AdWords Display Network, CPM & Our Branding Campaign

As we mentioned in the previous blog post, we have launched an aggressive, strategic branding campaign for Gnosis Arts. This has mainly been a combination of PR and AdWords content network advertising - with a small portion of the funds allocated towards old-fashioned search PPC advertising. The campaign has been underway for about 2 weeks. We want to report on the progress of the campaign.

We have 3 different branding campaigns going, corresponding to three of our brands: Microtank, our new weekly news column (http://gnos.tk/microtank); the Gnosis Arts Community Intranet (http://gnosisarts.com/home/Intranet); and our YMR scholarship program, which gives entrepreneurship grants to microbusiness owners (http://gnos.tk/ymrsp)

For Microtank and the Intranet, we chose to run large display ads on the display content network only. These ads are also only running on a CPM basis, not CPC. For the YMR program, we started out the same, but switched to a more traditional text ad format. The YMR campaign is running on the search network only.

We chose the search network for the YMR scholarship because it is the only one of our brands that actually is based on a performance model. Through this program we hope to generate actual scholarship applications via a registration form. Therefore, it seemed to make more sense to choose a CPC model for this one.

The Microtank and Intranet ads are running on an automatic bid, CPM model. We chose this approach for these two brands for a few reasons. One, we wanted to limit the spend on these ads due to budgetary restrictions. Second, we want the ads to be viewed more so than clicked. So, we didn't want to pay for clicks, but rather a guaranteed number of impressions.

Third, our strategy for these two campaigns is more of a mind-share strategy. We want these brands to possess "front of mind" status to our target market. In line with this, we are pruning the sites on which these ads run; we want to target sites that our target market - small PR firms and small marketing firms - frequent. And, we want sites that have loyal, repeat visitors. We want the ads to be shown to the same demographic, over and over, until the brand "seeps in", if you will. We are taking great care in choosing the site psycographics and demographics, of the websites these ads run on.

*Results
Of course, 2 weeks is too early to really make any conclusive decisions. As we're wanting to capture more mind share, we want to measure any increases in brand name mentions in Google searches. We also want to generated new, previously unsearched for, brand name searches. So we are closely monitoring our analytics for this. Ideally, we want to be able to attribute these brand mentions to the brand campaigns.

The YMR campaign has already generated 1 lead. One lead in one week isn't great, but it isn't terrible, either. We've had to wait much longer in other ad campaigns, so we're hopeful. It also demonstrates that there is definitely some demand for this service.

Both Microtank and the Intranet have received 2 or 3 clicks. The impressions they are receiving are steady and relatively predictable. It is still, however, too early to tell, as we have much more site pruning to do. There do appear to be a few more brand-related Google searches that didn't exist previously. So, this is a good sign that brand awareness is happening already.

(For a more in depth discussion on the ideas behind this branding strategy, visit http://gnos.tk/branding)

Is Branding Simply A Matter of Money?

How do you promote your brand(s), service mark(s) or trademark(s) on the Internet? Does your business even have a branding strategy, or do you solely focus on generating clients, sales and revenue? What are the best branding techniques; and, perhaps more importantly, does successful branding simply boil down to a matter of money?

We have noticed that our brand name - Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications - is growing in awareness on the Web. Just today, I was looking at some of my website analytics, and I noticed a small but steady stream of Web searchers are searching for our business name in the search engines. This is very encouraging, especially as a business which has only been in existence a little over two years. It demonstrates that our Internet marketing strategies actually do work.

Nevertheless, an enormous time, money and labor investment has gone into these results since our inception. What we want to know specifically is this: Is effective branding merely a function of advertising spend? Put another way, can a business - particularly a small business just starting out - effectively promote their brand virally throughout the Internet without making a significant monetary investment?

Traditional Branding Theory

Traditional marketing theory suggests that the main way to establish and grow a brand presene is through impression-based advertising. Impression-based advertising means basically bombarding your target market with your logos, slogans, products and services repeatedly and over a long period of time in the hopes that the ads will create a lasting (subconscious) impression on the psyche of its viewers. The theory, which has a pedigree in social psychological circles, argues that, at some point, the public will begin to connect your brand ideation to conscious thoughts of value, worthy, quality or importance. In this way, when they do get ready to purchase a product or service in your niche, they will think of yours.

Traditional Branding in the Web 2.0 Era

In today's Internet driven economy, traditional branding strategy still exists. But it has a new name: It's called CPM advertising ("CPM" stands for "Cost Per Mil"). In this type of advertising scheme, the advertiser pays for 1000 impressions - that is, 1000 showings of his or her ad. This is contrasted with Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), in which you pay only when a vewier clicks on your ad.

This distinction isn't so important for the purpose of this blog post, except to highlight the point: Branding on the Internet as elsewhere, no matter how you look at it, costs money.

There's probably scant chance that your brand will proliferate virally throughout significant nodes of Cyberspace if you don't pay for it. The benefit of CPM advertising is you can calculate how much you have to spend to get, say, one million impressions. The downside: It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of CPM from an ROI standpoint. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to justify CPM advertising to an advertising or marketing department.

One Way to Measure CPM Advertising ROI

One way to measure the effectiveness of a branding campaign (albeit a not-so-very scientific way) is to first count the number of times your brand name is searched for prior to the start of an impression-based ad campaign, and then measure the change in this number after the campaign ends (if any). Of course, to do this you will first have to have some good analytic tools or software running for a significant amount of time prior to starting the campaign. As always, best practices in Internet marketing and SEO require the collection of data and responding to that data over a longer term.

And of course there will be confounding factors, for it is unlikely that your CPM advertising will be the only thing you do in terms of marketing your website. This will make it virtually impossible to do any A/B testing or establish any control groups, unless you are willing to implement the exact same SEM tactics on both the test group and the control group. This duplication of marketing efforts will require much more time and money than is usually available to a marketing department.

If your business or organization needs marketing research or branding strategy, please contact one of our SEO consultants.