The Low Quality Ad Traffic

This week's feature on Bloomberg Businessweek is an investigative article that asks the question - "How Much of Your Audience Is Fake?"

We've learned in our recent classes that advertisers should bid high on keywords to get ahead of competition, but it turns out the quality of audience is also a huge component in the clearing price of ad placement auctions.  It turns out, in this wild west of advertisement, what you pay is what you get.  Whereas quality "human"-initiated Google keyword search may cost several dollars per ad click to the advertisers, brokered traffic can be bought for often less than $0.01 per click.  However, the article uncovers that some of the shady source websites that sells supposed "visitor" traffic through brokers  are in fact massively inflating its unique visitor counts via automated programs that run behind servers and infected desktops.  These sites often have just enough stale and outdated contents to appear like a badly managed website, but as much as 95%+ of its visitorship could be non-human.

Google and Facebook are listed as some of the safer bets for advertisers where there are much higher likelihood of a real person behind the screen.

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

Will "Buyable Pins" Boost Pinterest's Pie in Search Advertising?

Pinterest, often considered a "Social Networking" site than a serious Search Engine, is wiggling its way into the advertising sphere by promoting a little blue pin called "Buyable Pin" which allows advertisers to convert consumer interest directly into sales.

Over the past few months, the image-bookmarking service has been making the rounds with advertisers trying to persuade them it’s not a social network but rather a place where consumers search for and discover products.

Pinterest is not a place where people come to connect with family and friends, it’s a “catalog of ideas,” says Tim Kendall, the company’s head of monetization. People “go through the catalog and do searches,” he added.

Source:  http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/09/14/pinterest-targets-search-ad-budgets/

WeChat: A Complete Social Media Ecosystem

Over the course of my summer internship in Loyalty Program Marketing, we heard the same complaint over and over again from our counterparty in the APAC region - our team's marketing strategy was NOT working in mainland China, where our largest customer base is outside of the United States.  

Our regular promotion consisted mainly of Email deployments and Banner Ads in our internal websites, but they were not effective at reaching our Chinese audiences - "nobody in China reads Email these days, and our internal websites take 45 seconds to load," we were told.

So what does work?  One word - WeChat.

What is WeChat exactly?  Out of all of the English-language articles I've read that attempt to capture the essence of this Chinese"Social Media" app, the below article by Connie Chan is by far the most effective in conveying what is so different about WeChat compared to WhatsApp / Facebook / Messenger / Twitter / Instagram / etc.

When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China

In short, WeChat has the seamlessly integrated mobile payment functionality that allows transactions to take place within the "App-within-App" environment, without ever leaving the WeChat Ecosystem.  Whereas Western Social Media tools stops at broadcasting promotional messages, WeChat actually provides the tools to convert that "like / share / retweet" into monetary transactions.

While most companies are still figuring out what to do with Facebook / Instagram / Twitter, these brands have successfully gained traction within the mainland Chinese audience with WeChat campaigns that are creative and interactive.

Top 10 Advertising Campaigns on WeChat