Google spent $750 million for its 3^rd largest acquisition to date behind DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.65 billion). DoubleClick strengthened Google’s arm in display advertising and YouTube gave them the most popular video collection on the Web as well as another outlet for advertisements. Now the AdMob deal gives Google the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. (more…)

Apple recently unveiled iAd, which is its new mobile advertising platform. Here are a few of iAd’s features and specs:

- Designed for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, & iPod)

- Built into Apple’s OS

- An ad let’s you stay in the application while it’s still running

- Implements rich media

- Apple sells and hosts the ads

- 60% of Ad Revenues go to developers

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For those agencies and marketers with a total focus on ROI, sometimes branding campaigns can be confounding.  How can I measure the effectiveness of my branding campaign to optimize performance?  The answer is something we call a “Brand Metrics Calculator”.  A Brand Metrics Calculator will convert all brand touch points into a common unit, and thus a common financial value.  This way the marketer can determine the effectiveness of multiple brand touch points and shift budget accordingly, as they would say in determining that a paid search campaign generates leads at a lower cost than say a banner campaign.   While this is not by any means an exact science, it allows the marketer to make data-driven decisions on how to invest marketing funds. (more…)

As Internet marketers, our number one objective is to utilize online marketing to boost company revenue by means of increasing sales. If you are like most marketers, you are spending money across a variety of online channels to generate conversions. So, knowing it is our responsibility to generate revenue via these channels, it is also safe to assume that most advertisers know their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) threshold, or how much they are willing to spend in order to have a potential customer submit a form, purchase a product/service, or complete whatever action they have deemed necessary to achieve their objective. After all, knowing this number ensures we can effectively allocate and measure marketing dollars and therefore prove an initiative’s value to company leadership. (more…)

When running a banner/display advertising campaign there are often many options as to how the advertiser will pay the publisher or publisher network.  The general options are cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) or cost-per-action (CPA).  In the CPA pricing model the advertiser only pays the publisher if the user completes a pre-determined action.  The action will usually be the purchase of product or the submission of contact information in lead generation campaigns.  If you are running a large banner advertising campaign across two or more publisher networks that receives hundreds of thousands of impressions per day using the CPA model, it is extremely important that you use Ad serving technology. (more…)

Display advertising, also often referred to as banner advertising, is another key aspect of online marketing. Display advertising is online ads consisting of text, graphics images or logos that are embedded into a Web page.  The three most commonly used display sizes —leaderboard, skyscraper, or boombox/big box (see Figure 1)—are presented in rich (flash or dynamic), static (unmoving) or expandable formats. In order to choose the most impactful type of ad for your campaign, one must consider many factors before getting started. (more…)