Mobile Advertising: A big step forward

Google has been talking about integrating the various acquisitions like DoubleClick, AdMob and YouTube etc. One of the news last week (source: AdWeek) was that mobile Rich Media ads (expandable, interactive banners) can now be served via DoubleClick (Google's ad server) on AdMob media (Google's mobile ad network).

I feel this is a big step forward as we will be able to get consistent metrics from online (desktop based) and mobile advertising from the same system – DoubleClick, assuming DoubleClick is being used as the ad server for Desktop campaign as well.

One of the next things I would hope from Google is utilizing DoubleClick for the video ad (in-stream) across all their properties worldwide including on YouTube.

 

Improve your SEO rankings

There are a few key elements which can help in improving your SEO rankings. This post will talk about a few of the key things necessary for improving and also helping your site getting indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing.

1. URL: Make sure that the URL is short and friendly to read. Including keywords within the URL, it is easy to index these pages. For example: www.xyz.com/desktop/OEM-name
   
2. Web site design: It is known that if frames are used within the pages, it is not a good user experience and also hard for the search engines to index the content.
   
3. Navigation: Avoid flash based navigation categories. Search Engines are not able to go and read the content within flash, causing issues and lower SEO rankings. It is a known best practice to use the navigation lists as HTML links.
   
4. Link similar pages: If you know that users will be reading similar pages, link them to each other.
   
5. Add keywords within the content: Make sure there are a lot of keywords within the content of the website; this enforces that the site is about a particular search engine category.

CUIL is live

A new search engine was launched today, CUIL.
I personally have not used it a lot but I thought it would make sense to post a few links that provide a lot of insights about the new Search Engine.

http://searchengineland.com/080728-000100.php
http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

Let's see if it really hits it big like Google.

Diagnostic and Success Metrics

It took me a while to figure out what is the difference in these two metrics and one day I was explained in a very nice way, which was embedded in my mind.

Success Metric - A metric which the CEO or CMO would care about. Example: Total new clients or revenue
Diagnostic Metrics - A metric which is used to explain or diagnose the success metric if it over achieved or under achieved. Example: Click-through rate, Interaction rate, Landing page visits

I feel it is very important to put them in the measurement plan and also realize if it is feasible to calculate them. The reason I talk about feasibility is that many time due to technological limitations, it is not possible to get all the data required to calculate the metrics.

For example our friends at Google do not accept third party vendors (example: DART) to serve display ads (banner) and thus it is hard to get the number of impressions and clicks or any other post-impression, post-click activity for the banners served through the Google ad network. Yes, I do know that Google just bought DART - and trust me until this day, they do not accept third party tags.

I have been in various situation where earlier it seems feasible to get the data but when the campaign really launches, it becomes hard or impossible to get the data. OR sometimes the correct tags are not put in place which enable to get the data in the correct form.