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
What technical, operational and campaign performance [bidder] KPI’s should be considered when ramping up, and are there any industry benchmarks?
This question was asked on quora, below is my answer.
From a technical perspective you’ll want to measure how many different types of inventory you support: mobile, app, web, video, facebook ads etc… You’ll want to track how many SSPs you’re integrated with and how many impressions are available to you. You should look into creating a feature matrix and decide which advertising features you and your customers find most important.
On the operations side you’ll want to make sure your bidding system is responding to bid requests quickly. The round-trip time for a bid response, from an SSPs perspective, should be no more than 100ms – and even that is pushing it these days. Your internal bidding algorithm should probably make a decision in less than 30 or 40ms. This allows about 60ms for network latency between the bidder and the SSP. Some SSPs have DSP latency monitoring available. This type of monitoring will give you insight into what the SSP is seeing. Read more
