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Tag: digital marketing

Why human services are needed for world peace

The bot can be boss, as long as we have jobs. Why are human services the future of our economy? (And, therefore, an absolute requirement for world peace [1].) For three reasons: They do not pollute or waste material resources (or tend to do so with significantly less degree than material consumption) Exponential growth of population absolutely requires more human labor…

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 which a tool will create…

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 the users. What’s more, their…

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 we do when the campaigns…

Using Napoleon’s 19th Century Principles for Email Writing

“In this age, in past ages, in any age… Napoleon.” (The Duke of Wellington) This is a short post reflecting upon Napoleon’s writing on war and efficient management. I think many of his principles are universal and apply to communication — my special consideration here is writing of emails, which is a vital skill because 1) you want your message to…

Example of Google’s Moral Hazard: Pooling in Ad Auctions

Google has an incentive to group advertisers in ad auction even when this conflicts with the goals of an individual advertiser. For example, you’d like to bid on ‘term x‘ and would not like be included in auctions ‘term x+n‘ due to e.g. lower relevance, your ad might still participate in the auction. This relates to two features: use of…

Modern Market Research Methods: A Startup Perspective

EDIT: Updated by adding competitive analysis, very important to benchmark competitors. EDIT2: Updated by adding experimentation (14th April, 2016) Introduction Somebody on Quora was asking about ‘tools’ for validating viability and demand for a startup’s products. I replied it’s not a question of tools, but plain old market research (which seems to be all too often ignored by startup founders).…

Dynamic Pricing and Incomplete People Information

One of the main problems in analytics is the lack of people information (e.g., demographics, interests). It is controlled by superplatforms like Google and Facebook, but as soon as you have transition from the channel to the website, you lose this information. So, I was thinking this in context of dynamic pricing. There’s no problem for determining an average solution,…

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 marginal returns equal marginal cost.…