Tag: online advertising

Controlling ad quality in programmatic buying

Highway to ad quality. Ad quality is an issue in programmatic buying where ad exchange takes place via computer systems. In traditional ad exchange, there’s a human supervising the quality of advertising, but in a programmatic system it’s possible to receive spammy, illegal, or otherwise undesirable advertising without publishers (ad sellers) being aware of it. […]

Quality in programmatic advertising

Introduction This is a very short post explaining, from a media house’s perspective, how to manage the two-sided online ad market. Why does quality matter, more than you think? The success or failure of online advertising takes place through QUALITY. My argument rests on the notion of two-sided markets, along with their distinctive element of […]

Here’s Facebook cheating you (and how to avoid it)

Here’s how Facebook is cheating advertisers with reporting of video views: How is that cheating? Well, the advertiser implicitly assumes that ‘video views’ means people who have actually watched the video which is not the case here. Say, you have a 10-second video; this metric does not show people who have watched that video till […]

Facebook Ads: too high performance might turn on you (theoretically)

Introduction Now, earlier I wrote a post arguing that Facebook has an incentive to lower the CPC of well-targeting advertisers because better targeting improves user experience (in two-sided market terms, relevance through more precise targeting reduces the negative indirect network effects perceived by ad targets). You can read that post here. However, consider the point from another […]

Facebook ad testing: is more ads better?

Yellow ad, red ad… Does it matter in the end? Introduction I used to think differently about creating ad variations, but having tested both methods I’ve changed my mind. Read the explanation below. There are two alternative approaches to ad testing: “Qwaya” method* — you create some base elements (headlines, copy texts, pictures), out of […]

Facebook’s Incentive to Reward Precise Targeting

Facebook has an incentive to lower the advertising cost for more precise targeting by advertisers. What, why? Because by definition, the more precise targeting is the more relevant it its for end users. Knowing the standard nature of ads (as in: negative indirect network effect vis-à-vis users), the more relevant they are, the less unsatisfied […]

A Little Guide to AdWords Optimization

Hello, my young padawan! This time I will write a fairly concise post about optimizing Google AdWords campaigns. As usual, my students gave the inspiration to this post. They’re currently participating in Google Online Marketing Challenge, and — from the mouths of children you hear the truth 🙂 — asked a very simple question: “What do […]