Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Display

  • 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…

  • Convenience Marketing: The Medium is the Message

    As marketers and advertisers we sometimes forget the most basic reason people use the digital medium. Convenience. The user experience online has no parallel in the offline world. The offline experience is optimized in a whole other manner. If you read Paco Underhill’s wonderful insight into offline shopping strategy in “Call of the Mall” you…

  • How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention

    In my last post I wrote that all user intentions can be boiled down to one of two goals, discovery or recovery. To create marketing strategies for these intentions we must begin by understanding the way users think in the course of trying to achieve these goals. Users respond to what they know. This can…

  • 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…

  • Flash Forward: Six Examples of Optimizing Flash Video for User Engagement

    As engagement becomes a more valuable and measurable metric (and we know through many test across verticals that increasing engagement leads to increased conversion and page views) optimizing flash video movies and other rich Internet applications (RIA) like Ajax become critical. I’ll explore Ajax optimization in an upcoming post. This post was prompted by a…

  • Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

    Brand is many things but at its core it is an emotional connection between a user and a product or service. That connection has its greatest impact at the experience level where an interaction between the user and the product or service takes place. So what is interactive marketing then if not branding? And how…

  • 4 Strategies for Optimizing Name Tags

    How Changes in User Behaviors and Search Results can Increase Traffic, Drive Engagement and Deliver Relevance for Your Name, Event, Brand and Product I have noticed an interesting referrer trend in my analytics. A growing number Organic search traffic visitors are coming to my blog off name queries. Not my name but names of those…

  • Afterthoughts on SES New York City

    A full week of client kick-offs on the West Coast and back home to NYC for a week (actually three days) of Search Engine Strategies has rendered O&P without a post the past two weeks. With so much going on I wanted to first share some thoughts on what was one of the more enjoyable…

  • The Next Generation of Digital Marketing Agencies

    A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with the President of a digital marketing agency conglomerate and heard the following: “You think, what do I want the consumers to do, and then you plan your campaign from there.” Here’s how I would rephrase the comment: “You think, what do consumers want to…

  • 5 Lessons from Multivariate Tests on Google PPC Ads

    Search ads are the bridge of relevance between the keyword query and the landing page. They are a key factor in your Quality Score, affect the traffic to your site and thus your spend and budgets. They set user expectations for the landing page and influence conversion. At OTTO Digital we’ve been working with clients…

  • Why You Must Exceed User Expectations

    Apple has an automatic pause of the track when the iPod is playing and your headphone plug comes out of the jack. The first few times this happened to me the pause was unexpected, but I was psyched each time I plugged back in and didn’t miss a beat. In fact, it didn’t really occur…

  • 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags

    I can’t get YouTube off my mind. With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, the revolution is being videoized. Contrary to popular opinion it just may be an ad revolution. H&R Block’s recent promo for their TaxCut online filing includes the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube. There has also been a…

  • The Sphere of Information Distribution & Consumption

    It’s a simple truth: we gravitate toward the information we are interested in. This information sits in many different places. We access it in many different ways and we use it in infinitely more ways. In the online world these 0s and 1s are the window to our life. Information on the work we do,…

  • Marketing Darwinism: Is Anheuser-Busch’s $40M Gamble on Digital Content Moving Online Marketing Forward or Back?

    This Sunday New York Times Magazine will run a piece titled “Brew Tube” that focuses on Monday’s launch of Bud.tv, an effort of A&B’s marketing team to reach the young and wired demographic with a marketer owned channel of original digital content. I read the article with some skepticism as to the effect that this…

  • More on the Promise of Behavioral Targeting

    Phil Leggiere has another great interview in today’s Behavioral Insider column titled “Beyond CPM: Bidding and Behavioral Data.” This time it’s with Alex Hooshmand of Right Media. Right Media is a transparent auction based platform that matches advertisers and publishers and optimizes ROI based on targeting. The exchange (RMX) officially opened to publishers this week.…

  • Real Behavioral Targeting Focuses on Intent

    Dave Morgan of Tacoda has an insightful essay “When Will We Deliver the Promise” that addresses a question asked to him by WSJ technology writer Walter Mossberg: when will online advertising deliver on the promise of right ad, right, customer, right time? The question is great one. However, I’m afraid the folks in display media…

  • Targeting Based on Category Affinity

    One of the more interesting things we’re doing at OTTO Digital is pushing the envelope on content targeting and re-targeting based on source and behavior. Presently we’re working with a major retailer on delivering contextually relevant content on their homepage to return visitors (either in-session or on subsequent visits) based on what category the user…

  • Lead with Landing Pages: Create Your Campaigns by Starting at the End

    Why do keywords and ads inform landing page creative? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? This is a vestige of the old way of thinking about advertising. The ad was everything. The ad could persuade. The ad could influence. The ad could brand. Those days are a nice walk down memory lane. Still, most…

  • YouTube Video Ad Optimization: Send in the SEMs!

    Ok, I know YouTube hasn’t officially started running video ads but they are testing. So it’s time to start thinking about how to optimize them. Well, maybe not so fast. The video ad production, media buying, results analysis and optimization will likely be done by folks that have little experience purchasing media based on user…