Chandler Nguyen

What makes an Online agency unique

2009-06-27T09:53:00.008+08:00

For those who notice, I haven't been writing much lately. I have spent considered amount of time exploring the reasons why an investor should invest or a business owner would set up an Online agency.

The Online world is changing too fast, way too fast from both technology front and the way new technology is being adopted/used by millions of people worldwide.

What i am after are answers to the following questions:

Why would institution investors/big network invest or set up offices to provide Online Marketing services to advertisers?
What is/are the potential returns from an Online Marketing agency compared to old money like commodity products, oil & gas etc...
What makes an Online Agency unique? and how can it keep its clients from changing to another agency?
Which form of Online market service is most profitable? is it Search Engine Marketing (paid Search or Search engine optimization) or Display Media (whether it is arbitrage or being an actual media owner) or technology provider (Omniture/DoubleClick) or search engine/service provider themselves (Google/Yahoo/Twitter/Facebook etc...)
How to actually make a profit out of the service provided? Well being able to provide good service to client is not enough, agencies/companies obviously need to have a working model to be able to churn out profit from those sales

If there is a unanimous conclusion with regards to which company/service will do best in the long run, should we all put money or work for that company or trying to provide that service?
Clearly the answer is No to the question above. We haven't YET reached the unanimous verdict on which company/service will be the most profitable in the long run. And if we haven't been able to make that decision in the past 10-20 years since the popularity of the internet, what then gives us the confidence that we will be able to make the decision now or in the next 5 years?

Is it because of the inherent nature of the fast changing Online world? Are we trying to predict the unpredictable?

Microsoft recently introduced Bing and it has been receiving quite a lot of attention, more good critics than bad. But can Bing challenges Google from a consumer standpoint and agency standpoint?
How about Social Media Optimization (SMO), Mobile Marketing, Online Consultancy Services?

If i apply Phil Fisher, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, John Burr Williams, Robert G. Hagstrom teachings then i should only follow:

Online services/technologies that i understand.
Look for company with consistent operating history, managed by capable managers with strong integrity
Evaluate to see if the company has "durable" long term edge. What is an Online agency "moat"?

Or are we approaching the problem at hand from the wrong angle? Stop trying to predict where the industry as a whole is going but rather focus on individual company/niche vertical?
Will looking at top 10 agencies/companies in any 10 years duration help? Top 10 in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s?

Ok sorry for jumping around, i tend to do that a lot...

Back to "What makes an Online agency unique"

First let's start with why i want to answer this question?
It's because it matters in the long run regarding:

How you decide which Online niche you want to work in?
Which company to work for?
If you want to start your own firm, what services to go into?
If you want to invest your money, which network should you explore? or you'd better off invest in other industries (old money) or invest in service provider/Media owner (Google/Yahoo)
and well it's fun for me to try to answer these questions :)

I recently contributed an article "How to Choose an SEM agency" to iMediaConnection, in which i put a great emphasis on Human Resource (Staff turnover rate to be specific)
Then i wrote another piece on this blog titled "Challenges of Running a SEM firm in South East and North Asia", in which i briefly touched on the gross profit difference generated from Paid Search and SEO activities.

I think there can be a lot of factors that make an agency unique (being a survival in the long run):

The breadth of clientele? No doubt it's one very important factor.

Being able to keep existing clients (this will largely be the job of account managers and operation/production team) and bringing new clients (the strength of sales team). However, the current trend with household brands is consolidation, budget cut and low profit margin for agencies.

Should an agency then focus on the long tail and services hundreds of smaller SMEs? The hopefully increasing size of clients is part of the "moat"

Expanding to services with higher profit margin to avoid commoditization?

It, however, takes time to build a team to be able to offer a particular Online market service properly. In the mean time agency needs to demonstrate to clients that this new service can actually be a more cost effective solution to reach the client's objective/target audience.

Also which service? There are so many of them....

Expanding to hot, buzz technologies/services? Social media optimization, online reputation management, mobile marketing/targeting

Having the most talented, respected team? It's not easy to find and keep a group of talented team members working together in harmony though.

Company culture definitely comes to play here and older/more established agencies may have an edge if they have good culture to begin with.

Focusing on operating profitability by streamlining processes, cutting cost?

Long term i guess the bulk of an agency cost will be employee salary/executive remuneration
Working process/model is not easy to build either because it's different from region to region. It again takes leadership/time to at least customize a successful working model to a particular region. APJ for me presents great challenges because of the inherent diversity

Competition/copycat: there is little doubt that whatever makes an agency unique short term will be copied/tried to copy from other agencies. It's no difference from any other industries where products are being copied, talented executive being "stolen"...

So the trick is really to find an edge, a fundamental comparative advantage that can last long term, being the leader in something worthwhile.

I personally haven't found answers to many of the questions above yet. This is, by no small portion, the result of my lack of clarity in questions that i raise.
I, however, firmly believe that our industry is a people business.

Alrighty, enough "nonsense" from me... if you have anything to share, as always you are welcome to email me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

Have a nice weekend everyone
Chandler
P.S: There are approximately one billion people who need food on our planet so it's truly a privilege for me to wake up early on a Saturday morning, enjoying a cup of Vietnamese coffee and mumble about these stuff :)

Challenges of Running a SEM firm in South East and North Asia

2009-05-30T11:56:00.010+08:00

Ok this question is tough to answer... and I know that instead of thinking about challenges, one should think about opportunities or solutions for those challenges...
Well I am (and always be) a student of life so I don't think I am qualified enough to talk about solutions yet.

Besides I am sure there are many challenges and I won't be able to cover them all so feel free to join in through emailing me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

Southeast Asia and North Asia is a diverse region

It is known that we are diverse in terms of local languages, in different stages of economic/online infrastructure development. We have countries like Myanmar who are still under military regime, Thailand with political unrest since 2003-2004.

One practical example is each country has its own currency. Since the economic crisis started, the exchange rates between different currencies have been fluctuating a lot. If you are running regional campaigns in KRW, HKD, JPY, NTD with Yahoo (Yahoo only accepts local currency) in KR, HK, JP and Taiwan, but the contract you have with your client is in USD and you pay all corporate expense in SGD then you are exposed to exchange rate and it can be severe.

The agency can't run away from not using Yahoo either since Yahoo (and its partners) is the more popular search engine network in those countries
well I guess every regional company face this problem. However, the point here is that if you just operate in North America, Europe or AU, you won't have to.

As for different local languages, this region present a unique challenge compared to other regions as well: an agency must have native speaking employees in order to do the job well. Ad copies, keywords, meta title, link building etc... All need to be done in local languages.

Different working cultures, business cultures make managing expectation much more difficult i.e. people in HK for example are working extremely long hours compared to some other countries (I won't name which one to avoid any offenses) so turn around time for them is much shorter.

In addition, different search engine teams in the region have different work process/procedure or SLAs (Service Level Agreement) as well: (hey even with the same search engine, different teams like SG vs. HK vs. JP are different) request for proposals, payment term, credit limit, internal policy regarding account transfer etc... are all different.

Even for Google, who has the most convenient platform for managing PPC campaign, have some country specific issues. For example, if an existing account was opened directly with Google KR, using KRW to pay for the media spend then a new agency outside of KR has no way to take over that account. What I mean by that is the agency will have to create a mirror account and start from scratch since:

• They don't have physical address in KR and Google KR does not allow a company outside of KR to pay in KRW.
• In order to pay in KRW to Google, a company must have a physical billing address in KR.

Starting a new account from scratch means all historical data, quality score etc.. are all gone. Not only that the average CPC of the new account will be likely to be higher than the existing one for a while until it accumulates enough clicks and have high quality score again and so forth.

Well, I am not trying to complain how nice/easy life the agencies in US, Europe or AU have compared to this region (hell I know they face stiff competition, laser thin profit margin etc.. as well). Yet they don't have so much issue with regards to diversification like us I supposed.

Total Revenue and Operating margin

SEM includes both Pay per Click (or Paid Search) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
However, the cost model for PPC and SEO are totally different.

Pay per Click margin

Most agencies charge clients account management fee as a percentage of media spend. (I know there are other cost models like CPA-Cost per Acquisition, CPL-Cost per Lead, etc... however they are not popular yet).
This percentage, in most cases, ranges from 4-5% to 20%. This is NET Gross Profit by the way since most search engines no longer offer rebate unless you are a reseller.

For example, let say the search spend is $100, then the gross GP to an agency ranges from $4-$5 to $20.

One could ask a couple of questions at this point:

• Why the wide percentage range?
There are many reasons for this.

For example, in certain territories, the understanding about Paid Search is quite limited. Traditional creative/media agencies use search only when there is some money left over on the table so they just charge the client a very small percentage of account management since the budget is so small for them and they don't make money there anyway.

This has been going on for a while and created the wrong perception from the client side. (Hell, I would think that some guy is trying to rip me off as well if normally I only pay 4% fee and now they want me to pay 10% or more!)

However, we know how complicated Search Engine Marketing can be and it's really hard work! 4-5% is simply not enough for any decent SEM agencies to cover off all of their operating expenses.
For most cases, if agency only charges 4-5% management fee, that means the client receive a "4-5% level of service". I know it's ugly to say it but it's true and I come across campaigns like this.
I am not going to give a straight forward numerical example because I believe it's very easy to see what 4-5% out of say US $15k equals to.
When the monthly budget is around US $1 mil or something then it's a different story. However, even at that level, 4-5% is just too little but well many clients are used to this level of management fee in certain territories.

On the other side of the scale are those with 20% management fee. It would be wrong to generalize and say that it's too high or too low. Search Engine Marketing is a professional service so hiring a SEM agency is just like hiring a lawyer. Depending on individual needs, the values the lawyer can bring to the table, the fee will be different.
This is not the main point I want to bring across those. It's the second question below.

• Is the Gross GP low or high?

Frankly speaking, I think for an agency that provides only Paid Search service, their operating margin will be very small as a percentage. It seems smaller providing this is new Media, the internet where other firms in other industries are having much higher operating margins.

Coupling with the low budget allocated to search as a percentage in the whole marketing mix, Paid Search agencies will have a tough time.

Search Engine Optimization margin

It's proven that Paid Search and SEO needs to work together to provide best results. You would want to "diet and exercise at the same time to keep your body healthy" (I learnt this example from my boss).
Yet, the adoption rate for SEO is still very low in this region. It's partly because of the fact that Paid Search can provide immediate results while SEO is changing all the time and most clients don't know how to define KPIs for SEO projects.

Having said that SEO will provide better profit margin for agencies and allow them to function as normal businesses. Until that happens most pure SEM agencies in the region will struggle to make ends meet or produce less than satisfactory results from an investor point of view.
Why do I have to invest in a company that produce only less than 4-5% operating margin (let alone earning percentage) when I can invest in other companies that yield much better return?

It's challenging to look at a business plan, understand where all the cost, profit are and realize a complete different picture for a pure SEM agencies.

For this post, i focus solely on the commercial challenges for a SEM firm in the region, not mentioning about human resource issue, the long client education journey etc...

My hope is that we (the industry as a whole) won't follow the footstep of airline industry in which the volume of traffic is increasing leaps and bounds but not many airlines are making money.
Of course at the end of the days, agencies can ONLY make money long term if they in turn provide good services to their clients and help their clients make money...

Ok that's all from me for now. I am going to a friend house to enjoy some authentic Vietnamese food now! Yay

Cheers and have a nice weekend everyone!
Chandler
P.S: I pressed the "Publish post" by accident while i was still half way through this post so some of you may receive the wrong version of this article. I am very sorry for that. Accident happens sometimes!

Singapore Statistics

2009-05-24T13:29:00.005+08:00

Well i have been obsessed with different type of numbers lately and so today i want to share a few key Singapore statistics as a country. This is to continue the conversation with my flatmate over lunch.

All of the statistics can be found on Statistics Singapore: Key Annual Indicators.
Even though i know that numbers in silo won't do anyone any good. However, I won't try to read between the lines too much but rather give suggestions only.

ok here goes....

1. Population:

Total population (as of 2008): 4.839 millions
Singapore residents: 3.642 millions (include of 3.164 mil Singaporeans and 0.478 mil Singapore permanent resident)
Foreign workers and ex pats: 1.197 mil

Foreign workers, expats and PRs over Singaporeans: (1.197+0.478) / 3.164 = 52.9%

Yup, for every 2 Singaporeans, there is 1 foreigner staying here in Singapore!

There are many ways to go from here like: racial/social harmony, debate over the need for foreign talents in Singapore, Singapore internal market place or how it is compared to Hong Kong for example?

Hong Kong total population (as of 2008): 7.008 mil
By 2006, 95% of the population are Chinese, followed by Filipino 1.6%

Obviously Hong Kong population is much higher than Singapore and the percentage of non Chinese is much lower.

2. Economic Indicators:

GDP as of 2008: SGD $257.418 billion
GAP per capita: SGD $53,192
GDP per Capita excluding people below 15 and above 65: SGD $67,700

I know any kinda of comparison between countries will be imperfect taking into consideration cost of living, purchasing power and so forth.
But well if you are in Singapore and knowing this number at least you know where you stand on average.

(Additional resource from Wiki: List of countries by GDP (Purchasing Power Parity) )

GDP in Q1/09 compared to Q1/08: -9.6%
Employment Mar09: 2.951 mil
Monthly Wages/Earnings Q4/08: 4,229
There are plenty of meaningful graphs which you can find under Statistical Charts section as well like Real Economic Growth, Visitor Arrivals, International Telephone call Minutes etc...

We have so many valuable numbers from this site. However, the tricky thing is to understand them in their respective context and it's obviously beyond the scope of this post/my capacity T_T to go that far so i will leave it here.
For information about Singapore Online Stats, please go to Hitwise Singapore data center. This month industry spotlight is about Retail Industry

Cheers,
Chandler

Acknowledgement

2009-05-17T10:01:00.006+08:00

Hi all,

First of all, thank you for reading this post and this blog!
This is my 99th post and i am truly excited, grateful!

I am grateful because it has been a wonderful journey for me ever since i started this blog. I have the chance to get to know so many new friends during the past 3 years.

A bit background info about myself
I am lucky enough to find what i love to do early in life and that's one of the most wonderful gifts one can get. Being able to throw oneself wholeheartedly at something is not easy to find and when you found it, oh well! it can only get better and better as time goes by.

It reminds me of the "Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005"

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

It may come as a surprise but i actually have a degree not in marketing or IT but an engineering degree in IC (Integrated Circuit) Design. It's one of those very niche fields that only a few percentage of engineers would go into. If i followed my major, i would probably work in a lab right now, wearing those white color lab clothes that you often see on TV.
Luckily i realized early that i am not smart enough, patient enough or simply don't love IC design so i decided to switch completely. One thing led to another and well 5 years later here i am :)

I am not sure if any of my bosses will read this post but i would like to thank them anyway because not only I have learnt so much from them but also they allow me to have the time to read and write :) For that i am truly thankful!
(Realistically not many companies/agencies are like us in Singapore where employees still have a normal work life and a social life)

I am also thankful to my colleagues, ex colleagues, friends and business partners who

inspired me with interesting topics:

If I were Yahoo Chief for Search Engine Marketing
How to Take over A PPC account from another agency
and so on...

contributed guest posts

Online Marketing: The lack of thought and Initiative

helped me to collect/translate materials to write

Information about Vietnam markets
Baidu Paid Search series

For those who know me personally, I have a very short term memory but well all of your efforts are remembered and much appreciated!
This blog has always been strictly for professional purpose. However, moving forwards i will
start expanding out to cover some parts of my personal life and i hope you don't mind that :)

In the next couple of months, i will shift my focus more on the holistic approach to Digital marketing because i feel that it starts to become a must, not a "nice to have" to integrate different Online mediums into a good Digital Plan.
Of course, you still need to take care of the basics first before trying to jump into more sophisticated fields like Social Media, Mobile Marketing etc...
Web Analytics, of course, will continue to play a central role in all of this. However, advertisers also need to realize that Web Analytics can't do everything and the industry is still in its early development stage.

In addition, i will write more about Vietnam as well because i am a Vietnamese :P and i would love to see the industry's booming in Vietnam. There are challenges but many of us start to see the light at the end of the tunnels!

That's all for now from me! I hope you enjoy what you have read so far from this blog and i always welcome any comments/feedback you may have.
Just ping me via chandlerblog@gmail.com

Cheers... and once again thank you all my bosses, colleagues, ex colleagues, friends and business partners!

Chandler

Can RedNano survive as a Local Search Engine?

2009-05-10T10:10:00.009+08:00

For those who don't know who RedNano is, it is the child of Singapore Press Holdings Group (SPH), the state own media powerhouse and a Norway company.
So far, RedNano has been advertising heavily, trying to muscle its way into Local Search Engine business, just like the way Mocca (an online classified portal owned by MediaCorp) did with so many hours of TV ads, MRT ads, print ads etc...

However, up until now, i have failed to see how RedNano can be successful as the "First Local Search and Directory Engine". Below are the reasons why:
(Please note that i have no personal grudge against RedNano in anyway and i dun know anyone from RedNano team. The below is just my personal opinion)

1. Who needs another Generic Local Search Engine in Singapore?

With the overly dominant size of Google and the trailing Yahoo in second place, if you are a consumer in Singapore, why you need to use another search engine?

The latest stats from Hitwise clearly shows us that

From the table above, for the 24 weeks ending 02nd of May 2009, Google commands 73.2% of the market share, Yahoo has 21.36%, MSN Live Search is no 3 with only 2.15%
The three search engines in total occupy 96.71% of the market share!

18 months ago in Sep 2007, according to Hitwise, Google only had 58.5% and Yahoo had 35% of the market share. At this rate, sooner rather than later, Google will reach 80% or even 95% of the market.

+) RedNano has very little market share in Singapore, even though it's branded as a local search engine with a huge amount of marketing spend and the support from SPH
+) People are creature of habit (myself included :) and they just won't start switching from Google or Yahoo to use RedNano simply because of the massive PR/marketing activities
+) Google clearly dominates the market place.
Besides, Google can always start providing Local Search service in Singapore when it sees fit since the technology is already there for them.
+) Many "blind" tests have been conducted to show that people think Google's search results are more relevant than Yahoo or other search engines partly because of the perceived perception of the brand and this is a great barrier to any new comers to the search engine business.

2. RedNano Actual Search Results

On Rednano home page, one of the most popular search terms at the moment is "travel agencies"

When i click on it, it redirects me to the directory list first and below are the top results

Personally i don't see any of the big local agencies like Chan Brothers, Asa etc... and i will immediately question why this page is the first page that i see after clicking on top search terms.

I tried again the terms "travel agencies" but this time viewed the Web Result.

Come on, how "travelpear" can appear twice above the fold and none of the famous local agencies come up on the first page?!

Similar results are seen with keywords like "singapore travel agencies"

If RedNano fails to show me the "greater relevancy" from its search results then why i need to switch from Google

3. Singapore is just too small as a market

Well this is no brainier really. Singapore has only 3.6 million citizens and Permanent residents (according to Statistics Singapore by year end 2008). (Yup only 3.6 millions!)
Total population (including foreign workers, expats etc...) is only 4.8 millions!

Out of 3.6 million residents, only 2.6 million are between the ages 15-64. I assume this part of the population use internet more heavily and have more purchasing power.
From IDA Singapore, the internet penetration rate is around 80% so let's say the total number of frequent internet users in Singapore is 2.8 millions users (2.1 million users from the Residents pool and 0.7 million users from Foreigner pool). This number is already higher than the number provided by InternetWorldStats.

Just to be fair, Singapore internet users conduct 164 million searches per month (according to monthly data for Apr, Jul and Sept by comScore 2008)
Search per Searcher for Singapore is, on average, 100 per month so this is not bad for a small population like Singapore.

Based on all the numbers above, we can roughly calculate that all other search engines (not only RedNano) in Singapore only command about 3.29% of the market share or 5.4 million searches per month.

(At this point, i wanted to dig deeper, trying to figure out with that 5.4 millions searches/month, how much the potential earning is for search engine like RedNano assuming an average click through rate on Paid ads, together with average CPC.
However, there are no publicly reliable data on the average click rate on paid ads on RedNano yet and we can't use the ones from Google and Yahoo simply because the interface is quite different. Average CPC does not exist yet for RedNano i believe)

4. Scalability issue

This is a very big issue, scalability. After years of working in Singapore market, i am painfully aware of how low the search volume in Singapore is compared to other regional markets, let alone more mature markets.
With such low search volume, no agencies are willing to promote RedNano aggressively just in Singapore because the return is just too low. If RedNano can't rely on agency to sell search inventories for them, they have no choice but to partner with Google or Yahoo

I recently came across the news that RedNano partnered with Yahoo to be part of Yahoo Search Network. Joining other people network instead of promoting your own means only 1 thing, your revenue needs to be shared with others and hell, the search market share for RedNano is already small.

If RedNano wants to reach out to SouthEast Asia markets, then i imagine it virtually has to start from scratch again. It's because RedNano is in local search engine business (be it web search, mobile, image etc...) So i guess massive work need to be involved to localize the current technology to suit other SEA markets due to the difference in languages, infrastructure etc..

Southeast Asia is more challenging in that way, it's too diverse. Besides, each country is at different stage of development from political stability, to e commerce infrastructure, to laws etc...

5. RedNano Search Engine Marketing platform

From "Advertise with us" section, RedNano offers Search Engine Marketing plan with fixed price per month and unlimited clicks.

This is absurd! This model is even worse than the way Yahoo SEA used to sell Keyword Search using CPM model
The old Yahoo CPM model worked like this: advertisers buy keywords just like the way they buy banner. Different keywords will have different fixed price based on their search volume on Yahoo.

From that time, Singapore market has been getting more and more savvy so i am very doubtful if RedNano model will work again even for SME market. I am pretty sure MNCs won't accept this model because

It's hard to evaluate the results
Even with dirt cheap pricing, resources still need to be allocated if a company decides to test this out. However, the volume i can imagine is painfully low.

It may work for some advertisers because of the low effective CPC for some keywords. However, this won't work for larger crowd.

In addition, the only reason any search engine would want to "play" with this model is because they don't have enough search volume to command better price.

How sophisticated RedNano SEM platform is from an advertiser point of view is another question also.

Can it do ad rotation?
Landing page rotation?
What type of keyword matching option is available?
Does it have an offline tool to manage campaigns?
Reporting interface? simple data like impressions, click, cost per click etc...?
How ad ranking is determined?

6. RedNano directory service

Yup, it looks like RedNano wants to go into Online Directory services as well.

My question is Why? again

People nowadays use Search Engine almost exclusively to find whatever they don't know. Agree that we can't always find what we want from generic search engines like Google and Yahoo hence the need for vertical search engines like Hungrygowhere.com for places to eat, Mocca for classified ads, Streetdirectory.com for mapping services etc...

The question here is how RedNano fits into this picture.
How much traffic RedNano imagine it can get to be able to earn enough money to survive? Is it trying to do so many things at once instead of just focusing on 1 key vertical?

Right now RedNano offers: web search, directory, image search, people, map etc... Basically everything!

From advertiser point of view, what is the value proposition of RedNano Directory listing? Why would the mass need a generic Directory service anyway? How often one uses Directory?
How about eGuide? YellowPages?

7. Search Engine ties with PC makers

Google and Yahoo dominate the distribution game by having ties with computer makers like Dell, HP, Lenovo embedding their search engines as the default engine on Internet Explorer or Firefox.

One can't underestimate the power of this distribution channel simply because people are lazy and when they see a search box, they just simply type in what they want.
Only affluent users, who either like Google/Yahoo too, will bother to change the default search engine settings on their browser.

Danny Sullivan wrote a beautiful post to discuss in dept about the power of the distribution channel so i won't repeat it here again.

In short, it might be my ignorance that i couldn't see a way out for RedNano. How long did they estimate that they can break even and through which model?
Feel free to email me to discuss your thoughts/comments.

How to Handle Invalid Click Objection

2009-04-27T21:40:00.009+08:00

One of the most common objections from Vietnamese clients is Invalid click.
It's so serious that many advertisers use it as an excuse for not using Pay per Click.

Before going straight to how to handle this objection i just want to give a brief understanding of this "Invalid Click" objection in Singapore context.
About 3-4 years ago, this objection was very common, especially amongst Small and Medium Enterprises. Since their monthly/daily budget was so small back then, they really concerned with invalid clicks would eat up a big chunk of their budget.
For example, if an advertiser's monthly budget is $300, or $10/day, then with a Cost per Click of $0.5, he/she can only have 20 clicks per day. He/She is afraid that the competitors may click on the ads 5-6 times throughout the day, which account for 30% loss due to invalid clicks.

Having said that, my main point here is Invalid click is definitely a VALID concern. Yet, it shouldn't be the main/only reason why advertisers decide not to use Pay per Click.

1. How Invalid Click concern makes sense in Vietnamese context:

Vietnam is a new market
There is no e-commerce yet and the majority of the advertisers' websites do not offer any actions that can be fulfilled online. The main purpose of having a website is merely to publish information.

What i am trying to get to here is the commercial intent behind a click or the lack of it.

Because of the lack of commercial intent, Advertisers have no way of measuring whether the traffic to the site from PPC actually do them any good. Most Online marketing campaigns stop at either branding or increasing awareness.

Once the commercial intent behind each click is measured, advertisers can easily calculate Return on Investment of their marketing campaigns (be it display media, edm, ppc etc...) and being able to justify whether or not invalid click is still a big concern

Historically, some local media owners/agencies boosted up the number of clicks so some advertisers lost their trust on reports provided by media owners/agencies.
From what i heard (hearsay only) there seems to be some soft wares that are capable of "clicking" on clients' banners, which again raise the issue of invalid/fraudulent clicks

2. What are invalid clicks

Most of the materials from now on are taken from Google Adwords Learning Center Invalid Click section or a Third party report "Alexander Tuzhilin's report on Google Invalid Click"
I would suggest you go through these materials to have a complete picture. Due to limited space, i only highlight some key points below.

"Invalid clicks are clicks generated by prohibited methods. Examples of invalid clicks may include repeated manual clicking or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Invalid clicks are sometimes intended to artificially and/or maliciously drive up an advertiser's clicks and or a publisher's earnings"

If advertiser uses Google Analytics on their site then obviously Google will know all the post click data like bounce rate, time on site, page view/visit etc... hence i would imagine it makes Google job easier to filter out invalid clicks.

3. How to handle invalid click objection:

There are a couple of ways to handle this objection, a non technical and technical way.

Non technical way:

Google PPC program has been widely used in many countries, both in western mature markets like US, UK, AU or emerging markets like MY, TH etc...
Google PPC is very popular in Singapore and other Southeast Asia countries like MY, TH. Indonesia, Vietnam and PH are countries where the adoption rate is lower. However, PPC has become a common topic every time there is a seminar about Online marketing in Vietnam.
Google Adwords is used not only by MNCs like Citibank, HSBC, British Airways etc... but also by Small and Medium Enterprises, by Government agencies and private corporations, from finance to travel, consumer electronics to even "weird verticals" like private investigation firms ...

This is clearly show how effective PPC is in delivering on advertisers' objectives.

The bulk of Google revenue is coming from Advertising (be it Adwords platform or Adsense) so Google treats "Invalid click" very seriously.

Technical, detailed explanation:

Google uses the following process to combat invalid clicks

"Detection and filtering techniques: Each click on an AdWords ad is examined by our system. Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks.

Many advertisers in Vietnam want to see the IP addresses of delivered clicks so let me explain more about this.
First of all, looking at IP address alone is not an ideal way to investigate invalid clicks.
It's very common that many computers may share the same external IP address. It really depends on the service providers and how the network is being set up.

For example, if a company has 1000 computers, more often than not they don't occupy 1000 different external IP addresses. Instead, many of these computers share the same external IP address. Small company most probably occupy only 1 or 2 external IP addresses.

Another example if Internet cafe or public hot spots, each device most probably does not occupy a unique external IP address either. One of the simple reason for this is that there are limited number of IP addresses being assigned for each country, each region etc...

Hence, even if you see from a report that from a particular IP address, there are 10 clicks in the last 1 hour, it does not mean those clicks are all invalid clicks.

Advanced monitoring techniques: Google uses a number of unique and innovative techniques for managing invalid click activity. We can't disclose details about the software, except to say that we're constantly working to expand and improve our technology.
The Google Team: In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks."

This team is real. The famous blogger, Matt Cutts, is from Google's Webspam team.

Please take a minute and ask if any local media owners in Vietnam or international publishers (sites) actually set up teams to combat invalid clicks, meaning paying full time engineers and specialists to just look into how to improve invalid click filtering techniques.
If you are currently putting banners on those portals, sites then should you be alright with advertising using Google platform as well?

Please note that Google auto filters out invalid clicks before they appear on Advertiser reports, meaning that at the first round Advertisers do not get charges for Auto detected Invalid clicks by Google
Google provides Invalid Click report that you can run on a daily basis or any other unit of time

You can find this report by running an Account report and check the boxes next to "Invalid Click" and "Invalid Click Rate"

These invalid clicks represent loss of revenue to Google. Let's say if the invalid click rate is at 5-10%, this literally means a loss of 5-10% revenue to Google. From a business perspective, this is a very big percentage, which again shows the commitment from Google.

Besides, how many local media owners provide this type of report at this level of granularity. It would take a lot of effort to fake these numbers at an hourly level on a global platform for so many clients :P

After the first round of auto detected invalid clicks, Google actually does check again based on its log file and refund advertisers if necessary.

This is another measure by Google to show how serious they are regarding Invalid clicks.
Imagine how much efforts Google needs to put in in order to do this: developing algorithm to analyze log file, making sure that money being refund is justified from a business stand point because these are revenue loss to Google, a proper finance process need to be in place etc...

The same question for other local media owners, publishers applies here. Which media owners/publishers/portals actually refund advertisers due to invalid clicks? Further more, it's not justifiable to argue that display banner incurs lesser invalid clicks as a percentage compared to Pay per Click either.

In short, while invalid click is a valid concern, i hope the above sharing is comprehensive enough to show that this concern shouldn't be a barrier for advertisers to start using Pay per Click in Viet Nam. Google clearly puts in a lot of efforts to combat invalid clicks, in comparison to other media owners. But again, if you have any comments/feedback, feel free to email me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

Cheers,
Chandler

Can a baby grow properly without grown up guidance?

2009-04-22T21:39:00.006+08:00

Recently i started listening to Vietnamese music, especially songs by "Trinh Cong Son" again. The more i listen to those songs, the more i fall in love with my home country, with all of its native beauties and challenges. This motivates me to write a review about what was mentioned on Vietnamese Marketing Magazine the other day.
This is a magazine which follows exactly the same format as the Singapore version so i am not sure if they are both under the same company.

Anyway, what happened was that Marketing magazine number 53 in Vietnam dedicated the whole content to just Online Marketing: what it is, where it is and how to take advantage of it in Vietnamese context?

The way it approached this subject is quite logical:

Definition of Online Marketing
Where Online Marketing is in the overall marketing picture in terms of budget split, the potential, estimated growth rate in the next 3 years
Recommended steps for an Online Marketing campaign
It all starts with a good website... what is a good website/micro site?
Ways to promote your site: Display Media, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media etc...
How to measure the success using Web Analytics

(I worked with the reporter to contribute the article about Search Engine Marketing, which covers both Paid Search and Search Engine Optimization. Due to limited space, i could only cover some very basic concepts though. )

Back to what was mentioned in the magazine, depending on which sub topic, the materials range from basic concepts to quite complex techniques.
Comparing Vietnam and Singapore Online Industry, in terms of infrastructure, Vietnam is obviously way behind Singapore: e commerce law, credit card penetration rate, online consumer behaviors. However, in terms of using different online mediums to promote websites, the overall Vietnamese market is actually not that far behind.

We are massively behind in terms of using Search Engine Marketing effectively (if not at all) compared to Singapore. Yet banner advertising, sponsored blog, microsites, ad network, mobile advertising, social media etc...are all booming.

I am certainly not qualified to comment too much about the whole Online Industry in Vietnam. However, as for Paid Search or Pay per Click, i am sad by the fact that it's yet to become as popular as it should be.

One of the major challenges, that was not mentioned in the magazine, is Industry Leadership. As per my understanding through talking to friends, business associates from agency side, client side in Vietnam, there has not been any clear leaders in sight yet. The whole industry is growing like a baby without grown up guidance.
Nevertheless, I have yet to come across an agency with big enough exposure to lead and set the benchmark for the whole industry to follow. Yet there are plenty of them for traditional Media.

Reasons for this situation are plenty:

Current budget allocation for Online marketing campaign (estimated less than 1%)
Limited level of understanding, willingness from clients to take a leap of faith
Human resource issue from both agency side and client side
Confusing messages from different agencies as to how effective SEM is
Macro economic situation and local norms (long term debt from big clients)
etc...

Search Engine Marketing was introduced in Vietnam long long time ago (at least 5 years ago). Yet until now, the adoption rate is so low that Google support for the market is virtually zero.

Most marketing managers when asked will say that they know about Search Engine Marketing, be it Paid Search or SEO. However, many of them never tried it before or have incomplete understanding/misunderstanding about SEM.

(Just side track a little bit: if you use Vietnamese credit/debit card to pay for your Adwords campaign, the reviewing time will take forever (more than 5 working days) simply because Google is concern about credit card fraud. Also by law, agency needs to pay additional 10% tax on top of their Google spend on behalf of Google since Google incurs profit in Vietnam market yet there is no way that Google pays that tax to Vietnamese government. This makes the overall charge increased substantially. )

Some Examples:

Government agency like Vietnam Tourism Board is not using Online Marketing aggressively to promote Vietnam tourism to other countries. My guess is that whatever offline initiatives are being done are much more expensive than equivalent online ones.
Most of the big hotels, travel agencies are not using PPC to reach out to foreign markets as well
Vietnamese economy is an export oriented economy yet so few firms/government corporations are using Paid Search to promote their products overseas

This has to change and it largely depends on local/international agencies or search engines like Google and Yahoo. While Google has about 80-90% of the search market share, it does not focus in this market since the overall revenue is still too small. Yahoo has little market share but it has other very popular products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo messenger etc so it can afford to open a local office there. Nevertheless i don't believe in the idea of using Yahoo Search Marketing for Vietnamese market simply because of its Vietnamese search capability from Yahoo and the support of its YSM platform.
Google has end users so sooner or later it will get more advertisers but the question is WHEN?

In short, it's definitely a wonderful initiative that Marketing magazine dedicate the whole issue to Online marketing in Vietnam. It shows the level of perceived importance, appreciation and attention that Online Marketing is receiving. There are, however, a lot to be done in order for us to have a prosper, mutually beneficial industry (for both end users, advertisers and agencies).

Now your turn.

Please share your comments / feedback / critique / about this post. Are you from agency side or client side? How do you think we should improve things? What would you eliminate? What would you add? What did I miss? Please email me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

P.S: Feel free to email me if you want to have a copy of this month issue from Marketing Magazine as well.

Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Survey 2008

2009-03-29T17:59:00.005+08:00

There has been a rather heated debate regarding an article on Marketing-Interactive titled "Reality check for mobile and social media". I tried to get hold of a soft copy of the survey from Asia Digital Marketing Association's website but failed. Thanks to Peter Steyn, from Aha! Research - the firm who conducted the survey, i have one now.

I am not going into details about the debate or interpretation of the findings from the survey. What i intend to do is to look at the raw data and try to interpret the data on my own just like what i did with Future Tense: The global CMO report from Economist Intelligence Unit.

Please note that this is, by no means, to show my disapproval of the author/reporter findings/conclusions because i am sure that i will agree with many of the findings from the survey myself. This is merely the way i like to look at report.

The companies...

There are no companies...well just kidding!

One main point to take note about this survey is that it was done at an individual level, not corporation level hence multiple individuals from the same corporation may participate in this.
The sample definition was described as "Individuals with an interest in marketing activities in Asia Pacific"

51% of these companies have annual marketing and advertising spend in Asia Pac (excluding Japan) of US$ 1 mil or less.
26% of respondents don't know their company annual marketing/advertising spend.

59% of these companies employ less than 250 people in Asia Pac (excluding Japan).
There are, however, 44% of these companies who have less than 100 employee.

The Respondents...

40% coming from the agency side and an equal percentage from advertisers side. The rest are from Media Owner side or others. So pretty much all parties involved have a say.
Most of the respondents, however, are from Singapore and Hong Kong. Virtually none are from markets like Australia, China, India, Korea or Taiwan.
They are mostly in Marketing, management or biz dev role (87%).

Because of the respondent profile, i have to say the findings from this survey will be more applicable to Southeast Asia and Hong Kong only. It can't be treated as findings for Asia Pac region.
While i appreciate that many regional HQs are in Singapore and Hong Kong, the size of these companies, number of people employed in Asia Pac, annual marketing/advertising spend make it hard to generalize the findings beyond Southeast Asia and Hong Kong only.

The Findings...

Overall, the findings are pretty much in line with what i feel about the market condition at the moment.
(I base in Singapore and work more closely with clients/agencies based in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and China).

Percentage spend on Digital Marketing in general is increasing amidst the financial crisis. In fact, because of the current financial crisis, companies/agencies are forced to look at alternative ways to get more bang for their buck and hence the greater emphasis on digital marketing.

The greatest barrier to the increased spending on digital is again understanding of the medium/options and education. Digital Marketing is newer than traditional media and as a result the number of professionals working in Online industry is quite limited. This is hardly new to us though. Yet it's something that has lasted way too long. Going into detailed explanation or solution to this problem is beyond the scope of this post but i may come back later to this topic.

Surprise!!!

I am totally taken by surprise when the survey reveals that Search Engine Optimization received more time, effort and budget in 2008 compared to Paid Search or Search Engine Advertising (the term used in the survey).
Also Banner Advertising only ranks number 10 in the list, way below email marketing, e-newsletters, SEO, PPC, Viral campaigns, etc... even Social Network advertising.

Professionally, i would seriously doubt that the budget for Search Engine Marketing has surpassed Banner Advertising/Other Online Branding effort in 2008 for big corporations in Asia Pac. Besides, Banner ads certainly should get more budget than Social Network advertising. Unless i missed out some vitally important point here but the adoption rate for Social Network advertising is still very low amongst agencies and even big corporations.
It even more confusing when respondents were asked about Corporate blogging. Nearly 70% does not currently maintain a corporate blog. If this is the case, how much effort their corporation could actually spend on social media, viral marketing in 2008?

When asked about "How important do you think each of the following digital marketing strategies or campaigns will be for marketers over the next 12 months", good corporate website, Search Engine Optimization and behavioral targeting are amongst the top 3. Again, i seriously doubt this because of:

40% of the respondents are supposed to be from agency side and there are just not many agencies out there in Singapore/HK have capability in Search Engine Optimization or SEO
10% of the respondents are from Media owner side and i am doubtful that they would recommend SEO as one of the top strategies.
Email marketing ranks below both SEO and Paid Search! We all know that harnessing the current customer database/sales lead is one of the most effective way because the recipients ALREADY use the products/services so for Email marketing to rank number 7 on the list, it raises some serious questions
What exactly is the definition of Behavioural targeting in the survey context? Did all respondents share the same understanding/definition of Behavioural targeting?

I include below the screenshot for the ease of reference.

Holistic Approach to Marketing

Lastly, it's not surprised to learn that the majority of advertisers have several agencies and vendors for online and offline marketing. 36% have the same agency for both Online and Offline initiatives. However, adopting holistic approach to Online marketing alone or the synchronization of both Online/Offline initiatives (including tracking/measurement) is still a big challenge in the region for both advertisers and agencies.
This issue, nevertheless, is fairly complex and not easy to solve.

Most advertisers book/run Online campaigns on a CPC or CPM basis with media owners highly prefer CPM pricing model.

That's pretty much what i have for the time being. I understand that the way i interpret the findings of this survey may be very different from some of you. So please feel free to share your thoughts/comments via emailing to chandlerblog@gmail.com

A digital survival guide for the recession (iMedia Connection Series)

2009-03-29T10:36:00.002+08:00

I have been contributing a series to iMedia Connection titled "A digital survival guide for the recession". It has 4 parts and 3 has been published.

1. Introduction: A digital survival guide for the recession.

If you are thinking of shifting more of your marketing budget online, here's a guide on how to get started, and what pitfalls you should avoid.

(Please refer to iMedia for more. )

2. Digital media options in a recession

If you are thinking of shifting more of your marketing budget online, here's a guide on how to get started, and what pitfalls you should avoid.

3. How to Choose an SEM agency

Staff strength is the most important thing to evaluate when selecting a search engine marketing agency, so be sure to ask any agencies about their staff turnover rate before embarking on any digital marketing ventures, especially in tough economic times.

I am looking forwards to the last part being published and it will more or less give an overall idea about what options Advertisers in this region have and how to implement them.
Right now i am working on a few other series which highlights ways that advertisers can save some money and be more cost effective in tough time.

Stay tune :)
Chandler

Google Ad Planner update for SouthEast Asia

2009-03-22T22:04:00.007+08:00

About 6 months ago, i blogged about the use of Google Ad Planner in Singapore and Southeast Asia region.
At that time, Vietnam and Indonesia were not even in the list yet. This time round, information about these countries are available!
Data is being updated until Jan 2009 which is recent enough.

I took a careful look into Vietnam market and found that the data is fairly accurate in terms of Unique Visitors. The category classification is a bit odd though.
For example:

VnExpress.net is in Music Category => a big NO NO, this is a Web Portal or at least it belongs to News section
The same with www.dantri.com.vn. This is essentially an Online Newspaper, not Audio & Multimedia
Baamboo.com is a local search engine specializing in Music, Video search, Mapping services, NOT "Home Improvement"'

Please refer to the screenshot below for details.

Another point to note is that while there are about 19 million Internet users in Vietnam, Google Ad Planner only "defines" 6.8 million. Hence we can't overly rely on the data at this point. It's not a market where you can find reliable data easily though so Bravo Googlers!

It's actually quite interesting if one likes to compare the stats from Google Ad Planner vs the stats provided by the Site Owner (so called media owner) or to compare stats for different Online Newspaper like VnExpress, thanhnien, dantri etc...

Another distinct difference we can see for Vietnam market is that Google Content Network coverage is still very very limited compared to Singapore or Malaysia where Google has ties with at least 50% of the top 10 sites.

A few other comments applicable for SEA region:

Filter function by site or keyword does not work yet. It would be great for advertiser to be able to display ads to people who are surfing on certain sites and also search for some specific keywords!
Demographics data is not available yet

In short, Google Ad Planner is still in beta and the data shouldn't be taken too seriously. Other competitive intelligence firm like comScore, Hitwise or Compete do provide a deeper level of analysis and data availability. It is, however, recommended that Google Ad Planner numbers can be taken as guideline or to compare different sites, a quick and easy way of identify Google Content Network strength in certain verticals...

Search Engine Market Share around the World updated Mar 09

2009-03-21T22:26:00.006+08:00

A lot of people have been telling me that my previous post on Search Engine Market Share around the world is quite useful so i decided to keep a regular update on it.
Understand that having the image is not a good thing for SEO but well, i find that it's a better way to present the information to readers. In a quick glance, they can have the overview and be able to compare different territories.

I published this file using Google Document as well so if you want to have the original excel file, here it is "Search Engine Market Share around the world"

Note: I tried to find reliable data sources as much as possible but for some cases, i have to put in Personal Experience as the source due to lack of public data sources.

Cheers,
Chandler

New Yahoo Ad format in Singapore

2009-03-12T23:12:00.007+08:00

Tonight while casually surfing the Net, i came across the new ad format by Yahoo Singapore.
I will definitely call our contact at Yahoo Singapore to ask for more information first thing tomorrow morning but this is really amusing. Yahoo is testing new ad format...

If you haven't noticed it yet, then here is the close up version

In that so called "Frontpage WAM" position, normally Yahoo puts up only one advertiser Display Ad, not multiple text links like what we see above.
See screenshot below

I am not 100% sure about the motivation behind testing the new ad format on the homepage WAM position on Yahoo SG. However, it seems that the recession is hitting Yahoo SG as well because after refreshing the browser a few times, i couldn't see any advertiser Display Ads, they are all internal Yahoo Display Ads.

Anyway, I will provide update on this later on.

Cheers,
Chandler

P.S: After my chat with the guys at Yahoo SG, it turned out that the above is simply a new internal ads by Yahoo to promote Yahoo Search Marketing in days that Yahoo does not have advertisers for WAM position.

RFP process for Search Engine Marketing

2009-03-01T10:28:00.002+08:00

I came across a series of high quality ( or i would say mind blowing) articles on MediaPost Publications last week. They are:

10 Reasons Why SEM Agencies Don't Win New Biz by Aaron Goldman
The REAL Problem With The Client/Agency RFP Process by Aaron Goldman
Moving Toward Rational SEM Agency Procurement by Steve Baldwin
SEM Is A Service, Not A Product by Steve Baldwin
When is Enough, Enough? by Janel Landis

They all focus around the Agency Procurement process and what the clients & agencies can do to improve the situation.
I am a big fan of "it takes two hands to clap" so i firmly believe that everything that both agencies and clients need to work on this RFP process together.

Search Engine Marketing is no longer new in the region yet misconceptions about SEM are common.
I won't repeat what were already discussed in full in those articles above but simply want to share my agreement with the authors and probably share these articles with those who haven't got a chance to read them.

It does not matter whether you are working for an agency or a direct client, i believe you would find these articles note worthy in one way or another.

If you would like to discuss or share your view with me, feel free to send email to chandlerblog_at_gmail.com

Have a nice weekend everyone,
Chandler

Hitwise pulled the plug in Singapore?

2009-02-21T23:08:00.007+08:00

Note: After i published this post, i received the confirmation from Hitwise that they still service Singapore. The broken links are merely some technical issues.
Thanks Hitwise for letting us know!

I checked out Hitwise Singapore today and found a couple of broken links.

However, when i clicked on the link sg.hitwise.com, it is a broken link.

Then i tried to access the page by going through the home page. Apparently, the link was changed to : http://sg.hitwise.com/resources/data-center.php
It is here that i find it very strange because the interface was changed. If you click on "Top Websites and Search Engine Analysis", it redirects you to http://www.hitwise.com.au/datacenter/main/dashboard-1706.html
The same situation happens with other links like Top Industry Search Terms and the like.
So my question is What happened to Hitwise Singapore??!

Did they pull the plug on the Singapore operation? Because it's hard to think that Australian data is somehow more meaningful to Singapore market compared to local data.

Actually, under Hitwise Office Location, Singapore office is no longer there! or was it there in the first place? Now you only see a US number.

If it's true that Hitwise no longer reports/gathers any data for Singapore market, personally i will find it depressing because so far, Hitwise was the only company who officially published any analytic data regarding Singapore market for free. Without Hitwise public data, information like search engine market share, top industry search terms etc... won't be easily accessible.

Anyway, let's see how it goes from here...

Have a good weekend,
Chandler

UOB Singapore is playing hide and seek?

2009-02-18T22:52:00.010+08:00

I was looking at different deposit rates offered by different banks in Singapore to see which bank i should set up new account with.
The first thing i realized was that it TOOK me a lot of time to go through every single bank looking for Interest Rates!
For most of the banks (OCBC, DBS, Citibank etc...) i had to click at least a couple of times to see the rates for different saving account types : Monthly savings, Smart Savings, Saving Plus, S$ Saving account...
Further more, for some banks, they don't even display the rate on the website! What is that about? How am i supposed to decide which account to apply for if i don't know exactly what the interest rate is and how it is being calculated!?

But then something strange happened, i realized that i didn't even remember the brand UOB at all. I had been spending at least a couple of hours browsing through deposits, savings, investment products, insurance products offered by OCBC, DBS, Citibank, HSBC but i didn't think of UOB at all!
This is really strange to me because I had a UOB card before when i was a student and used that quite often. At the same time, UOB is supposed to be quite big in Singapore. Everyday when i go to work i walk past UOB Plaza, which situates UOB headquarter! Every single morning, 22 days a month.

Then slowly it dawns on me the reason why UOB brand is lost on me. It's because when i do searches on Google, i never see any ads by UOB! Bingo
You see, as human being, we are getting lazier and lazier. We no longer remember the bank URLs. Instead we just go to search engine, type in what we want and expect the results to be there. Like for this case, i either type in the brands: OCBC savings account, Citibank deposit, DBS asset management or generic terms like saving accounts, deposit account etc...

Please note that i have NO personal grudge against UOB whatsoever. I used their product before, but it's just that it's my profession and i spend quite a lot of time online so when i see something strange, it's my instinct to investigate.

UOB currently does NOT have any ads on Google/Yahoo for savings account, deposit, credit cards, insurance or investment related products.

So the first thing i do is using Google Insights for Search to compare different brands

This is for the last 12 months

This is for the past 4 years

The above graphs show that the web search volume for keywords related to different brands in the last 12 months (the first graph), last 4 years (2004-to date) in Singapore market only.
This can be used to gauge the overall popularity of a brand from Search Engine point of view (how many people are inrested in your brand)
UOB is apparently quite popular (second position) in Singapore, higher than OCBC, Citibank or HSBC.

Secondly, i use Google Keyword Tool to see the actual keyword and their average monthly search volume

The above list of keywords are not exhaustive. I just want to showcase that there are an enormous amount of people in Singapore, searching not only for Financial products in general but UOB products in particular but they couldn't find the information they want easily. There are no Paid Search Ads and the SEO is not that great.

For example, if you search for "UOB card", you will see the following results on Google (taken on 19Feb09) in Singapore

I am no expert but as you can see from the screen shot, the link for uob singapore is near the bottom and it's not even a page about "uob credit card", which is the product i am looking for!
The tragedy is that UOB Singapore actually has a very nice website! I am not sure how long ago did they revamp the site but it looks much better now with proper sign up form in appropriate locations!
Yet i DO NOT even REMEMBER this brand because of their lack of exposure on Search Engine (both Paid Search and SEO).

May be i am different because i spend too much time online so my decision/perception is largely based on online information but i seriously doubt the effectiveness of UOB customer acquisition strategies. If you are not there when i am looking for you or related products, too bad you forfeit the possibility of me being your customer and worse yet i slowly forget about the brand!

Just my humble opinion!

Cheers,
Chandler

P.S After i wrote this post, Lance LoveDay wrote a good article on Search Engine Land titled "Search: Too Boring for Branding?". In this article he also highlighted the possible impact of not having any links (Paid Search or SEO) on the Search Engine Result Page to a particular Brand.

TravelClick became Google Authorized Reseller

2009-02-18T21:53:00.004+08:00

I just read about this piece of news a few hours back and it is a real surprise to me. It surprised me because of my "incorrect" understanding of how Google Adwords Business model works.

From what i knew previously, Google has three main business units promoting Adwords

OSO or Online Sales and Operations. This unit is in charge of "Do it yourself" type of advertisers. They take care of those advertisers who go online and sign up with Google Adwords themselves.

I am not sure if this unit is behind the "Live chat" function embedded deep in Google Adwords interface a few years back. What happened was that i used to log into Google Adwords and chatted with live support person, mostly related to image ads approval a couple of years back.

DSO or Direct Sales and Operations. This unit takes care of all big brands (blue chip clients). The idea is that blue chip clients tend to spend much more money on marketing/advertising and so Google wants to have direct relationship with these clients by providing good account management services

By right, all the big accounts (banks, telco, etc...) should be handled by this team (as per my previous understanding)

Google Authorized Reseller: I used to think that Google uses Reseller to tackle SME market where the monthly budget tends to be smaller. However, they would need more support than "Do it yourself" advertisers.

Working in SME field requires resellers to have hundreds of clients in order to survive. Resellers are supposed to charge a one time set up fee and on going (monthly) account management fee.
Because of limited monthly spend, Google provides agency rebate for these resellers upon hitting certain target.
Resellers by right are not supposed to touch big brand names because they belong to DSO "territory"
In the UK, Google has only 1 reseller left Infoserve. In Australia, Hot Goanna is the only one.
While there are a lot of well known Digital Agencies in those mature markets, not many of them are Google resellers despite the fact that Google only provides rebate to Reseller, not to normal agencies.

Well that is my understanding until now that i know TravelClick just became Google Adwords Reseller. It looks like because of the global economic crisis, Google started to change their strategies.
TravelClick is an established Digital Marketing firm, specializing solutions for hotel chain worldwide. I guess because of that Google wants to leverage on their existing clientele to push more revenue for Google products.
Before becoming Google Adwords Reseller, I guess (THIS IS MY HUMBLE OPINION ONLY) TravelClick was more liberal about how they allocated client budgets on various search engines, platforms, products. Now that they will receive rebates from Google for hitting specific revenue targets, i would assume that naturally more Google products will be pushed towards existing customers.
Of course we (outsiders) don't know about the details of this deal. However, i knew of certain Google Reseller Deal in which the Reseller is NOT allowed to use Yahoo/MSN or any other search engines but Google. It's more like an exclusive deal. In a way this is quite limited to clients because of the fact that while Google is vastly popular in many markets, there are still certain parts of the globe where Yahoo, Naver, Daum, Baidu or other search engines are more popular.
North Asia region is one example where we see that average CPC on Yahoo HK is normally much cheaper than Google HK.
On another note, using only 1 search platform for client campaign can be very rewarding for agencies in terms of human resources. I've spent considered amount of time on Google Adwords platform (is it a given :D), Yahoo Panama, MSN AdCenter and Baidu before so it's safe to say that Google offers the most robust system to manage online campaigns. It is more efficient and more importantly saves a lot of time and effort for agency people (poor me still have to use all the different platforms!). However, more often than not, we find that while other platforms are far less superior compared to Google, even in the case of lesser traffic and so on, the Return on Ad Spend can be quite good if done correctly. So using 1 search engine only may not be the perfect solutions for every client.

Well, let's wait a bit more and see whether we see more Google Authorized Resellers deals coming up. If these deals are exclusive then i am seriously worried for Yahoo, other search engines or even some direct clients.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Chandler

Respond to Why agencies don't get digital

2009-02-14T20:41:00.002+08:00

There has been a rather heated discussion on Marketing-Interactive regarding the article
"Why agencies don't get digital - our readers speak"
A lot has been covered by the author Phil Carroll and other participants in the discussion like:

Applying old world models to new world technology
Human resource issue
The lack of technical competency or production capability
etc...

Personally i find the article and what has been discussed noteworthy, comprehensive and useful. Coming from the agency background, i agree that in this region we still have a lot to learn, to do and apply (yup, not just from talking about the concept but actually implementing it).

Much has been discussed about what agencies are lacking, what we need to do and so forth to move forwards. However, as i wrote before in another post "Client of the Year Contest - How an ideal Client Looks Like?" the clients play an equally important part in this process.

It has the same analogy with cooking. Famous chefs can cook all kind of fancy dishes, from French, Italian, Japanese to traditional British dessert but if the customer is someone like Warren Buffet, who only likes hamburger and french fries, then even Katharine Graham's chef has to give up :)

Another example is with cards. To me, no mater how fancy a car looks, how prestigious the brand is, they are just driving vehicles. As long as they have air conditioning and good seats, it's satisfactory to me.

For the development of Online Industry in the region, there is a need for clients to be more proactive and be willing to try different Online initiatives.
Right now, companies only spend about 2-5% of their marketing budget on digital (the number is based on my working experience in SEA and North Asia) so in actual fact they don't spend a lot of resources (human resources or otherwise) on this channel.
Without the right attitude towards digital marketing and experienced managers, we will continue to see small changes towards online marketing budget/results.

From my humble opinion, human resource is the main reason behind the development of Online marketing industry in the region. It's not limited to talented professionals working for agencies but also experienced online marketing managers/executives from the client side.
While Online Marketing professionals are rare, they seem all come to work for agencies, leaving the client-side with mostly traditional minded marketing managers.
Taking online news, magazines or offline marketing forums for example, how many people working from client side do we see/read about?
Most of the materials written in SEA and North Asia are from evangelists working for agencies/media owners/technology providers.

One can argue that professionals working from client side see no need to get their voice heard, or they want to protect the firm strategic edge over competitors.

However, i believe that companies need to spend more attention on recruiting/nurturing experienced Online marketers. They are very very rare because unlike people working for agencies, they need to possess specialized knowledge in a particular filed other than Digital in order to work for a company successfully. At the same time, these marketers are under great pressure to perform, to convince upper management about the potential return of this Online channel that they never tried before.

Without the right persons in charge on the client side, no matter how brilliant the plan that the agency puts together, it won't be implemented successfully if at all.
Without meaningful goals, request for proposal documents, working process or campaign evaluation and a long term plan from the client side, it's hard to judge whether a particular medium works or the agency is competent enough.
This is particularly difficult in SEA context because the way we do business is different. Trust is a big factor and we don't embrace changes/technologies as fast as we like to believe.
There is no analytics culture within the whole company even though numerous reports are presented for example.

In short, there could be many reasons why the Online industry is where it is now in SEA. The potential is huge but it requires diligent, hard work and good leadership.

That should be all for now.

Thanks for reading,
Chandler
P.S: There is a song that i love. I know about this song from a special friend, who means more to me than i realized. (I know this is bad for SEO but hey who cares :P)

Digital Survival Guide on iMedia

2009-02-10T20:48:00.004+08:00

Halo,

For those who's wondering why i have not been blogging lately, it's partly because of Chinese New Year break and more importantly i have been very busy at work.
The industry's started gathering some momentum since the economic crisis and that would mean people like us getting busier.

I have a good news to share with everyone as well. That is i started contributing to iMedia Connection. My first series is titled: A digital survival guide for the recession

I shared 4 main points being:

What are the fastest ways to waste money online?
Different digital media options
Tips on how to choose a search engine marketing agency
Holistic approach to web analytics and competitive analysis

I hope that this series may be of help to marketing managers who suddenly find themselves having the need to spend more time, effort and budget on Digital.

That's pretty much it for today. A couple of things are already on my mind so hopefully the next article will be out soon :)

Have a nice evening in Singapore and a great day ahead in US!
Chandler

Singapore Online Landscape update (part 2)

2009-01-20T21:59:00.011+08:00

In 2007, i wrote "10 things about Singapore Online Landscape" to serve as a guide for those who are new in Singapore and would like to have an overview of the Online environment.
At that time, i used publicly available data in 2006, which was outdated so i intend to give a brief update again here.

Please note that all the data below are from Statistics Singapore, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), Hitwise and comScore unless otherwise stated.

1. Singapore Computer and Internet penetration rate

As you can see from the above table, there was a big increase in the penetration rate in 2007, 68% compared to 59% in 2006. However, over the past 5-6 years, the penetration rate is fairly constant at around 60%.
It is a bit of a surprise to see that internet penetration rate for Singapore does not hit a higher mark provided the excellent infrastructure and low cost.

If you are interested in the absolute numbers, as of mid 2008, Singapore had about 4.8 million people including citizens, permanent residents and foreign workers (from C level to blue color).
So that works out to be about 2.9 million internet users.

It would be even more meaningful to start comparing Singapore and other countries in the region: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.
Due to lack of official data, i use figures from Internet World Stats site. While being the unofficial source, this would be enough to show relative comparison.

Country	Penetration Rate	Internet Users (million)
Singapore	58.60%	2.7
Malaysia	59.00%	14.9
Thailand	20.50%	13.4
Philippines	15.10%	14
Indonesia	10.50%	25
Vietnam	23.40%	20.1

Indonesia has the lowest penetration rate yet highest number of internet users due to the enormous size of the population compared to other ASEAN countries.

2. Household access to Internet

The above stats couples with the fact that Singapore household income (after inflation) grew substantially in 2008 (more than 10% on average) promise a stronger household access to Internet rate in 2009.

3. Household broadband penetration rate

The Broadband penetration rate has increased 133% over a five year period from 2003-2007!
As for Vietnam, from VNNIC, total broadband subscribers is around 2.4 millions, which is comparable to Singapore in absolute numbers but far behind in terms of percentage.

4. What Singaporeans and residents do when they are online?

Online shopping Rate 2003 - 2007

Percentage of Online Shopper by Age Group 2003 - 2007

Just to put a little context behind the figures, the below table is for the US market from U.S Census Bureau

			Total Internet users (percent)

Activity



Send or read e-mail			56
Use a search engine to find information			49
Get news online			39
Check weather reports and forecasts online			30
Look for news or information about politics			23
Do any banking online			21
Watch a video on a video-sharing site			16
Use a social networking site			13
Send instant messages			13
Visit a local, state or federal government web site			13
Get financial information online			10
Buy a product online			6
Look online for info about a job			6
Use online classified ads or sites like Craig's List			6
Create or work on your own online journal or blog			5
Buy or make a reservation for travel			4
Rate a product, service, or person			4
Participate in an online auction			3
Download a podcast so you can listen to it or view it later			3
Make a donation to a charity online			1

While online shopping rate amongst internet users in Singapore is at a whopping 35% in 2007, the same figure for the US is only 6%. This, again, proves that Singapore is one of the most wired countries in the world. Individual Internet Usage by Age Group - Communication Activities in 2007

Individual Internet Usage by Age Group - Transactional Activities in 2007

Individual Internet Usage by Age Group - Working and Learning Activities in 2007

5. Search Engine Usage

According to comScore, Singapore Internet users conducted 171 million searches in Sept 08 or an average of 105 searches per searcher in Sept 08. This works out to be 1.71 million unique searchers in Singapore during Sept 08.

Google is the number 1 search engine in Singapore, with 71.04% market share (Hitwise Dec 2008 based on volume of searches). Yahoo is a failing number 2 with 23.2% market share
Together, they command 94.24% of the total market share.
It's clear that the search engine war in Singapore is over with Google & Yahoo are the two most popular engines.
I am actually very amazed to learn that Singapore Press Holdings even started to develop another local search engine not long ago with the code name RedNano.
I am looking forwards to seeing how the business model will pan out since the population in Singapore is so small and Google& Yahoo already have so much market share.

Well, that should be about all for this update about Singapore Online Landscape.
I am actually on holidays at the moment back in Hanoi but couldn't stay away from the computer for so long!

Looking forwards to the US inauguration ceremony in the next 2 hours and the coming "Tet" (Chinese New Year) !

Cheers,
Chandler

Is Yahoo really that Bad...How about Microsoft?!

2009-01-01T11:13:00.002+08:00

Danny Sullivan wrote another beautiful post right before the end of 2008 titled "Tough Love for Microsoft Search".
It's a long but truly inspiring post. It comes as a part of the trilogy that includes "Yahoo the Failure: Myth versus Reality" and "the Google Hive Mind".

In his post, Danny covered reasons why Microsoft failed (is failing) regarding Search despite the fact that the company started developing search engine some 11 years ago (in 1998 Nearly a year after announcing it would get into search, Microsoft finally unveiled its own search engine dubbed MSN Search):

Search is simply not at the heart of the company leaders. It is a chore and the company does it simply for the money. Well most companies do that but they don't publish it out right like Microsoft...
The odd way of thinking about Search just like software development with different versions/updates.
Microsoft doesn't even have a brand. There is a painfully/funny example that Danny used in his post. It's regarding Eric Jackson, a dissent Yahoo investor who used to be convinced that Microsoft is the solution for Yahoo Search.

Below is the whole quote from eWeek:

"I had never used Microsoft search before a couple of weeks ago. I sat down to try it and then realized I had no idea what to type in. I tried Microsoft.com, but the only search bar was to help me search MSFT internal directories. I then remembered seeing some advertisement for 'Live Search,' so I tried Livesearch.com. It was some spam site. Finally, I tried Live.com, and the results were no good. I will never use it again. When I want to Google or find Yahoo, I know what to punch in. Simple as that," Jackson said.

Human resources, Long term plan are all what Microsoft is lacking as well.

Danny also covers massive opportunities that Microsoft has due to its own brand, various distribution deals with computer makers like HP, Dell.

His posts made me reflect upon my posts on "Microsoft & Yahoo: a North Southeast Asia perspective" and "If I were Yahoo Chief for Search Engine Marketing".

Looking at the big picture, I have to agree with Danny that most people have been too hard on Yahoo (myself included). The challenge with Yahoo is that "Yahoo sits in a sandwich, with Google the giant top slice of bread crushing it down into the thin Microsoft slice below." Danny wrote

I totally agree with this point. Yahoo is the number 2 search engine and it's doing a much better job than Microsoft, just not as good as Google does.
"If you are frustrated with Yahoo Panama, wait until you work with Baidu !" My "slave" Liz often says.

I have been focusing too much on the problems Yahoo has, how difficult it is for Microsoft to rebuild, should it buy Yahoo. However, i didn't put enough thinking about the problems that Microsoft has on its own.
I guess it's probably because of the fact that MSN does not have any significant share of the search market in this part of the world in the first place. How sad that is if you were working in MSN search team!

I have not been using MSN Ad Center a lot to give any insightful comments about its platform. Below are some observations i got so far:

Ad Center barely exists in Singapore. It's certainly not available in other SouthEast Asia countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam or the Philippines.
MSN Ad Center does not exist in North Asia countries as well (as far as i know of): Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea etc...
Since MSN has no share in North Asia markets, the issue of handling single byte vs double byte characters becomes irrelevant
No offline/desktop ad editor software yet
User interface is not as robust as Google. The same goes with Reporting functionality
Other Online tools like keyword research, keyword funnel, commercial intent etc.. are simply worthless since advertisers are concerned about volume, efforts putting in versus return. They won't spend massive amount of time on a search engine which has like 5,000 searches/month on a particular subject.
MSN already lost in US market. Its shares in UK or EU countries are simply worse

Yup, it appears that MSN is clearly worse compared to Yahoo for advertisers in SouthEast Asia or North Asia. While Yahoo identified the emerging markets are regions where it can still put up a fight with Google, I don't think MSN follows the same thinking. More previsely it can't afford to do so with such little volume (both in volume of searches and revenue).

So what if Microsoft bought Yahoo, would there be any threats to Google in short/mid term in Search Marketing?
IMHO, there is none. In fact, Google needs a stronger competitor than what it has right now (Yahoo), a company that is not too strong, not too large to make the field seems to be more competitive and helps to drive Google further.
Imagine a world without Yahoo, how Advertisers can really appreciate the robustness of Google's system like the way they do now? How can Google be motivated to constantly coming up with new solutions, integrating more services into its Adwords & Adsense platforms?
And more importantly, how can Google maintain a user friendly perception and not becoming another Microsoft?

So in a weird way, Microsoft buying Yahoo might prove to be a good thing for Google. It will strengthen Microhooo as a second player in the market, without being too threatening. The process of simply integrating Microsoft Search team and Yahoo search team will probably take 6 months or more because of the size of the two companies, Human resource issue, internal policy, work flow etc...It will probably take another 6 months for Microhoo to come up with some thing useful to compete with Google (giving the way Yahoo normally works). And in this 12 month buffer time, Google'll probably gain so much more share for Microhoo to play catch up.

Well, i am sure that great thinkers at Microsoft considered very carefully and already had their own detailed plan when they decided to bid for Yahoo last year. It would be very interesting to see how things unfold in 2009 regarding this.

That's about it for now.

Cheerio,
Chandler

Future Tense: The global CMO - from Economist Intelligence Unit

2008-12-28T10:01:00.007+08:00

More than a year ago, i wrote "Future of Marketing (in Singapore context)" after reading a white paper by the Economist with the same title.
This year, the economist published a subsequent report, also sponsored by Google, called "Future tense - the Global CMO".
This report was based on the survey done in Feb 2008 before the economic crisis happened at global scale so i think there will be a lot of changes in 2009 that were not mentioned/thought of in Feb 2008.

Unlike last year, i am not going to cite findings from the report but rather looking at the raw survey results and point out a few things applicable to ASEAN or North Asia region.
For those who want to have a copy of the report, you can try go Google it or shoot me an email at chandlerblog@gmail.com

First thing first, let's start with some background information about how the report was done and who the respondents are, which companies they work for.

The companies...

This report was done by the Economist Intelligence Unit after conducting a survey of 263 executives from MNCs around the world. All of these companies have annual global revenues in excess of US $500 million dollars. In fact, a whopping 40% of these companies have annual revenues above US $10 billion.

Financial services (24%), IT and Technology (14%) and Consumer Goods (13%) are the top 3 industries in which most of the surveyed companies are in. While travel being one of the most competitive/expensive industries in Search Engine Marketing, they only represent a dismal 3% in the total number of respondents.

The Respondents...

30% of respondents have C level titles, with majority is either CMO/Head of Marketing/Head of advertising (11%).
68% have at least regional scope as their responsibilities. 18% are responsible for global activities across the entire organization.
The majority of them are either from sales background (25%) or have always been in marketing (17%).

Majority of the respondents are based in Western Europe (35%) followed by Asia-Pacific (29%) and North America (20%). From this ratio, one can see that the findings of this report are quire relevant to Asia Pacific region.

Now is the juicy part: The Findings...

I always like to start with budget first :)

61% of these companies have annual marketing budget exceed 5 million US dollars, that equals to around US $420k/month. Interestingly, only 24% of respondents when asked in Feb 2008, mentioned that they expected a cut in marketing budget in 2008 (not 2009). I assume that the percentage will be much higher now, especially in financial services sector.

Having centralized budgeting with decentralized spending/allocation is the most favorite way the marketing budget is being managed (with 59%).
It makes sense this way since each region has its own landscape/characteristics so it required separated allocation, tailored messaging. However, it's also because of this reason and the lack of understanding that Online marketing is normally allocated the least amount compared to ATL activities IMHO.

Marketing objectives

Amongst all the different marketing objectives, brand building/brand-awareness is still number 1 with more than 62% of respondents agreed that it's very important (compared to customer acquisition, even though in the second place, is only at 43%)

More than 49% respondent agreed that their marketing strategy is focused on brand building at the expense of other initiatives with more demonstrable ROI. This is hardly a surprise though.
However, sales/revenue data (online, offline etc...) leads the way as being important/very important (49%) for measure of ROI for media campaigns.

Marketing Medium

In 12 months' time, which mediums do you think will be the most important to your company's marketing objectives?

As you can see from the picture above, Online Marketing really start to become mainstream. Traditional ATL activities are become less important so marketing managers in the region when you allocate budget, please take note of this...
In this context, Search engine enquiries simply mean Search Engine Marketing, whether it's Paid Search Or Search Engine Optimization. 25% of respondents rate it amongst the top 3 most important medium to companies' marketing objectives!
Online Video sites still have a long way to go. So does Mobile marketing!
I need to stress this point because many times, clients just want to look "sexy, sophisticated", creating campaigns for the sake of winning the most "innovative" awards rather than taking care of the basics!

However, no matter which medium being used, the need for integrated effort from planning to execution and evaluation is of paramount important.
No longer the case where companies just use one or two mediums. The difference between number 2 most important medium to number 8 is merely 7%.
Yet, how many companies in ASEAN or even North Asia truly embrace an integrated approach towards marketing? Or even how many agencies are capable of executing online/offline activities, gathering resuts and evalutating the performance as a whole?

I am not saying that there aren't any, my point is that the percentage of those is really small.
Even if it's just about Integrated Online Marketing (BTL), i doubt that there are many companies in this region are truly doing that. The red tape is just too complicated and the lack of understanding is just too much.

Marketing Vendors/Agencies

Which are the most important attributes of marketing/advertising vendor in Feb 2008?

How about in the next 12 months?

As you can see from the two pictures above, the top 3 attributes stay the same. That is to say companies still pay for value not Rate!
However, it may be something of the past since Low Cost ranks number 4 in 2009.
Also, Agencies with footprints across multiple territories clearly have the edge over others.
I am surprised to see that direct/personal contact with vendors ranks so low in the list. I often find one of the most frustrated things for people on the ground (from client side) is to have to deal with many different account managers in a short period of time. It takes so much energy and time just to build up the rapport, the understanding in terms of work process and managing expectation from one another.

Well, that's about all actually. We have covered everything from background to marketing objectives, marketing medium to vendors.
I hope this has been useful to you (readers of this blog). If you have any comments, feel free to drop me a line.

It's time for football now: AFF Suzuki cup Final (second leg) Vietnam vs Thailand!

Cheers,
Chandler.

P.S: This is probably one of the last posts for 2008. I plan to continue writing more regularly in 2009, expanding the coverage from just strict work related topics (marketing) to some area of personal life as well!
Happy New Year and have a Great holiday everyone!

AIG... Where are you? I can't find

2008-12-16T20:22:00.009+08:00

AIG just launched a new print ad campaign across The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Financial Times, The Straits Times, The Business Times and The South China Morning Post to say that customers can rely on AIG to meet their needs amid global recession.
Marketing magazine covered the news today under the title "AIG says you can rely on us"

The agency didn't disclose the cost of this campaign but it seems that both the client and the agency are happy about it.

My first reaction after reading this news is to check whether AIG is there for me?
I did a search on Google and Yahoo Singapore today:

Well as you can see, I can't find any information about what AIG intends to say online!
And it gets worse on Yahoo where some other company is buying AIG brand on Sponsored link...

I am not sure if my reaction is the same with everyone else but i assume people who read WSJ, Financial Times etc... would be quite internet savvy and would like to understand more about what AIG has to say. After seeing the ads on news paper, they probably go online and find more information (well if they even care...)

The fact is that there are a huge number of people, just in Singapore alone who are searching for AIG day in and day out, especially after the bad news broke out a couple of months back...

For those who are new to Google Insights for Search, the graph above basically shows the search volume TREND on terms related to AIG and AIA in Singapore market from Jan 2008 to Nov 2008.
If you want to have a sense of how much search volume out there on Google alone for Singapore market

Dont be too confused by all the jargon, basically from the above graph, there are on average 33,100 searches/month in Singapore for the term "aig" and 27,000 searches/month for the term "aia". But the search volume trend is not the same over time.
Last month, Nov, there were 110,000 searches for "aig" and 33,100 searches for "aia". These are people who go out of there way, sit in front of the computer, open a browser, type in www.google.com, then continue to type in "aig" to find more information about the firm...
A massive, hungry for info audience is Neglected completely there!

Well i understand the branding aspect of running a print ads, I can NOT understand why either the client in this case or the agency don't supplement the offline campaign with a simple Online Paid Search campaign to make sure they have the maximum effect???
Do they think that people will just read the print ad and they understand everything?
With a simple online landing page (even carrying the exact content as the print ads) can be enough for this info-hungry audience Online but Nah, why bother!

It so happens that Yahoo carries a piece of news on the homepage today that says Internet Reliance in Today's Economy. 46% of Women would rather give up sex for 2 weeks than go without the Internet for the same period.
And what people do when they go online... they Search

Ah well, AIG can afford to have a mediocre PR campaign anyway with all the Free money from tax payers!

Cheers,
Chandler

Keyword Matching Option and Search Query Report

2008-12-13T16:01:00.004+08:00

I came across Adwords help forum today and notice that Sarah (Google's employee from San Francisco) is writing a series of Tips on How to Optimize your Adwords account under Campaign Management Section.

In one of the tips, she mentioned about "Match Type and Negative Keywords", I must say that i didn't know about negative exact and negative phrase match before. Such a shame!

I often use Negative Broad match though...:(

If you want to understand more about these types, i suggest you read Sarah's post.

However, the main thing i want to touch on today is Google Expanded Match function under Broad Matching option and a very important report that advertiser should use "Search Query Report".

I understand that many blog posts have been dedicated to this topic before but because it's quite important so i want to mention it again here.

Broad match, by definition,

the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren't in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.

While broad match has many benefits, i often find out based on Search Query report that my ads are shown to terms that have absolutely nothing to do with the products/services, and recently even terms in a different language (not the language i chose).This is because of the Expanded Match function where Google shows ads to synonyms etc... However, broad match often covers more than that. Google system tries to understand how "relevant" words associate together and show ads to those, by Google definition, associated words.
Google has done an excellent job with English language, there is little doubt about that. Nevertheless, when it comes to local language in SouthEast Asia, i don't think Expanded Match function works that well because i almost had an heart attack when my colleague showed me the report.

(For those who never used Search Query Report before, refer to the screenshot below
Search Query report is basically a report that shows advertiser the real search queries that people type into Google and Adwords ads appear for those queries. It is often used to expand the keyword list (add in those terms that people type in but not exist in the account) or find negative keywords.)

In conclusion, "Search Query Report" is a must use report on a weekly basis IMHO (Previously i did it bi weekly but because i am so disappointed recently to see how expanded match functions when targeting local languages in SouthEast Asia.)
For negative phrase and negative exact, i envision they would be very useful for most of my clients because we often run campaigns for multiple products under 1 brand.
Considerable amount of time need to be spent on this though.

P.S: When can we have this level of information with Yahoo btw???

If I were Yahoo Chief for Search Engine Marketing

2008-11-29T18:14:00.004+08:00

Yes you read it right, what if i were Yahoo chief for Search Engine Marketing...
Well there are a couple of things that i would put as highest priorities

1. Improve Ads Targeting

Danny Sullivan wrote about how poor Yahoo Ads Targeting is and i couldn't agree with him more.
For those who don't know what ads targeting is: it simply means that if an advertiser bid for the keyword "flower", he/she has an option to show ads to people who types in "red flower", "flower in singapore" etc...
Technically this is what Google calls Broad Match, and Yahoo calls it Advanced Match.

Back to the topic of poor Ads Targeting, while i appreciate that implementing expanded match or broad match might be hard for multiple languages and Yahoo reached its limit even with English, i still do not understand why Yahoo Panama (code name for the "new" Yahoo Search Marketing platform) in SouthEast Asia only has exact match option 8 months after the official launch!
And in SouthEast Asia, advertisers can only bid on English keywords just like the US...

What "Exact Match Option" means is that advertiser's ad will only be shown if user types in the exact search term as the keyword advertiser bids on.

Yahoo can keep arguing that they want to maintain relevancy, serve only the most targeted ads and having only exact match (standard match - in Yahoo vocabulary) helps to achieve that. However, the reality is who has the bandwidth to add in millions of search terms into the system to cover off every possible keyword variations.
It gets even worse because when you add in many long tail keywords, the system somehow manages to show you the message saying those long tail keywords are covered off by more generic terms so it ignores 70% of your newly added keywords! What is that about???
(Please correct me on this if i am wrong, btw)

Besides, Danny Sullivan rightly pointed out, Yahoo Advanced match (Broad Match) Option does not work properly even in the US.

If Advertiser ad does not appear => users have no chance to click on the ads => Search Engine earns nothing...

It's as simple as that but after more than 8 months, after all the money throwing into affiliate program to promote Yahoo Search Marketing, running Ads on Google network, hiring more people to promote search, PR news here and there, nothing has changed.

Anyway, if you need detailed analysis on this, i suggest you read Danny Sullivan post above.

2. Ads Editor Software

I don't know much about programming/online security and I do appreciate the fact that Yahoo does not own their portal 100% in every market so the decision making process can be long and complicated.

At the same time, in each local market, due to historical reason, the way Yahoo portal being monetized is different. The portal itself is being developed with different focus as well.

However, what i do know is this, it's too painful to do bulk changes to an YSM account using Yahoo upload template.
Historically, Yahoo entered the Paid Search Arena much earlier than Google. However, Google already started Adwords Editor a couple of years back. Yahoo on the other hand, has nothing.
Is this because Yahoo chief is trying to come up with a perfect solution to compete with Google?
Are they afraid that they may "loose face" if their Ads Editor Software looks exactly like Google?

Well one thing for sure is the current upload template is a very big barrier for advertisers. It makes them less willing to optimize the campaign since bulk changes are just too painful.
As for smaller advertisers (the long tail), they probably just set up the campaign and then forget about it.
(Note: i know there are many bid management tools out there but how many advertisers know how to use them effectively and how many actually have access to these tools. What about changing in ad copies, add more keywords?)

Without regular optimization, Yahoo campaigns can't produce good Return on Investment. In the end Advertisers just got fed up and blame Yahoo for not producing the same kind of results as Google. I see it many times before, it's not entirely because Yahoo traffic is bad, it's just the lack of continuous optimization.

The result: a lose lose situation for both Advertisers/Agencies and Yahoo. Advertisers/Agencies are not keen to spend more money on Yahoo since it does not produce good return. Yahoo shoots itself on the foot again simply because of losing revenue and more importantly the brand name in Search Marketing.

Just to make the matter worse, if you compare Yahoo importing template and Microsoft Ad Center template, Ad Center template is much more simpler and easier to use!
Normally what happens is that Advertiser/Agency will set up the campaign on Google first then after that convert them into Yahoo or MSN. I know this is hard for Yahoo folks to hear but it's the truth!
So the easier it takes for advertisers/agencies to convert from the exporting format on Google side to either Yahoo/MSN uploading format, the better it is.
It takes me no more than 5-10 minutes to convert from Google format to MSN Ad Center format but hell Yahoo format is another story all together!

3. The Inability to buy across multiple Markets efficiently using one single Platform

While it's a piece of cake to advertise across multiple markets on Google using Adwords, advertisers need to register for individual region on Yahoo.
For example, if advertiser wants to advertise in SouthEast Asia, Hong Kong and Japan, they need to contact 3 different teams. If you are lucky, you can get in touch with Yahoo international team and they can help to buy in Hong Kong and Japan :P so you end up dealing with two teams, do twice the paperwork (instead of three times)...

However, this option is not available for small advertisers because Yahoo in Japan has the minimum buy of USD $20k/month :)
If the amount you are going to commit is lower than that then there are nothing much the international team can help you with, you are on your OWN.

Alternatively, advertiser can go online and register for each region individually. With this option, just be aware of that there are some territories in which they do not accept international credit cards (Visa, Master Card, Amex etc..). The only way is to do bank transfer, which is extremely troublesome and time consuming...

Another problem with the current model by Yahoo is that each territory only offers the interface in local Language and English. Google offers local language interface for most languages in the world.
For example, Overture Japan only has the interface in English and Japanese so if advertiser can not speak either languages (Chinese Advertisers for ex), they can't use Yahoo Search Marketing in Japan. And Japan happens to be one of a few territories where Yahoo still have larger search market share compared to Google.

Why the ability to advertise across multiple territories is important to any Search Engine?
Simply because it brings in Massive revenue!
Not only MNCs want to have regional campaign but even Medium enterprises as well.

4. Online Tool to estimate traffic

What happens right now across Asia Pac is that every time an agency needs to do proposal for a client, they need to contact Yahoo and ask them for it!
Yahoo will then take a couple of working days to come back with the proposal.
More often than not, revision or sense check is needed when you receive proposals from any Search Engine (Google, Yahoo, Baidu etc...) so a senior person needs to be involved and it probably costs another day or two.
(What i mean by revision or sense check is to make sure that what Search Engine proposes is in line with the client's objectives. For example, the keywords are not too generic, cover all different aspects etc...)

How is this working model far from optimal?

Firstly, the waiting time is quite obvious from the explanation above.
Secondly, Yahoo needs to maintain a big group of people just to do proposal, churn out keywords and estimate traffic and it is costly to do that.
Whereas with Google's model, more often than not agencies or smaller advertisers can generate some keywords and estimate traffic themselves. It's faster and cost effective to Google...

Besides advertisers often want to see different options like: the costing to advertise in one territory vs another. So with out an online automated tool, it simply costs Yahoo Editorial/Operation team huge amount of time and resources, just to satisfy a simple innocent query from client. (The chance of them going ahead with all possible options is slim).

5. Proper Editorial Policy, Reporting Functionality, Master Account (similar to Google MCC) and others

There are still many things that one can list down on how to improve Yahoo Search Marketing program. This post is getting too long so i won't go too deep to any of the remaining issues.
Personally, I think that most of the major concerns from advertisers are listed here.

These issues are important because they not only help advertisers save time, have a successful campaigns but also can help Yahoo to bring in more revenue quickly.

Having said all of these, i must say it's a privilege to have the chance to work with multiple Yahoo offices in Asia Pac region. Each office has an unique level of service and you will love it :)

Also, I have to admit that implementing the changes above is not at all easy and they may not be the most pressing issues for Yahoo at the moment.
Hey, they need to find a new CEO first.

Finally, after all of the hard work to improve YSM, If i were Yahoo Chief for Search Engine Marketing, i probably decide to sell it to Microsoft for some quick bucks :D

It's a beautiful weekend here in Singapore...

Cheers everyone,
Chandler

Search Engine Marketing Share around the World from US, Europe and Asia

2008-11-29T09:43:00.011+08:00

I have been asked this question many many times internally and externally so i decided to spend some time today to gather as much data as i can.
The focus of this blog has always been SouthEast Asia and North Asia. However, in order to give a broader picture, i will cover as many territories where reliable data is available as possible.

In this post i will cover:

First part: Search Engine Market Share in various markets around the world: US, UK, France, German, Russia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, India, Australia, Singapore and the rest of Asean (Oct2008)
Second part: Comments on Searches volume and searches per searcher in APAC.

1. Search Engine Market Share in US Oct 2008

Google sites: 63.1% (or 7.971 billion searches out of total 12.642 billion searches for Oct 2008)
Yahoo! sites: 20.5% (or 2.589 billion searches)
Microsoft sites: 8.5% (or 1.080 billion searches)
Other smaller search engines

Note: Data from comScore

2. Search Engine Market Share in UK Oct 2008

Google sites: 89.44%
Yahoo sites: 2.86%
Ask.com sites: 2.16%

Data from Hitwise UK for October 2008 based on volume of searches

3. Search Engine Market Share in France for Aug 2008

Google sites: 82% (or 2.05 billion searches out of total 2.5 billion searches for Aug 2008)
Microsoft sites: 2.7%
Groupe Pages Jaunes: 2.7% (Yellow pages in France)
Yahoo sites: 2.3%
Other smaller search engines

Data from comScore: Top 10 French Search properties

4. Search Engine Market Share in German in Aug 2008

Google sites: 79.8% (3.022 billion searches out of total 3.790 billion searches for Jul 2008)
eBay: 6.1% ( 0.230 billion searches)
Other smaller search engines

Data from comScore: Top 10 German Search Properties

5. Search Engine Market Share in Russia in Feb 2008

Yandex: 47.4%
Google sites: 31.2%
Rambler Media: 9.7%
Mail.Ru sites: 7%
Other smaller search engines

Data from comScore: Top 10 Russian Search Engines

6. Search Engine Market share in Japan in Sept 2008

Yahoo! Sites: 51.2% (or 3.012 billion searches out of total 5.879 billion searches for Sept 2008)
Google sites: 39.0% ( or 2.294 billion searches)
Rakuten Inc: 2% (or 0.12 billion searches)
Other smaller search engines

Note:

Data from comScore: Top Search Properties in Japan
Total number of searches in Japan excludes searches from public computers such as internet cafes
Google number include searches done on YouTube

7. Search Engine Market Share in Korea

Naver.cim site: 77%
Daum.net site: 10.8%
Yahoo site: 4.4%
Google site: 1.7%

Data from KoreanClick, an Internet market research company

8. Search Engine Market Share in Hong Kong

Again, there is no data form Hitwise, comScore available for public. However, from my experience of running PPC campaigns over there, the marketshare for Yahoo is about 80% and Google is less than 15%

9. Search Engine Market Share in China 2008

Baidu sites: 63.4% to 65.8%
Google sites: 22%

Data from market analysis firms: China IntelliConsulting Coporation and Analysys International

10. Search Engine Market Share in India in June 2008

Google sites: 81.4% (1.0111 billion searches out of 1.242 billion searches during June 2008)
Yahoo sites: 9.4% (117 billion searches)
Ask Network: 1.9%
Other smaller search engines

Data from comScore: Top search properties in India June 2008

11. Search Engine Market Share in Australia in Oct 2008

Google sites: 90.57%
Live.com (Microsoft sites): 3.83%
Yahoo sites: 2.30%

Data from Hitwise - Leading Search Engine in Australia Oct 2008

12. Search Engine Market Share in Singapore Oct 2008

Google Sites: 69.75%
Yahoo sites: 23.53%

Data from Hitwise - Leading Search Engine in Singapore

13. Search Engine Market Share in MY, TH, VN, PH, ID

Well there are no reliable sources to verify the exact percentage for each country. My personal understanding of each market is as below

Vietnam: Google leads with more than 90% of the market share
Thailand: same situation, Google's search market share should be more than 90%
MY, PH and Indonesia: Google should have at least 50% of the search market share

14. Asia Pacific Search Overview

First of all, according to comScore, Asia Pacific region has the largest unique searchers and largest volume of search queries in the world (out of 5 regions reported by comScore):
There were 29 billion searches conducted in Sept 2008 and this number is growing, which shows us the enormous potential for search engine marketing.
This number for Jul 2008 and April 2008 were 27.059 billion and 22.363 billion respectively.

Below are the graphs representing searches conducted in some countries in Asia Pacific from April to Sept

We saw the most increase from China and Australia. Most of other countries, the search volume stays relatively the same.

Country	Searches (Millions) in April	Searches (Millions) in July	Searches (Millions) in Sept
China	6,233	10994	12758
Japan	6160	6162	5879
Korea	2139	2101	2303
India	1209	1192	1169
Australia	851	855	977
Taiwan	698	748	618
Malaysia	385	431	405
Hong Kong	256	228	199
Singapore	170	152	171
New Zealand	146	136	135

Above is the same information but in absolute values.

Those people who search online, they conducted on average 84.7 searches per person in September 2008

Country	Searches per Searcher in April	Searches per Searcher in July	Searches per Searcher in Sept
China	75	76.7	85.5
Japan	102.6	100.8	96.2
Korea	103.5	102.8	109.3
India	55.4	51	51
Australia	97.7	102	114.6
Taiwan	70.7	74.8	63.5
Malaysia	54.3	64.2	65.2
Hong Kong	88.1	81	71.8
Singapore	100.9	91.2	105.6
New Zealand	88.5	87.2	90.1

Singapore, Australia and Korea lead the way in terms of searches per searcher with more than 100 searches per searcher per month or at least 3 per day. This shows that the savvy audience increasingly depends on search for their daily activities.

In conclusion, the use of search engine is becoming an inseparable part of daily urban life. No matter where you are, people use Search Engines.
The opportunity for Search Engine Marketing in Asia Pacific region is enormous with its huge audience (online internet users) and the volume of searches conducted.
The ball is now on advertisers' court to see how they can take advantage of this opportunity to reach out to an ever increasing audience who's constantly looking for information online using Search Engines.