Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Analytics

  • Speaking at Web Analytics Wednesday – Cambridge, MA

    If you’re in the Boston area please come out to this month’s Web Analytics Wednesday on March 19, 2008 at 6:00 PM. I’ll be speaking and presenting on the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to Onsite Targeting. The event takes place at Asgard in Cambridge and admission and food is free! Judah Phillips hosts the event…

  • RAMP is Born to Run

    Two and a half weeks. That’s all it’s been since I left to start my own company for the third time in the past decade. In that brief period I’ve signed four clients including leaders in Social Media, B2B Services, Politics and Auto. Every day is filled with talking to prospects, potential investors, potential employees,…

  • The Brand Optimization Revolution – The Metrics are Coming! The Metrics are Coming!

    A common trait I find among many “red-coat” marketers is a lack of respect for the collective intelligence of consumers. This expresses itself in many ways. One is the “we know what our users want” mindset. Another is the Boston/NY-SF/LA view that folks in Middle America are unsophisticated and stupid. These attitudes are constantly reflected…

  • Why We Need Many Metrics to Answer the Same Two Questions

    One of the things that has drawn my ire recently is the shouts from agencies, media buyers and advertisers that more ad spend would come into digital if there just weren’t so many metrics and tools for gathering analytics. I have news for them. The spend is coming and nothing will stop it. Digital is…

  • Webinar, Podcast & Speaking on Personalization, Targeting and Testing

    Over the next week I’ll be doing what seems like a quite a bit of evangelizing — hopefully it is more of a knowledge transfer than anything else. 3 Proven Approaches to Delivering Targeted Content – Webinar This is an Omniture webinar I had the pleasure of doing with Charlene Li of Forrester Research. Charlene…

  • Results from Facebook Ads

    On October 19th I launched my first Facebook ad campaign. The results reinforce a number of questions and concerns about the effectiveness of advertising in social media. Namely, using passive media tactics in an active media environment. Results Summary: Ok, that’s typical banner response. Here is the ad I ran. My target keywords were “advertising,”…

  • MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook

    MarketingSherpa’s second edition Landing Page Handbook was released last week. I’m very proud that Anne Holland thought so much of OTTO Digital/Offermatica and myself to include six case studies and some extensive quotes from yours truly. Personally, I’ve worked hard over the past few years to promote the value of landing page testing, targeting and…

  • Creating Intent in Digital Media

    In Part 1 I will look at three types of digital media and cross-media and see what the future may hold for intent creation. Next week in Part 2 I will focus on using creative and technology in synergy to optimize intent creation. The idea of creating intent is one of the touchstones of marketing…

  • Two Days in the Facebook Gold Rush

    I spent the past two days in Silicon Valley immersed in the world of Facebook Application Developers (I can’t resist the temptation to call them FADs) and Venture Capitalists. This culture shock was courtesy of being invited to speak on Metrics & Targeting at the awesome CommunityNext Platform Conference. Congrats to Noah Kagan and Andrew…

  • Landing Page Resolution: 800×600 vs. 1024×768

    While not one of the eternal questions of our time, what screen resolution to build your landing page is nevertheless always a key design consideration. Many factors weigh into this decision. What are the browser resolution settings for the majority of your users? How does the page appear on different resolution setting (e.g. where is…

  • Microsoft says Brand Search Ads a Waste of Money – Show Me the ROI!

    I have to chime on this since the timing of this Microsoft release and SES is not coincidence. It’s certainly attention grabbing but I think it’s almost irresponsible to make these claims without the right data to support them. In an article backed with little ROI data Microsoft/ Atlas is saying that it is a…

  • Ad Testing

    Ad testing can lead to huge increases in conversion rates. I don’t care if it is text based search ads, rich display and banner ads or video ads – all benefit site-side from advanced testing techniques done on the ads leading to these landings. We know marketing messages have a tremendous influence to persuade action.…

  • A Digital Marketing Lesson from Wall Street’s Woes

    As the New York Times points out in Sunday’s Business section the recent collapse of the stock and bond markets has much to do with the automated black-box systems of hedge funds whose algorithms are seeing behavior that despite all their statistical modeling has no precedent. The automated systems have failed and it’s now people…

  • Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners

    Over the last year I’ve become immersed in the world of Behavioral Targeting (or BT as insiders refer to it). Of course, in many respects I’ve been doing BT for a long time. The key components that make up the qualitative and quantitative aspects of BT; segmentation, targeted creative, testing, and analytics are all built…

  • Test Design Advice for SEOmoz on their Landing Page Competition

    I’m incredibly excited about the SEOmoz landing page competition. Not only did they chose to use the Offermatica platform but because of the awareness, education and information that this test will provide, countless marketers will experience the fun and excitement of testing. What is testing if not a competition? Testing is also an ongoing learning…

  • Offermatica’s Behavioral Targeting by Personal Affinity

    Back in January I posted the great results OTTO Digital was having with clients using Offermatica to behaviorally target content based on user defined affinity and the advantages this solution has over classic BT technology employed on the ad serving side of the world. Things have gone so well using this technique (also known as…

  • The Search Engine Election: 2008 Presidential Campaign Scorecard

    The immense power of search engines to reach people and influence behavior based on information discovery intentions is beyond debate. Still, with the 2008 Presidential Election little more than one year away the ability to quickly find relevant information on the candidate’s views and positions from the search engines, namely Google, is extremely poor. The…

  • Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages

    Last week on Search Engine Land Neil Patel raised the idea of creating custom landing pages for Social Media. I’m all for it. I’ll try to build on Neil’s ideas and add my thoughts on optimizing this type of landing page. SMO Success Metrics One problem people have with Social Media Optimization (SMO) is not…

  • Bud.tv: Anheuser-Busch Cracks a Cold One

    As prophesized here upon launch and reported yesterday and today elsewhere, Bud.tv is officially a failure. The next time your business or agency wants to throw money at a digital marketing initiative it is probably a good idea to do some testing and optimization of your offering first. A lot of egg on the face…

  • Targeting the Two Intentions of Users

    The benefit to understanding intent lies in targeting. Targeting ads, tags, copy, images or creative to source or behavior and whether in-session, in-site or retargeting is a proven and highly effective optimization strategy. Targeting will continue to drive the growth of digital marketing for the foreseeable future because it does one thing really well. Deliver…