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Tag: online advertising

Online ads: Forget tech, invest in creativity

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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Keyword optimization routine for search-engine advertising (AdWords)

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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Controlling ad quality in programmatic buying

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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Quality in programmatic advertising

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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,…

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

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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 perspective: the well-targeting advertiser is…

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Facebook ad testing: is more ads better?

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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Facebook’s Incentive to Reward Precise Targeting

Facebook’s Incentive to Reward Precise Targeting

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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A Little Guide to AdWords Optimization

A Little Guide to AdWords Optimization

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

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…

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