Search engine optimization should be used in conjunction with online advertising to drive more users to your site. It can, in some cases, allow a small business to reduce the month-to-month costs of advertising by bringing “organic” (unpaid) traffic to their web site.
Rather than Small Business Advertising, I was going to title this post, “Eating your own dog food,” but I decided that a more descriptive title would get the benefit of SEO. I recently took on the task of advertising for my wife’s small business, here’s our story.
Leslie Smith MD
My wife’s acupuncture practice recently moved into a larger space; her patient capacity almost doubled overnight from one to two treatment rooms. I say “almost” because she’s still just one practitioner. With acupuncture, once the patient has been needled, they simply rest comfortably in pin-cushion mode. The practitioner doesn’t need to be in the room. That’s where my wife takes the opportunity to start treatment on a patient in room number two.
I took it upon myself to do some online advertising for her practice to fill up that second room as frequently as possible. Now, my wife is not your typical acupuncturist. She’s an herbalist, a holistic medicine practitioner and, most uniquely, an MD. One would think that her résumé would do the marketing for her. That’s not the case, obviously. We have to let people know just how fabulous she is. So, here’s the long story of how I used my background in advertising, my wits in video production and my fabulous wife’s personae to kick off her marketing push for the new office. Read more
Why historically (and currently) only one single bid was allowed for each DSP per impression? Why hide demand from the exchange and create opportunities for the DSPs to arbitrage? – I know this is changing now with the possibility of multiple bids per DSP (openRTB v2) but why ad exchanges let this happen at the beginning?
This question was asked on quora, below is my answer.
A multiple bid response was discussed at the very first OpenRTB meeting. It was not seen as a favorable feature by the demand side, at first. They preferred submitting one bid. Supply side partners were not in a position to force the issue, nor had the necessary research been done to support the idea.
From the supply side’s perspective, as with many transaction systems, early efforts in RTB were focused on connecting the pipes. RTB represented a new source of demand and the pressure was applied to getting plugged in to as many DSPs as possible. Read more
I wrote an earlier post called “In a world without cookies” which was my early response to the default setting in Apple’s Safari browser. This issue has expanded such that we’ll see even fewer cookies out there, so I’m going to bring a little more light to the issue of privacy and privacy compliance in mobile, tablet and the desktop.
For the purposes of addressing privacy, the physicality of the device, whether it is a tablet, phone, or a desktop computer, can be mostly ignored. The real technical distinctions with regard to privacy are between browsers and apps. It’s also important to understand the need for advertising companies to maintain compliance with organizations like the NAI and initiatives like the OAB. Together, the OAB and NAI dictate opt-out rules that online advertising companies must adhere to.
Apple’s Safari browser has a default set to block third party cookies. Firefox will soon have a similar default setting.
The most prolific obstacle in privacy and compliance is probably a result of Apple’s move to disable 3rd party cookies by default in their Safari browser. This is not just the Safari that ships on your iPad or iPhone, but all Safari browser installs, including that one on everyone’s beloved Windows machine. Now, the team behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser has pledged to do the same. Blocking by default causes two problems: advertising companies can’t do simple things like frequency cap using a cookie, and there’s no way to determine the user’s actual intent. If the default setting was to allow 3rd party cookies, a user’s intent would be crystal clear if it was set to block. Read more
This post is getting old and might not be as relevant today. If you are looking for information on Google’s Exchange Bidding program you might check out this question on Quora.
I am not clear if SSP send a impression to a ad exchange and get ad from it, and how it works? I know ad exchange send a request to DSP then DSP send back response. But how SSP work with adx?
This question was asked on quora, below is my answer.
Luma creates two distinct categories. One for Exchanges and another for SSPs.
In its purest form an SSP would only send bid requests to DSPs. Google’s Ad Exchange actually behaves like an SSP in this regard. The Ad Exchange, however, does not behave like a DSP. It does not receive bids from SSPs, nor would it bid on them if it did. Ad Exchange receives inventory via a traditional ad request using an ad tag.
Online advertising has very few companies filling a single role, such as the role of SSP. Most SSPs are also in the yield optimization business. In cases where a yield optimization platform runs an impression through their SSP technology and doesn’t receive a bid that wins the impression, it’s possible that the impression may be sent to Google’s Ad Exchange via an ad tag redirect.
In some cases the publisher may even be responsible for such an occurrence. The publisher might have a pass-back tag set up with their SSP which, in the event that there’s no winning bid, redirects traffic back to the publishers adserver which, in turn, would redirect the impression to Google.
Google does have DSP technology, but it’s not AdEx. It acquired a DSP company called Invite Media in 2010.
