How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising

Buy and sell, it's 100% free: Apartments, jobs, cars, anything!
You are aware of contextual advertising where ads are displayed based on the content of the web page. For instance, if you are reading an ESPN newsletter inside Gmail, the Google ads in the sidebar could be for sports related products and so on.
The buzz is however around interest-based or behavioral advertising where ads are displayed according to your past online activity and interests.
To give you an example, if you watch a video on ‘cooking pasta’ on YouTube and then switch to Amazon.com, the shopping site may show you ads for books around pasta. Or if you have been searching for “cars” on Google and then visited CNN for reading the latest news, the ads on the news site may still be related to cars.




In other words, the ads follow you even after you switch websites. The above video explains behavioral advertising in slightly more detail or you may read this detailed WSJ study on how advertisers are tracking your behavior across the web.

Opting Out of Interest-Based Advertising

If you would not like companies to use your “online behavior” to target ads on your computer, you can easily opt-out.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other web advertising networks offer simple ways to help you opt-out of targeted advertising. You can go to google.com/ads/preferences to disable the Google cookie that stores your interest related information. Microsoft offers a similar option at choice.live.com while Yahoo’s interest-based ad can be disabled here.
If you have an iPhone or an iPad, visit oo.apple.com on your mobile Safari to opt-out of receiving interest-based ads from Apple’s iAd network.
Alternatively, you may use web-based tools from NAI and PrivacyChoice to turn-off behavior advertising across dozens of popular ad networks with a simple click.
The only downside is that these tools rely on a cookie and therefore your preferences would be lost if you use a different browser or clear your browser cookies. There are some plug-ins that will help you permanently opt-out of targeted advertising but they don’t work with all browsers, especially those on a mobile phone.

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How to Setup Google DFP on your Site – A Tutorial

You rely on an ad network like Google AdSense for serving ads but do you also accept direct advertising on your website? Or have you signed up with multiple ad-networks but, due to limited ad space on your site, will only like to run ads from the network that pays you the most money (read maximum CPM)?
If you just said yes, Google DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) could be an ideal solution for you. It is a free ad server from Google that lets you sell ad space on your website.
You may choose to run banner ads, text ads or even rich-media (like video and flash ads) through DFP. The tool, which was formerly known as Google Ad Manager, requires no downloads or installation and any website publisher can sign-up for the DFP program as long as they have an active Google AdSense account.

Sell Your Advertising Space with Google DFP

Say you have a news website (or a blog) where you cover topics such as technology, sports, entertainment and so on. An advertiser wants to serve banner ad campaigns on all your tech related pages. He will pay $20 CPM for all US based impressions  and you can fill your remnant inventory through Google AdSense ads.
Let’s see how we can easily setup such an ad campaign through Google DFP.
Step 1: Create Ad Units
We need to tell DFP about the advertising space on our web pages. For instance, in our above example, we’ll have to create three ad slots for the 300x250 rectangle, the 160x600 skyscraper and the 468x60 banner. These are standard IAB units though you are free to define custom ad sizes as well.
Go to DFP –> Inventory –> Ad Units –> New Ad Unit. Give your ad unit a descriptive name so that you can easily determine where exactly that ad unit will be displayed and it’s size. Also check the option “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense.”

Step 2: Define Placements
You have multiple ad units on the same page and there’s a possibility that an advertiser may want to place ads on more than one unit. Therefore, we need to create a placement which is like a group of one or more ad units where an advertiser's ad can be displayed.
Go to Inventory tab –> Placements –> New Placement and define the placement. To keep things simple, we will associate only one ad unit (the 300x250 one) with our ad placement. Check the option that says “Offer this placement to advertisers” through AdWords and DoubleClick Ad planner to attract more advertisers.

Step 3. Create an Order
Now that we have defined our ad inventory, it’s time to feed in the client’s order. The advertiser will specify where he wants to place the ad, what kind of demographics he wants to target, what’s the price he is willing to pay and how long will the campaign run on our site.
Go to DFP –> Orders –> New Order. Create a company for the advertiser and then fill in the order details under “new line item.” Set the Type to “Price Priority” if you want the highest paying ads to be served on your site. Set Value CPM equal to the price that the client will pay and then add the targeting criteria.

Step 4. Upload the Ad Creative
It’s time for your to upload the “actual ad” that will display on your web pages. You can either upload images, Flash videos or even snippets of HTML and JavaScript in case you’re going with text ads.
Go to DFP –> Line Items and select the “Line Item” that you’ve created in the previous step. Click Add Creatives –> New Creative and upload the image / SWF Flash file. You can even upload multiple creative ads per line item and they’ll display evenly across that site – this helps you determine an appropriate ad copy that performs best with your visitors.

Step 5. Get the Ad Tags for your Site
We are almost done. All we need to do is get the JavaScript code from Google Ad Manager DFP and copy-paste it into our blog’s template.
Click the Inventory tab in your DFP dashboard and choose “Generate Ad Tags” – select the appropriate ad unit (the one that we created in Step #1) and choose “Generate Tags.”  Add this code to your website and within 10-15 minutes, the DFP tool should start serving ads on your pages.
Here's a narration-less screencast that captures all the above steps in a quick video.





If you ever have trouble serving ads through DFP , just open any page of your website, add ?google_debug to the URL and reload. This will generate a tracing log that should help you debug the problem, if any.

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How to Advertise on Facebook

This video from the official Facebook channel describes how you can advertise your own website or product to Facebook users using their advertising system.
The video also talks about what information is available to Facebook advertisers and how you, the Facebook user, can control what ads are displayed on your Facebook pages.

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How Effective is Advertising on Facebook?

I really like the Facebook Advertising system as it’s extremely easy to setup ads and yet I can easily target the exact audience that might be interested in reading my blog.

How Effective are Facebook Ads

I recently ran a short ad campaign on Facebook targeting users who are based in India, speak English and are working for tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo!, etc. Some 20k users met that criteria according to Facebook estimates.
The ad campaign was live for about 5 days and here are some numbers that will you an idea of how effective the ad was.
It was a CPC based campaign and since I had set my default bid slightly higher than what was suggested by Facebook, the ad did reach a large part of the audience.  The ad made some 350,000 impressions across various Facebook profiles but the real surprising part is that only 18 people finally clicked on the ads. That’s like a 0.005% CTR with the average CPC at $1.18. 
Maybe the ad would have been slightly more effective had I added an image to the creative or chosen a different demographic but performance of the recent campaign is obviously a bit disappointing. Here're the numbers in detail:

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Be Selective When Choosing Advertisers

As a content publisher and website owner, you should be very careful about picking advertisers for your site. Don’t ever devalue your site by running irrelevant ads like the blinking cursors or those teeth whitening solutions.

Advertisements and promotions contribute to the experience you provide. Like any other content on your site, ads should be useful, relevant, and current.
Hold your advertisers to the same quality standards as your product. Don’t let a third-party reflect badly on you or your site.
If you’re trying to drive revenue, don’t drive your readers away from your site with annoying, inappropriate garbage. link.

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Taking a Cue from Digg, Google Introduces Ads in Orkut That You Can Trash

Get More Relevant Results From Your First Search. Use Google Homepage!
If you don't like a particular ad on your screen, just throw it in the bin but if you found it interesting or useful, why not share the ad with your other friends - this seems to be the new advertising formula for Digg and now Orkut.
The traditional banner ads and even contextual advertising (like AdSense) is not really working on social news sites so web companies like Facebook and Digg are trying more innovative ways to get the advertiser's message across to their users without actually annoying them.
For instance, Digg introduced a new advertising platform early this month that gives users more control over advertisements that get displayed on the Digg website. Digg users can vote or even bury an ad just like they interact with other non-sponsored stories on Digg.

The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.

Taking a cue from Digg, Google is introducing a slightly similar form of advertising in Orkut where users will have the option to trash ads that they dislike.
Called Orkut Promote, this is sort of a self-advertising platform where advertisers as well as regular Orkut users can promote their content including photos, videos or text content among the Orkut community. Google will charge advertisers for promotion while regular Orkut members won't pay have to pay a fee for using Orkut promote.
It works like this. Say I have a video on YouTube that I want to spread virally on Orkut. I create a new promotion in my Orkut account that embeds the YouTube video. As soon as I publish this promotion, all my other friends on Orkut can see it and if they like it enough, they can further promote it to their own circle of friends. Or they may just decide to trash it.
 
Who is using Orkut - Comscore
To get started, watch out for a link on you Orkut profile that says " Promote on Orkut" - the service isn't live for everyone yet.
Orkut Promote will be another tab to your Orkut profile page and Google will use the tab to display promotions from both advertisers and other Orkut users (i.e., your friends). You can trash or re-promote sponsored promotions in the same way as your friends' promotions.

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Advertising Inside PowerPoint Presentations

A coffee chain in Amsterdam is trying something unique to advertise their brand across campuses. They are giving away free coffee coupons to college students who agree to sneak in a branded slide from the coffee company into their PowerPoint presentations.

These advertising slides resemble coffee-stained paper napkins and some of them carry pretty funny captions like "I got free coffee to put this slide into the presentation" or "Drink Coffee. Copy from Wikipedia".
To claim the coffee coupons, the students are required to post a picture or video of the classroom where that presentation was made. Here's one such video capture.

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Google Audio Ads for Radio to Stage a Comeback

Back in December 2006, Google introduced an Audio ads service that allowed advertisers to run campaigns on AM/FM radio stations using the familiar AdWords interface. Google's foray into traditional radio advertising was not very successful and therefore, in February 2009, Google decided to shut down their radio ads service.

We have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts on exploring internet-based solutions that will deliver relevant online streaming audio ads. These plans include discontinuing the Audio Ads platform within AdWords and selling our Automation business [dMarc], which is the system we built to integrate with broadcast radio stations.

The last batch of Google Ads on radio stations will run on May 31, 2009 but just as we though that Radio Ads on Google are gone forever, Google has posted a new job requirement for their online Audio Ads business and surprisingly, the requirements lay special emphasis on "Radio".

As an Account Executive for Online Audio Advertising, your goal is to drive revenue by selling Online Audio Ads solutions to top-tier advertisers. This is a high-adrenaline, client-facing sales role requiring deep Radio and Internet expertise, proven sales ability with a particular penchant for closing deals, and a broad base of industry contacts.

The minimum requirement for applying to this job is "at least six years of progressive work experience, including Online Radio, in advertising sales, marketing or consulting, with at least five years working with or at agencies."
Looks like Google is all set to try audio ads on radio again but this time, the focus has shifted from "traditional radio stations" to "Internet based radio stations".
Google Online Audio Ads, if extended outside radio, could be great news for podcast producers as well as most of them still haven't found any decent solution to monetize their podcast shows.

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Google AdSense Ads in RSS Feeds – First Impressions & Screenshots

The AdSense for RSS feeds program is now live for some publishers and Google has also discontinued the FeedBurner Advertising Network in favor of AdSense.
 
*If you are subscribed to this RSS feed in either Google homepage or any news reader, you may have already seen the new feed ads at the bottom of each article.

AdSense Ads in Feeds are contextual and are available in banner (468x60) and medium rectangle (300x250) formats. They are probably a mix of CPC and CPM ads because you can show either text ads or image ads or even a combination of both in your feeds.
Here's a screenshot of a feed ad inside an article that was about search engine optimization - notice the relevance of the ad.

AdSense publishers can choose how frequently the ads should appear in the feed and whether ads should appear in articles that are relatively short.
What's different from FeedBurner though is that with Google AdSense you can position ads either at the bottom or top of the feed item.

There are two big advantages here:
a. The ads are contextual, very relevant and publishers may therefore see better returns.
b. A large majority of FeedBurner advertisers targeted their ad campaigns for US traffic so publishers were not able to successfully monetize traffic from other countries. That will change with AdSense for Feeds as Google has advertisers almost everywhere.
Here's another example of an RSS ad - its a medium rectangle this time.

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Smart and Effective Rich Media Advertising Campaigns from HP

Help Your Business Be Found Claim Your Free Google Place Page!
HP is running an innovative advertising campaign on some technology blogs for their upcoming TouchSmart series which are desktop computers but with Tablet PC like touch screen.
These ads are done in Adobe Flash and pop-up when you hover the mouse over the ad.

The more impressive part is the 3D look and the interactive nature of these ads - you can read specs of the machine, watch demo videos or even place an order from the ad itself without visiting the advertiser’s website.

I spotted the HP ad on Lifehacker but it’s no longer there. You can however still experience the ad from the screencast video video.
Am not sure if such an interactive effect is possible with the upcoming Google Gadget ads but this is definitely very effective and non-obtrusive rich media advertising.

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BuzzLogic Ad Network for Bloggers Guarantees $2 CPM Rates

Bloggers, take notice.
BuzzLogic’s new blog ad network will pay you minimum $2 CPM (per 1,000 impressions) if your blog gets accepted in their program. You can run ads from BuzzLogic along side Google AdSense since they are not contextual in nature.

To get accepted into the program, your blog should be hosted on one of the popular platforms like Typepad, Blogger, WordPress and the frequency at which you post content will also be considered.
Another important point – BuzzLogic will pay you only for US traffic. Am not sure if BuzzLogic ads will collapse for international visitors. BuzzLogic will also pay less if you place their ad units below the fold. For details, visit BuzzLogic.com.

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The Importance of Short URLs in Print Newspapers & Magazines

It is interesting to see how newspaper sare trying to connect stories published in their print edition with online content. See this clip from Business Standard newspaper.


They add a short URL after the story that print subscriber can type in their browser and read related content on the web.
And this approach may actually be helping companies drive traffic to their web properties. They work at least in the case of print advertisements that have URLs.
A new study shows that including URLs in magazine ads drives readers to advertiser Web sites. The analysis of 833 print ads in seven magazines showed that ads with Web addresses were up to three times as likely to drive readers to a Web site, depending on the magazine category.
The biggest increases came in the home, women's service, travel and fashion categories, though not so in the financial category.

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Promoting a Blog through Facebook Advertising and Google Adwords

  recently experimented with running a 7-day advertising campaign for this blog on Facebook as well as the Google network using Adwords.
This was my second attempt and the results are pretty encouraging.

I mainly targeted the 20-35 age group on Facebook who are based in India with some level of education and any marital status. In the case of Google Adwords, the ads were only shown to Internet users in India where were looking for technology related websites.
First, here are the individual performance reports for AdWords and Facebook advertising:
Google Adwords (Ads were shown on Google search and sites that use AdSense)

Facebook Advertising (with a daily advertising budget of $5)

If you compare these tables, Facebook can deliver tons of impressions for a small amount of money but the average cost of visitor acquisition (CPC) is higher for Facebook than Google Adwords.
Now Google Analytics tells me that a visitor from either of these advertising networks spent anywhere between 2-3 minutes on the page which is not bad at all.  The bounce rate for visitors from Google were nearly the same as the site average but in the case of Facebook, the bounce rate was 25% less than the site average.

This was just an experiment with a very low advertising budget but looking at the results, these advertising options are definitely worth exploring as they deliver if you can target the right crowd.
If you have never tried advertising with Facebook, it even allows you to target employees of a particular company or students of a particular college. For example, you may set your ad to appear only on the terminals of Google employees or students of IITs and IIMs.

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Advertising Program for Tech Blogs from IDG – AdSense Alternative

IDG, the company famous for publishing technology magazines like Macworld and PC World, has launched an advertising network for technology bloggers.
IDG will leverage their existing sales team to get advertisers for your blog and will keep 50% of the advertising revenue. The ads are CPM based and available in all standard formats like the media rectangle, wide leaderboard or the long skyscraper format.

The program was earlier known as Tech Dispenser - that old site will continue like an aggregator of tech blogs but the advertising network is now rebranded as The IDG TechNetwork.

If you run a technology related blog or website, I highly recommend signing up as these programs generally yield higher returns than Google AdSense because you get to specify your own prices. If there are no matching ads, you can always fill the unsold inventory with AdSense ads* so its always a win-win situation.


Another advantage of joining IDG Technology Blog Network is that your content gets syndicated across different IDG websites so you can expect some additional web traffic.
To get started, open an account at Adify and wait for the site to get approved. The payments are handled by Adify and are made via PayPal.

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Get Your Blog Listed In USA Today Website For Free

You can get your blog (and RSS feed) listed in USATODAY.com for a month without paying any of the advertising charges.
Other than a free directly listing, your blog also be mentioned within articles on USA Today.com if the theme of your blog is contextually relevant to the story.


Here's how to get your blog on USA Today:
1. Goto bloggerandpodcaster.com and register a free account with your email address.
2. The next screen will have various advertising options. Choose #4 that says "Custom Partner Program" and type coupon code "BP" (without quotes).
3. You can then fill other details in following screens like your Blog URL, RSS Feed, Category, etc.
Though you will not be charged for the entry, you will still have to share your credit card information for the transaction to complete.
Important Update: There's probably a serious issue with this offer. When you give your credit card details, you are not charged the first month but will be billed automatically in the coming months if you do not cancel the subscription.
Several users have reported that they have not received any confirmation emails from Blogger and Podcaster magazine after signing up. So there's no way to cancel.  
Please stay away from the offer. I have written to the customer care at Blogger and Podcaster about canceling my credit card subscription but they haven't responded.

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Advertising With Flyers On Facebook – Do The Ads Bring Traffic ?

As an experiment, I recently ran two advertising campaigns on Facebook - one used Flyers Basic (CPC) and the second used Flyers Pro (CPM). If you are wondering how effective are Facebook ads in terms of clicks, here are the results:
1. Facebook Flyers Basic - They cost $5 to display your ad 2,500 times on various Facebook pages. I bought 5,000 ad impressions on Facebook and here's what Google Analytics has to say about the number of clicks received from Facebook - Total Visits = 5

[Facebook won't share the click-through-rate for Flyers Basic version]
2. Facebook Flyers Pro - This is a CPC ad program of Facebook where you pay only for the clicks. Flyers Pro The ads made around 800 impressions on Facebook and the number of visitor clicks received was five (CTR = 0.6%).

Though the above advertising campaigns on Facebook were run for a very short period, they do indicate that the click through rates for ads appearing on Facebook can be extremely low.
Sidenote: If you are located outside US, you can make the payment for Facebook Flyers via International Credit Cards but not PayPal. The Payment page for Flyers looks as if it won't accept non-US credit cards but just type your full address and it will work just fine.

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Should Websites Offer Subscriptions or Ad-Supported Free Content

One alternative for Web sites would be to bank on subscriptions rather than advertising revenue, but few existing outlets have been successful with that model.
The reason is that unless the site offers extraordinary content, people simply refuse to pay for it, said Mark Miller, president of RMG Connect, an advertising and marketing agency.
"If Warren Buffett wanted to put out his own subscription newsletter online, well, I'm sure he'd get a bucketful of people to subscribe to it," Miller said. Link.

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How Much Money is Moving Into Online Advertising

There is little doubt today that a hefty portion of advertising dollars will shift to the Internet from TV, radio, print and elsewhere in the coming years.
The catch is that much of the money flowing toward the Internet is concentrated on a few dozen of the most popular sites. That has left smaller, less well-known sites at a severe disadvantage when it comes to attracting advertising money and surviving.
In the United States, the top 50 Web sites accounted for more than 90 percent of the revenue from online ads in the first half of 2007. The top 10 sites accounted for 70 percent of the revenue. Link.

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