Optimize & Prophesize

Category: A/B & MVT Testing

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Optimize and Prophesize 2010 Highlights

    2010 was my fifth year of blogging and my second year on Twitter. My number of blog posts have continued to trend down the past few years, though my posts these days tend to be more thought out and longer – so hopefully the quality has gone up. I looked back on my blog posts…

  • Another Brick in the Paywall

     There have been some interesting thoughts, news and events the past week in regards to paying for content online that made me realize while I hold some strong beliefs and experiences in the area I’ve not written about these ideas in a long while. Over the past couple of years I have helped advise three of the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

    "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." – Emerson 2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

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