Josh Baker - Practical Advice for Optimizing your Internet Marketing

42 CPC & CPM Ad Networks to Review

Josh Baker — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:59:34 +0000

Do you want to expand past the big 2 – Google and Bing, to either advertise on or to monetize your website or blog through? Below are a list of 42 Ad Networks for you to review as additional options. This list consists of a combination of CPC and CPM Ad Networks, with some providing both.

Many will cost much less than the big 2 but will provide less traffic as well. Depending on what you are marketing they could convert worse or better for you, however in my experience they convert worse from a percentage standpoint but some have had a better ROI than Adwords. Many of these Ad Networks can be tested for $50-$100 each (or sometimes even less) depending on the specific Ad Network you choose in combination with your niche or market you are promoting to.

If you are trying to monetize your site, most of these will pay-out less than Adsense on a per-click basis depending on the network. In some instances the ads may be less recognizable by your visitors if they are used to only seeing Adsense ads on the sites they visit thus increasing the freshness level or opportunity for you.

Unless you test a couple of these Ad Networks out you wont know for sure how they will perform for you – so give a couple of these a test run.

7 Search
ABC Search
Ad Marketplace
Adbrite
Adengage
Admanage
AdToll
Advertise
ASK
Bidvertiser
Bizo
Business.com
Casale Media
Chitika
Clicksor
ClickThruTraffic
Enhance
ePilot
Etology
Exit Junction
eZanga
Facebook
Fastclick
FinanceClicks
Go Click
Kanoodle
Klickvip
Looksmart
Mamma
Mirago
Miva
Peakclick
Revtwt
Search 123
Search feed
Searchfeed
Target Point
Thegreenppc
TrafficVance
Twivert
Umax
ValueClick

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Top 7 Online Testing Pitfalls

Josh Baker — Thu, 05 May 2011 10:23:44 +0000

I was going through an old notebook the other day and found this gem from an Online Testing webinar that featured guest Ronny Kohavi, GM of the Microsoft Experimentation Platform.

Top 7 Pitfalls of Online Testing and Marketing Experimentation:

Wrong success metric
Incorrect interval calculation
Using standard formulas for standard deviations
Combining data when percent to treatment varies
Not filtering out robots
Invalid or inadequate instrumentation
Insufficient experimental control

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Behavioral Retargeting (Behavioral Remarketing) Basics

Josh Baker — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:57:51 +0000

Behavioral retargeting, for those that haven’t worked with it yet as discussed in this article is a form of online advertising where your ads are redelivered to visitors whom recently visited your website and didn’t complete a pre-determined desired action during their visit. In other words in an overly simplistic explanation (more clarity is described in the next paragraph), the user visits your website, doesn’t complete your desired action and then leaves and is continued to be shown your advertising on websites that they visit after yours in order to get them to return back to your website and then gives you another chance to close the “deal”. The theory behind it is that the visitor has shown some engagement with your site or brand by initially visited your website and therefore is a prime person to retarget more of your advertising to and to continue the marketing conversation with them. This allows you to draw them back in an attempt to make the conversion again by providing multiple contacts with that same prospect within a short period of time.

For example, a visitor comes to your website and views a page or multiples pages and then leaves. That same visitor goes to other websites after your website and your advertising is shown to them on those websites. Now to be completely clear, your retargeting ads won’t show on every website that visitor goes to after yours; it has to be a web site that is part of same advertising network as the retargeting platform you are working with. Usually, the ad network will have you place some pixels or tracking codes on your website so when a visitor comes to your website information will be stored in a cookie in their browser so that when they leave and go to another website in their network it knows to show them your advertising.

According to an article on InternetRetailer.com in May 2009 24% of online marketers were using some form of behavioral retargeting. And when viewing from the consumer side it makes perfect sense – you visit a site that offers something you have some level of interest on, but not yet ready to pull the trigger and purchase or subscribe. You leave and suddenly start seeing over and over again advertisements that feature that company, product, or website almost everywhere you go. Suddenly you can’t get it out of your head, you have to go back and look again, and you start justifying the purchase that it makes sense. It seems so right in your mind. Not everyone will feel this way, but a small percentage will, and had you not retargeted them, you would have lost them to elsewhere.

Once a visitor is at your site and does not covert, behavioral retargeting provides those additional interactions with your product or brand, building that level of trust and interest, making it more likely they will convert upon drawing them back.

TIP:

You need a decent amount of traffic in order for retargeting to be cost effective so that more visitors pick up your behavioral retargeting cookie. This enables more opportunities for visitors to see your ads on the ad network. Of course, you want this traffic to be relevant or they won’t convert no matter what. A good initial offering is to offer a free report or downloadable product (relevant to your site and target audience) to entice visitors to your website, then they will pick up the cookie and see your ads as they continue onwards as they are retargeted.

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Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics Made Easy

Josh Baker — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:20:25 +0000

Many people mix up marketing strategy and tactics. If you search the internet you will find many references to both that are incorrectly referenced and used. Simplistically speaking, marketing strategy is your idea; or how you will reach your specific and measurable goal. Marketing tactics are the actions that you use to make your idea (strategy) come to life.

Let’s look at an example of marketing strategy vs. tactics fall in place from the top down:

Marketing Goal (measurable objective):

Double my consulting revenue by December 31^st.

Marketing Strategy (idea):

Increase brand exposure

Tactics (actions):

Submit my prewritten guest article on widget making to Mr. Jones’s blog
Increase my max CPC bid to $0.90 in Google Adwords for the phrase “josh baker”
Post video from conference at Youtube

How about a non-marketing analogy to make it even easier?

Goal (measurable objective):

Buy new black shoes for tonight’s dinner

Strategy (idea):

Buy shoes at shoe store at 361 Main Street

Tactics (actions):

Get into car
Turn car on
Turn left out of driveway
Drive straight for 2 miles
Pull into parking spot in front of store
Go into store
Ask salesperson for brand XYZ in size 10, black
Etc.

Your tactics are the individual actions that you take to make your strategy come to life. Your strategy is the idea that will help you reach your goal.

That is marketing strategy vs. tactics made easy!

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Google Website Optimizer Security Issue

Josh Baker — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 01:34:50 +0000

Google Website Optimizer announced this week that there is a potential security issue with their Website Optimizer. The basics of the vulnerability is that it would allow an attacker to execute malicious code on your site using a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack, but only if the website or browser had already been compromised by a separate attack. Google says that the probability of the attack is low but that you should take the necessary action to protect your site from it.

Google has fixed the bug and any new experiments created on or after December 3, 2010 are not vulnerable. But if you have any experiments running that were created before December 3^rd, or that are paused or stopped that were created before that date you will need to update the code.

They have given two options to update your code which can be found here in the Official Google Website Optimizer blog post titled Update Your Website Optimizer scripts to secure your site, but your choices are to either stop your experiments and create new ones, or update the code on your running experiments directly. Google states that creating a new experiment is the simpler way between the two options.

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