51–60 of 98 posts
Advertising in its current form is broken. I was recently in a class where we performed a case study on Google. The professor asked if anyone had ever clicked on an ad. One kid out of 60 had clicked on ad for cheap protein supplements, but hadn't bought any. Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock, and cited their gullible parents as the only people they knew who might ever possibly accidentally click…
Besides the non-human traffic, most online ads are created to not be seen. I was even thinking about creating a blog post to call out the marketers out there to change this, but I am too lazy... specially to make them make more money. I am so used to how ads that cover the entire page work that I manage to pass by them without even knowing which brand was advertising there. Ads that force you to watch a video for X s…
You (the advertiser) have to capture my interest in the first 10-20 frames of video, and pitch me in 5 seconds. Anything else is a waste of your money.
Advertising in its current form is broken. I was recently in a class where we performed a case study on Google. The professor asked if anyone had ever clicked on an ad. One kid out of 60 had clicked on ad for cheap protein supplements, but hadn't bought any. Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock, and cited their gullible parents as the only people they knew who might ever possibly accidentally click…
Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock If your entire class was running AdBlock, then your sample is far from representative of the general population. There are two ad models that work in my opinion The thing is, opinions don't matter in this game, facts do. Do you really think major brands like Coca Cola or McDonalds or Ford spend such astronomical sums of money on advertising without being pretty…
That would be an unusual viewpoint. People love identifying with their heroes -- I don't think anyone considers that a secret.
Related: http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/10/26/h...
Besides the non-human traffic, most online ads are created to not be seen. I was even thinking about creating a blog post to call out the marketers out there to change this, but I am too lazy... specially to make them make more money. I am so used to how ads that cover the entire page work that I manage to pass by them without even knowing which brand was advertising there. Ads that force you to watch a video for X s…
Plus, at least thus far the retargeted ads have all been... friendly? Not obnoxious?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock If your entire class was running AdBlock, then your sample is far from representative of the general population. There are two ad models that work in my opinion The thing is, opinions don't matter in this game, facts do. Do you really think major brands like Coca Cola or McDonalds or Ford spend such astronomical sums of money on advertising without being pretty…
> You might think that no-one really buys a car because of the product placement where the successful business owner drives that model in their favourite TV show That would be an unusual viewpoint. People love identifying with their heroes -- I don't think anyone considers that a secret. Related: http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/10/26/h...
Of course. My point is simply that there are more tried and testing advertising models that work than just the two that exist in roymurdock's opinion.
This is a problem I have seen first hand. But this is not really as big a problem as it is made out to be. The real issue here is that it is hard to predict of the given impression is a bot impression or a genuine impression. As a consequence any CPM based dealing is difficult. Difficult only means falling CPMs. That is what I have observed. The advertisers will not have to put in more efforts to measure conversions…
I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.
tracking conversions isn't easy given cookie churn. lots of advertisers end up paying in a last-view attribution model, so that drives a lot of dirt cheap ad purchases. and regardless of whether most advertising is sold on a cpa model, much of it is evaluated on a cpa model. the structure of ad agencies seems to be that they run $x worth of advertising and take a fraction, so they're heavily incented (and hence incen…
That said, I'd be careful painting all agencies under the same brush. There are plenty of CPA/performance-based agencies out there now, plenty that are flat fee-based, and every shade of gray inbetween.
Ultimately, ad agencies are incentivized to retain their clients, and if they have performance-based clients, just spending their money with nothing to show will not keep them in business very long. Likewise, people assume most brand advertisers at big companies are stupid. First off, you can't be a "big brand advertiser" without a "big brand" which means "a ton of cash." This also means they have fairly savvy and advanced statistical methodologies and research groups in place to help measure overall lift. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is their lifeblood. Sure some of them have idiots working there, but at a certain point you have to look at the data at a higher level because you simply can't track everything you do in an accurate manner. Doesn't mean there isn't a way to observe lift and attribute it.
There are two pretty obvious approaches: only pay per conversion, or accept that not all views are human. Just like when you advertise in a classical news paper, you only know how many copies are typically sold, not how many humans actually look at your ad.
Case in point...
- You work with 3 CPA networks
- Each has their own tracking tag that their terms require payment be based off of
- A conversion comes in and each network registered an impression (or heck, even a click) before the visitor in question signed up.
Who gets the credit?
Well, if you don't have an agreement that states billing is done off of numbers from YOUR ad server, where you can dedupe and set an attribution model that makes sense for your particular business, the answer is that all of them will.
So you are paying 3x when realistically odds are that not all of them should get full credit. Hell, that doesn't even factor in other channels like organic, social, etc. that all likely played a role as well.
This is a problem I have seen first hand. But this is not really as big a problem as it is made out to be. The real issue here is that it is hard to predict of the given impression is a bot impression or a genuine impression. As a consequence any CPM based dealing is difficult. Difficult only means falling CPMs. That is what I have observed. The advertisers will not have to put in more efforts to measure conversions…
I am also working in ad yield analytics, so while I wait for a DFP report to run, I'll also say, it's also in the network's interest to address this issue. In the meantime we'll just see more CPA line items and a drop in price for CPD and CPM. Being an auction, I'm sure Appnexus already sees this. When the issue is addressed we'll see a rise in CPM that reflects the increase in value with less bots. There is money in…
Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…
Retargeting was definitely ripe for abuse. This underscores the importance of getting MUCH smarter and pickier with your audience lists and how you actually define them and value their contribution to a given conversion.