Digital Marketing Vietnam

Presidential campaigns in the US are much different from the last election with much ad dollars spending online. Live debate from CNN is not a decisive option in the campaign manager’s plan. US citizens could watch candidates’ promise on YouTube and other video sites instead of turning on TV while still interact with others. According to Federal Election Commission, Obama team spent more than 70 percent of online budget to Google paid search. A bit money was placed directly into general news site with CPM-based display ads. Over 90 percent is for search marketing with Yahoo, Right Media, Microsoft after Google’ lion share. It seems that the Internet savvy teams of the Presidential Candidates understand the power of SEM better than management of many US corporates. Back to Vietnam, it is a good opportunity for local companies to learn using this new powerful weapon in competition with foreign corporations. With limited budget Vietnamese companies could not burn costly dollars on traditional media that will not bring good ROI. Spending online wisely could put you ahead of the game.

Web metrics provider Alexa just announced the New Alexa Rankings with new algorithms that pushed most of Vietnamese websites’ ranking down overnight. In fact it is a good news for marketers in Vietnam since Vietnamese online publishers used to set Alexa ranking as a norm of traffic measurement and monetization. Last year a news portal in Vietnam even posted a headline saying VnExpress in Global Top 100 Websites and near the line of CNN.com and BBC Newsline. Ironically it said Alexa was the only independent and objective ranking system of web metrics worldwide. Actually many international marketers and advertisers had left Alexa for other web metrics/analytics service such as comScore, Hitwise, Compete and Nielsen//NetRatings. Among the fierce competition, comScore had became the leader with reports can send Google’ shares down significantly.

Since online advertising is emerging as an important piece of media and branding communication strategy of marketers in Vietnam, the need for more accurate web metrics is so strong and a pretty room for web analytics services. AC Nielsen Vietnam can catch up the opportunity monitoring online media landscape with its acquired services such as NetRatings, BuzzMetrics while TNS dominates old media tracking.

What about Vietnamese online publishers? Be prepared to be more transparent and look into other measurements beyond traffics such as SEO, SEM, engagement, behavioral advertising.