Are Interstitial Ads “successful” due to fat-fingers?

Folks who have worked in launching mobile marketing campaigns would be familiar with the term Interstitial Ads.

What are Interstitial Ads?

Those pesky ads which take up the entire screen space in the middle of an app or a website. Yes, the ones which block the content underneath and make you click on the small cross in some corner of the ad.

Continue reading “Are Interstitial Ads “successful” due to fat-fingers?”

Food for Thought: Part V

Healthy food

Ever since Google Reader was shunted, I haven’t been able to settle on a RSS reader. I did try out multiple other services and I am currently using Digg’s reader. Not having a good RSS software kind of puts a huge impediment on one’s reading, and this is probably my excuse for not posting more often!

Continue reading “Food for Thought: Part V”

Now find exactly how many people are bidding for your keyword

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is often becoming the de facto traffic generating mechanism for people who have the pockets. This, in addition to the fact that Google is really aggressive about its growth in the Indian markets puts Google Adwords right up there in the strategy of any digital marketing executive.

I have been working on the Adwords interface for the past 18 months or so now and get excited whenever I discover a new and useful feature in the web app. One such awesome feature is the single keyword bidding tool.

Where do you find this?

You find this feature in the Keywords interface of any campaign. Be sure that you have enough data points (works for a weekly period for most of my keywords).

The tool is only available if you are selecting one single keyword at any point of time.

Google keyword bidding

There is a small bar graph icon for the keyword bidding tool, now simply select this keyword and view the bidding and competitors.

Google Keyword Competitors

What can you do with this?

This data is good, but what can one do with this data? Well, this gives you a wealth of information –

  • How many people are you competing against (for eg. I did not expect ask.com to be running an ad on this keyword)
  • How are you doing vis-a-vis your competitors in SEM (yes, we are beating the crap out of the rest ;-))
  • The approximate budget spends of your competitors
  • A bit more research on the landing pages can help you identify what your competitors are doing right and you are doing wrong

This is one fun tool that the folks have Google Adwords have churned out.

Economics teaches us that when information is provided to everyone, then the wealth extraction within the market is at a maximum. The adwords bidding is one such great example, wherein me (and all my competitors) have the same access to data. The two players who will end up benefiting the most after the correct usage of this tool are bidders who take fast decision and Google.

Confessions of an Ambush Marketer

Dear Internet Surfer, I have sinned.

  • Ever since I have found about HTML forms and Emailing systems, I have been lurking around in web-pages awaiting to spring that form on you
  • When I found about javascript and the onLoad event, I welcome you to my pages and bidded for my time. The time to spring my multi-inputted trap!
  • jQuery added to my arsenal of timed web-pages and put some smarts in my traps. My traps started looking good and how!
  • CSS helped me to create the singing sirens, beckoning you to click on my lovely form elements
  • Smart written form elements and squeeze pages made me more credible to you
  • Auto-responders helped me to have an active dialogue with you … making you think that I actually care to have a conversation
  • After well timed campaigns when you swiped your credit card and transferred your hard(ly) earned money to my account, I can only do but thank you for your efforts

In case, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me, then please forget the money that you paid to me and consider this as a practical lesson learnt!