Offer extensions allow advertisers to extend their Google search ads with redeemable offers including coupons, discounts, rebates and more. This ad extension engages customers by delivering valuable offers that are relevant to what consumers are searching for.
With this new ad extension, you can provide customers with two different redemption options:
Offer ads help advertisers manage two key challenges concerning online offers:
To help with these challenges, offer extensions provide a new way to distribute offers online in a highly targeted fashion. In addition to engaging customers, they allow advertisers to measure offer performance by tracking metrics like impressions, clicks, number of offers printed, saved and emailed, as well as online conversions. Offer extensions complement your existing campaigns to help you increase current customer loyalty and attract new customers.
Note: Still in Beta, not released worldwide as of yet, just a limited release per Google.
Source: Google
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just got back from the recent iMedia Brand Summit in not so sunny Florida – where the whole fried snapper is still delectable – good, hearty discussions flow – smart, engaged digital marketers meet – and a productive time is had by all.
iMedia events remain one of my favorites to attend – and that is not only because they named Netplus, a top 25 agency nor because i met my husband there – but because they never fail to add value on the surface and beneath. I learn a alot – and while some it is from the content – most of it is from talking and sharing with others. Underneath the surface of the sessions, the breakouts, the dinners and so forth – you get to know what is really going on – what folks are struggling with – what really matters to them – what they ultimately value. This allows me to come back home, share these insights with our team – to keep moving our practice forward and add value where it really matters.
So underneath all the talk from the big brands – there is still a struggle for resources – a need, a hunger for attainable programs that are strategically sound, conceived, produced and executed to drive measurable value. There was also a palatable thread of frustration over cocktails for defining clear roles among agencies – particularly because most brands work with multiple agencies. Land grabs for digital, particularly social appear common – great ideas may come from anywhere – what do you do with that – particularly if it is not the lead agency – how do you keep everyone playing nice – working towards mutual goals – maximize their talents and experience – and not piss off or upset anyone – on the brand or agency side! Brands are still figuring out how to define clear roles of engagement and create shared forums for effective brainstorming, planning and program management. This is certainly a work in progress!
And I readily admit that outside of seeing and hanging out with many of my fav colleagues, one of my favorite things about the iMedia brand summits are the one:one match-ups. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these – they are 10 minute meetings where you make an appointment (and they have to accept) with marketers/brands you want to meet with. I love connecting with brand marketers, discussing the industry, their challenges and sharing our work. While there isn’t always a match for our services - The feedback to our team’s hard work, talent and results is extremely rewarding and validating. And if I can bring back a new challenge, project, great brand to work with – all the better. We are always looking for new opportunities to bring it on!
’til next time my friends.
We’re excited to announce that The Philadelphia Business Journal has named us as a Social Media Star for 2012. While recognizing our work with the Black & Decker brand, this award is representative of our proven integrated approach.
The power of Social Media is ubiquitous. Our full service capabilities and business focus have enabled us to effectively integrate social across our programs, extending value, engagement and driving measurable results.
As seen in these programs, we often harness a number of tools and tactics including Facebook Apps and Advertising, Gaming Design and Development, Email, Display Media, Blogger Outreach, and Community Management to engage consumers in meaningful ways. The work being recognized as part of this award is also published as case studies in our portfolio:
These programs are a real-world example of the level of engagement and results that can be achieved with set objectives, smart planning, creative solutions and a focus on customers.
Thank you to the Philadelphia Business Journal for selecting us and Black & Decker, and congratulations to the other winners!
The Netplus Black & Decker Team
From Left to Right:
Dan Bell, Sr. Digital & Game Designer
Todd Carpenter, Digital Designer
Jim DelPizzo, Director of Technology
John Bell, Sr. Digital & Game Designer
Sean Flanagan, Sr. Art Director
John Shanley, Creative Director
Liz Kantner, Social Media Associate
Joe Edelman, Director of Project Management
Jesse Rice, Programmer
Roman Zubarev, Social Media Manager
Denise Zimmerman, Chief Strategy Officer
Meridith Oram, Sr. Client Service Manager (not pictured)
Originally published on
Call them advocates, evangelists, ambassadors, or something else, these vocal consumers are perhaps the most compelling reason that brands invest in social media. Finding that small percentage of the population that loves your product, service, or brand; is inclined to talk about it within their various social channels; and has some influence online is no mean trick. When you do find them, you want to cultivate them and equip them fully to do what they do best – talk you up! In order to get them talking, you have to give them something to talk about.
What techniques do you use to identify or activate your brand ambassadors?
When it comes to planning, building and running display campaigns, we have done great things for our clients. Things such as doubling site traffic and driving additional revenue by triple digit percentages are not unheard of and what we strive for. But how do we do this? Well I wish I could say ‘easy street…like this’ but it isn’t. We aggressively test and optimize for the highest converting, most efficient creative, ad size, frequency cap, network and numerous other levers and stay up to date on the latest trends in the industry…we push our campaigns to the limit, squeezing every dollar and percent of efficiency out of them.
But we realize that display doesn’t work for everyone and decide during the planning process if it makes sense. But how do we know? How do you know? What is the best way to know? Well you need to identify at the very heart of your business if running a display program will not only benefit you but even just make sense. Below I lay out some questions to ask yourself to help you identify if display is right for you.
Who is it for? – Instead of thinking about what type of business you run (retailer, finance, etc) consider if you have a website. Mostly any business will benefit from display when building an online presence. So if your business needs the online presence, then display will surely help you to expand your reach of customers.
What do you want to accomplish? – Display media makes sense for you if you want to build your brand’s awareness, drive more visitors to your site, increase sales and/or boost your overall marketing campaigns (display has been shown to benefit other digital efforts, such as paid search). With a goal in mind you can determine if display would be an integral part of your overall digital strategy.
Where are your customers? – While it might be entertaining to know that your customer hangs out with a polar bear club, I am referring to whether or not they spend time surfing the internet and are involved in any type of digital communities (think Facebook, blogs, forums). If so, display if a perfect way to not only bring them to your website but also reengage them with retargeting (retargeting is a display program in which ads are shown to customers who visited your site but may not have converted for whatever reason…this type of program is very effective).
When do you need results? – While traditional media no doubt produces results, you generally need a large budget and have to wait longer than desired to get results back and optimize. Display advertising can be measured and optimized in almost real time all while seeing results immediately. This gives great flexibility in knowing where to push your budget.
So to sum up, if you are looking for increased digital presence, to build your business’ exposure and want measurable and immediate results display can be a huge benefit to your marketing plan. Of course there are many other parts to planning your strategy and what course of action to take but asking these four questions can help you decide if you should begin the conversation.
Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO and many financial institutions and investors are wondering how Facebook plans to justify that price. Luckily Facebook has answered the question already with ad targeting by in app behavior. This new feature was announced last year at F8 and has been quietly integrating itself into Facebook over the past few months through the open graph API as the Action Spec feature in the new Ad API. This ad system will allow advertisers to target users based on their application specific actions, such as listening, reading, watching or playing, depending on what each application allows.
The ad system is still in beta, and advertisers with apps that take advantage of the new open graph api still need to wait for their app actions to be approved. Since the launch of the original 3 Facebook actions “read”, “listened”, and “watched” Facebook has added over 60 official sites and applications with custom actions. In the coming months, it’s expected Facebook will approve an exponential amount of new apps to use official actions for ad targeting.
This will undoubtedly increase the ROI of Facebook ads and allow Facebook to increase its cost per click and bring in more revenue to justify its initial IPO price. Facebook is looking to become as big as Google with its ad system, and definitely has the ability to do so with all of the personal data it collects from every user. Its a win-win-win situation: Facebook generates more revenue, advertisers can reach their target audience more effectively, and users will have more relevant ads related to their interests.
Originally published on
There is nothing like experience to teach you some hard lessons. After numerous, successful social media launches, campaigns, and sweepstakes, our team has accumulated our share of well-earned bruises and scrapes. We have tried to learn from our experiences in order to alleviate some of the pain that can result and also to catalog a growing understanding of the best practices that drive brand results. Here are some of our social media life lessons.
Your clients (internal or external) are new to this and will react in predictable ways. They will be watching the pages intently, almost hourly, and may not know how to interpret what they see. They will expect daily or more frequent updates and reports on any metrics that they can’t see, and they will need guidance. Is this a good response? Average? Poor? Be prepared in advance with a schedule of reporting that recognizes the need, particularly at launch, for regular updates and provide them with context on the results. Have a glossary of terms available to make your jargon understandable. Better yet, don’t use jargon.
Plan for the impact of social media across channels. A social effort touches the website, the mobile experience, and most of the other social spaces. The strategy, budget, timeline, creative, and technology all need to be prepped in advance for those impacts. Don’t forget to adjust your offline and digital media efforts to help support your social campaigns. Get a link and a line of copy into the print ad or FSI or even as a closing frame of the TV ad or radio spot. Produce new search ads and banner ads and rotate them into the digital media campaigns. Track the results.
Caution – good ideas tend to grow. It’s critical to have the social media team and, in particular, the community managers who will be the face of the effort involved in the campaign strategy and formation. Have them map out all the touch points and implications of your core idea in advance of sign off to make sure you have accounted for all the impacts. It’s very tough to resist the impulse to enhance or connect additional populations or channels mid-build when you could “just” add this one element to the campaign. That’s how budgets are blown and unexpected consequences occur.
The technology will crack – just a little. Plan for it. Facebook will change something mid-campaign and consumers will mysteriously revert back to IE6 just to vex you. Be prepared to troubleshoot on an almost daily basis and think about posting the desired browsers and other environments that you built your app to support. Have your servers prepared for a ridiculous amount of traffic; more than you could ever hope for in your wildest dreams. Server capacity is cheap. Watching a promotion go down – even for a half hour – when response overwhelms the technology is a disheartening event.
Plan for the end of campaign before you launch. Does that app need to come down at midnight? Do you have the copy and graphics ready to transition? Did you change the corresponding images and copy on the website? Most importantly, how do you plan to continue to engage with your audience now that you have them fired up? Listening and collecting feedback will help you plan for what’s next and apply your learnings as you move forward.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you’re running a contest or sweeps, plan for more than just one grand prize winner with some instant wins, daily or weekly wins, or giveaways to spread the wealth and keep people engaged. If you have instant wins, make them something that has perceived value even if it’s small. Digital downloads, screensavers, and ringtones may not fit the bill unless you have a truly passionate fan base or it’s an entertainment brand.
Prepare everyone for the Negative Nellies. Clients struggle with a proportional response when they see some cranky person making negative comments about the brand, promotion, or campaign in the middle of their tightly planned social campaign. There will always be that one, probably several or more cranky souls if you have sufficient scale. Prepare clients in advance for this eventuality and let them know how you plan to handle the situation. Often other members of the community will begin to police and control the negative elements and, if at all possible, you should let them.
Be careful with absolute dates. Don’t promise to announce something or do something on day X if you don’t have 100 percent control of the timing. Winners of promotions, for example, often have a few days or a week to respond to notification in the rules. If they don’t check their email or mistyped it in your form, you might need some extra time to get in touch with them or disqualify and replace them. In the meantime, your audience may be getting antsy waiting to find out who won. Awwkward…
Not all social media participants are created equal. If you’re running a sweeps, you’re going to draw some consumers who don’t care about your brand, may unlike you shortly after you announce the winners, and who won’t engage fully or at all with the community. To the extent that you are building a remarketing database, acknowledge and note those consumers who came to your brand through different doors so that you can create relevant messaging and promotions for them down the line.
Get your language squared away up front. If you play in a regulated industry or have other legal concerns, get clearance in advance for specific language you can use, but also ask for general guidelines that allow you to respond quickly in the unscripted world of social media. You simply won’t have time to play phone tag with the legal team before you post responses. Even if yours isn’t a legal concern, it’s still a good idea to have some sample language vetted by the key stakeholders to make sure everyone has the same idea on messaging and voice. This allows your community managers the autonomy they need to react and respond.
Social media is a quickly evolving space, and consumers, vendors, partners, and brands are all learning and adjusting together. What lessons has social media taught you?
I’m a big fan of wartime propaganda posters. Like the most effective brand posts in our social feeds, these messages were always short and bold. Aaron Wood, the clever artist behind justonescarf design recently merged popular social channels and propaganda to create a series of beautiful posters that entertain and jokingly inspire.
Take a look at my favorites below and be sure to visit Aaron’s Etsy store for a wider selection and to order prints.
Social extensions make it possible to link your Google+ Page to your AdWords campaigns, so that all your +1s – from your page, your website, ads and search – will get tallied together.
Consumers will be able to see all the recommendations your business has received, whether they are looking at an ad, a search result or your Google+ Page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day.
NETPLUS TWEETS 
BLOG
Insights, thoughts and notes
PUBLISHED
Articles and presentations
NEWS
Company happenings
625 Ridge Pike, Suite E 200
Conshohocken, PA 19428
t 888-758-7468
hello@thinknetplus.com
Client Login
Careers
© 2012 Netplus Marketing, Inc.
All rights reserved.
