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Web 2.0 Expo – Optimizing Ad Revenue

In his talk, Maximizing Ad Revenue Through Format Optimization, Paul Edmondson from YieldBuild shared their data on how to change the advertising on your website in order to increase revenue. With so much advertising on the web, the audience has become increasingly blind to ads, which drops their click-through-rates (CTR) and revenue. However, very subtle changes to the ads on your website will prevent a dip in revenue (if you measure performance).

There are four pillars of ad optimization:

  • Ad Size – Size matters. 728×90 (leaderboard), 300×250 (medium box) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most effective ad sizes (with the most clicks). Different ad networks have different rates of success of selling clicks for certain ad sizes, so be aware of that when choosing one.
  • Format attributes – such as rounded corners, background colors, borders, font colors, etc. Grey background with little border works best. Try testing variations on link colors, font colors, highlight colors, of your website.
  • Placement – Design your site to accept the best ad sizes (see above) to make every ad account. Don’t underestimate below-the-fold value. A 300×250 ad placed in the center of the content will get better click-throughs than skyscrapers above-the-fold. For your title bar, ads aligned to the right perform best.
  • Ad Network – Choose the right ad network for your blog or website. Look for ad networks which allow geo-targeting to match ads to your audience. If ads served on your site don’t seem to match your content, try a different network.

For smaller websites who would like to try to monetize their content, try placing one great ad unit in a prominent position for a high-value return. Overall, keep in mind that more ads are not better and not only are they decreasing value on your site, they may be slowing down the load time of your site, which will eventually deter your readers (and then your ad revenue will decrease with less traffic).

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Web 2.0 Expo – Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

  • P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
  • O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Real Time Web

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

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