I just read a post about Google now offering video ads and then what do you know I ad Adwords/Adsense to this new site design and the next thing I know there’s a video ad. This one happened to be a video ad for the Cadillac Escalade with some hip-hop star talking about how roomy it is because “he’s fat” and that the sound is better than the one in his crib.
Question now is what is the cost for a video ad and what do they pay?
We launched our new weblog FaxChronicle.com. This is the newest in our series of blogging for leads sites as we experiment with generating leads for technology and b2b sites which is our specialty as we consult with clients on their web marketing strategy.
Google Unwraps Multi-Variate Site Testing, Anoints Partners
Google has released a site optimization product it’s calling the “third leg” in a stool that includes its flagship AdWords product as well as Google Analytics. Previously available in limited beta, the company’s Website Optimizer is a free tool to test and switch out Web site offers and other content with the goal of producing the highest possible conversions. Now available to all AdWords customers, the product will go head to head with enterprise software platforms, most of which are beyond the budgetary reach of mid-sized businesses.
Any readers out there buying spots in games? I would love to hear about the results. My specialty is more B2B, but I have always thought that ads in games would work. It is similar to ads in software that died due to privacy concerns. I understood the concerns, but never understood why someone didn’t develop away around the concerns so that users felt safe. Jeff Clavier’s Software Only: Introducing Kongregate – my first investment in the gaming space
In an interview with Red Herring’s Ryan Olson, I mentioned that one of the motivations for gamers is ego/bragging rights about beating a level, hitting challenges and being on the top score leaderboard (the need for consumer services to satisfy one of the seven sins is a notion I learnt from Accel Partner’s Kevin Efrusy) . There is also the opportunity to hang out online in one of the many chat rooms available on the service, where you can interact with other gamers as you are playing.
Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site. Let’s run through the details: Ad placement: Pay-per-action ads are only shown on sites in the Google content network. Publishers choose specific pay-per-action ads that are relevant to their site and can place them in a new ad unit on their page.
Source: Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test
Seth has some great insight and advice as usual on bad interfaces, bad design, and bad signs and labels. Moral? Think!
This is an excellent article about the trouble Yahoo has had adapting to the challenge that Google presented to them. The quote below is from the closing paragraph, but the meat of this piece says far more than that. I too believe that the tech is important, but Google is not just tech. Google is simplicity and service and marketing.
I am not sure I agree that they are out of the game just yet, but they must adapt and simplify if they are to succeed.
“Terry could never pound the table and say, ‘This is where we need to go, guys,’” one former Yahoo executive says. “On those subjects, he always had to have someone next to him explaining why it was important.” One could have made a convincing argument two years ago that such deep technical knowledge didn’t matter much. But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.
Update:Brad Feld covered this piece as well and makes note of one very important thing and that is the use of the term clusterfuck in the article indicating that the piece has to be good.
We’ve launched new sites in our ongoing SEO and SEM experiments:
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