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Tag: digital marketing

Why social advertising beats display advertising

Introduction I’ve long been skeptical of display advertising. At least my students know this, since ever year I start the digital marketing course by giving a lecture on why display sucks (and why inbound / search-engine marketing performs much better). But this post is not about the many pitfalls of display. Rather, it’s outlining three arguments as to why I nowadays…

Programmatic advertising: Red herring effect

Introduction Currently, there is very strong hype involved with programmatic buying. Corporations are increasing their investments on programmatic advertising and publishers are developing their own technologies to provide better targeting information for demand-side platforms. But all is not well in the kingdom. Display advertising still faces fundamental problems which are, in my opinion, more critical to advertising performance than more…

Online ads: Forget tech, invest in creativity

Technology is not a long-lasting competitive advantage in SEM or other digital marketing – creativity is. This brief post is inspired by an article I read about different bid management platforms: “We combine data science to SEM, so you can target based on device, hour of day and NASDAQ development.” Yeah… but why would you do that? Spend your time thinking of…

Basic formulas for digital media planning

Planning makes happy people. Introduction Media planning, or campaign planning in general, requires you to set goal metrics, so that you are able to communicate the expected results to a client. In digital marketing, these are metrics like clicks, impressions, costs, etc. The actual planning process usually involves using estimates — that is, sophisticated guesses of some sorts. These estimates…

Keyword optimization routine for search-engine advertising (AdWords)

In this post, I’m sharing a simple optimization process for search-engine advertising. I’ll also try to explain its rationale, i.e. explanation of why it should work. The process is particularly applicable to Google AdWords due to availability of metrics, but for the most parts it applies to Bing Ads as well. First, take a list of your keywords along with…

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. Likewise, the quality of performance…

On digital marketing ROI

Introduction There are many sub-types of ROI calculations in digital marketing. This post aims at making an argument that digital marketers should measure digital marketing returns as a sum of sub-returns from different channels/actions. Through that, they are able to capture the ROI impact on a wider scale than just looking at overall sales. Some metrics which inevitably have (some,…

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 network effects. In more detail,…

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 the end, but only those…