I can discern over the last three years, three phases of their messaging to potential advertising clients.
2012-13. Big focus on taking out display ads next to different targets. The emphasis was on competing with Google by having good cost per conversion.
2013-14. Big focus on improving your company's Facebook page and getting more followers. We were encouraged to advertise our page to get more followers. Now, businesses have lots of followers but only 4% of them see the posts.
2014-forward. The focus now seems to be on brand building on a mass market scale. Much like TV, the emphasis in their marketing now seems to be on creating broad brand awareness in the market about the brand and its positioning which is an investment in longer term market development, not a short-term sales generation tool.
I wonder what's next....
Showing posts with label advertising online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising online. Show all posts
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
adsense & advertising nitty gritty questions
Here's a few adsense questions that I'd love answered:
1 - When I use blogger to set up a blog and I click "add adsense", as I did on this blog, google automatically finds my adsense account and sets up the appropriate ads. Which is what I did when I went to the new blogger on this website. That's cool. But what channel does it put it under? I can't find an "other"category so I'm a little confused.
2 - If I have two google ads on the same page, as I do on this blog, and someone views a page, so that both ads are viewed, does that count as one or two page views? I've been told that it counts as one by adsense but I can't seem to find this info documented anywhere. ANSWER: It counts page impressions, not ad block impressions. But if you want ad block impressions, or even individual ad impressions, you can find this in adsense advanced settings.
3 - If a page has two or three types of adsense ads; such as adblock ads, menu ads, and a search function; will adsense count that page impression multiple times. I believe it counts it once per type of ad on the page, but I'm not sure.
The implication is that you need to be careful when you compare $ per thousand of adsense vs advertising statistics. My advertising statistics are kept as $ per thousand page impressions. A page with two ads would count each ad impression separately. So a single page impression produces two ad impressions. But, if google is counting page impressions (not per ad impression), then I need to adjust my calculations accordingly.
I can't be the only one struggling to understand these nitty gritty number issues. Am I?
1 - When I use blogger to set up a blog and I click "add adsense", as I did on this blog, google automatically finds my adsense account and sets up the appropriate ads. Which is what I did when I went to the new blogger on this website. That's cool. But what channel does it put it under? I can't find an "other"category so I'm a little confused.
2 - If I have two google ads on the same page, as I do on this blog, and someone views a page, so that both ads are viewed, does that count as one or two page views? I've been told that it counts as one by adsense but I can't seem to find this info documented anywhere. ANSWER: It counts page impressions, not ad block impressions. But if you want ad block impressions, or even individual ad impressions, you can find this in adsense advanced settings.
3 - If a page has two or three types of adsense ads; such as adblock ads, menu ads, and a search function; will adsense count that page impression multiple times. I believe it counts it once per type of ad on the page, but I'm not sure.
The implication is that you need to be careful when you compare $ per thousand of adsense vs advertising statistics. My advertising statistics are kept as $ per thousand page impressions. A page with two ads would count each ad impression separately. So a single page impression produces two ad impressions. But, if google is counting page impressions (not per ad impression), then I need to adjust my calculations accordingly.
I can't be the only one struggling to understand these nitty gritty number issues. Am I?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Advertising sophistication
I was trying to set up business with a medium size CPM advertising network and in a phone conversation, he asked me: "Tell me about the demographics of your users."
I candidly and stupidly replied. I don't know much about them, I think they're mostly kids.
BONG. Wrong answer.
You should pretend to know something about your users to have some credibility. It's not really checkable information so there's really no wrong answer. And, grown-up users are more valuable than kids. So I got zero out of two on that little test.
But how would I know about my user demographics? One, if your site is registered with a service, just repeat their information. It might be nonsence but it sure sounds good. So, for instance, for my SpellingCity.com site, I could say:
My site is 62% female, 49% over the age of 18, and 50% of the users are regulars. I get all this information directly from the Quantcast website. I'm not sure I believe it but this sort of info is the standard medium of advertising.
I'm also trying to understand how comscore with media metrix provides info so that I can better understand and characterize my site, and find appropriate advertisers. I was just reading through one of comScores PDFs which explains how to characterize your site and it baffled me.
I candidly and stupidly replied. I don't know much about them, I think they're mostly kids.
BONG. Wrong answer.
You should pretend to know something about your users to have some credibility. It's not really checkable information so there's really no wrong answer. And, grown-up users are more valuable than kids. So I got zero out of two on that little test.
But how would I know about my user demographics? One, if your site is registered with a service, just repeat their information. It might be nonsence but it sure sounds good. So, for instance, for my SpellingCity.com site, I could say:
My site is 62% female, 49% over the age of 18, and 50% of the users are regulars. I get all this information directly from the Quantcast website. I'm not sure I believe it but this sort of info is the standard medium of advertising.
I'm also trying to understand how comscore with media metrix provides info so that I can better understand and characterize my site, and find appropriate advertisers. I was just reading through one of comScores PDFs which explains how to characterize your site and it baffled me.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Monetizing websites - CPM focus
Standard sources of revenue (when volumes get big)
- Sites with small amounts of traffic always start with google adsense. It works at low volumes. CPM vendors require sites to have certain levels of traffic. Will wrote a great article on ProBlogger about CPM marketing where he lists the minimum page views that different vendors require. They range at the high end to Advertising.com (2 million pageviews per month) to the low end where AdsDaq and Ad Dynamix have no minimums.
- Most site owners with large volumes of traffic (again, what is large?) prefer the reliability and predictability of CPM over CPC or CPA. They know what they'll make.
- Definitions for you beginners: CPM - a dollar amount, often $3, per thousand impressions. An impression is a page view. One visitor might have 8 page views. CPC is cost per click (Google adsense, AdBrite), CPA is cost per action, as in affiliate programs.
- Top CPM network vendors: Tribalfusion, Burst media, - I found some good starting materials, an advertising focused website, an article on CPM Vendors, and a freaktitude article. Hotchalk is focused on our market so they are of interest to me
- CPM vendors have to be above the fold
- You can have multiple CPM vendors on the same page so long as they are above the fold. I know where exactly the cut-off is on my computer with my toolbars and my resolution. But, is there a standard definition of how many pixels down is above the fold?
- CPM network vendors do not ask for exclusives so you can mix and match
in the same spot. For instance, with one leaderboard, you might set up an adserver such as Open X which alternates between your own ads, tribalfusion, burst media, and google ads (when there is no demand from the others).
- google ads go lower on the page as an additional revenue enhancer
- affiliates are a time drain, highly unreliable, and mostly don't work. With great skill in some niches, you can work an affiliate successfully but it's an uphill battle
- if you have very valuable traffic, google ads are a good way to go
- very valuable niche traffic might best be monetized with affiliates and adsense.
Some details. I was just looking at TribalFusion's Publisher agreement which says:
- they need at least 2K unique visitors per day
- They must be the only 468x60 banner above the fold!
- All banners are 468x60 pixels.
BTW - TribalFusion's Publisher agreement should be updated in terms of ad size since their website says the standard unit sizes are: 468x60, 728x90, 300x250, 336x280, 120x600, 160x600, and Pop-Under
Data Sources
Advertisers like standard sources of date more than your own web stats. Examples:
- Quantcast - Currently the best since they pull data from the ISPs
- Alexa - An old favorite but biased by the percentage of people that install their toolbar
- Compete - New to me but very user-friendly
- Comscore - Subscription-based
Current hot sizes for CPM Vendors:
728 x 90 - leaderboard
160 x 60
300 x 250 - preferred
I had thought the banner (468 x 60) was the standard but it's apparently a has-been.
What's hot in our market in terms of demographics?
- teachers & parents
- what's not in demand: kids
So printable worksheets and our parents forum are hotter than sites for kids for advertising
del.icio.us
- Sites with small amounts of traffic always start with google adsense. It works at low volumes. CPM vendors require sites to have certain levels of traffic. Will wrote a great article on ProBlogger about CPM marketing where he lists the minimum page views that different vendors require. They range at the high end to Advertising.com (2 million pageviews per month) to the low end where AdsDaq and Ad Dynamix have no minimums.
- Most site owners with large volumes of traffic (again, what is large?) prefer the reliability and predictability of CPM over CPC or CPA. They know what they'll make.
- Definitions for you beginners: CPM - a dollar amount, often $3, per thousand impressions. An impression is a page view. One visitor might have 8 page views. CPC is cost per click (Google adsense, AdBrite), CPA is cost per action, as in affiliate programs.
- Top CPM network vendors: Tribalfusion, Burst media, - I found some good starting materials, an advertising focused website, an article on CPM Vendors, and a freaktitude article. Hotchalk is focused on our market so they are of interest to me
- CPM vendors have to be above the fold
- You can have multiple CPM vendors on the same page so long as they are above the fold. I know where exactly the cut-off is on my computer with my toolbars and my resolution. But, is there a standard definition of how many pixels down is above the fold?
- CPM network vendors do not ask for exclusives so you can mix and match
in the same spot. For instance, with one leaderboard, you might set up an adserver such as Open X which alternates between your own ads, tribalfusion, burst media, and google ads (when there is no demand from the others).- google ads go lower on the page as an additional revenue enhancer
- affiliates are a time drain, highly unreliable, and mostly don't work. With great skill in some niches, you can work an affiliate successfully but it's an uphill battle
- if you have very valuable traffic, google ads are a good way to go
- very valuable niche traffic might best be monetized with affiliates and adsense.
Some details. I was just looking at TribalFusion's Publisher agreement which says:
- they need at least 2K unique visitors per day
- They must be the only 468x60 banner above the fold!
- All banners are 468x60 pixels.
BTW - TribalFusion's Publisher agreement should be updated in terms of ad size since their website says the standard unit sizes are: 468x60, 728x90, 300x250, 336x280, 120x600, 160x600, and Pop-Under
Data Sources
Advertisers like standard sources of date more than your own web stats. Examples:
- Quantcast - Currently the best since they pull data from the ISPs
- Alexa - An old favorite but biased by the percentage of people that install their toolbar
- Compete - New to me but very user-friendly
- Comscore - Subscription-based
Current hot sizes for CPM Vendors:
728 x 90 - leaderboard
160 x 60
300 x 250 - preferred
I had thought the banner (468 x 60) was the standard but it's apparently a has-been.
What's hot in our market in terms of demographics?
- teachers & parents
- what's not in demand: kids
So printable worksheets and our parents forum are hotter than sites for kids for advertising
del.icio.us
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Google Analytics - not really working, yet
For a little over a month, we've been trying to implement google analytics on Time4Learning. So far, I don't really feel that we've learned that much. The good news is that:
- the number of conversions from Google Analytics matches (within a few percentage points) what our shopping cart/credit card system is showing
- we are beginning to get a sense of which of our referring sites (aka ads and partner sites) are contributing not just in terms of traffic but conversions.
It just occurred to me that we don't know if the we are correctly tracking the PPC traffic. We installed tracking codes on our Google, Yahoo, & MSN PPC campaigns so we can track that traffic separately. I wonder if the the PPC results from within those programs matches the Webanalytics results?
The big problem is that 70% of our conversions are being tracked by Google Analytics as "direct", meaning they found our site through typing in our URL or through a bookmark. I simply don't believe that since our users report, as part of the signup process, how they heard about us and we get around 70% reporting that they found us through the search engines.
I also noticed that we got NO conversions out of our top 16 keyphrases from natural search.
This feels unlikely to be true.
When we dug into the statistics, I was told because of the iframe coding on our demos, the sessions could not be tracked. (which is why the iframe demos were recoded with java script).
This would explain why two thirds of our conversions are classed as "direct entry".
But, this doesn't make sense. Google analytics, much like PPC, is primarily cookie-based. This means that whether the session was trackable or not, google analytics ought to be able to track the conversions back to the original entry to the site. So even if a user found us through natural search, bookmarked us, return a week later and signed up, Google analytics should report them as natural search.
del.icio.us
- the number of conversions from Google Analytics matches (within a few percentage points) what our shopping cart/credit card system is showing
- we are beginning to get a sense of which of our referring sites (aka ads and partner sites) are contributing not just in terms of traffic but conversions.
It just occurred to me that we don't know if the we are correctly tracking the PPC traffic. We installed tracking codes on our Google, Yahoo, & MSN PPC campaigns so we can track that traffic separately. I wonder if the the PPC results from within those programs matches the Webanalytics results?
The big problem is that 70% of our conversions are being tracked by Google Analytics as "direct", meaning they found our site through typing in our URL or through a bookmark. I simply don't believe that since our users report, as part of the signup process, how they heard about us and we get around 70% reporting that they found us through the search engines.
I also noticed that we got NO conversions out of our top 16 keyphrases from natural search.
This feels unlikely to be true.
When we dug into the statistics, I was told because of the iframe coding on our demos, the sessions could not be tracked. (which is why the iframe demos were recoded with java script).
This would explain why two thirds of our conversions are classed as "direct entry".
But, this doesn't make sense. Google analytics, much like PPC, is primarily cookie-based. This means that whether the session was trackable or not, google analytics ought to be able to track the conversions back to the original entry to the site. So even if a user found us through natural search, bookmarked us, return a week later and signed up, Google analytics should report them as natural search.
del.icio.us
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)