Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Targeting

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Introducing the NML – The National Marketing League*

    Wouldn’t it be great if there were a professional marketing league? It could literally be the best media property in the world, NFL be damned. I know I would follow it very closely and even place a wager or two. Owners would form teams of digital marketers across different verticals. Team members could include marketers…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Search’s Long Tail Rising

      “When they kick out your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?” Last week Google confirmed changes to their natural Search algorithm.  In short, by giving more weight to site authority in the algo, long tail Search traffic should begin to rise for…

  • 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…

  • The Market Value of Supply Side Data

    AdExchanger had a nice post from TRAFFIQ’s Scott Portugal about publishers using a Value-per-Customer metric for site visitors. As longtime readers know, I’ve been advocating publishers take this approach and measure site performance on revenue per visitor for years – most recently here. I especially liked this part of Scott’s post: “users interaction with a site…

  • Dynamic Segmentation (La Nouvelle Vague)

    I’ve always loved segmentation. One of the keys to the success of my first web business and the number one reason we survived the dotcom bubble was that we segmented our email list like crazy. Every supplement purchased qualified you for a segment. We knew the categories you were interested in and what products within…

  • Launch Interviews on Yieldbot

      I realize that not everyone follows me or yieldbot on twitter so I wanted to post links here to recent interviews I've done surrounding the launch of yieldbot. AdExchanger ExchangeWire  Hope you enjoy. I tried to go into great detail on our vision and execution. Publishers interested in getting into the yieldbot beta please contact…

  • 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…

  • 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…