Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Display

  • Dawn of the Video Search (& Ad) Age

    Quietly, as if it occurred while you were sleeping over the past few years search relevancy has improved. The combination of increased algorithmic accuracy plus an abundance of additional data and content have made this possible. Long gone are the days you could and would go from engine to engine and try your query in…

  • Optimizing Content: Give Users Control

    A week and a half ago I spoke at Outsell’s BrainGain conference to a group of leading executives from traditional publishers on how they can deliver relevance to their audience. It was a great group of folks and the Outsell team does their best to steer them in the right direction. However, I couldn’t help…

  • Afterthoughts on SES Chicago

    SES Chicago had a very different vibe from the six other SES shows I’ve participated in. The show was packed with first time attendees and lots of in-house folks. I actually think this is a really good sign. SEO/M has reached a turning point. On one level it has matured. Early practitioners now have years…

  • Marketing Speak

    I’ve been doing plenty of talking the past couple of weeks and I’ve been repeating a number of ideas. Forsaking humility, I thought that sharing what’s on my mind might make an interesting post. In no particular order: Contextual Relevance: Deliver relevance in the context of the user focus Sub-segments: Segmentation…at a whole other level…

  • Measuring and Optimizing Engagement: The Audible.com Case Study

    https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=9259&doc=adtech-ny-next-generation-strategies-for-ecommerce-the-audiblecom-case-study-9259-9996 You can measure engagement. More importantly, engagement can be optimized. Yesterday, at ad:tech New York I delivered the presentation above on work we just completed at OTTO Digital for Audible.com on the panel Next Generation Strategies for eCommerce, moderated by David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. The case study shows how we used multivariate and…

  • Why (Insert Your Brand or Product Here)?

    True story. I’m on the subway heading downtown in NYC. I notice an ad for Fiji Water. It was a picture of the bottle and this copy: Message In A Bottle FIJI water is from Fiji What caught my interest most of all was the question “WHY?” handwritten in black pen next to the bottom…

  • The Death of Best Practices

    Best practice by definition is the best possible way of doing something. Most marketers look at implementing best practices as executing standards to make improvement. Unfortunately, this one-way, one-size fits all standardization mentality is not an effective practice for digital marketers. It’s lazy marketing. Old school. Our world needs to be ruled by looking at…

  • How Starbucks Segments and Targets its Brand

    The lead story in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section this Sunday was “The Starbucks Aesthetic” and it’s worth a read. It actually would have been better placed as the lead story in the Business section. What the story made clear is that Starbucks has successfully expanded its product offerings, revenues and brand…

  • Choice Kills Conversion

    Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy. When confronted with choice user response will slow, users become unsure of themselves and many times they will fall off their task. As soon as…

  • R.E.M. Reshaping E-Metrics (or Revolutionizing E-Marketing)

    Marshall Sponder’s blog WebMetricsGuru had a post with comments from a recent Eric Peterson’s e-consultancy interview that caught my attention. The conversation is about the present difficulties for analytic vendors and display advertisers in the face of rich-internet applications (RIAs) and feeds as they continue to proliferate on the web. Sorry if I don’t shed…

  • Social Media Optimization & Branding

    Pathways to Experience Your brand value is in large part made up of the many different experiences your users have with it. The value increases as more new users have good experiences and your existing user’s expectations are met. Our job as marketers is to create the awareness and expectations that feed user desire to…

  • Optimizing Your Content Pages

    https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=3622&doc=omma-new-york-when-every-page-is-a-landing-page-14215 This past week at OMMA New York I spoke to content providers. The session was titled “When Every Page is a Landing Page.” This indeed is the case and exemplifies the power of digital marketing (namely search) to deconstruct traditional forms of media and the long held practices around them. The idea of presenting…

  • Landing Page Optimization Part 2: Search Ads

    Marketers optimizing landing pages often neglect to look at a key element in that optimization equation. The ad. The Reason: Testing results recently showed a 61% impact on conversion rate In Google for a particular ad with the first description line having the greatest impact on that performance. Display ads are being tested as well.…

  • Delivering Contextual Relevance Through Segmentation

    Mass marketing in the digital age means marketing to many segments of the entire mass. In fact, we all know the very idea of “mass marketing” is road kill. Technology allows us as marketers to understand the individual segments of our audience and deliver messages contextually relevant to each segment. In fact, segmentation is the…

  • Rocket Up Your ROI with Contextual Relevance

    Once you figure out how to deliver relevance to one of your key market segments I guarantee you’ll want to try again. And when you try it again you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it sooner. From beyond the universe to the planet OTTO, I present the ASTRO rules for delivering contextual relevance. 1. Analyze-Numbers…

  • Is it Real? YouTube’s “lonelygirl15”

    Brilliant Hoax, Marketing Genius, or UGC Savant? Whatever ends up happening with “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15 “>lonelygirl15” it will be a fascinating study of online marketing prowess in the nascent world of user generated content (UGC) and social-media. If you’ve become a fan of YouTube as I have then you probably know who she is. Her two-minute…

  • Landing Page Optimization Part 1 (cont.)

    The Keyword Query and Transactional Landing Pages Picking up where we left off in Part 1 we’re now heading downstream and focusing on experiences where the user lands closer to completing their goal. I refer to these as Transactional Landings. Here the keyword driver can be anything from a general query like “mortgage” to a…

  • Viral Vidiocy: The Agency.com Video

    So I finally watched the agency.com viral debacle. What struck me was that all the smart people that used to work there must have left. Agency.com seems like…well, not the sharpest tool in the shed. While they were spending their time learning how to make sandwiches and use a cash register, a smart agency would…

  • The State of the State: Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    Online marketing and in particular search is still very much a nascent insurgency. I try to remember that. But at the end of this latest SES, after I had the chance to talk with the leaders in strategy, technology, analytics as well as reps from the engines themselves I walked away (once again) with a…

  • The Quality of Web Analytic Data. Or, why you need to be doing High Impact Segmentation

    Avinash Kaushik of Intuit had a great post recently on the poor quality of web analytic data. A side story to me was how much better the amount and quality of data we have for online marketing is over every other measured medium. As we look more and more towards this data and the quality…