Alex Schultz

Author: Alex Schultz

  • Advertising to Students: facebook’s a win for banks

    Personal banking is an amazing example of an industry that is embracing the net for all it is worth. An in bank visit costs the bank about 100GBP, a telephone contact costs 10GBP and an online contact costs 0.01GBP.

    The second interesting effect is switching costs. When you make the decision to join up with a bank the probability is that they will retain you as a customer for the rest of your life.

    The one really obvious thing I haven’t seen is a bank really forming a kick arse facebook.com campaign. In the years when someone is first at university switching costs are much lower for their bank account. These students can switch, these students are using facebook tonnes and they are the most valuable demographic. Someone, somewhere get these banks to try it out.

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  • Taking Brand Advertising Learning’s Online

    A relatively standard way of working out the value of a brand building campaign in old media is to advertise say Bold washing up powder in all regions but the Northwest and define that region as a control group for research. The advertiser can then watch the uplift in purchases of Bold in the regions with the advertising vs. the trend they would have seen based on the control. This is obviously tricky because it is hard to pick out local PR effects and so on from the overall trends and does the Northwest really have the same trending as the rest of the country in general but in broad strokes it works.

    Something that shocks me is that I have not heard of large brand advertises using this trick online and I have been browsing blogs and searching for evidence of this happening. Geotargetting through Ads on Google/Yahoo/the big banner networks to a city level is totally doable. Why not just for a test spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a banner advertising campaign in say for example York in the UK or Boston in the US on a sizeable network like adsense or valueclick. Running this campaign for a similar period to an offline campaign and looking for uplift.

    Maybe I am being foolish and this is already happening, I just don’t know about it or maybe brand advertisers are convinced of the value of online already (as a site owner I don’t believe this… if they did I wouldn’t have smiley ads continually appearing through Valueclick, Casalemedia and Burst on my site) but I love to do things that I can measure and as such this idea really excites me esp. since it could convince more advertisers to spend money online.

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  • Geotargetting, IP sniffing and behavioral targeting has a bright future

    I saw some very interesting research from Forrester today about the growth of online advertising. They feel that the growth of direct response advertising like PPC will at some stage be outpaced by brand advertising, banners and so on, online.

    Look at it this way, of my sites my cocktail recipes site has a smaller level of traffic than my paper airplanes site but the cocktail recipes traffic is predominantly adults in the 18-35 bracket which is definitely of more value to banner advertisers.

    Users unknowingly tell webmasters and ad networks a lot about themselves. Operating system, referring domain, browser and version, JavaScript enabled. I am positive that someone who elects to use firefox is telling you something meaningful about themselves.

    Geotargetting is already huge at a country level and is the first step into more granular targeting of users. A typical way of monitoring offline ad performance is to have dark regions and light regions and then observing what happens in each region.

    Google has made a move with CPM banners into their adsense network but I wonder if their brand has the elasticity to stretch beyond being a highly targeted direct response advertiser. There is a space here for someone else to really nail this… could it be Yahoo?

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  • Skype users online draws adwords ad, why?

    So I sometimes don’t have the foggiest idea why some things happen on the net. I have the pleasure of having a top ten position for my randomdomainname.co.uk website for my graph showing skype users online (built using a little RSS webservice Skype open up to allow you to do this) for the keyword skype users online. Incredibly this is driving traffic to my site every day which is cool but surprising (esp. since I am only about 10th and the site is entitled Alex’s Tag Cloud Fun – del.icio.us & eBay). What was even more surprising is the screen dump below:

    The blue ad at the top is someone paying for traffic to his site for essentially the same skype statistics that I have developed and placed on my site. This fella is definitely doing a great job (and luckily his graphs look exactly the same as mine) and is also making those graphs free but it totally blows me away that they want to pay for traffic, esp. with no adverts on their site. If anyone has any idea why you would want to pay for this traffic I’d love some suggestions.

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  • Using PHP setcookie() for an adsense test

    I have wondered for a long time whether people who come to my site via google behave differently in respect to ads than other users. There are lots of reasons for wondering this but specifically for now I am thinking that potentially someone who has just come from google may be more likely to click on an adsense link than someone who has come from somewhere else.

    Thankfully I have 10s of k’s of ad impressions daily to test this on and the technology isn’t exactly challenging. I have set up a cookie on every page of my largest site that drops on a users computer once every 72hrs where they have been referred from.

    Then lower down the page on every page I have a similar include that powers my advertising. Within this include I read in the cookie and test whether it contains the string “.google.” (not perfect I know but good enough for my purposes.

    Note the === in the strpos() function is because strpos() doesn’t always return false when it is false therefore you have to look for responses equivalent to false (===) rather than just equal to false (==). So for me this looks like it could be a really interesting test, I will of course paste the results of the test here and if there’s any substantial difference in results I will of course make changes to capitalize.

    I may choose later to also split out people with cookie blocking (since I love vinny’s article) and see how they behave but for now I will just let the results tick over like this for a couple of weeks.

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  • flickr typepad widget

    Today I finished my second widget for the typepad developer program, am really proud of and pleased with it. I am however always looking for comments and suggestions for improvement so if anyone has any… let me know 😉

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  • del.icio.us typepad widget finished

    Today I finished my first widget for the typepad developer program, am really proud of and pleased with it. I am however always looking for comments and suggestions for improvement so if anyone has any… let me know 😉

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  • All your base are belonging to Google Base

    This weekend I have been completing the user sign in functionality for my cocktail making website. I have been monitoring the SEO results for key terms such as “cocktail recipes”. A competitor has uploaded 10k cocktail recipes to google base and as such google has added a cocktail search box to the top of the search results page.

    As a publisher I want traffic from google badly and to get that traffic it looks like I am going to have to gift them some content… in fact not just some content but all the content I have taken 5yrs to get hold of. At what stage will google say thanks for the content, give me an attribution and then not refer the users to my site 100% of the time?

    Should the search engines be competing with every niche webmaster at the same time for content while being their lifeblood for traffic? Right now I simply don’t know but I am scared they will kill my little sites with their own content within the next few years.

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  • mySQL UPDATE statement working example

    I am a true fan of mySQL and one of my favorite statements is the UPDATE statement. One of the big needs for any website with a wiki or with user generated content is the ability to edit content drawn from a database. The UPDATE statement is the statement that allows a webmaster to do this.

    The example I will use here is a user table with columns for username, password, number of logins, and user description.

    Say I want to update George’s user description – that can be done really easily using the UPDATE command in a mySQL database with proper WHERE clauses to ensure security.

    There is one more little trick I want to share which I enjoy with the mySQL UPDATE statement and that is the ability to perform math on a column. Really beautifully simple to do and yet really useful in a whole host of cases… I hope you learn to love the mySQL UPDATE statement too!

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  • Facebook – Just a little bit of history repeating

    So I for one am quite enjoying the facebook fun going on at the moment.

    But I will say all the fear of stalkers is more than a little silly, everything it is possible to now “stalk” was 100% possible before and these newsfeeds don’t make it that much easier.

    I will say that one argument has totally gathered my support and that is the simple “publically available isn’t publically announced”, it’s a really good distinction.

    Either way this really reminds me of the million auction march back in the 90s at eBay and Mr Z of facebook fame really should read his internet history books. Nothing is new between heaven and earth 🙂

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