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  • Yelp To Businesses: Want More Customers? Try Our Ads.

    In a push to get more advertisers, Yelp put out a new blog post and video about why businesses should advertise on Yelp.

    Have you advertised on Yelp? Was the experience positive or negative? Are you considering giving it a try? Let us know in the comments.

    Let’s go ahead and get to the big elephant in the room right away. Yelp saves it for the very end of its post, but it seems to be one of the most discussed Yelp topics, so let’s talk about it up front.

    Yelp VP Revenue & Analytics Matt Halprin writes, “So, can a business owner pay to get a better star rating? Absolutely not. We treat advertisers and non-advertisers exactly the same and you’ll find plenty of Yelp advertisers with negative reviews, and plenty of non-advertisers with stellar ratings.”

    As you may know, Yelp is often on the defensive against businesses who claim that the site holds their positive reviews hostage in the review filter. Some of these businesses say Yelp makes their negative reviews more visible when they refuse to pay for advertising.

    Yep, you know the story. Yelp denies it, and denies it, but the accusations don’t seem to ever stop. And typically when we write about the company, we get even more angry business owners slamming the site in the comments. Obviously we can’t verify the legitimacy of any random comment we get, but again, we do get a lot of them.

    Here are a few we got on our article a couple weeks ago:

    “Yelp cares about profits more than the average small business owner. That is irrefutable and evidenced by their unethical actions. It’s 2014 and with the technology we have, there is no excuse for Yelp to filter a legitimate positive review. Yet, this has happened to virtually EVERY business owner I’ve worked with. Yelp does not filter negative reviews… at all. It doesn’t serve them to do so. I’ve worked with a few thousand small business owners and less than 10% are happy with Yelp…”

    …

    “Ditto with my hotel business as well. They hold you hostage by only allowing the negative reviews to stick until you pay for advertise with them. Then they finally let the positive reviews you receive stay up. I wish the government would do an investigation on them.”

    …

    “Yelp hurts small business more than it helps. They will post a negative review from a person with a new account,1 review, no friends, zero activity. If a new review is a 5 star, with a new account- they filter it. We manage online campaigns for small business. We submitted to YELP proof that 2 of our customers reviewers (4 total) used new accounts to write the same 1 star review. One of the reviewers was a competitor and his wife. Same info written days later. All showed up bringing clients rating down to 3 stars. They did nothing. BTW- Their PPC campaigns don’t work and their search capabilities within the site makes no sense. Reality is you have to deal with them.”

    They pretty much go on and on. And as we’ve seen before, these complaints are sometimes brought to the company’s events, and even to TV shows.

    So what is Yelp saying about its ads now?

    “An average of 120 million unique visitors turn to Yelp each month to help them make a spending decision,” says Halprin. “Since these consumers are already searching for a business with which to spend money, Yelp offers local businesses a wide range of advertising options that allow them to get in front of even more of these highly engaged Yelp users. In fact, a study done by The Boston Consulting Group last year found that Yelp advertisers generate average annual revenues of more than $23,000 from Yelp. With the average Yelp advertiser spending $4,200 annually, that’s a pretty impressive potential return on investment.”

    He goes on to talk up the company’s flat-rate subscription bundles, packaged CPC bundles and self-serve CPC ads, as well as the metrics it gives businesses as part of their Business Accounts.

    Here’s the aforementioned video with business owners talking about what they get out of the experience.

    Sold?

    Last week, Yelp expanded into Mexico, its 25th country. Additionally, Yahoo has started including Yelp reviews in its local business search results.

    Do you think Yelp is good for businesses? How about Yelp ads in particular? Share your thoughts.

    Image via Yelp

  • IAB Gives Advertisers A Primer On In-Image Advertising

    The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Image-Based Advertising Working Group just released the In-Image Advertising Primer, providing marketers with an overview of this type of ad, which is often used in native advertising campaigns.

    This is essentially a follow-up to the Native Advertising Playbook the bureau released a few months ago.

    In-image ads are content-relevant ads inserted within editorial images on the web. These can include things like product information overlaid on still photos or videos or rich media that appears when users hover over ads.

    IAB

    The In-Image ad primer walks readers through five case studies with major brand advertisers Activision, Cat’s Pride, Garnier, Mazda and the Northwest Dealer Group (NDG). It also highlights research showing that these types of campaigns generate an average rise of 37% in brand lift for awareness.

    IAB Head of Brand Initiatives Peter Minnium said, “Placing advertising in the viewer’s activity stream is a powerful way to reach audiences and in-image advertising has the potential to do this in an effective and elegant manner. In particular, it can bring a new level of relevancy by leveraging the power of the visual web for marketers – something that has not been done well at scale to date.”

    “This paper is an essential first step toward informing brands about how they can harness the power of images,” said Tony Winders, Senior Vice President, Marketing at GumGum and chair of the IAB Image-Based Advertising Working Group. “Consumers are clearly drawn to visual content and research shows they are more likely to view and engage with ads when they are overlaid on that content. In-image advertising has proven its ability to capitalize on these facts – in turn benefitting marketers that incorporate it into their campaign strategies.”

    You can find the paper here.

    Image via IAB

  • Report: Half Of Google Paid Search Clicks Will Come From Mobile By December Of Next Year

    Report: Half Of Google Paid Search Clicks Will Come From Mobile By December Of Next Year

    50% of Google paid search clicks will come from mobile devices by December of next year, according to Marin Software, which has a new report out on the subject. That figure is based on the current growth rate.

    The report (via Search Engine Land) is based on data from advertisers who invest over $6 billion per year in ad spend on Marin’s platform. It also found that cost per click on mobile device s increased at a much higher rate that on desktop last year, with tablet CPCs surpassing desktop in some regions.

    Conversion rates on tablets and smartphones increased throughout last year as users got more comfortable with mobile commerce, the report says. Conversion rates on tablets even surpassed those on desktops.

    Marin CMO Matt Ackley says, “We’re at the cusp of mobile becoming the dominant channel in search marketing. Consumers are becoming much more comfortable using their smartphones and tablets to complete transactions online, and as we see that comfort level rise advertisers will follow suit with continued investment and optimization in mobile.”

    A new report from eMarketer finds that global mobile ad spend increased by 105% in 2013, reaching $17.96 billion, and is on pace to hit $31.45 billion this year.

    Images via Marin Software

  • Google Adds DoubleClick Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding From Cloud Platform

    Google Adds DoubleClick Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding From Cloud Platform

    Google announced that it is now letting marketers conduct real-time bidding on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange right from Google Cloud Platform.

    Ad Exchange users hosted on Google Compute Engine will always get 100 milliseconds for bid request processing and free network transit from Google Cloud Platform to all Ad Exchange trading locations (North America – east coast and west coast – Europe and Asia Pacific).

    “Real time bidding (or programmatic buying), is one of the fastest growing methods of buying and selling ads online, and is predicted to account for 25% of all display spending by next year,” says DoubleClick Ad Exchange Director of Product Management Scott Spencer. “Marketers are embracing this model as it allows them to connect to audiences at scale quickly and we’ve been making ongoing investments to help them grow their programmatic businesses.”

    “Speed is critical to success in programmatic buying and many exchanges, including the DoubleClick exchange, require that bidders respond to an ad request within a certain time limit in order to preserve the real-time nature of the marketplace,” he says. “Real time bidding transactions typically happen within 100 milliseconds from a user visiting a website.”

    Google is offering Gold support for Cloud Platform to customers hosting their bidding infrastructure on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

    Image via DoubleClick

  • Google Launches New Tools For Mobile App Businesses

    Google announced on Tuesday that it is adding Google Analytics to mobile ad platform AdMob and launching new content experiments for Google Tag Manager.

    Analytics will be available within the AdMob interface on a new “Analyze” tab, which should be quite helpful for app businesses.

    “Today’s app developers have to make decisions quickly and implement them seamlessly if they want to stay relevant,” says product manager Russell Ketchum in a blog post. “It also helps if every business decision is backed up and validated by reliable data. Until now, app developers using AdMob and Google Analytics had to use two separate tools to monetize and measure. Starting today, they’re now in one place.”

    There are also some new features including a drop down menu to switch between individual app reports and a new home page with reporting from both Analytics and AdMob. The new home tab will include data on how the developer’s app is monetizing.

    Last summer, Google launched Tag Manager for mobile apps. The new content experiments let you run experiments to change things like in-app promotions, menu layout, etc. and modify app configurations without having to push out actual updates.

    “But how can we always be sure that we are changing it for the best? Wouldn’t it better if you could validate business decisions with data? Now you can run content experiments on a subset of your users to choose the best option – where to show promotions? How often? Data in Google Analytics will answer your questions and you can now be sure your decisions will be backed by data,” says Ketchum.

    As he notes, Tag Manager is made to be used by people who aren’t familiar with coding, so companies can let marketers or analysts run experiments without the need for the developers to get involved.

    Image via Google

  • Forrester: Brands Are Disillusioned With Facebook

    Facebook is failing marketers, according to Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst, who says he’s talked to brands, who are becoming increasingly frustrated.

    This isn’t the first time Nate Elliott has criticized Facebook. Last fall, he wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook failing marketers, generating a fair amount of industry discussion. In that, he told the CEO that a Forrester survey of nearly 400 marketers and eBusiness executives told the firm that “Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.”

    He included this graph:

    Facebook

    And that was before the company implemented its devastating News Feed algorithm changes, which all but killed organic visibility for brands who spent years acquiring “likes” from customers who wanted to see updates in their feeds.

    Even since then, Facebook has started cramming in more content from Pages users actually haven’t liked.

    But organic reach is one thing. Paid is another, right? According to Elliott, Facebook’s paid ad products “aren’t delivering results for most marketers” either.

    “Brands and agencies are now openly talking about their discontent,” he writes in a new blog post (via Business Insider). “Every day I talk to brands that are disillusioned with Facebook and are now placing their bets on other social sites — but few of them want to go on the record. Lately, though, more brands and agencies have started speaking openly to the media about how Facebook is failing them. One former Facebook advertiser referred to Facebook as ‘one of the most lucrative grifts of all time.’”

    That would be James Del, head of Gawker’s content studio in a recent DigiDay article. The rest of his statement was, “First, they convinced brands they needed to purchase all their fans and likes — even though everyone knows you can’t buy love; then, Facebook continues to charge those same brands money to speak to the fans they just bought.”

    “Marketers are worried many of their fans are ‘fake,’” continues Elliott. “Many marketers and many publishers are reporting that huge percentages of their fans come from emerging markets where they didn’t expect to find an audience. The kicker? They’re saying many of those fans don’t seem to interact with people or with branded content — they seem to do little other than ‘like’ thousands and thousands of brand pages. The conclusion some marketers are coming to: The paid ads Facebook encourages them to buy often lead to ‘fake’ fans generated by ‘like farms.’”

    He goes on to mention that one B2B marketer told him that Facebook’s “constant rule changes” are the biggest problem they have, and concludes that marketers don’t believe Facebook will ever “live up to its promise and become a valuable marketing channel.”

    This hasn’t stopped Facebook from raking in the ad dollars. In January, Facebook reported that its ad revenue was up 75% year-over-year at $2.34 billion (with 53% of that from mobile, which itself was up 23%).

    And yes, on the organic side of Facebook’s News Feed, things really are that bad. Earlier this month, research from Ogilvy found that the average organic reach of content published on brands’ Facebook Pages had fallen to 6% by last month (compared to 12% in October).

    As you can see, it’s even worse for Pages with more likes. Way to reward the brands creating the most engagement, Facebook.

    Those are some depressing lines, eh? They don’t exactly look like they’re about to change paths in March do they?

    Images via Forrester, Ogilvy

  • AdWords Team Answers Questions About Data Feeds, Keyword Insertion & Mobile Bid Adjustments

    Google put out a new video in which a couple guys from the AdWords team answer questions submitted via social media. They tackle the subjects of approving Merchant Center Data Feeds, using Keyword Insertion, and Mobile Bid Adjustments.

    This is part of Google’s “Ask AdWords” series. Advertisers with other questions can get their questions answered in future videos if they use #askadwords in their posts on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook (nope, you don’t even have to use Google+).

    Image via YouTube

  • Consumers Are Actually Watching A Lot Of Long-Form Video Ads

    Long-form online video ad views are experiencing tremendous growth, according to data from FreeWheel, as reported by eMarketer.

    This refers specifically to video ads that play during videos 20 minutes or longer. Those served on FreeWheel’s network experienced a massive 86% jump year over year in the fourth quarter, after experiencing a 56% YoY jump the prior quarter.

    eMarketer shares this visualization:

    Not only are the views growing, but completion rates have been significantly higher than they have been for ads on short and medium-length videos (0-5 minutes and 5 -20 minutes respectively). The completion rates are even better for the same length ads on long-form videos compared to short and medium-length. According to the data, fifteen-second ads saw a 92% completion rate compared to 82% for medium-length and 75% for short. Ads twice as long saw only a slight decline in completion rate (90%).

    It makes sense. Consumers are likely committing to completing longer videos, and there therefore sitting through the ads to do so. With long-form videos, people know they’re going to spending some time watching. With shorter videos, users often aren’t going to give them as much of a chance to capture their interest, and may decide sitting through an ad isn’t worth the time they’re going to spending watching the video itself.

    Image via eMarketer

  • Yahoo Brings Brands’ Images To Life With New Motion Ads

    Yahoo has a new ad format, which “brings images to life”. it’s called Yahoo Motion Ads, which is fitting:

    yahoo motion ads

    Yahoo is selling the format as a way to help brands “tell more engaging stories”. You have to admit, that grilled cheese is a lot more engaging with the steam rising from the cheese. You can almost smell it.

    Obviously Kraft is the launch advertiser. Kraft Cheese Senior Associate Brand Manager Brian Gelb had this to say: “Kraft Cheese is proud to partner with Yahoo on the brand new Kraft Singles Motion Ad. We are always looking for opportunities to engage our consumers in unique and innovative ways that deliver our news – Kraft Singles are now made with no artificial preservatives. Yahoo brought forward a great executional idea and we are excited to be the first brand to launch it.”

    “We believe that when you combine beautiful images with elegant animation, it creates a very powerful form of brand storytelling,” Yahoo says in a blog post. “And when brands have a flexible canvas to design beautiful ads, we see experiences that engage our readers more and ultimately drive higher results for advertisers.”

    Ads using Motion ads will make use of high-quality brand images and subtle animation. Subtle is nice. It’s not overpowering, but makes for a more compelling ad than something super-flashy and distracting. This grabs the user’s attention without screaming at them.

    The ads are available for Yahoo’s Billboard Ad on its homepage, its vertical category homepages and the Yahoo login page, as shown above.

    Businesses interested in taking advantage of Motion Ads are told to contact their Yahoo account manager.

    Image via Yahoo

  • Patient Requests Do Influence Doctors’ Prescriptions, Shows Study

    Nearly every commercial break on TV now includes drug ads that list dozens of possible side effects and outcomes. No matter how different these lists may be, though, every ad includes the phrase “ask your doctor.” Now new research is showing that asking doctors about certain medications really can influence their prescription.

    A new study published in the journal Medical Care has found that this type of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing of brand-name drugs actually does significantly influence a doctor’s decision to prescribe those medications. The study results throw fuel into the debate over such marketing, raising questions about medical ethics and patient safety.

    “A patient request for a specific medication dramatically increases the rate at which physician s prescribe that medication,” wrote the study’s authors. “These results highlight potential negative impacts of DTC advertising and other forms of activation in medication requests.”

    The study used videos of actors who described specific painful medical conditions. Some requested oxycodone, some Celebrex, and others simply wanted “just something to make it better.” These videos were randomly shown to nearly 200 primary care physicians, who then gave their diagnosis for a patient.

    Around 50% of the patients who requested Celebrex were prescribed the drug, opposed to only around 25% of those who requested nothing specific. Those who requested oxycodone received the strong narcotic at around a 20% rate while those with no brand request received oxycodone only 1% of the time.

    “Supporters defend [DTC advertising] as a way to empower consumers, while opponents argue that commercially motivated messages leads to inappropriate patient requests for medication,” said Dr G. Caleb Alexander, deputy editor of Medical Care. “In order to resolve this debate, more research is needed to determine the effects of DTC advertising on patient and physician behavior, especially how it affects prescribing decisions and health outcomes.”

  • Users Search For Specific Brands, Have To Scroll Past Competing Services From Google

    Website owners often complain that Google is pushing organic results down the search results pages by putting its own services at the top. Google’s response is something like, “You’re the corkscrew, and we’re the Swiss Army Knife.”

    One of our readers, by the way, had this to say in response, “Got it backwards google… knowledge graph is totally the corkscrew… fits awkwardly and you only need it once every 3 years or so and half the time it breaks the cork.”

    But now Google is even going so far as to put its own services in ads that appear above websites on searches for those sites’ actual brand names. That’s just messed up. Here you can see this in action with Google’s car insurance comparison tool appearing as “sponsored” over MoneySuperMarket. As illustrated in this Search Engine Roundtable article, this occurs on a an actual search for “moneysupermarket”.

    Google is also doing this on results for confused.com.

    Google launched the car insurance comparison tool in the UK in 2012, and then in France last year. Clearly they’re going above and beyond just trying to help users compare quotes, and into directly competing with specific brands that users are actually looking for.

    Remember when Google was a search engine?

    Image via Twitter

  • Facebook’s Video Ads Are Here: 15 Seconds, Autoplay, and Silent Unless Clicked

    They’re heeeeeere.

    Actually, they’ve been here for a while, but today Facebook has announced that their long-awaited (and long-bemoaned) video ad product is going wide, with a limited group of advertisers. The company first started testing the autoplay ads back in September, and made the first big push in December with a video ad campaign for the new film Divergent. We’d known that Facebook was planning on rolling these out since 2012, but they were delayed so that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team could figure out how to make them less-intrusive, or at least tolerable to the average Facebook user.

    So, will they be tolerable? Probably. The video ad you’ll see in your news feeds over the next few months (that’s the rollout timeframe) will be 15 seconds long and yes, they’ll autoplay–but they’ll autoplay without sound. If a user clicks on the ad, the video will go fullscreen and the sound will kick in.

    If you scroll by the ads, they’ll stop playing.

    “Premium Video Ads are designed for advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion,” says Facebook’s Susan Buckner. “With Premium Video Ads, brands now have another way of engaging people on Facebook with compelling video experiences…this limited introduction allows us to concentrate our efforts on a smaller number of advertisers with high-quality campaigns to create the best possible experience on Facebook.”

    Basically, Facebook says that the videos will be of the highest quality, and therefore shouldn’t disrupt your normal Facebook experience. Now, whether that’s true or not is a question we’ll have to answer down the road. To me, it’ll have everything to do with clutter. Too many news feed video ads, even if they’re silent and ignorable via scrolling, will piss off a lot of people.

    Then again, everyone always seems pissed with Facebook, but 1+ billion strong keep coming back.

    Here’s the relevant part of Facebook’s announcement for those on the other side of the equation, the advertisers:

    Premium Video Ads are bought and measured in a way that’s similar to how advertisers already buy and measure ads on TV. The ads are bought based on Targeted Gross Rating Points to reach a specific audience over a short period of time. Delivery is measured by an independent third party, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR), and advertisers only pay based on what Nielsen OCR measures.

    To make sure Premium Video Ads are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds, we’re working with a company called Ace Metrix to help us review and assess how engaging the creative is for each ad — before it appears on Facebook. Ace Metrix will allow us to objectively measure the creative quality of the video in the Facebook environment, and highlight performance indicators for advertisers such as watchability, meaningfulness and emotional resonance. We’re taking this step in order to maintain high-quality ads on Facebook and help advertisers understand what’s working to maximize their return on investment.

    Like most Facebook products, these videos ads will come in a slow rollout.

    Image via Facebook

  • Google’s ‘Promise-Breaking’ Banner Ads On Search Results Aren’t Happening

    Last fall, Google was spotted testing a big banner-style ad in search results. As we know, any of these tests can quickly become real features at any time, but it looks like Google has killed this one.

    The “banner” appeared on certain branded search results, such as this page for Southwest Airlines:

    Google said at the time that it was only a small test in the U.S. Keep in mind, Googe conducts roughly 20,000 search experiments every year.

    Still, a lot of people called out Google for this one, saying it was breaking a promise it made. In 2005, the company said, “There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”

    Whether or not this ad could be considered a “doodad” is debatable I suppose. Either way, Google’s Amit Singhal said in a keynote at SMX West that the test is over. It reportedly ran with about 30 advertisers.

    Image via Twitter

  • Google Makes Changes To TrueView Ads

    Google announced some upcoming changes to its TrueView video ad formats, which will take effect on April 15th.

    Google will actually be reducing the number of available TrueView formats from three to two. These will be TrueView in-stream and TrueView in-display. The existing in-search and in-display will be combined into the in-display format.

    According to Google, one of the benefits of doing this is that it organizes TrueView around how a user interacts with the ad, such as by viewing it as a pre-roll video or clicking on a thumbnail, as opposed to where the ad appears. Another benefit is that it tells Google where advertisers want the ads to appear at the campaign level. The company says it will also deliver more relevant ads on the YouTube search page.

    “Just as you can use in-stream ads to reach different demographics or audiences, now you can tailor in-display ads running on YouTube search pages to these same parameters, in addition to keywords,” says product manager Ryo Akasaka.

    “Since its debut in 2010, the TrueView format has enabled advertisers to break free of time constraints, grow view count with opted-in views and only pay when people choose to watch their video ads,” Akasaka says. “Thanks to these benefits, TrueView advertising connects users with relevant ads, and empowers creators to monetize their content.”

    While April 15th is the day all new video campaigns will use the new settings and formats, all campaigns will be automatically updated on May 15th.

    Image via YouTube

  • Video Explains Why John McAfee Is ‘The Real Most Interesting Man In The World’

    Video Explains Why John McAfee Is ‘The Real Most Interesting Man In The World’

    John McAfee has a new video out. It’s a parody of the Dos Equis “The Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign in which McAfee is “The REAL Most Interesting Man in the World”. It’s an ad for crowdfunding company Qikfunder.

    The voice in the video says, “He is such a master of disguise that while being hunted as an international fugitive he spent two weeks searching for himself. He is so convincing, that when he tells his enemies where he is they believe him. While incarcerated in Guatemala he promoted himself to prison warden, and reassigned the prison guards to manage and maintain his blog.”

    “He fought off the entire Belizean army while escorting a bevy of journalists and young women to a day at the beach,” it continues. “He single handedly created the computer virus industry while simultaneously winning the Guinness world record for illegal drug consumption. He lived with seven hot blooded women at the same time. He is still breathing. Need I say more?”

    )

    “I don’t always crowdfund, but when I do, I prefer Qikfunder,” McAfee says at the end as he picks up his beer. “Stay solvent, my friends.”

    This is just the latest in a series of funny and otherwise interesting John McAfee videos to hit the web. Other recent ones include the wonderful “Guide To Uninstalling McAfee Antivirus,” McAfee playing piano in an airport, and McAfee playing piano for a puppy.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Launches AdWords Format With Consumer Ratings, Says CTR Can Improve By 10%

    Google announced that it is rolling out a new consumer ratings annotations format for search ads, which gives users “detailed” consumer opinion data. Don’t worry. They highlight the good ratings.

    Specifically, Google says the ads will highlight one or more strongly rated aspects of your business as part of the ad. Here’s what they look like:

    The data comes from Google Consumer Surveys, which Google launched two years ago.

    Apparently there are hundreds of thousands of these things for Google to draw from. The new ad format could offer businesses greater incentive to take advantage of them.

    “Google Consumer Surveys provides a controlled platform for sampling consumer opinion, helping to avoid some of the potential biases and risks with other types of open-to-everyone review platforms,” says product manager Shreyas Doshi. “Each rating is based on at least hundreds of completed surveys, with the average above 1000. We plan to regularly refresh the survey data to keep the ratings current.”

    “Whether users are searching for clothes, car insurance, or a holiday, they have never had so much choice,” Doshi says. “And as users increasingly rely on the opinions and experiences of others to help them choose, a brand’s reputation matters more than ever before. That’s why we’ve developed ways to show ratings, reviews and social endorsements for your business as part of your search ads on Google. This kind of information makes your ads more useful to potential customers and can improve ad performance.”

    Last fall, Google updated its terms and services to enable the “social endorsements,” which put users’ names and faces in ads, so other users can see when their friends have recommended services.

    Google also launched survey ads for display and video campaigns last year. These are powered by the Consumer Surveys product as well.

    According to the company, based on tests with beta advertisers, the new search ad format can increase click-through rates by 10% on average.

    Image via Google

  • Reddit to Donate 10% of Ad Revenue to Charity

    Reddit to Donate 10% of Ad Revenue to Charity

    Although the massively popular beast that is the reddit machine is still struggling to turn a profit, that has in no way dampened its giving spirit. The company has just announced that it is going to donate 10% of this year’s advertising revenue to charity–charities that the reddit community votes upon.

    When 2014 comes to a close and reddit tallies up its total ad revenue, it’ll “hold an election” based on community-nominated charities. The top ten charities will receive some portion of the 10% ad revenue pie, proportional to how many votes each garners.

    “We want to show that advertising doesn’t just support the reddit platform, it also directly supports the causes and goals of reddit as a whole,” says reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a blog post.

    Of course, Wong knows that online votes are often manipulated by large online communities, for instance the one he runs, so he’s basically reserving the right to veto any “charities” that make it to the top via “obvious trolling.”

    “Ultimately, it will be up to all of you what happens – if things go well, the community will be responsible for disbursing a very real amount of money to a set of causes of your choice. If it doesn’t go well – then we’ll simply just pick by ourselves,” says Wong.

    Either way, that 10% is going somewhere other than reddit’s coffers.

    Wong took the reins as reddit CEO nearly two years ago. In that time, the “front page of the internet” has grown in ways few could have expected. But billions of pageviews do not necessarily an empire make, and Wong has admitted that reddit is still in the red.

    Reddit makes its money from three places, primarily: ads, selling reddit gold, and through the redditgifts marketplace. It’s the latter that Wong feels has the best chance of sustaining the site moving forward.

    “Our backers are saying, ‘Don’t worry about making money, just keep money and grow things,’” Wong said in an interview with Reuters in December. “But I would like Reddit to be self-sustaining because I think that’s a healthy way for a business to run. It means that what you’re doing provides real value, and Reddit Gifts is so promising because it can do that.”

    Image via reddit

  • Google Partners With Boost Media For DoubleClick Search

    Google announced on Thursday that it has partnered with Boost Media to bring the latter’s ad creative optimization solution to DoubleClick Search.

    Google says the partnership will allow advertisers to benefit from increased ROI with “proven” optimization agorithms, as well as scale campaigns and save time with custom-tailored ad creation, and cut costs by focusing on the right ads.

    “On top of intra-day keyword bidding from DoubleClick Search, Boost Media tests ads side-by-side, and chooses ads based on Boost Media’s proprietary algorithms. According to Boost Media, their clients experience an average of 30 percent increase in sales volume,” says Google. “Boost Media offers a network of professional copywriters to develop engaging and high-performing ads at scale. Advertisers can expect unique and creatively written ad text, distinguished from the standard Dynamic Keyword Insertion templates that are often used today. According to Boost Media, advertisers save an average of 60 hours per month on writing, testing, and reporting on creative.”

    “Boost Media decreases cost by identifying and eliminating underperforming ads, allowing clients to capture additional, unseen revenue from their ad groups. According to Boost Media, users see an average 5% decrease in CPAs,” the company says.

    This is only one of a handful of significant partnerships involving DoubleClick announced this week. Others include a display partnership with Yandex, an ad exchange deal with the Local Media Consortium, and another exchange deal with Time Inc.

    Google also announced this week that DoubleClick Search will now integrate feed management and optimization capabilities from Channel Intelligence in an add-on to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite.

    Image via Google

  • Facebook Restructures Ad Campaigns

    Facebook is introducing a new campaign structure, which it says will make it easier for advertisers to organize, optimize and measure their ads. The changes are aimed at advertisers of all sizes.

    Facebook is taking the process from a two-level approach (campaigns and ads) to a three-level one (campaigns, ad sets, ads):

    Facebook campaign structure

    Facebook explains:

    Campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives, like building brand awareness or driving web traffic. They’re designed to help you optimize and measure your results for each objective across multiple ad sets and ads. Each campaign can feature multiple ad sets, each of which has its own budget and schedule. You can also organize each ad set to represent audience segments, like people who live near your store. This will help you control the amount you spend on each audience, decide when they will see your ads, and measure their response. The ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set.

    Within each ad set, you can have multiple ads, each of which can feature different images, links, video or text. You’ll still control the creative, targeting and bidding at the ad level.

    The changes will start rolling out on March 4th to all countries and ad interfaces, including the Ads Create Tool, Ads Manager, and Power Editor. It will also roll out to third-party ad interfaces from Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developers program.

    All campaigns will be automatically migrated to the new structure. According to the company, it won’t have any affect on delivery, spend or performance for existing campaigns.

    Image via Facebook

  • Google And Yandex Partner Up On Display Ads

    Google And Yandex Partner Up On Display Ads

    Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine company, announced that it has struck an advertising partnership with Google, which will see Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manger connect to Yandex’s own real-time bidding system. Yandex’s demand-side platform AWAPS will join Google’s DoubleClick AdExcahnge.

    The deal is only related to display advertising, and has no effect on text-based contextual ads.

    Google advertisers will get access to Yandex Advertising Network inventory, and Yandex clients will be able to bid for DoubleClick AdExchange inventory. Yandex says the partnership will result in a larger number of bidders, and will boost revenue.

    “We are happy about this partnership that will help to develop the RTB [real-time bidding] ecosystem in Russia,” says Google’s Frank Einecke, who heads SEEMEA Media Buying Solutions for DoubleClick. “Given the adoption speed of RTB in this market, accessing local and global qualified inventory is key to our publishers and advertisers who are looking for incremental reach. We are very excited to see the Russian market moving towards innovative programmatic solutions that can serve both branding and performance strategies in reaching their targets in a more efficient way.”

    “The integration of the two advertising systems will undoubtedly stimulate the online advertising market,” said Nikolay Danilov, head of Sales Technologies at Yandex. “The transparency that is characteristic of RTB systems creates new possibilities for growth. The more players, the wider range of ad inventory, the greater the competition for placement, and the higher the quality of the ads themselves. We anticipate that the partnership with Google will result in increased display advertising sales and improvements in ad quality.”

    Yandex says the integration of the partnership will take several months to complete.

    Image via Google

  • Twitter Launches Promoted Accounts In Search

    Twitter announced the addition of a new format to its ad platform – Promoted Accounts in Search. Twitter will show these to users in search results along with recommendations of people to follow.

    Twitter says it automatically selects relevant search queries for presenting Promoted Accounts based on an advertiser’s targeting choices. Advertisers need not take any additional action to appear here.

    Twitter Promoted Accounts in Search

    “Twitter is a platform built around live public conversations that happen as events unfold in the world,” says Twitter product manager Nipoon Malhotra. “One of the best ways for users to discover what’s happening on Twitter is through search, giving users the ability to instantly connect to conversations and topics of interest.”

    “Search also presents a great opportunity for marketers to connect with users, just when they desire information relevant to their search query,” Malhotra adds. “Building on the expansion of Promoted Accounts in timeline, we’re pleased to further connect businesses to users at the right moment, now through Promoted Accounts in search.”

    The company points to a recent study from Market Probe International finding that people are 72% more likely to make a purchase from a brand they follow or engage with on Twitter. Promoted Accounts are a way to get more of these types of people doing so.

    One important point worth considering is that Twitter Search is a very unique place on the Internet for a brand to appear. Where else are people searching for real time info?

    Image via Twitter