"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Well, they said it would launch in Q3, and it has – yesterday Yahoo! unveiled its new ad management platform, called APT, at a razzamatazz-filled event in New York introduced by John Hamm, star of Mad Men (currently the topic of much debate in our house as to its merits). APT started life as “Project … Read more
So far in my nascent Online Ad Business 101 series, I’ve covered the overall advertising value chain, and looked at a superficial level at how an ad ‘call’ is actually handled. This installment brings together themes from those two first posts, by taking a look at ad networks. As I have mentioned before, ad networks … Read more
When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it’s easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, … Read more
There’s a very interesting post by Robin Goad over on the Hitwise blog about the change in distribution of search terms on search engines. As more and more people are searching online, two things are happening to the range of search terms, one intuitively obvious, the other somewhat counter-intuitive. The obvious change is that the … Read more
One of the things I was struck by (apart from the fact of how woefully inadequate the New York Hilton is as a major exhibition venue) last week at ad:tech was the staggering number of “Ad networks” touting their wares on the exhibition floor. Of the roughly 300 exhibitors in New York, at least a … Read more
Apologies for the rather slower pace of posts of late, but life has been a little busy here, what with moving house in Seattle, taking a trip to London to attend E-metrics, and succumbing to a nasty cold this week. Hopefully this post, the latest in my ‘mini-series’ on online marketing measurement techniques, will make … Read more
Do you know how online ad serving works? Are you familiar with the difference between a publisher-side ad server and an advertiser (or third-party) ad server? No? Then read this excellent article on the topic by my colleague and ad industry veteran Eric Picard. The article’s actually an updated version of one that he wrote … Read more
I came across a very interesting article in last week’s Economist Technology Quarterly the other day (which I was reading a week late, thanks to the efficiencies of the US Postal Service). The article mentioned a couple of sites such as AttentionTrust and Agloco which have sprung up to help users take ownership of their own online behavior … Read more
For part 2 of this n-part series on marketing measurement techniques, we’re turning our attention to the methods employed by web analytics tools to capture the source of an inbound click and turn that into a report about whether marketing is working for you. Bye bye, Referrer Back in simpler, more innocent times (i.e. up … Read more
It goes without saying that measuring the effectiveness of online marketing is web analytics’ #1 ‘killer app’. But how realistic a picture of the value of online marketing can a web analytics deliver? Come to that, is there any such thing as a true picture of marketing effectiveness? The short answer to the above question … Read more