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Saturday, January 25, 2014

How To Be The #1 Trending Hashtag On Twitter: Lessons From Nat Geo’s #KillingKennedy Campaign

The National Geographic Channel regularly uses both organic and paid campaigns to engage audiences on Twitter. For its film, Killing Kennedy, timed to premier the week before the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Nat Geo wanted to make a big impact on Twitter to build excitement and drive viewership.

Armed with Twitter-savvy celebrities and a wealth of visual assets, the team employed Twitter TV ad targeting for the first time to reach beyond its follower base of just over 520 thousand followers.
Nat Geo and its agency Mediahub/Mullen encouraged the cast — including stars Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin, both of whom were already active on Twitter — to tweet about the film during production. Nat Geo also used engaging graphics pulled from their website kennedyandoswald.com to tease the film.

The campaign was highly successful. During the November 10 premier, the hashtag #KillingKennedy was the number one trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. Nat Geo’s website experienced record traffic, and the film set a new ratings record for the network with 3.4 million viewers. These were no small feats for a small network up against big name shows during its timeslot, as noted in a tweet from Rob Lowe.

According to Twitter’s campaign wrap-up, Nat Geo saw average engagement rates of 10 percent on Promoted Tweets, which was 110 percent higher than the network’s historical average. TV ad targeting also proved to be highly efficient; costs fell 82 percent.

I spoke with Katy Anadale, Director, Digital Marketing for the National Geographic Channel by phone about the planning and execution of their first campaign using Twitter TV ad targeting.

Asked if the team set any specific goals for the campaign, Anandale says they didn’t peg goals for metrics such as number of tweets, retweets and comments, so much as they wanted to surpass what they’d done before. Historical performance was the benchmark.

Planning Ahead
Anadale says the team began planning early for #KillingKennedy. “This was a big priority for us so we started planning for this far in advanced. Putting things on paper was at least six months in advanced. For social we started talking earlier than we normally would in part because we had assets and information already available to us.”

With a typical series premier, Nat Geo starts promotion about three weeks out on air and turns to social within the two-week time frame before the first episode airs. Anandale says for Killing Kennedy, “We tried to be out in front, so we weren’t competing with all the other news about the 50th anniversary.”  Nat Geo began to tease the premier on social media in June, shortly after Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin signed on to play JFK and Jaquelyn Kennedy, respectively.

The cast members also tweeted during filming to get fans excited. Nat Geo white listed Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin’s Twitter accounts to be able to promote their tweets about the film. Some of those celebrity tweets reached engagement rates of 20 percent.
KillingKennedy Rob Lowe Promoted Tweet

The Power Of Visual Assets

Nat Geo and Mediahub/Mullen began to incorporate visual assets much more heavily with TV ad targeting  n the week leading up to the premier.  Anadale said, “Some of the assets were created specifically for us to use for social, but none were created specifically for the Twitter TV ads campaign.  The only thing we did differently was write specific tweets to try to resonate with viewers of certain shows. But what we learned, is that photos and infographics still did the best.”
KillingKennedy Promoted Tweet Twitter TV Ads
For example, during a mob-related TV show, the Nat Geo team used Promoted Tweets about Kenendy’s rumored ties to mob. They found those types of tweets didn’t perform nearly as well as the photos and infographics.

Anadale says, “If you stay true to what works well in Twitter and social, it’s going to work. The Twitter TV ads reinforce what they see on television. If you have that visual reinforcement, the connection is just more immediate. We saw more tweets, retweets when we used visuals. TV viewers saw the emotion we have in our promos and were able to share that on Twitter.”

Media Buying And Social Teams Need To Work Together
Mediahub/Mullen handled the media buying and monitored performance at an aggregate level to provide insights, while the Nat Geo team monitored their feed throughout the day and executed the tweets.

The client and agency both echoed the need to have close collaboration between the social and buying teams to make the most of TV ad targeting on Twitter.

Sarah Stroller, Digital Media Advisor for Mediahub/Mullen, said via email, “From Mediahub’s point of view it was incredibly helpful to work so closely with the client to optimize our campaign and leverage the celebrity tweets. We were on call most of the weekend leading up to the premiere to promote celebrity tweets the minute they were posted to capture the full social potential of the cast. Our efforts paid off as these celebrity tweets resulted in extremely high engagement, adding to the success of the Twitter campaign as a whole.”
“We have a very good relationship with the buying team. You need to stay close and share your plans with them so they understand the whole process and larger picture. It does take some last minute planning,” said Anadale.

Nat Geo has more Twitter TV ad campaigns planned. Anadale says in the future they’ll try to tailor assets to specific shows or network audiences.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

The Performance Marketer’s Field Guide to #AdWords #Ad #Extensions: Part II

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The Performance Marketer’s Field Guide to AdWords Ad Extensions: Part I

Ad extensions are a way to give potential customers useful and relevant info beyond a regular text ad.  You can win a customer’s consideration, convince her of your value, or drive her right to a conversion.  Ask yourself which extensions would fit with your keywords and fulfill a potential user’s needs.

People engage with ads that have extensions.  Seller ratings give users confidence in your website.  Call extensions connect customers right to your employees.  Advertisers spend lots of time optimizing their ad text (which is great), but you should know that implementing extensions is typically a more impactful way to improve CTR.   An ad extension adds value to potential customers just by being present.  Additionally, with the recent changes to ad rank, extensions have become an increasingly important part of getting your ads noticed.

Every type of extension that we offer is intended to benefit our users, which translates to a higher CTR for you.  Many, such as sitelinks, show improvements of 10-20%.

There are tangible and measurable gains to giving users more information, and extensions are auto-optimized to show the best possible combination on each and every auction.  Sometimes the “best possible combination” translates to areas aside from CTR - users may get value from seeing a phone number on a desktop ad (i.e. a direct connection to your business via a phone number) even if that doesn’t translate to a routine click.

We’ve also found that more information is a good thing, which means that ads with multiple extensions perform better than ads with only one extension.  Identify which extensions work for your business and implement them.  The best combination of these extensions is automatically determined on an auction-by-auction basis.

Enabling extensions is a good thing, but remember that your extensions are most likely not going to show 100% of the time.  Only certain positions are eligible to show certain extensions.

There are lots of extensions in existence (and even more in beta).  While this set of options will continue to evolve, here is what is presently available and where they can appear on the page:


Note: Search Partner site owners choose what, if any, formats they allow, so not everything will show by default.

As you can see, placement on the results page determines which of your extensions can be shown.  If you know you have great extensions in place for users, watch your average position and placement to ensure that your extensions are showing as often as possible.

Things to Remember

  Google try to show as many relevant formats as possible in the available space.  Since there are so many moving pieces, there’s no way to prioritize which extensions you want to show.  Enable whatever makes sense for your customers and let the AdWords system decide within those options.  The specific extensions that are displayed are a function of your previous performance, user context and available space on the page.

Clicks on extensions are typically charged the same price you would be charged for a click on your ad.  There are a few exceptions, though.  The below types of interactions are all free:

  • Phone calls from your forwarding number on call extensions that show on desktops/tablets 
  • Links to reviews from seller ratings extensions
  • Clicks to the review site on your review extensions
  • Clicks on +1 button or a link to your Google+ page

In many cases there isn’t a lot to optimize for extensions.  Implementation is the only step to take for a practitioner, but that doesn’t mean you can enable them and never think of them again.  Be aware of what’s going on in your account so that you know you’re saying the things your customers want to hear.

Reporting on Extensions

Report on how your extensions are doing by taking a quick snapshot of before and after implementation.  Take note of when you turned on certain extensions and compare dates in the interface to ensure you’re heading the right direction.  This isn’t going to be a perfect solution, as there are lots of other variables present over that same timeframe, but it should give you directional evidence regarding your account’s performance.

Segment your reports by click type to see detailed performance for many of your extensions.  Anything that’s active in that time period will appear as its own type of click.  There isn’t any reporting on the extensions that appear automatically (seller ratings, social annotations, previous visit annotations).

Extensions are a proven way to provide value to users and increase your ad’s CTR.  Implementing every type of extension that makes sense for you should benefit both your users and your account.

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