Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Relevance

  • Algorithmic Search and Discovery

    When Rich Skrenta who has been a pioneer in Search with Topix (and just launched Blekko) writes the following, I take notice: “Algorithmic search is sinking. The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category.…

  • Search Vs. Social: A Game Over Before it Started

    I really like GigaOm but they fell prey yesterday at the end of a piece that was for the most part accurate about Search not being a demand-gen channel to the false prophet of Social Media advertising overtaking Search. They’re in good company underestimating the upside of Search. In 2003 Jupiter predicted paid search would grow to…

  • My Thoughts on Online Privacy

    Anyone that has followed me on Twitter knows that I have been a staunch defender of online privacy rights and outspoken against third-party data sharing practices of our industry. The reasons are twofold: one personal, one business. I’m compelled to finally write a post on privacy after reading Esther Dyson’s comments on it. It’s a…

  • Ten Intent Triggers for Digital Media

    It has long been my belief that the ability to create intent would define web monetization but I had no idea it would play out (and literally “play” out as in Zynga et al) the way it has. Certainly we are at the dawn of a new age where technology powers marketing in more powerful…

  • Ladies and Gentlemen: Search Has Your Attention

    "Google has become the remote control for the world; it's the first stop, not TV” – Will Margiloff, CEO of Innovation Interactive Nothing is more realtime than Search. Have a question? Search gets the answer for you right away. Need to find something right now? Search will track it down in less than half a…

  • CTR is the Web

    My friend Darren Herman has reinitiated a debate about the validity of Click Through Rate (CTR) as an online advertising metric. On his blog he posted a great collection of quotes he obtained on the subject from some brilliant industry people. It's an important read. Interesting to me, of the 9 people asked only 1 was…

  • The Web is Not an Ad Supported Medium

    The web is the greatest marketing channel ever created but there is incredible irony in that. It was not created as a marketing channel. In fact, understanding that fact and even leveraging it is one of the best strategies you can undertake in online marketing. Seth Godin said it best two years ago and I’ve…

  • Unlocking the True Value of Digital with User Flows

    From 2003-2005 I spent a lot of time observing people of all ages and walks of life use the web across many different sites and verticals. I watched their facial expressions and body language as they surfed. I watched their mouse movements and the locations of their clicks.  I asked them to put their brains…

  • Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Segmentation in the Age of Data Objects

     Almost everyday of the past 12 years I’ve looked at web analytic data. It’s never been a completely satisfying experience. Log files don’t paint a vivid picture and javascript’s palette of data points is often a mess. At the end of the day, it is all “just numbers.” It doesn’t tell me what to do.…

  • Online Advertising is Not an Intent Generation Channel

    Chris Dixon posted yesterday about Facebook and the ad channel they are trying to create with the Like buttons. He thinks they are building for top of the funnel Brand advertisers. The day of the big FB “Like” announcement I tweeted that Facebook was going to use these buttons to go head-to-head with Google on direct-advertising. It…

  • Display Advertising’s New Wave

    This week I was supposed to be in Amsterdam giving a presentation at Sanoma Uitegevers MediaParade event. As luck would have it a volcano erupted and forced me to cancel the trip. Below is the presentation I was really excited to give. It’s 45 minute talk, history lesson, state of the union and crystal ball…

  • Bounce Rates & Publisher Monetization from Search

    Bounce rate from natural search is a problem that has plagued publishers for a long time. It’s one of the problems we’re working on solving at Yieldbot. Many pubs spend a great amount of time and effort working on SEO to increase site visitors. The fruit of this labor is increased traffic to pages relevant…

  • Yieldbot is Born to Run

     Two years ago after Omniture purchased Offermatica and I started Relevance AMPlified (RAMP)  I stated three core principles of what I was doing next: 1.    Intent & affinity are the root segmentation strategies 2.    Achieve success w/ the most advanced technology 3.    Testing, targeting & optimization is our DNA These ideals are also evident in…

  • Display’s Matching Problem

    Simply put, advertising is a matching problem. It is a puzzle of people and needs, demand and awareness, creativity and messaging, and most of importantly, timing and context. It works best when the shape of the consumer fits perfectly with the shape of the advertiser. While conceptually this idea is not new  - advertisers have…

  • Links vs. Cookies: A Tale of Two Web Economies

      I credit Jonathan Strauss of link analytics company awe.sm with coining the phrase “the link as the cookie.” I’ve been borrowing that expression for the past year because it not only describes his service and the meta concept of linked data, but it also encapsulated what intelligent landing page optimizers had been doing for some time…

  • What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

    I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and…

  • 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…

  • Waiting to Rule the Ad World: The Next Decade Will Shift to Search

    With apologies to BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Over the next decade we’ll see Search explode unlike any media we have ever seen before. Dollar for dollar, in one form or another, sometime before the end of the coming decade, Search will become the most important and valuable media channel in the world. Search…

  • Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking

    With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords (those that have transactional value). Case in point is this SERP for "rifle scopes." This was a query used during my Ad Copy & Continuity…

  • 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…