Category: User Experience
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Interviewed by AdExchanger
If you are at all involved in display advertising AdExchanger.com is a daily must read. So I was really psyched when they wanted to interview me and that interview was published today. It covers what we are doing at RAMP Digital and my POV on the state and future of the digital ad industry. …
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People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices
The following post was originally published as a guest post for the AdMonsters blog in advance of my speaking at their Leadership Forum. For more reading on the ideas contained here I also recommend this post and this post on Chris Dixon's blog. Fragmentation = Problems & Opportunities No one will argue that the Display marketplace is an…
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Reaping The Ads You Sow
Trends in search provide amazing intelligence. So much so that Google has provided a destination site with information even non-data junkies will find interesting. You can look at this data and understand two things about online marketing. TV drives a great deal of search inventory/demand/price/scale Getting media channels to work together can reap huge rewards Different…
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Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal
There is growing debate about the future of journalism and to a greater extent publishing in the digital age. The axis of the conversation is revenue generation or lack thereof. The problem in this space is one that frustrates me enormously because the answers are there. We know how to make money on the…
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Recap: Search Becomes the Display Operating System
"So yeah I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong/ You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song" – Jay Z, Takeover It was with the swagger that comes from presenting at my 5th SES in San Jose that I created a new presentation below for the session I put…
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Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.
For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…
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Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?
Display advertising, which at one time looked like the web’s glorious channel is now a glory hole for direct marketing. In many respects brand advertisers have themselves to blame, not believing that a click is branding and fumbling around with poor microsite driven strategies that have zero ROI. The fact of the matter is an…
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API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next
We have reached maturation point with APIs where the three core components of the web experience – content, utility & data – are becoming readily available via API delivery. The implication of this growth is nothing less than the next web. A smarter web that delivers improved relevance, a better experience and expanded revenue generation…
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Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing
This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years. As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been…
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Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics
Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many…
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SES Presentation: Search Becomes the Display OS
75% of the audience was agencies and amazingly 80% of those people were running both Search and Display campaigns. As my fellow presenter Scott Rafer has noted on more than one occasion the falling cost of Display can bring back better returns than search. Believe it! I saw it myself three times this week for…
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Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book
Aaron Wall is a legend in SEO and his site SEO Book gets about 1 million uniques a month so I was really psyched when he asked to interview me. Aaron asked some really thought provoking questions and we covered everything from my career path, to what I’m working on now, to the future of…
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Why Is Recovery.gov Making Online Access to ARRA Difficult?
Note: This post has bias to no political party — other than the optimizers of freedom. There has to be a reason that the good folks at recovery.gov want to make it difficult to view the full ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) bill. First, I had to fish around before finding the actual law that…
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Advanced Landing Pages – SMX West
For years, first with javascript testing and content targeting tools and now adding APIs and semantic technology, I have maintained that landing pages are the most advanced forms of digital marketing — the ultimate marriage of technology with creative. So it was great to finally get an “advanced” landing pages session on the schedule this…
Optimize & Prophesize 