR news with a big event at the end. Example could be launching a new car, n ew phone, new TV etc... Should you use Paid Search or SEO? Well I would assume t hat since you are using Online Banners, you have a website/microsite ready. Ther e 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 t his a visual 176 In summary, for this scenario Bank needs credit card leads I would recommend an ev ergreen campaign for Paid Search with some budget allocated for tactical campaig ns and at the same time invest in SEO. Evergreen Paid Search targeting brand ter ms, generic terms related to credit card, credit card application, lifestyle ben e ts terms Separate campaigns for seasonal campaigns/promotion targeting speci c typ e 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 ther e already so I won't repeat it here. I would even encourage you target brand terms , slogan of the campaign and all related terms of your products using Paid Searc h. 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 couldn't nd any relevant/of cial 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/servi ce online using brand terms or other related terms. Use Google keyword tool to u nderstand 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 pro duct but also generic category terms as well, product bene ts terms etc... You don't have to run the Paid Search campaign for a long period of time if you are unsur e and this is the rst time that you try, just make sure the campaign is live duri ng the product launch period. Optimize your PR article to make sure they are SEO friendly as well. I am talkin g about online PR articles, not of ine. If the article is optimized well, not only its lifecycle can be longer since people may be able to nd it on Google when the y search for your new product, but it will help you later for online brand reput ation management also. If you can't 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 prominen tly near the top of the article repeat 2-3 times variably in the copy below keyw ord in the ALT tag of the image used in the article If the product is a key prod uct, and there are people searching for your category on Google, it's best to spen d some efforts/money with SEO for longer term as well. How much money you want t o spend for SEO depends on search volume, users' behavior for your category and of course your own budget. 3-month promotional campaign for FMCG 177

You are the marketing manager of a FMCG brand (Fast Moving Consumer Good) like g reen 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 se eding, some online banners and of course a massive of ine campaign. Should you use Paid Search or SEO? Well there are many variables in this case. While FMCG prod ucts are not generally searched for online but you need to make sure that at lea st if people search for your campaign name on Google, either by Paid Search or S EO, you have to be there, ideally on the top position. The same goes with your k ey message, your slogan even. Do not assume that when people search for your cam paign brand name, your dedicated microsite would show up at position 1 for natur al results. More often than not, these microsites are made of Flash and Google h as a hard time understanding Flash. Almost all production agencies in Vietnam, f or this kind of campaign, they do not make your Flash Microsite SEO friendly at all. They may say that they do but it's not happening due to expertise issue, lack of client's 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 sear ch engine result pages. More over, even with HTML microsite production agencies may not make it SEO frie ndly for brand terms as well. It's very common and I have seen it time after time. Traditionally in Vietnam, FMCG companies would run campaigns for 3 months and t hen 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, ev en for a 3 month microsite, I would still recommend SEO with some onsite and off site 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 traf c from Search Engine. Again this is d ifferent from one sub category to the next and it depends on each campaign as we ll. 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 engi ne? If user has a particular information need, is the content on your microsite uniquely valuable enough to make user satis ed and not bouncing back to the search result page after visiting your site? Please don't 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. 178

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 tha t you are running so for that to happens there must be a relevancy factor betwee n the keywords that you plan to use, the landing page content and your overall c ampaign. People talk about it on Facebook, forums and other channels. When you search usi ng 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 r esults as well. Because of this, you may be thinking whether SEO could help to p ush DOWN those bad articles and push UP those PR articles that you paid for? Fir st of all, the way Vietnamese marketers handle PR crisis (real or not) is very d ifferent from the WEST. Rarely that we publish of cial information on the corporat e 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 th e crisis and also onsite optimization for the landing page with of cial informatio n. Secondly, depending on how you want to tackle this crisis holistically, SEO c ould be used. However, please consider carefully the impact of what you are tryi ng 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 activ ities then may be you should consider thinking of something actually helpful and meaningful to your 179 Year end party Your brand is going to have a super big year end party in one of the hottest loc ations 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 webs ite. If you decide to use only social media assets for this campaign then Paid S earch or SEO can't 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. Y our customers could read articles about the scandal on the homepage of some of t he most popular newspapers in town, they don't need to search on Google for it. I would strongly advise against hiring an agency or a freelancer in this case to s et up bogus sites with domains similar to your company website, include useless information on those sites and do aggressive/spammy link building or similar sch eme 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 ver y limited because people are still using social networks to talk about it, newsp apers still publish articles about it. You accomplish nothing by doing this. 180

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 be ing calculated. There is no special favor from Google because certain agencies a re 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. Of cially from Google Now l ets 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 who se ads will appear and in which order? Its 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 you r 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 in corporates bid and Quality Score. There is no mystery that ads appear on top of t he natural results would normally receive higher click through rate, more clicks compared to ads on Other positions. (By the way, click through rate is calculat ed by dividing the number of clicks to the 181 1. Ad rank and Quality Score 2. Ad text & ad extension 3. Actual paid Cost per C lick

number of ad impression.) However there is no guarantee that your ads will alway s appear on the Top position. From Google on How Adwords chooses top ads: An ads position on the page is based on two things: your bid and your Quality Score (t ogether, 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 se arch 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 i f 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 cer tain ad extensions (like sitelinks) and other features available only in top ad positions. As always, you're never charged more than your max CPC bid. Ads at the top of a page generally have the following qualities: High relevance: The ad tex t, keywords, and landing page are relevant to people who click the ad. Good perf ormance over time: The ad consistently generates clicks. Competitive bids: The a ds bid is competitive with other advertisers and exceeds the top of page bid es timate. We can only show up to three ads at the top of a search results page. Because Qu ality Score and thresholds are recomputed on every page, ads can sometimes appea r 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, ther e could be anything from 0 to maximum 3 ads. For Other Spots, there could be max imum 8 ads. Another example just to make the point clear 182

Google Chief Economist Hal Varian explains more about the Auction, Ad Rank and Q uality Score in this video Search Advertising with Google: Quality Score explanat ion 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. F or 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 of cially con r med that Conversion rates don't 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 wil l 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 i s per keyword basis so every keyword in your account has a quality score for Sea rch. The lowest score is 0 and the highest is 10. The Ad Rank is calculated ever y time a 183

keyword user types in triggers your ad so it can change from time to time. The Q uality Score is affected by the followings ( I simply copy this part from Google site) Your keywords past clickthrough rate (CTR): How often that keyword led t o 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 re levant to what they are searching for. Your display URLs past CTR: How often yo u 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 relevan ce: 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 youre targeting Your ads performance on a site: How well your ads been doing on this and simil ar sites (if youre targeting the Display Network) Your targeted devices: How we ll your ads have been performing on different types of devices, like desktops/la ptops, mobile devices, and tablets you get different Quality Scores for differen t types of devices So in short, you need to try to have the Quality Score as hig h as you can and the actual CPC you have to pay will be lower, you will have bet ter position, your minimum rst page bid will be lower, you have more chances to b e 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, eac h category. 184

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 cert ain 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 u p to 20% more clicks in a day than your daily budget speci es. We call this overde livery. Overdelivery can help make up for days when traf c is slow and your ads do nt get as much exposure. However, in a given billing period, youre never charg ed more than the average number of days in a month (roughly 30.4) times your dai ly 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 vers ion from Google, please refer to here. 185

In Adwords auction, you will only pay enough to beat the advertiser just below y ou. Let's 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 A d 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. 186

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 of cial video on You Tube How Search Wo rks 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 secti on 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 b elieves 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 (sp ider) out to index the Internet (this isn not small feat because millions of pag es are being created and removed every hour of every day 24/7/365. Somehow unders tand, 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 resul ts are return them in lighting fast manner. How Search Engines see your website? 187

Search engine doesn't see a website as we human do because they don't have eyes or e ars. 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 whi ch part to ignore etc... There are tools like Lynx (recommended by Google) or ot her similar tools that helps you to understand how search engine sees at your si te. Search Engines still have limitations trying to understand images, music, vi deos 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: 188

just plain text. This is the technology limitation right now so we have to help se arch engines understanding our site. Well you may say that you should be free to code your site in whatever way that you want and it's search engine job trying to make sense of it. It's somewhat true and search engines are trying hard to unders tand as much as they can about different websites, coded in different languages. It's just that traf c from search engine often represents an important part of the site overall traf c so it makes economic sense to help rather than playing wait and s ee. 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 Googl e 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 thi s question in class, the answer I get back is money, money and money. I haven't te sted asking this question outside of Vietnam so I don't know how people from diffe rent territories would respond. 189

Yes money/cash ow is important to any publicly listed company. But I guess that i s not what Google founders/CEO care most about. If you want to read Google missi on & 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 user's search queries in lighting fast manner. The query could be input by text or voice or predictiv e i.e. Google gives you the answer before you even ask. Google doesn't want you to have to wait 20 seconds to receive your answer and it doesn't want you to struggl e 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 informa tion about the subject of interest. It's all about making sure user is happy using Google to nd whatever thing they want across the globe, in multiple local langua ges. 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 Marke ting angle. Focus on the users rst and Google will follow, not the other way arou nd. Personalized Search For a comprehensive picture about this, you can read Danny Sullivan series: Of Ma gic Keywords & Flavors Of Personalized Search At Google Google Now Personalizes E veryone's Search Results Google's Results Get More Personal With Search Plus Your Wor ld This is not new if you have been working in search engine marketing industry l ong enough. However, to many the idea that when they search on Google, they woul d 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 c ountry/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 histo ry, your 190

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 bel ow that link to indicate the last time you visited it). at your search behavior over time to personalize the search result page that bes t suits you. Personalized Search is not a bad thing. It's a great thing to user be cause the natural result page would be a better t to your need the majority of th e 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 i s that if you see your website ranks high on the search result page for certain keywords, don't be too happy just yet. You need to check it again using private bro wsing mode for refox or incognito window for Chrome. Google Guidelines for web masters Google has developed a Webmaster Academy. It has four sections: Beginner webmast ers 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. Go ogle will look Webmaster tools 191

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. It's easy to read, easy to understand and most importan tly it's from Google so you know you can trust the content 100%. For optimizing im ages, 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 be st practices. For Rich snippets, Google has guidelines for you as well. Please p ay special attention to the Quality Guidelines, which indicate what you should o r shouldn't do. If you are trying something against these guidelines, you may face penalty from Google, which means your site is banned. Because the guidelines ar e important so i repeat the basic principles here: Make pages primarily for user s, not for search engines. Dont deceive your users. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether youd feel comfortable explaining what youve done to a website that co mpetes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does t his help my users? Would I do this if search engines didnt exist?" Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand o ut from others in your eld. AVOID the FOLLOWING TECHNIQUES: Automatically generat ed content Participating in link schemes Cloaking Sneaky redirects Hidden text o r links Doorway pages Scraped content Participating in af liate programs without a dding suf cient value Loading pages with irrelevant keywords 192

 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 traf c from Go ogle. 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 sa y 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 cons idered one vote to a particular page, a reference letter about a particular topi c of interest. In many cases, what your former manager, former colleagues say ab out how you perform at work normally would carry more weight compared to your pe rsonal friends who don't work with you. The same applies to outside links. Outside links from trusted sources, sources with relevant experience about the same top ic (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 wat ch the video from Matt Cuts. You could also check out other posts on seoMoz abou t link building as well. It's good to read again this chapter from the be193 Content & Link Building The of cial note from Google is this One key element of creating a successful site is not to worry about Googles ranking algorithms or signals, but to concentrate on delivering the best possible experience for your user by creating content th at other sites will link to naturallyjust because its great. For those who are br and new to SEO, you may ask what link building is or how it is important? Well s ince the beginning of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders) start ed 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 l ife example is that when you apply to a company, you would submit your resume, w hich 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 techniq ue vs content marketing. Rand Fishkin has a few things to say on this topic SEOs 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, w hat 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 buildin g program, it's 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 (shor t form OSE) Majestic SEO 194

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? 195

How to do SEO? 196

197

Guiding principles Where we are? Onsite Optimization Offsite Optimization 198

The cheat sheet is arranged as a mind map and could be downloaded here. 199

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) O site)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 won't 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. 200

Section 7 Performance Evaluation General principles One common question people ask would be how they know if their campaign (Paid Se arch or SEO) is going well? This question should be asked in the beginning durin g the planning phase. If you are running the campaign half way and you are askin g 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, traf c from organic search, traf c from brand vs non brand terms, bounce rate 3. Conversion 4. Goals 5. E commerce First let's go back to the beginning your overall marketing objectives, why did yo u choose to use Paid Search or SEO in the rst place? Next is to translate these b usiness objectives into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Which metrics would re present the KPIs? Can these metrics be measured with the reports from Google Adw ords/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. I f the objective is brand awareness then unique visitors (Reach) and Frequency ma y be of interest to you. 201

How to measure Reach and Frequency with Paid Search or SEO? Well with Search Eng ine Marketing you know whether you are hitting the right target audience based o n keywords they use. Second, you could easily measure the number of unique visit ors to your site and how many times they visit. I know it is not perfect using t he proxy like the above. However, it's better than nothing. In Vietnam, most people care only about traf c (click, cpc, quality score) when th ey 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 h ave competition on your site and people need to sign up to join the game/ contes t etc... Bounce rate is something that you want to look at as well. However, whe n interpreting the value of bounce rate on the landing page, you need to be care ful. 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. Howeve r, 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 l anding 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 campa ign 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 traf c to your website Measuring brand awareness Measuring sales and conversions You could read Performance, pro tability and growth from Googl e as well. Basic SEO Metrics Normally people would care about rankings for targeted keywords. 202

I would avoid, however, evaluating SEO strictly from a ranking point of view. Th e 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 couldn't nd the information they are loo king for) or brand awareness. So recommended metrics are: Keyword rankings over time Traf c from organic search: visit, new visitors. You may want to split the tr af c into branded terms and non branded terms. Bounce rate: A high bounce rate for tra f c 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 vo lume i.e. not many people search like that on Google. Normally people would sear ch 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 l ooking for? 203

Section 8 Common Myths There are a number of myths, outright manipulations in Vietnam and I only list d own 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 Adwo rds, you could have higher rankings on organic search results, imagine what woul d happen? Well one thing for sure is that sites from big brands would dominate t he search engine result pages and there are no spaces for the little guys, for i ndependent 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 wo rse, 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/pers on has special relationship with Google, they somehow manage to in uence the ad ra nk 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 kno w now that ad rank is decided by algorithm, not human relationship. Spending money with Google Adwords will help to improve ranking on natural searc h result page In other words, the natural/organic search results could be bought by paying mon ey indirectly to Google via Adwords. 204

Special software that automatically improved ranking by posting on hundreds of f orums. 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 resul t 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 othe r websites will be relatively 0. It's just like if everyone is wearing 10cm high h eel shoes, the net result is that the relative difference between everyone heigh t is the same. Secondly, it is very unlikely that such a software works simply b ecause 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 thou ght about it long time ago. Our infrastructure, our software engineers are not a s good as those from mature markets so I won't 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 co mplained that we're giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And s o we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turnin g the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wou ldn't 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 E MD 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 use ful 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 205

 Mistake #2: segmented approach (i.e. no communication between marketing, busines s 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 practice s 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 hopeful ly bring you more conversion, webmaster builds site for search engines). Mistake #5: Slow iteration (Agile SEO cycles) 206

Section 9 How much does it cost? This is always a topic that has so much misunderstandings and misconception beca use just like in any developing markets, people try so many funny ways to packag e 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 wo uld charge for their Paid Search service: 1. Flat fee per month: Some agency cou ld use this model if the client has limited budget or the budget is too big :D F or 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 of cial guideline fr om Google unless you are an of cial 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 tha t you could judge for yourselves. 2. SEO: at fee, man hours, project keyword Sear ch 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 onl y when someone clicks on the ads, you are not charged based on keywords, a x amou nt per month or any similar ideas. It's pay per click. So if someone comes to you and say that if you want to buy 5 keywords per month, it would 207

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 m odel 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 websit e. 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 Thi s is quite popular in oversea markets but not in Vietnam. Basically the client a nd the agency would agree on a low base fee and then a fair performance based bo nus 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... (plea se 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 Acq uisition, the agency would split 40-60 with the client. For example: if the actu al cost per acquisition at the end of the month is $8, or saving of $2/acquisiti on. 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 n ot very common in Vietnam for Paid Search. Basically the client would indicate t he scope of work and the agency would then quote the number of man hours. The to tal 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 ho urs similar to Paid Search. How does the agency come up with the costing per mon th? It probably depends on: Scope of work Keyword dif culty 208

 Target market Target ranking after a period of time Some agencies even go as far as guarantee performance i.e. rankings or traf c otherwise the client doesn't have to pay. Some agencies would split onsite optimization and offsite optimization i nto 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 ranki ngs 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, i t 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 lo t 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. 209

Section 10 Reference http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRx7AMb6rZ0 Inside Adwords Blog: http://adwords.b logspot.com/ Yahoo Search Marketing: http://advertising.yahoo.com/article/search -advertising.html Yahoo Search Marketing Blog: http://advertising.yahoo.com/blog s/advertising/ Bid Management Tools: Kenshoo: http://www.kenshoo.com/ Marine Sof tware: http://www.marinsoftware.com/ DoubleClick Search: http://www.google.com/d oubleclick/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 J ohn Battelle's Search Blog: http://battellemedia.com/ Paid Search speci c: 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.goo gle.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ Search Engine Optimization: Facts about Google and Competition: http://www.google.com/competition/howgoogles earchworks.ht ml The beginner guide to SEO by Moz: http://moz.com/beginners-guid e-to-seo 210

 Webmaster Help from Google: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?h l=en& answer=1050724 Search Engine ranking factors survey from seoMoz: http://mo z.com/search-ranking-factors Webmaster Tool Help http://support.google.com/webma sters/?hl=en Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp ot.com Aaron Wall's SEO book: http://www.seobook.com/ Matt Cutts Blog: http://www. mattcutts.com/blog/ Michael Gray: GrayWolf's SEO blog: http://graywolfseo.com/ SEO by the sea: http://www.seobythesea.com/ Web Master World: http://www.webmasterw orld.com/ 211

Digital Strategy Digital strategy is a complex topic. This chapter tries to summarize common 3-6 months campaign types in Vietnam. 14

Well this is probably the most dif cult 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 campaign s publicly so in this chapter, I will include some key pointers so that you coul d judge for yourself the value of different digital strategies. Since Digital St rategy is vast and complex. For the purpose of this chapter, we will ONLY talk a bout 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 don't want to stop at ideation or c ampaign 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 med ia 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 jus t the start. From what presented during the pitching between agency and client t o 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 don e regularly/properly during the course of the campaign. So what I am trying to c over in this chapter? 213

Section 1 Brief What is the main objective of the campaign? Please specify Business Objectives a nd 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 eleme nts below: Who is our target audience? Demographics, Income level, Location, preferences (i f 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 pro duct in this brief, market condition, competition Competitors' offering, marketing, positioning in the market? Describe any comparative advantages the brand/produc t has? Any key issues & challenges / Opportunities that the brand is facing? Reason To Believe Product features and bene ts that support the above message we are trying to conve y Campaign Overall Plan Key of ine/online channels if available? Key of ine activities if any? Campaign Objectives Measuring Success KPI's and results desired? 214

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 lega l restrictions etc) Timeline And/or Pitching Process Deadline to send back/present proposal by the agency. Information about the Pitc hing process (if any) like rst round submission, second round presentation etc... 215

Section 2 Research It may be helpful to look around other Southeast Asia/Asia countries to understa nd 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 ou t 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 re tailed chains, supermarket? reseller? How many store does it have? How could pro spective customers buy the product/service? Looking back at the previous marketi ng 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 pla ce better. Aha moment! The key is to understand the audience insights or putting yourself in the audien ce's shoes. Understand the purchasing funnel (sales cycle) is critical to a succes sful digital strategy. What would motivate them to do what we want them to? Simi larly, you could think about barriers that may discourage them not doing the des ired action? Research could be done of ine or online, using many tools that mentio ned in previous chapter from Google Keyword tool, to Google Display Planner, Lis tening Tool, Analytics tool, etc... 216

If you have never used the product/service before, it would be helpful to try ou t yourself or at least interview a bunch of people who do. Visit the of ine store is necessary to understand how the customer would experience if you drive them t o 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 se e if it still makes sense with what you nd in the Research stage. 217

Section 3 Ideation If you do a simple Google Search for brainstorming technique or ideation technique y ou could see millions of results online with things like no killing of ideas; goi ng for quantity, not quality at rst so I won't go into too much details here. I woul d highlight a few common approaches in Vietnam when it comes to campaign idea. H owever, 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 ex ample 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 it's fun ctional 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, of ine event, etc... Photo Contest This is probably the most popular type of campaign in Vietnam for the past 1-2 y ears. Basically the ow is like this: The photo contest is often wrapped around a c reative or brilliant idea. The main idea could be about showcasing the love for you r 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 s how 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 pic tures/submit pictures of themselves, of the topic of interest in the campaign et c... on either a microsite or facebook or Instagram. The brand may ask participa nts 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 prod uct, some require participants to upload the pictures into 218

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 activatio n of ine and take photos there to upload online. Advertisers may ask participants to include together with the photos a few lines Winning criteria: Participants n eed to ask others to vote for them either on Facebook, website, or whatever medi um. 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, br ands 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 us ing photo contests. It is almost like if you can't think of anything else to do, a photo contest is something you can try. A few things to note about Photo contes t: General audience in Vietnam has been very familiar with this type of contests so there's good and bad to that. Prize hunter is the winner of almost 90% of these contests if the only winning c riteria is the number of online Like/Vote. These prize hunters are very likely NOT y our target audience or even they are, it's 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 th e purpose of the campaign to promote certain concept of course is not achieved b y 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 ($150 0 - $3000) would attract generally about 300 - 1000 participants on average. Kno wing 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 particip ants or use a credible panel of judges. 219

Limit one user with unique ID number to sign up only once won't 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 shouldn't ex pect much from security point of view as well. (even iOS 7, the most advanced mo bile operating system, produced by Apple is commonly hacked as well). However, w e need to avoid the obvious loopholes. Because prize hunters hack these games, y ou often nd that the top 3 or top 5 guys get like 5-10 times or 20 times more poi nts than the average players. If you use lucky draw amongst the top 3-5 to selec t the winner, then you may nd that one prize hunter signs up under different name s 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. S ince the game is likely not great (due to budget and lack of professional game s trategy), it's likely that of ce worker will only play these games once or twice unl ess the prize is very attractive. Online Game contest This is quite popular in Vietnam as well. Basically as the name suggests, advert isers would ask the agencies to create a game/ series of games to be hosted on t he 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 for m of edutainment or something similar. What advertiser hopes for (and the agency sells) is that by playing the game, participants would learn something about th e 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 advert iser or the agency are professional game developer so these games won't be too gre at or addictive. Also these games are for short campaigns only so they last norm ally 2-3 months only. These games are prone to hacking quite easily. Prize hunte rs 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 di scussed above because it requires user to do 220

a lot more to participate. User has to produce a video, which is considered quit e 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 t he 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 o n related subjects, hopefully the target product/service would be incorporated i n 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 t he 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 y our 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... W inning criteria for this type of contest could be either by voting (again) or by advertiser's 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 t ype 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 bene ts of the product/service like hel ping you to cook better, taking better photo, producing fresh air, cleaning your hand etc... we could explore other emotional bene ts by asking the audience to pa rticipate. So from there the advertiser/agency starts a contest around sharing y our 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 bene ts etc ... In uencer as the key hook 221

One common way is to select a suitable Key in uencer (normally a prominent celebri ty, whose pro le 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. Basical ly the advertiser/agency hope that due to the celebrity status, the target audie nce would be in uenced accordingly. Famous celebs could attract quite a lot of new spapers themselves so brands or advertisers often create a PR campaign using the m as well. Another way is to invite these in uencers to write, upload, talk about your campaign on their blog, facebook fanpage or even participate in these campa igns as participants. Moderators, admins of popular forums or those that have po pular 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 oor etc... Another type is about organizing mass walking, dancing or doing hing to raise awareness about an issue of interest. Through CSR campaigns, s hope to position themselves as good guys, good citizen, good neighbor in ommunity etc... and of course this will help to push sales as well. the p somet Brand the c

Viral clip This is proposed/thought of quite often by agencies and brands. However, the col d truth is that most clips are not viral, especially when they talk in promotion al ways. Advertiser/agency often thinks of using celebrity, shock factor, fun fa ctor 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 don't think I need to talk too much about this type of campaigns. Advertisers/ag encies use it quite often as well. Basically it's about if consumer buy/use the pr oduct/service, they help to save the environment, contribute money to educationa l fund, 222

Section 4 Evaluation Evaluation of ideas is not a simple task and I am certainly not the expert in th is subject. So I will repeat here again the principles presented by two great au thors: 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, l et's 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 prese nt to the client/your team. The idea may be cool but it may not help you to achi eve your goals. SUCCESs and STEPPs First, with Jonah Berger in his book Contagious: Why things catch on. Jonah also w rote 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: Socia l currency: People want to be smart, cool and savvy. That motivates us to share a nd engage with things. Triggers: Stimuli prompt people to think of related things E motion: we care, we share Public: monkey sees, monkey do principle Practical val ue: People like to help others. If your content can save time, or money, or impro ve their health, they'll spread the word. Business objectives You could start by reviewing your overall strategy and see if the idea would t in to 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 im pact the target audience? helping you achieving your objectives? At the end of t he day it is about whether the idea/concept could help us to achieve ALL of our business objectives? I have to 223

 Story People don't just share information, they share stories Secondly, with Chip He ath, his principles are somewhat related to what Jonah Berger mentioned. Chip wr ote Made to Stick They are: Simple Unexpected Credible Concrete Emotional Story here 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 go od 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 b ecause if it is going to be too expensive to execute, too time consuming (in oth er words, not feasible), then it is of little use. If you still like the idea, y ou may want to tweak it a little bit to make it more doable. 224

Section 5 Campaign Development Paid, Owned and Earned Media Once your overall strategy is con rmed and you need to develop a full campaign aro und 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 dec ide 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, hum an 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 traf c/ interaction to, you could start to choose the placements, audience targeting met hods, pricing options etc... A quick note, if you have a video and you want to make it viral, beside the crea tive idea followed the guideline suggested by Jonah Berger or Chip Heath, you wo uld 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 es timated traf c/views vs the total KPI of the campaign. You need some experience to account for organic uplift in traf c, the halo effect of your different activitie s as well i.e. the sum is bigger than the parts. It is typical in Vietnam to use forum seeding or in uencer seeding on Facebook. You normally pay for this in Viet nam so it's 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 s tart 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 propo sed strategy/concept. Of course your overall estimated KPIs need to be at least equal or bigger the required KPIs in the brief. 225

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 a lready. 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 estima ted timeline. This is quite straight forwards. Basically it is about listing dow n 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 Medi a/Earned Media preparation could be done in parallel. 226

Conclusion 15

It is just part 1 Writing about Digital Marketing in Vietnam is hard. Not only that the industry i s changing too fast, there is no authoritative gure in the market place so I can't refer to many materials in English in the market place. Many of what I write her e 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 mak e 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 pa ge :) I expect this of course. Hence, I publish this book in ebook format so tha t It could be updated easily, building on the feedback received from the audienc e. 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 e xperience 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 s upportive. I spent quite some time writing this book and they have been nothing but encouraging. I can't nish this book without their help. Also I need to thank fo rmer colleagues, friends who have helped to review the book, given comments, des igned the cover page :) Cheers, Chandler Nguyen P.S: if you have any comments/qu estions, feel free to email them to me at chandlerblog@gmail.com 228