KEO Marketing » General

Display Advertising and the Future of Ad Retargeting

Sheila — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:41:48 +0000

Display advertising is changing rapidly and those changes are making it harder and harder to understand and keep up.

Here’s a quick breakdown on some of the most recent changes:

Fewer ads per page. Currently, there is way more supply than demand for online advertising. There’s really no limit to the number of ads one can display on a website (though a large number certainly isn’t advisable). As the market matures, and publishers begin to focus on their audiences’ needs, the price of online advertising should force a closer balance between ads and ad space.

People matter most. Some companies purchasing inventory on ad exchanges take a “spray-and-pray” approach to ad retargeting. They bombard the site’s audience with as many impressions as they can, with little regard for performance or efficiency. That works for a little while, but certainly not long term. This should make forward-thinking agencies optimistic about the future, as it allows for thoughtful ads to reach a more accepting audience.

Putting your customer data to work is a must. Too many companies think retargeting is easy… throw a tag on a landing page and retarget every customer who comes to the site. But as display evolves and becomes more competitive, advertisers need to use more of their own data to make decisions and optimally price each impression. For example:

What products did the customer buy in the past?
How does that inform what products should be shown in the display creative?
What’s the sales cycle for the advertiser’s product or service and how should that affect the CPM?

The important thing to remember is that you have a wealth of data to work with. You can control your own results.

For more information about display advertising and ad retargeting, contact KEO Marketing.

Recent and Upcoming Facebook Changes

jenn — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:41:38 +0000

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the f8 conference in San Francisco that your Facebook profile as you know it will be drastically changing. It is tiring for even social media mavens to keep up with the changes, so here is a quick rundown of what was announced last week, in the biggest revamp of Facebook in recent history.

What are the changes? There are many – almost too many to list – so here are the top 5 biggest changes:

Your “profile” is disappearing. In Facebook’s effort to “recover the past”, the Facebook Timeline will transform your profile into a chronological insight into your life, including photos, status updates and relationships – from day one (pre-Facebook). Think of it as a massive, public scrapbook.

Top stories and recent updates = most popular news feed. Facebook summed it up best by saying, “When you visit Facebook, you should see the things you’re most interested in.” If you log in a lot you will see recent updates, if you are a casual Facebooker, you will see top stories so you don’t miss anything important.

Facebook subscriptions. You can now “subscribe” to a person’s feed even if you are not friends with them and vice versa.

Friends list is now smarter. Facebook friend lists automatically create themselves and stay current based on your profile information and similarities you have in common with your friends, such as family, city, work, school, etc.

You never have to leave Facebook. Thanks to partnerships with Hulu, Spotify, Yahoo and Netflix (just to name a few) you can now watch TV shows, movies, listen to music and check out a news story. An instant ticker will display what interests you and that of your friends, allowing a collaborative social sharing experience.

For more information about social marketing solutions, contact KEO Marketing.

KEO Recommends

Skype – Improve your Proficiency and Production (Chad Nicely)
facebook ads (Chad Nicely)
Bing Facebook Deal Google Moves In (seogoogle)

Google Analytics Updates

Sheila — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:13:56 +0000

Google Analytics recently announced changes to the way sessions are calculated. A “session” occurs when a user visits a website, and triggers analytics tracking. These changes will not affect the majority of accounts in a significant way, the changes are still important. According to Google’s official blog post, most users will see less than a 1% change.

What’s Changing & How It May Affect Your Google Analytics
Below is a quick summary of how Google Analytics has ended a session up until the recent changes:

More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single user
At the end of the day
At the close of the browser session

After the changes, Google Analytics will end a session:

When more than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single user
At the end of the day
When any campaign information changes, including utm_source, medium, term, content, id, campaign, and auto-tagging from AdWords (gclid)

The most useful information that will come from these changes are that we will now be able to track the same user coming to a website multiple times through different mediums. For example, if a user comes to your site from a PPC ad, leaves and returns through an organic link, we would count it as two visits now, instead of one as in the past. This will certainly provide us with more accurate number and reporting.

For more information about Google Analytics, contact KEO Marketing.

Yahoo Traffic Stats Added to Bing Webmaster Tools

Sheila — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:12:26 +0000

Last month, a merger occurred between Microsoft Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. That merger brought about changes to Bing Webmaster Tools, specifically the addition of Yahoo traffic statistics.

By combining traffic data from both Yahoo and Bing engines, impressions and clicks will both appear to increase. The data integration began on August 12 and took until August 16 to complete. For now, site owners will not yet be able to select individual engines to view data separately.

This transition could signal the end of Yahoo Site Explorer.

For more information about website analytics, contact KEO Marketing.