How Internet marketers stole Christmas: Retargeted ads can give away gift ideas

The web is a powerful tool for researching and buying the perfect present. But what happens when your child sees a banner ad for the toy that will be under the tree in a few days, or the camera you plan to give your husband shows up on your shared Amazon account? The internet can spoil holiday gift surprises for those who share devices.

Dax Hamman knows all too well how ads can reveal too much. About a year ago, he shopped for engagement rings on the laptop he shared with his now-fiancé. "My fiancé saw rings all over my laptop, very much spoiling the surprise," said Hamman, chief product officer at Chango, a retargeting firm that works with more than 100 of the top 500 internet retailers.

Retargeted ads -- ads that target consumers based on their online history -- have the loosest lips when it comes to gift ideas.

"I passionately believe people show too many retargeted ads," he said, suggesting advertisers stop showing product ads after a purchase is completed. "[Retailers] want to move away from this annoyance of what can almost be referred to as digital stalking."

Glenn Fishback, head of global display at Ebay Enterprise, which does retargeting and manages the e-commerce platform Magento, recommends that retailers stop pushing product ads to consumers 24 hours after they search for a product. This helps maintain the element of surprise, but that's not the main motivation, he said. Consumers are just less likely to convert then.

"Retargeting is like post-it notes; it's that reminder," he said. "What we don't want to do is create wallpaper."

From a technical perspective, it's easy to identify items as gifts and avoid retargeting them, said Hamman. But products aren't always flagged that way on the retailer side.

And it's not a top priority for the marketers that give retargeting firms their cues. "It rarely comes up that a client would be thinking about [protecting gift ideas] when it comes to their top-of-mind marketing behavior," said Mollie Spilman, chief revenue officer at Criteo, a retargeting firm.

Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, also blows the whistle on gift ideas. There are benefits to shared accounts, like access to free shipping if you have Amazon Prime. But it leaves your order history out for anyone sharing your device to see. The same is true for other online retailers.

"They think of you as one identity and everything you do gets added into this one notion of identity," said Dave Vronay, CEO and co-founder of Heard, an anonymous social-exchange platform. He said Netflix is an example of how retailers could create different profiles to get over this hurdle. The streaming service allows users to create unique profiles under one account.

Some say it's not the internet's responsibility to keep your secrets. There are many ways to ruin surprises when it comes to gifts, said Spilman, recalling how she timed her parents shopping trips to guess which stores they went to and checked the closets for presents. "Technology has made it a lot easier, but people are savvy enough to know how to keep things private, just as you keep your personal financial information private."

Of course, there's a difference between hunting for a gift and it popping up when you open a web browser.

For now, it falls on consumers to keep their gift ideas under wraps. And they're getting craftier to keep their secrets -- creating separate Amazon accounts to hide their purchase history, searching for items they have no intention of buying to game the system and fool their gift recipients, or shopping in private browsing mode. Smartphones and tablets are also more private shopping platform, retargeting firms say. They're more customizable, like the Android 5 tablet that allows for multiple accounts, and are shared less often.

"If you're really are looking to be as secretive as possible, you should use your own device," said Spilman.

Article by By Ashley Rodriguez, Advertising Age

Infographic: Role of Mobile across Gender and Generations

Retargeting, as successful as it is, can discourage some customers

Over half (55%) of consumers are put off buying products or services if they see the same ad online multiple times, according to a study by InSkin Media and RAPP Media that surveyed over 1,600 people aged 20 to 60.

Only 10% of consumers are more likely to buy something after seeing the same ad served repeatedly because of their previous web surfing behaviour (known as retargeting). 

People are nearly four times more likely to be encouraged than discouraged to buy something if they see a relevant ad during their research on it. However, as an ad is seen up to five times, it becomes ‘annoying’ and ‘intrusive’. Once it hits 10 times, ‘angry’ becomes the dominant reaction (see chart below).

In contrast to the positivity for a relevant ad being seen during research, one seen after research is over is 15% more likely to discourage than encourage a purchase.

• If seen after the product is purchased, its nearly four times more likely to discourage future purchases.
• Ads seen multiple times are 40% more likely to be received positively if they’re served on a website related to the ad content (e.g. a hotel ad appearing on a holiday website).  
• Ads served on unrelated sites are over 11 times more likely to discourage than encourage a purchase. 
• The quality of a site also has a big impact on how advertising is perceived; people are 37% more likely to click on an ad if it’s on a site they trust.
• Almost one in four (23%) people are unaware that advertisers collect personal information to serve relevant ads.

Google AdWords 2014 - Ad Formats & Why Quality & User Experience are Key (By Tamara Gotlib)

How important is your Quality Score? Does it make that big an impact on campaign success? If you’re willing to place the highest bid in the AdWords Auction, does the Quality Score matter so much? These are some of the questions you may be asking as your PPC campaign rolls out, and the answers may surprise you.

The Quality Score, 2014: The Additional Quality Component: So what really matters when it comes to Ad Quality?

According to the recent whitepaper released by Google, “Settling the (Quality) Score”, your Quality Score is crucial to the success of your campaign. But don’t let the score run your campaign; use it as a guide for current performance, and an indicator for how to improve.

To refresh, the Quality Score you see in your account is presented as a general diagnostic tool of your overall performance during the AdWords Auction.

The three components of your Quality Score are:

1. Expected Click Through Rate (CTR): How likely it is that the user will click on your ad.
2. Ad Relevance: how well your keywords match the user’s search query.
3. Landing Page Experience: how relevant and easy to use the landing page is for users.

The Additional Quality Component

In general, the overall AdRank is calculated as the Quality Score multiplied by your maximum Cost Per Click (e.g. “bid”). However, in Google’s recent video release “Insights on the AdWords Auction”, we also learn the importance of Ad Formats to the AdRank Calculation. Ad Formats are enhancements attached to regular display ads that enable the advertiser to display more engaging information about their company. Giving users more relevant information means they are more likely to click on your ad.

Examples include:

• Sitelink Extensions
• Location Extensions
• Social Annotations (endorsements from Google+ followers)

The reason Google now incorporates Ad Formats into its AdRank calculations is clear. Just as Expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience all affect user experience, so do Ad Formats.

Even with the addition of this fourth component, it does not weaken the importance and influence the other components have on your Quality Score. For example: Your ad displays the keywords ‘Online international money transfer’ as well as your phone number for direct queries. Perfect! Just what the user was searching for. But when they click through to your site, they are taken to a page about international investment opportunities, not money transfers. This equals dissatisfied user. Even though your ad featured Ad Formats and your CTR and Ad Relevance were above average, your overall Quality Score will suffer as a result of below average Landing Page Experience.

This is where you can take advantage of the Quality Score as an indicator for how to improve. And the sooner you improve the better, as Google uses real time evaluations of the 3 components, not your actual Quality Score, during the AdWords Auction.

Furthermore, according to the AdRank equation, the better your quality score, the lower your Cost Per Click (CPC) bid needs to be to reach the top ranking. The equation also works in reverse. Even if you are willing to bid the highest CPC, a low quality score means your ad is less likely to rank well against others.

So what really matters when it comes to Ad Quality?

Google has also shared some key pointers on what does and does not matter when it comes to Ad Quality. For example, the user’s device (mobile, laptop, tablet etc) is taken into account when calculating quality. Even though Google does not require a different site for each device, it is crucial that the site is transparent and easy to use no matter the device. There is nothing more dissatisfying than browsing on a website on your mobile phone and finding that the exact line of information you want is being covered by a picture because the site hasn’t been optimized for a mobile device. Another important point is that relevance to the user’s intentions and needs really does matter. Ads and landing pages need to match the user’s search query. Following this, when Google measures new keywords, it takes into account the quality of related ads and landing pages. So it is always worthwhile to invest further on growing your coverage of relevant searches, especially when you know there is potential for high quality ads.

According to Google, the factors that don’t really affect ad quality (and therefore don’t ‘matter’) are those that don’t affect user experience. These include the other networks where your ad is running (traffic from other networks isn’t included in the CTR calculation for google.com) and the position of your ad on the page (expected CTR is normalized depending where the ad is on the page). Restructuring campaign names or the number of ad groups will not affect the Quality Score either, but be careful when moving a keyword to a new ad group that has new text as this may alter user experience and affect the Quality Score.

Together with Google’s latest quality recommendations, Ad Formats have refocused our attention on the importance of user experience. And it is enhanced user experience, not just your bid, which Google is pushing for.

This article is by Tamara Gotlib, at Seperia Digital Marketing. It was first published here

Adblocking on the rise

A study by PageFair has found a 69% increase in adblock users in the last year.

• The number now stands at approximately 144m active adblock users (4.9% of all internet users).
• 27.6% of internet users polled in the US claim that they employ adblock software when browsing.
• The demographic in the US most likely to use the software is 18-29 year olds (41%).

A beacon of hope for advertisers, more than 60% of adblockers polled expressed some receptiveness to viewing text, still-image, and skippable pre-roll ads.

Global ad spend growth

Global ad spend growth is forecast at 5% in 2014 and 2015 by Carat, the media network.

There has been strong performance in the US and UK, with Western Europe returning to positive growth.

• The 5% forecast is based on data received from 59 markets across the Americas, Asia Pacific and EMEA.
• Levels of advertising spend in North America are expected to exceed the pre-recession peak in 2007 for the first time by the end of 2014.
• Western Europe has seen two years of decline but is set see positive growth of 2.7% in 2014, driven by the UK advertising market forecast of +7.5% this year.
• Digital will increase its total share of spend, reaching 20.5% in 2014 and 22.6% in 2015

Google Analytics App Finally Comes To The iPhone

Google has released its official Google Analytics app for iPhone, now available for download in the app store.

The app is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, though is optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 6.0 or later. An Android version of the Google Analytics app has been available for a couple of years now.

The app launches with a real-time view of the number of visitors on your site followed by Audience numbers from the time frame selected.

It’s easy to drill in to get more data by tapping on each card on the screen — such as Real-Time or Audience in the screenshot above. Tapping the bar icon in the upper left corner opens the options that are available in the left hand menu in the web version of Analytics. Users can choose to drill into Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Segment filtering is also easy, by tapping the circle with a plus sign icon in the upper right corner. When a segment is selected, the icon turns orange. You cannot use custom segments in the app or do anything custom at all really. This is just the basics, but it’s clean and easy to use.

The Top Online Marketing Trends for 2014

The Internet has drastically altered the way in which information is shared, and has had a profound impact on marketing. Over the past few years, there has been more of a shift toward inbound techniques, while many outbound tactics have become antiquated. More businesses are finding success publishing original content rather than embedding advertisements within external content, because of the additional benefits these tactics offer, such as branding and audience growth.

With these trends in mind, let’s discuss my predictions for the top online marketing trends of 2014.

1.      Content Marketing Will be Bigger Than Ever

One of the main ways that companies are establishing authority and gaining trust with consumers is by consistently creating valuable content through a variety of channels. This typically involves relevant industry information that provides insight or entertainment to an audience. Doing so allows a company to steadily build rapport with its demographic and develop a loyal following. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the top B2B content marketing strategies are social media, articles on a business’s website, eNewsletters, case studies, videos and articles on other websites.

By using one or more of these channels, businesses are able to build a positive reputation within their industry. This trend suggests that marketing to the masses through techniques like television ads and radio ads are becoming less effective. Instead, it’s better to concentrate on inbound marketing, by producing valuable, engaging content designed for a specific audience.

2.      Social Media Marketing Will Require More Diversity

Just a few years ago, businesses were limited with regard to the social media networks they could implement into their marketing campaigns, with the biggies including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Now, it seems like new social media sites are appearing all the time. While some never really get off the ground, others like Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr and Instagram have surged in popularity and have provided businesses with a plethora of new options that allow them to produce engaging content in a variety of media forms and build their audiences across more channels than ever before.

Consequently, it has become common for businesses to branch out and experiment with multiple networks with the aim of reaching the maximum amount of consumers. This diversification seems to prove fruitful for many companies because it often builds brand equity by making it easier for consumers to recognize a particular brand.

3.      Image-Centric Content Will Rule

As consumers are hit with an increasing number of advertisements, it’s becoming more important to make content easily and quickly digestible. If you look at the social media sites I mentioned previously that are on the rise, three of the four have a common characteristic…they place an emphasis on images. The rapid rise to success of Buzzfeed and Pinterest are testaments to the power and viral potential of image-based content.

Successful blog posts that receive the most social shares also usually have a common characteristic: they pepper in some well-placed pictures to break content up and emphasize certain points. Another example is infographics, which combine images with a minimal amount of text to explain a topic and provide statistical information or data from research studies.

While I doubt that traditional text-based content will ever completely go out of style, it’s pretty clear that incorporating images is beneficial to a marketing campaign.

4.      Less Will be More

One notable trend is the apparent shift in consumer preference regarding simplistic marketing messages instead of in-depth messages. When you think about some of the top brands in the world like Apple and Google, they clearly value simplicity. A large part of Pinterest’s appeal is its clean, uncluttered, and minimalist aesthetic.

With many consumers feeling burned out by a constant barrage of information and advertisements that scream “look at me”, some of the most innovative marketers are going the opposite direction. The’re now making efforts to tone-down their campaign messages and not overwhelm consumers with hype.

Perhaps an article by Forbes said it best: “there is a sense that from the hyper-connectivity of our highly-digitized lives to the bright, flashy, complicated sensory input we’re fed everyday, there is no way to continue at this pace. As a result, 2013 is likely to be a year where the most successful marketing strategies will be ones that are not only simple in nature, but promote goods and services that serve to simplify the consumer’s life, or even just their customer experience.”

5.      Mobile-Friendly Content Will Be Necessary

Due to the widespread (and quickly growing) use of smartphones and tablets, it’s necessary for companies to create content that’s accessible to mobile users. According to Forbes, “87% of connected devices sales by 2017 will be tablets and smartphones.” Whether it’s creating an alternate mobile version of a website or utilizing responsive web design, it’s important to provide a positive experience to users that are browsing via a mobile device.

Otherwise, it’s easy to lose customers to competitors who have adapted to this trend. As the shift from traditional PCs and laptops to mobile devices continues, businesses that aren’t onboard are likely to suffer.

6.      Ad Retargeting Will Grow in Effectiveness

This is a marketing strategy that has really caught on recently. In a nutshell, it works by utilizing browser cookies to track the websites that users visit. Once they leave a certain site, the products or services they viewed will be shown to them again in advertisements across different websites.

It’s fairly obvious as to why this technique can be so effective. With only two percent of web traffic converting on the first visit, ad retargeting works to increase the overall conversion rate by reminding consumers of the product or service they viewed. This keeps the brand and the product at the top of the consumer’s mind. There are even psychological studies that have shown that simple exposure to brand names and logos creates familiarity, which builds trust and makes consumers more likely to make a purchase.

Even if there’s no immediate purchase, this can really pay off in the long run. Due to the success that many marketers have had with ad retargeting, there’s a good chance that it will become more mainstream in 2014.

7.      SEO and Social Signals Will Become Even More Intertwined

Although social signals still don’t typically carry the same weight as traditional inbound links, it’s pretty undeniable that they play a role in organic search rankings these days. After all, they’re one of the three pillars of SEO. Since the goal of Google and other search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and highest quality content possible, it makes sense why they would factor in the number of social shares that a blog post, article or product page receives.

The more people that are sharing a piece of content, the higher quality it’s likely to be, and therefore its position should increase within the search engine results pages. It’s no coincidence that the top-ranking search results tends to have lots of social shares, while those ranked lower have fewer.

Besides this, social shares can serve as a stamp of approval (ie, a trust signal) for visitors landing on a page. If they see that it has hundreds or thousands of shares, it’s likely that there’s something of value. That’s a big reason why so many businesses are installing social share plugins and encouraging consumers to share as much as possible.

While it’s difficult to predict algorithms will evolve in the future, there’s a reasonable chance that social shares will match or even outweigh traditional inbound links by the end of 2014. For more information on how SEO and social media are becoming intertwined, see my article “How to Integrate Social MediaWith Your SEO Campaign.”

This article is by Jayson Demers, founder of AudienceBloom and was originally published on Forbes.com

So Here's What People Do On The Internet All Day

As if we didn't know already:

People in the U.S. who go online spend more time on average perusing social networks than watching online video. But what else is eating up time: email.

GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau conducted an online survey in the U.S. as part of a digital-video report ahead of the advertising “upfronts” and the web video “NewFronts.”  Statista created the chart from the report’s data, which was published in April.

People surveyed said they spent about an average of 37 minutes a day on social networks like Facebook and Twitter in 2013, according to the survey. Emailing clocked in at a robust 29 minutes, while watching online video — everything from TV shows and movies to amateur video and shorter professionally produced clips — was 23 minutes.

The report found that while people doubled the amount of time they spent watching online video over the past four years, the overall percentage of their online time spent watching video slipped to 12% in 2013 from 13% the year before. (Overall time online is rising, largely driven by mobile.)  The average number of minutes watching video, emailing and reading newspapers online all slipped. What are people doing more of? Reading blogs, gaming and listening to the radio all saw increases

Article by Brian R. Fitzgerald from the WSJ

Dissecting a proper media kit

We have already talked about how to work on online advertising deals on CPM or CPA basis and even discussed working as an affiliate. What are the next steps? How do you move forward with actually launching an online marketing campaign?

Well the first step is to identify the best websites to advertise on and in order to do that you will need to make an informed decision on which websites are best. That't where a website's Media Kit comes into play. Mind you that a good Media Kit is also important to website owners and publishers as this is what they will use in order to justify the amount of money they are asking advertisers to pay in their rate cards, so regardless if you are buying or selling online advertising ... pay attention below :)

So what is a Media Kit?

A Media Kit is a document or presentation that contains all of the the key information you will need in order to buy advertising on that website. This includes (but is not limited to) information on available media, banner ad sizes, total number of visitors, hits, page views, impressions as well as demographic and geographical information about the website audience and traffic. It also usually contains information about ad specifications like file size, dimensions, submission guidelines and any possible limitations etc.

A quick breakdown of the above and why these are important:

• Available media: Well this is an easy one, basically lists out all the available advertising formats, sizes and spots that the publisher has available to sell. This will include the page on the site that the media will be displayed, the number of impressions the media usually gets, how much inventory is still available for sale, etc. Some types of media are Run Of Site (ROS) which basically means that the same ad type/size appears randomly throughout the site and not just on specific pages of your choosing (quick note: ROS ads are usually cheaper than page specific ads). 
• Demographic: Information regarding the size and characteristics of a the audience of the website such as their age, sex, income, education, size of household, disposable income, etc.
• Geographical: Information on the geographical distribution of the audience of the website. It usually offers a breakdown of the audience numbers by county or for local websites by city, state or even area code. This can sometimes include information on preferred language of communication.
• Impressions: The number of times a banner ad was requested and presumably seen by users.
• Unique Visitors: A term used to describe the total number of visitors to a website over a certain time period. Not to be confused with visits as a unique visitor can generate multiple visits over the specified time period.
• Pageviews: The number of pages the average users (or visitor) will view on the website during a standard session.
• Web Analytics information: With today's web analytics software you can get very detailed analysis about user behavior on websites and as such more and more publishers seem to share a lot more data on what they think advertisers might like to know about their audience. In some cases you may even request specific data that is only important to you to be included.
• Rate card: This is a very important bit of information that is usually included in media kits, as the name suggests, these are the rates that the publisher will ask you to pay in order to advertise on the various spots available on their website.

Reviewing the above information should provide you with all the information you require to make a well informed, educated, decision on whether or not advertising on a particular website is a good idea or not. It will help you judge if you can reach your target audience, in your target market and also give you an idea of what would be the most cost effective way to deliver your ad that audience. This makes planning and budgeting much easier. Last thing to remember about buying media after reviewing a media kit is that you should never pay Rate Card prices. Always negotiate and always push the publisher down on advertising rates. This is not only expected, but it has become so common that most rate cards are bloated just for the sake of accommodating discounts.

Why its good to be Google!

Here's a look at net revenue per user for a basket of big internet sites from digital media analyst Ian Maude. 

As you can see, it's good to be Google! It has a magic money machine called search that drums up more money per user than anyone else. That's why the next two biggest sites on the chart, Yandex and Baidu, are also search engines. 

This is why Microsoft tried so hard to make Bing a dominant search engine. It's also part of the reason Facebook keeps flirting with search.

Chart via Statista. Original article via Businessinsider 

The only chart you need to see to know what is Alibaba and why its IPO will be huge

Chinese internet juggernaut Alibaba has filed for an IPO. It had net income of $2.9 billion on revenues of $6.5 billion for the nine month period ending December 2012.

This chart from Quartz is the easiest way to fully understand the size and scope of Alibaba. As you can see, Alibaba is a sprawling company that does a lot of stuff.

Information for this post from Business Insider and Quartz.

How to work on CPA deals in online marketing

As mentioned in some of my previous posts, online advertisers, affiliates and publishers use a wide range of payment calculation methods to price their online marketing campaigns. I have already explained what CPM stands for, so in this post I will try to explain CPA.

CPA, short for Cost Per Action (or in cases cost per acquisition) is a metric that measures how much you pay (or get paid) once a specified action (or acquisition) occurs. The action can be anything that you define, anything that is important to your business whether it’s a new client making a purchase, downloading an app or software, making a booking, a phone call or simply filling out a form to become a lead. In most campaigns however it usually refers to a new paying customer. Also if the action is defined as a lead registration rather than sale then the payment calculation will probably be referred to as a CPL (Cost Per Lead)

It is definitely considered to be one of the simplest and safest methods of running an online marketing campaign, because unless you get the action that you specified, you don’t have to pay. This makes planning and budgeting a campaign around CPA goals much easier both everyone involved. It’s a no-brainer why this is a great deal for advertisers as it allows them to have a clear idea what to expect for the amount of money they are willing to spend and plan their entire campaign strategy around this. As such I don't think I need to spend any time explaining a concept as simple as that.

I believe it’s more important to focus on the fact that CPA deals are also potentially great for publishers because they allow them to identify exactly what they need to deliver to their advertisers in order for them to get paid, but also to satisfy those same advertisers and get them to return and renew their campaigns on a monthly basis. Confident publishers, who know the quality of their traffic and how that traffic usually converts usually jump at the opportunity to work on CPA. This last part is also especially helpful to affiliates that are using their own resources (traffic, money, time) to generate commission income from affiliate programs.

If you are an affiliate or a publisher with high quality traffic that you know converts very well, a good CPA deal can make you a lot of money as you can optimize your campaign for conversions and make a lot more money.

Take the scenario below as an example:

As a publisher, you have been offered a nice CPA deal while you usually work on a CPM model. How can this CPA deal be better for you and make you more money? It all depends on the quality of your traffic and nobody knows that better than you. Let’s assume that you usually sell banner ad impressions on your site for $5 CPM. In order for you to make $500 you would have to sell 100,000 banner ad impressions.

If you were offered a CPA of $100 you could make the same amount by completing five of the defined actions. Depending on what your average Click-Through Ratio (CTR) is and what the average conversion ratio for your traffic usually is, you can estimate how possible it is to actually generate more than five actions using those same 100,000 banner impressions. Any action generated more than five is additional income for you, which you wouldn't be receiving if you were working on a standard CPM deal.

Some simple math:

100,000 Banner Impressions @ 3% CTR = 3000 clicks. Assuming just a 5% click-to-lead ratio, this would generate about 150 leads. A lead-to-action conversion ratio of 6% would generate 9 desired actions. At $100 CPA that’s $900 VS the $500 you would would have made by selling the same traffic on a standard CPM deal.

Now granted, in the example above I just used average industry figures for CTR, click-to-lead and lead-to-action ratios. You know your traffic better than anyone, use the formula above but substitute the figures applicable for your traffic to calculate what makes sense for you. Depending on the content of your site and the product you are promoting you may have lower CTR but higher conversion ratios or the other way around. It might also be that you need a higher CPA for this to work, for example a campaign with a lower CTR or conversion ratio might still make sense if the CPA is $150 instead of $100.

I am sure you can see the appeal and the great earning potential of a good CPA deal. Lastly I would just like to list some of the benefits for affiliates to being paid on CPA rather than Revenue Sharing:

• Faster commission generation – As soon as the defined action takes place you have already earned your commission.
• Less dependence on third parties – You get your commission when the defined action happened without having to worry about what happens next. You don’t need to wait until “if and when” the business will start making money in order for you to get paid.
• Lower Risk – You will lose less money if the advertiser or affiliate program, for whatever reason, decides to stop working with you as you will not miss out on revenue that you would might have received in the future

I will be discussing Revenue Sharing and other affiliate commission calculation methods in a different post in the next few days.

Infographic on Mobile Marketing and the Magic of Push Notifications

Global-marketing company Responsys, surveyed 1,200 adults and found that almost six in 10 adults have downloaded apps from their favorite brands and of those who have downloaded apps, seven in 10 have enabled push notifications. Those percentages are higher when only the younger set is surveyed.

Take a look at the infographic from Responsys to see what compels consumers to download a brand's app and then why they consider push notifications from those apps to be useful. 

Online Affiliates Recruiting Process

This post is geared towards those of you who already have an affiliate program setup to promote your product or service via the internet but not getting the desired results. I will be writing a separate post on how to setup an affiliate program from scratch later on for those of you who don't have one or are not sold on the idea yet.

So you you took the time and setup an affiliate program for your business and you are now looking to get affiliates to sign up and start promoting your site. Unless you have a lot of brand recognition that will get people to your site and inquire about your affiliate program directly, you will need to go out there and start promoting it in order to make sure that potential affiliates know about your offer and potentially signup.

• Contact Website Owner / Potential Affiliate and explain the following key advantages of your Affiliate Program:
  
  

  i. What makes your product/ service unique and sets you apart from competitors

  ii. Discuss technical details of your website, any awards or key technologies that you use.

  iii. Make sure that you mention that you offer affiliate support staff that will always be available to assist

  iv. Mention details about the affiliate system you are using and how the back-office reporting system works

  v. Explain that they will be getting accurate statistics and full performance reports for the business they introduce to you

  vi. Offer to assist webmasters with optimizing their website to promote your product. Some people may have reservations about how well they can do this on their own.

  vii. Offer help on design including the creation of custom creative and marketing tools (banners, scripts, website design, text copyright, widgets) specially designed for the affiliate’s website or online marketing requirements. Free assistance and online support in website development

  viii. Most importantly make sure that you emphasize that they will receive their commission payments quickly and efficiently. Affiliates want to make sure that once they start generating business for you they will be getting paid quickly and efficiently.

• Discuss the commission calculation program that best fits their needs (Revenue Sharing, CPA, CPL)
• Assist them with signing up to the Affiliate program and guide them through the registration process
• Once approved, the Affiliate should receive an email with his login details for the affiliate system
• The Affiliate will now be able to log in and generate tracking links, access statistics, available creative material and other marketing tools.
• Any request for a customized creative material or other marketing tools must be sent via email to his account manager

The Affiliate is now ready to start promoting your business. Its important that you follow up and support him until you are sure that he is confident enough to do it on his own. Experienced website owners that may have dealt with affiliate programs before will need almost no support, but there are those who will be new to this and it will be your responsibility to guide them and assist them to be successful.

Don't forget that if your affiliates are successful it means that so are you. If they are generating commission it means that they are successfully sending business to you. 

Online Media Buying 101 (... for Dummies)

It is very important to be consistent when preparing to launch new online marketing campaigns. In order for you to be able to make an informed decision on which campaign will work best for you, you will need to compare a few of them. In order to make the right choice you can't compare apples with oranges and thus you will need to collect the same information from every website and publisher. When negotiating directly with publishers, you must try and negotiate deals by following the guidelines below as much as you can in order to be as consistent as possible. For the purpose of this post I will assume you are looking to buy banner ads to promote an e-commerce website and generate ROI. Depending on what you are looking to achieve from your marketing campaign some of the items below might be slightly different but the general idea will always be the same.

The main things you will need to look at when negotiating a new campaign are the following:

• Media Kit – Every site usually has a presentation that contains all relevant advertising information. You should always ask for this as soon as you contact a new site. This usually contains information like: total number of unique visitors to the site per month, geographic location and demographics of their audience (male, female, age group, etc.). This will not only help you get a better idea of what the publisher can offer you in terms of exposure, it will also tell you if your target audience is looking at that site.
• Banner Size – Bigger is always better in online advertising so always try and get a banner that will not disappear on the site. Usually the bigger the size of the banner the higher the price as well so you will need to find that sweet spot where you get the biggest size at the most reasonable price. Don't forget that paying too much is not a guaranty of success and in fact most of the time is quite the opposite.
• Banner Location – Banners near the top of the page usually do better than the ones on the bottom. Always try to go for the banners above the fold. Meaning the banners you can see on a site without having to scroll down.
• Additional Exposure – When negotiating to buy a banner, always try and get some additional inventory for free. Ask for a text review of our site to be posted on their site or links pointing to our site. This will not only increase your exposure on the site during your campaign but also help with SEO as search engines love to find links and content about your site on third party sites.
• Test Campaigns – Whenever you start working with a new site or finalize a new campaign, you must always insist on running a test campaign. Basically, most sites will offer you lower advertising rates so you can run a campaign on their site and evaluate their performance. You will have to push in order to get a really good rate.
• Payment Method – You will need to decide which payment method you feel most comfortable using CPM, CPC, CPA and Flat Rate. For new campaigns and when working with publishers that you are not familiar with I would usually suggest avoiding to work on Flat Rate deals because as the name implies, the campaign payment terms do not depend on delivering specific amount of exposure or results. You get the commitment that your ad will be displayed for a specific amount of time but no other guaranties 

Remember to constantly try and take advantage of any discounts the publisher may be willing to offer. Everything in online media is negotiable so it’s always OK to say that their original asking price is too high and keep pushing for a rate that you are more comfortable with.

Things you will need to pay attention to later on when the campaign is live:

• Click-through-ratio (CTR) – most commonly defined as numbers of clicks divided by number of impressions.
• Click-to-lead ratio – the percentage of how many people successfully registered after clicking our banner.
• Conversion ratio – the percentage of active users from registrations; after people clicked on your banner, how many of them signed up? And after they signed  up, how many of them became actual clients.
• Other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to your business or website. Things like free downloads, demo accounts, email subscriptions, likes or followers

For most online marketing campaigns the main focus should always be the results, so if during the course of the campaign you feel that something is not performing, then you should pause the campaign and make changes so that it performs better. Sometimes just changing the banner makes a big difference. Sometimes its the landing page or the message on the ad. You will need to keep making changes and keep optimizing the performance of the campaign while its running until you hit an acceptable performance.

Never wait until a campaign is finished running to evaluate if it was good or bad. You have access to valuable performance data from your marketing suite, your tracking links, analytic software that you should use daily to help you modify and improve your campaign.

What does CPM stand for?

Online advertisers and publishers use a wide range of payment calculation methods to price their online marketing campaigns. In recent years, it has been calculated by advertisers that more than 30% of all online advertising transactions are being negotiated on a cost-per-impression basis. An impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page. In order to count the impressions served as accurately as possible and prevent fraud, an ad server may exclude certain non-qualifying activities such as page-refreshes or other user actions from counting as impressions. This sometimes may lead to a bit of inconsistency of how impressions are calculated but in general the deviation is not very significant.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) is most frequently used in advertising to represent the cost per thousand (M is the roman numeral of 1,000). When used in online advertising it relates to the cost per thousand ad impressions. 

Working on CPM means that you have to pay a fee for every 1,000 impressions of your ad. One impression equals one display of your banner. So for example, $3 CPM means that once your ad is displayed 1,000 times you will pay the publisher $3.

CPM = (Cost/ # of impressions) x 1,000

Its always useful to take various elements into account when buying online advertising on a CPM basis.

For example lets assume you have a budget of $1,000 and you are offered a rate of $5 CPM. With this rate your budget will buy you 200,000 ad impressions. Depending on the size and popularity of the site, the total number of monthly ad impressions and how many unique visitors the site gets per month, 200,000 impressions may be enough to get a good amount of exposure or maybe not even be enough to make a dent.

For example if the site serves 1,000,000 impressions per month then your 200,000 is 20% of their entire inventory which will get you a good amount of exposure. However if you are dealing with a larger site that serves 10,000,000 impressions per month then your 2% of their ad inventory will hardly make any impact.

The site's number of unique visitors is also very important to take into account. If a site has a lot of users who visit the site frequently on a monthly basis or refresh pages often during each session, it means that a lot of the impressions you are buying are actually generated by the same people. Displaying your ad to the same person over and over again is not very useful and diminishes the effectiveness of your campaign.

What's worse, it also means that you are wasting impressions that could have been more effective if the ad had been seen by someone else. That's why is always advisable to add a daily ad display cap per user or buy unique impressions when available. Sites with good ad servers can accommodate both of these requirements and this will help insure that you get the most out of your budget.

I will discuss other payment methods such as CPA, CPL & CPC in follow up posts over the next few days.

Dynamic Pricing CPM campaigns (dCPM). Great deal or rip off?

This will be the first part of a series of posts where I will get into a bit more detail about various aspects of running online marketing campaigns. I will try and post one of these per week and the goal will be to cover each item in some detail, explain some of the advantages, things to look out for and in the end give you my own personal take based on my experience so far. If you are not familiar with some of the terminology I will be posting a glossary as part of this blog which you can use as reference. You can also contact me directly and I will do my best to explain things in further detail.

So here goes: Dynamic Pricing CPM (dCPM) campaigns.

Dynamic pricing allows networks to vary the CPM price on each ad call (bidding price). Think of it as a giant auction for online media. Publishers open their inventory to the network's ad exchange which in turn allows advertisers to bid on that inventory.

The entire process is automated so the only thing you need to do, in theory, is agree on the maximum average CPM to be paid for each creative size, and the network will do it's best to lower the price of the inventory in order to hit your ROI goals.

Most networks will claim that the initial first few days of any campaign is a learning period during which their ad server is determining the variables that lead to conversions (such as content, user behavior, frequency, geographical data, time of day, etc).

So far so good, and in theory this all sound very appealing, as this model appears to give you the best of everything: you get to set your own price, target the audience based on the demographic that you want and get more bang for your buck; as this is supposed to be an auction based system that will get you more impressions for the average CPM that you specified.

Now, as you have noticed above, I highlighted the phrase "average CPM", because what usually happens is that networks tend to optimize campaigns based on what is most profitable for them and not what you really need. Effectively what I have seen from a lot of these networks is that they will push more expensive ads to your site, where they actually have a much higher profit margin and then they will also deliver a huge amount of very cheap worthless traffic in order to drive the average CPM price down. At the end of the day they will come to you and say that the hit your CPM target but you will be left wondering what went wrong. The quality and sources of traffic vary so much that there is no way to gauge if a campaign will work for you or not.

Now don't get me wrong, some times depending on what the objective of your campaign is, this model can be useful. If you want to increase exposure and traffic to your site targeting a specific geographical area or demographic and you want your ads to appear on a variety of publishers, this type of campaigns might help. However if you have clear targets on conversions that you need to achieve or looking to generate specific ROI, then I don't recommend working on a dCPM model. There are too many variables that are out of your control which will end up working against your campaign. 

In my opinion, nothing beats going out, negotiating with highly targeted publishers directly and agreeing on a specific CPM rates. That way you know what to expect based on your own KPIs. You know your site and how targeted traffic usually converts, thus you will be able to plan and budget accordingly. The dCPM model might get you more impressions for your dollar but its usually not the impressions you are looking for.

Yahoo & NDN sitting in a tree ...

The Wall Street Journal reports that there are strong rumors that Yahoo has entered talks to buy NDN, a very popular online video service. NDN is currently ranked fourth globally in terms of video views and generates on average about 570 million video views per month, far more than Yahoo's 384 million (ranked at number five).

If the acquisition goes through it will give Yahoo more ammunition to fight Google which dominates the space. In case you are wondering Google does about 13 Billion video views in the same one month period (figures include YouTube). Facebook ranks second and AOL ranks third.

NDN does not produce its own video content, but has a large collection of videos that are widely used by sites like Bloomberg, LA Times, New York Daily News and thousands more. The move would help Yahoo distribute its own videos to these sites.

Yahoo has been trying to expand their video service and build a catalog of video content to rival YouTube for a while now, it put in a bid to buy Hulu last year, but then dropped out of the bidding and was also looking to buy Dailymotion but negotiations fell through early on.

Let's wait and see what happens, I like some of the ideas of this "new" Yahoo under Marissa Mayer but so far I haven't been impressed.

About Us ... #$!@$#%@

Dear "Almost Every Website I visited this last year" ...

Your “About Us” page is statistically one of the most important pages on your website for new visitors, especially people who are not that familiar with your brand or services. And yet most of you choose to serve your visitors with a few random, generic, by-the-book corporate generalizations - simply because the space on your website had to be filled and you were not bothered to do a proper job and produce smart content that will help drive real business to your site. I get really upset when I encounter this, especially when I am looking to buy a product or service online.

• Instead of treating it like a boring school assignment, think about how you would tell your story to someone you just met face-to-face.
• Try explaining your story, your motivation for starting the business and what level of service customers can expect.
• You should also consider using your “About Us” page to encourage new business, subscriptions or any other actions by including calls-to-action links through out the content.

Don't overlook this integral part of you website. There’s simply no excuse for a boring “About Us” page and it may end up costing you a lot of business ...