Category: A/B & MVT Testing
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End of the CPM Experiment
The flag bearer of display advertising was always Yahoo. Their massive sales force stoked 15 years of equity into “the web banner.” Yahoo arguably had the greatest hand in providing the economic foundation for the entire web for many of its formative years. That is why nothing better symbolizes the collapse of that foundation better…
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Talkin’ 2011 Publisher Revenue Blues
"Well, I finally started thinkin' straightWhen I run outta things to investigate." -Bob Dylan It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Optimize and Prophesize and even longer since I posted regularly. As has been the tradition here in all but my first year blogging in 2006, I provide a yearly recap of my…
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The Value of Search Ads for Brand Keywords
On Search Engine Land today I saw a nice post on understanding the dynamics of Paid vs. Organic (or Natural) search. As David Roth explains it: What keywords are we really talking about? Those that match exactly with your brand name or branded product name, where there is generally no competition. So if you are Acme Widget…
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Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010
Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was…
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Optimizing Display Ad Creative for CTR & Conversion
Most display advertising is still purchased on a CPM basis – you are buying a certain number of impressions. For that reason the higher percentage of clicks you get on your ad impressions the more cost effective your buying becomes. So ad creative is often the lynchpin to ROI. But it is very hard to…
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Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.
For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…
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Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked
Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed…