What makes an effective brand advertising campaign?

That was the core question at “The Ad Effectiveness X-Factor” panel, held last week as part at the 8th annual Advertising Week in Manhattan. Moderated by Kontera’s own EVP of Marketing, Ammiel Kamon, the esteemed speakers were Jason Krebs the CMO of Tremor Media; Sean O’Neal, the CRO of Vizu;  Joe Zawadzki,  the CEO of MediaMath; Florian Kahlert , SVP of Dimestore; and Kontera President Hal Muchnick.

Each industry insider shared an internal case study that provided a unique perspective on brand media strategies for either video, social, editorial placement, or display audience buying. Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Always measure the success of a brand campaign by real time brand lift, not by clicks.
• With online in-stream video, it’s not enough to syndicate TV ads, adding interactive elements will dramatically increase engagement.
• The best day for brand lift varies by vertical. For instance with hair products, Wednesday is the best day, while Sunday is the worst.
• You can save as much as $100,000 in buy effectiveness by optimizing a campaign in real time. Depending on when you start getting stable data, you can start optimizing within a day.
• Video is very hot right now and showing particular lift for CPG brands.

Another repeated theme during the panel was how placement matters for engagement. Aside from Hal Muchnick’s presentation on Kontera’s Ritz crackers/Glee Social ad unit, both the Vizu and Dimestore case studies spoke directly to the effectiveness Kontera’s contextual ads. For instance, in their brand study of a leading over the counter pain reliever, Vizu found that Kontera’s Editorial Placed units significantly outperformed the portal and endemic sites running the same campaign.

It truly was a fascinating discussion and well worth checking out. You can see video of the entire panel here.

With reportedly over 10 million early adapters having already joined, it appears that Google+ may be the social networking breakthrough that Google’s long been searching for.

So what does that mean for Kontera Publishers? While currently Google+ is only intended for personal profiles, Google has stated that they’re actively working on a version for brands and businesses that would increase AdSense and Analytics integration. Beta testing is expected to begin this week with select partners, and continue over a period of a few months.

While it’s still to be determined what the finished product will look like, based on what we already do know about Google+ from personal profiles, here are some ways that the business version will be able to help Kontera Publishers promote their sites:

• “Circles” will give you total control over what groups you share which content with. So for instance, if you’re running a technology blog, and want to share a story that you only think will be of interest to your readers who own Apple devices, you can create a separate Circle for that, and it will appear in their “stream”, the equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed. There’s no limit to how many Circles you can create, and you can place the same person in multiple Circles.
  
  It’s a major step up from the Facebook equivalent, Product Pages, where you can only target what you share by age or geography.

• Hangouts, the Google+ feature that lets up to 10 people participate in the same video call, could revolutionize the way people socialize on the web. Rather than having the intimacy of one on one video calling, or the driven agenda of video conferencing, Hangouts are all about community. As a website owner, the conversation no longer has to be limited to the comments on your blog. At the end of every post you  may link to a story’s dedicated Hangout or a Hangout covering that general topic, giving readers yet another way to interact with your brand.

• In terms of customer service, Hangouts can help online businesses in very tangible ways. Want to gain an edge on your competition by offering video support? It will make your brand seem friendlier and in cases where it’s possible to show what the problem is, it could be a real time saver.
  
  There’s also the potential for large and niche business to open up their support to entirely new groups of people. For instance, Google is currently working on making Hangout respond to visual cues, to make it accessible to the ASL community.

• Much like with the similarly named Google +1, Google+ will be another factor used to determine Google SERPs. While it’s unknown exactly how important a signal it will become, it’s safe to say an active Google+ profile can only help your overall SEO.

• Meant to “spark” conversation, “Sparks” is a portal of aggregated search results, revolving around a specific topic. So if you typed in “baseball” it would display a bunch of stories about baseball. How that’s different than normal Search, other than Google giving you default Sparks to follow, is that you can pin the interest for easy access. This has at least the potential to become an additional traffic source for your site, but there has to be easier way for people to create threads for people to follow. If they adapted a method, like how hashtags work on Twitter, websites  could potentially use Sparks to grow their audience.

Again, it will be a few months until we’ll know exactly what Google+ has to offer websites, and a couple of months until the dust settles and we’ll get a better idea of how much Google+ is resonating in general. However in the meantime, it might be a good idea to ask a friend for a Google+ invitation and familiarize yourself, so when it is time to open your website’s profile, you’ll be good to go.

What is it that makes a post stand out in someone’s Facebook news feed?

Two recent studies, by Buddy Media, who surveyed the Facebook posts of their 200 top brand clients over a two week period of time, and by the social media management provider Vitrue, who analyzed 1,500 brand streams over a three month period, sought to answer that question. Here are their collective takeaways on the most effective ways to increase engagement with your content on Facebook:

Short is better, both for URLS and post size – Buddy Media found that posts of 80 characters or less improve engagement rates by 27%. Additionally, posts that use a full URL, as opposed to the type of URL shorter that are popular for Twitter get 3 times as many clicks.

Image posts generate the most engagement – 22% more than video posts and 54% more engagement over text posts.  In all, it’s recommended that you use posts with images or quality video. Posts using just text are ineffective.

It doesn’t work while they’re at work – 60% of the posts tracked by Buddy Media went on Facebook between 10am and 4pm Eastern Time. If you post earlier in the morning like 7am, after people start coming home from work around 5pm, or around 11pm, engagement will increase around 20%.

Day of the week matters – Both studies found that day of the week is important, but which day you should post on varies on what topic you’re posting about. For instance according to the Buddy Media, Sunday is the best day for Automotive and Sports posts. However, according to Vitrue, Consumer Packaged Goods posts performed the best on Thursdays; 51% better than on Sundays. Still, there are some general conclusions that can be drawn. Monday is universally bad day thanks to oversaturation, and Sunday is the most underutilized day relative to when people are active on Facebook. Overall, posting is most effective on Thursday and Friday.

Use “Softer sell” phrases – People on Facebook respond better to softer sell language such as “win” and “winning”, as opposed to  ”contest”, “promotion”, “sweepstake”, or “coupon”.

Ask a question – Facebook posts that end in a question have a 15% higher engagement. Among questions, asking “where”, “when”, “should” and especially “would” is a good idea. People don’t respond well to “why”.

Additionally, back in February, Facebook very quietly changed their default news feed settings, so users are only seeing items posted by friends or business pages that they interact with the most.  That means posting with regularity is just as important as which day of the week your status messages are updated. It’s recommended that you focus on sharing quality content at least a few days a week, making sure the optimal day for your topic is always one of the times you share.

For Kontera Publishers looking to promote their websites, there’s no question that Facebook is an increasingly valuable tool in growing your audience. A recent comScore study found that nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes spent online in America is spent on Facebook, and by focusing on SEO alone, you’d be missing out on one of the most effective ways to connect with potential readers.

Just remember to be very alert in monitoring the success of your tactics; what people respond to on Facebook is a fluid situation, and what works now might not work in 6 months!

Microsoft and Facebook are turning your opinion into a celebrity endorsement.

The two internet superpowers have recently announced a deal to incorporate information from your Facebook friends into the search results you see on the Bing search engine. When you search on any given topic, a new “Liked by your Facebook friends” category will appear among the results, showing a thumbnail picture of your friend along with their endorsement.

The Facebook Likes will appear either on the top, bottom, or anywhere in between on the Bing Search page, depending on how relevant Microsoft deems your friends recommendation to what you were searching for.

So how does this announcement affect Kontera publishers? It’s a golden opportunity. If you consider how critical it is to appear on the first page of search results, think how even more effective it would be for your site to appear on the front page of results, as a recommendation from a trusted acquaintance.  While growing steadily, Bing still only accounts for 11% of all U.S. search queries. Yet, its share is larger in other continents, and Facebook has already expressed an interest expanding the feature to other search engines in the future. Additionally Google is rumored to be tested a similar “shared by” feature on their results page that would lead to Google Updates . This means that moving forward; it’ll become even more important to have a solid social networking strategy for promoting your site.

With that in mind, here are some quick tips for social networking optimization, both specific to the Bing-Facebook deal, and in general:

1. Create a Facebook page for your site, which you can do here. While there are numerous benefits to having a Facebook page for your site, in this context the key reasons is to converts readers from your site into “Likes” of your brand on Facebook. Just don’t be shy in soliciting your readers! According to a recent study by Opinionway Research, 75% of people who Liked a brand on Facebook, only did so after an invitation or advertisement from that brand.
2. As previously discussed, you need to have the Facebook Like plugin implemented on your site.
3. Make sure you post a link to every individual one of your posts on your Facebook wall. Even if an individual reader has “Liked” your site, or a specific post in the past, the more items they like, the better the chances that when their friends search for something on Bing, your site will appear as a recommendation.
4. “Like” everything you post on Facebook. At the very least it will assure that all of your Facebook friends will see links to your site, when performing a relevant search on Bing.
5. Grow your base of Facebook friends, through Facebook Profile Search. The other just announced collaboration between Facebook and Bing, when you search a person’s name on Bing, among the results returned are Facebook profiles, weighed heavily towards displaying people with mutual Facebook friends. It’s a great way to locate someone who say for instance, commented on your site that’d you’d like to befriend but has a really common name.

In all, while the technology is still in the nascent stages, the Facebook/Bing collaboration is likely a harbinger of things to come. With search going from universal results, to geo-specific results; a completely personalized search experience is the next logical step, and social networking data is the most logical bridge for this. The faster you adapt and prioritize building your social networking presence, specifically on Facebook, the better prepared you’ll be as social networking SEO is only increasing in importance.

Here at Kontera, we realize how important it is for you as a Publisher to control everything on your website- from content to how things look.  You are involved in every detail;  the layout of the page, imagery, style, link color, as well as how your site monetization tactics are displayed and integrated with you content.

We sometimes receive questions from our publishers, asking us how they can exclude Kontera ads from appearing on certain sections of their sites- be it a particular category or a certain section within a page.

In general, Kontera’s algorithm is automatically set to have ads appearing on the most relevant and performing text-rich sections of your website, and does not display ads over active links, navigation bars, and other locations that would disrupt your site’s usability. So for majority of publishers, Kontera is already appearing exactly where they want it to.

However, flexibility is always important. If, for any editorial reason, you’d like further control over where Kontera ads are displayed – Kontera offers Zone and Filter tags.

Zone and Filter tags are HTML code that tells the Kontera JavaScript where to display ads.  Zone tags show Kontera which areas of your webpage you should display Kontera ads, Filter tags do the opposite; instructing which areas of your webpage to exclude Kontera ads from.

Both are extremely easy to implement:

• For the Zone tags you just place the open tag (<div class=”KonaBody”> ) and closing tag ( </div>) before and after the content where you’d like Kontera ads to appear. Here’s an example how that would look:
  

  <div class="KonaBody"> Text to be analyzed </div>

• It’s the same concept as with Filter tags, except you’re placing the open <div class=”Konafilter”> and closing tags </div> around the text you’d like to omit from showing ads:
  

  <div class="konafilter"> Content to be excluded
   from analyzing  </div>

While you can use multiple Zone tags or multiple Filter tags on a single webpage, you can’t use Zone and Filter tags on the same page. Also, remember to exercise caution in implementing Filter tags, as to avoid unintentionally excluding large areas of your site from receiving ads, thus hurting your coverage and performance.

Zone and Filter tags are a great way to manage the placement of Kontera ads on your website, just keep in mind that implementing them will decrease the coverage on your site, possibly affecting your CTR. Unless you have a strong editorial reason to implement them, we recommend that you do not exclude Kontera from sections of your webpages, and rely on our proven track record in determining the best and most effective way to display Kontera In-Text ads.