Internet Planning – The Brand Manager’s Guide

So the super-boss has approved the idea of advertising online, and your agency’s presented you with their internet marketing plan.

How can you understand and evaluate it?
Obviously, you need to be able to understand what they’re talking about; so, just open the plan / presentation, and open up www.marketingterms.com. The first link on the page is a dictionary of internet terms; and all the stuff like impressions, page views, frequency caps, CPMs, clickthrough rates, will stop looking like IIT Chemistry and start looking like a better CV and a bigger bonus.

Don’t panic; just go through the presentation, looking up each word you don’t get, and it will make sense. If there’s a term you can’t find, just google it.

Once you’ve finished this, you’re through step one – understanding what is being said. Now you won’t be getting confused with the language and jargon. You’re ready for the next step – after understanding what they said, you’ll need to know why they said it.

In other words – evaluation.
How do you say if the sites they chose are good, bad, or any better than what you thought?

Start with Alexa (www.alexa.com). Alexa works on a sampling principle – it has a toolbar that you can choose to install, and this keeps a track of all sites you visit and updates it’s central database. Don’t worry, it’s anonymous and harmless.

Go to the traffic rankings section, at the top of the page. This lets you see what are the most popular sites, global, country-wise, and language-wise, and you can enter any site URL and get it’s traffic details. The details will include stuff like:

• Rankings – how popular is this site amongst all those 10,000+ Alexa toolbar-users.
• Page view counts – how many pages on an average are seen by each person while on that site
• Reach – How many per million visit this site, and
• Related links - Other similar sites.

With this, you can take a call on comparing two sites; say, if your agency suggested site X, but you think site Y is better, you can actually see the difference. Page view count will tell you what properties are good; low page views means you should look at home pages only, and higher ones means more people are exploring the site’s inside pages. And the comparison feature at the bottom of each graph gives you professional, neat little graphs for your presentations.

I recommend installing the toolbar. It gives the rank of each site you’re on, a list of similar sites, with all other info available at a click.

So, you’re on your way to becoming an expert on websites. What about searches?
Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) is a quick way to see what the world is searching for. Just type in the word you’re curious about – your brand, product, category, service, etc – and get an overview of where the searches are happening for that word. You can do a comparison with your competition by separating with commas, and see the results by country / city / language, and by month / year.

Unfortunately, this is only a relative graph; you can’t see the exact number of searches, but it’s good for comparisons.

Where can you use this?

A higher search volume for anything in a particular region will show that people there want it but don’t know where to get it… so, new markets. Or which brand is creating a bigger buzz, prompting people to search for it. Or who’s more popular.

When you have some time to spare, just open up these sites and explore. It’s the best way to find out, and you might find some fascinating results.

And it makes a great conversation topic during the breaks, too! For instance – did you know that Delhi is the only place in India where Garfield is more popular than Dilbert? Find anything interesting like this about your brand?