Tag: search advertising

In 2016, Facebook bypassed Google in ads. Here’s why.

Introduction The gone 2016 was the first year I thought Facebook ends up beating Google in the ad race, despite the fact Google still dominates in revenue ($67Bn vs. $17Bn in 2015). I’ll explain why. First, consider that Google’s growth is restricted by three things: natural demand keyword volumes, and approach of perfect market. More […]

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. […]

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 Quick Note on Bidding Theory of Online Ad Auctions

Introduction This is a simple post about some commonly known features of online ad auctions. Generalized second-price auction (GSP) is a mechanism in which the advertiser pays a marginally higher bid than the advertiser losing to him. It encourages the bidder to place a truthful bid, i.e. one where the price level is such that […]

A major change in AdWords – How to react?

Introduction Google has made a major change in AdWords. Ads are now shown only in the main column, no longer in the right column. Previously, there were generally speaking eight ads per SERP. For some queries, Google didn’t show ads at all, and additionally they’ve been constantly testing the limit, e.g. running up to 16 product listing […]

The correct way to calculate ROI for online marketing

Introduction This is a short post explaining the correct way to calculate ROI for online marketing. I got the idea earlier today while renewing my Google AdWords certificate and seeing this question in the exam: Now, here’s the trap – I’m arguing most advertisers would choose the option C, although the correct one is option A. […]

Assessing the scalability of AdWords campaigns

Introduction Startups, and why not bigger companies, too, often test marketing channels by allocating a small budget to each channel, and then analyzing the results (e.g. CPA, cost per action) per channel. This is done to determine a) business potential and b) channel potential. The former refers to how lucrative it is to acquire customers […]