Purna Virji says, “Persuasion. Influence. Psychology. The conversion rate optimization (CRO) crowd is adept at tapping into these to drive the actions of their audiences. When it comes to ad copy, there may not appear to be a lot we can do to actively influence our search audience. Short of a screaming headline (not allowed), all we have is a limited set of characters. We can make every one of those characters truly work by channeling our inner CRO expert. Before we jump into the words that work, let’s take a few minutes to understand the psychology of decision-making. What causes us to... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “On Wednesday, Google launched AdSense Labs to give publishers access to test newer features, kicking off with two Labs: Show fewer ads and Inline ads. The Show fewer ads lab lowers the number of ads shown to users by at least 10 percent. Publishers can, in turn, expect to see a drop in revenue, but a drop Google estimates will be “negligible,” or less than one percent of revenue, because the focus is on eliminating ads that are likely to be deemed of lower value to a publisher’s visitors. Inline ads are dynamically inserted mobile website ads sized 320×100. They... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “While there’s debate around the impact of ad blocking, the statistics are clear: the extent to which consumers have embraced ad blocking is not in question. And there’s no sign that the consumer desire to keep ads at bay is waning. In fact, according to a new eMarketer report, ad blocking in the US will grow to 69.8m users this year, a 34.4% increase from last year. And it will grow 24% in 2017, bringing the total number of internet users relying on ad blockers to north of 86m. If that estimate is accurate, nearly a third of the internet population in the... [...]

Peter Minnium says, “Poor, aggrieved advertising just can’t catch a break. Even in the good old days, when families gathered in living rooms to watch TV, advertising needed to run the gauntlet to be effective: creating an opportunity to see, capturing attention, leaving a branded impression, delivering a message, and finally, changing attitudes and behavior. I’ve outlined best practices to do this in a previous post. The internet and digital technology presented an opportunity to tip the odds in advertising’s favor. The promise of digital advertising — ad products with sight, sound,... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Though the term non-linear advertising is perhaps a little academic, the concept is a useful one when discussing multichannel campaigns. It’s also a lens through which to view display advertising, and the problems it is beset by. Here’s my attempt at explaining it. What does non-linear advertising mean? The term non-linear has been cropping up in media for years. We used to consume media in a linear fashion – we would start watching an appointment-to-view TV show and sit there until it finished, because there was ‘nothing else on’. Likewise,... [...]

Valerie Levin says, “We’ve all been victim to it. You’re perusing a site, reading an interesting article or scrolling your social feed and suddenly a headline or image catches your eye. Without realizing it, you’ve clicked and been sucked into an advertisement. But that was, in fact, the very goal of the company who produced the article and placed it strategically so as to bait your click among the site’s organic content. Even if you felt duped by the ad, you probably weren’t as angry as if a pop-up kept harassing you or a sidebar overtook your online experience. This subtle tactic,... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “While much of the talk about Microsoft’s plans to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash, announced Monday, has focused on beefing up its cloud business, there’s much to be considered for advertisers, particularly B2B advertisers. In past years, Bing Ads executives have talked about the breadth of user data that Microsoft has spanning work and personal accounts and hinted at a newfound willingness to open access to that data vault for ad targeting under Satya Nadella. In 2014, David Pann, Bing’s General Manager, told me in an interview that they were looking at ways... [...]

Frederick Vallaeys says, “After hosting Brandcast and I/O, Google wrapped up a busy month of announcements with Performance Summit, the new name for their combined AdWords and Analytics launch event. I had the good fortune of getting invited to a press event where I could ask questions of Sridhar Ramaswamy and Jerry Dischler, my former colleagues at Google, and now the top AdWords engineering and product management leaders. The changes that were announced should now be familiar to anyone in the PPC industry (this site did a great roundup of the announcement) but your game plan for preparing... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Almost all of the 100 most expensive Google AdWords keywords in the United States are related to lucrative legal terms, according to recent research from ClickZ, EmpericalProof, and SEMrush. The report was based on March 2016 US data from SEMrush’s database of more than 80 million keywords. The researchers looked at the average price paid per click and removed terms with a competition score of less than 0.3. The most expensive Google AdWords keyword combination is “best mesothelioma lawyer” ($935.71). Mesothelioma is a cancerous tumor that is at the center... [...]

Ophir Tanz says, “Advertising technology often gets a bad rap, as if its existence is a nothing more than a necessary evil that keeps the internet alive. But in a subtle way, it’s also the primary conduit for groundbreaking technology. At companies such as Google and Facebook, ad tech serves as the lucrative core of really nuanced, forward-thinking businesses. Unfortunately, this side of ad tech’s impact often gets overlooked. Instead, critics tend to spend most of their time focusing on the nuisance of digital marketing cluttering up news feeds and desktop and mobile screens. But companies... [...]