Category Archives: Internet Advertising

Advertising With Mobile AdWords Just Got Easier

Many companies do not invest money in mobile marketing because they think it’s too complicated, or don’t have the resources to create a mobile site. AdWords for mobile just launched a new feature that should solve these problems.

When creating a Google Mobile AdWords, you’ll be asked if you want Google to create a mobile landing page for you, free of charge and hosted by Google. Here’s the announcement from the Inside AdWords blog:

According to Internet market research powerhouse eMarketer, the mobile search advertising market size is currently $13.5 million and growing – by a projected factor of 50 – within the next four years. With everyone buzzing about mobile these days, we wanted to tell you straight from the horse’s mouth about some sophisticated new tools and features that we’ve recently rolled out to help you run a more successful mobile ads campaign.

AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads
Mobile ads can refer users to a business phone number, a mobile website, or both. Usually you need to be a web developer or contact your webmaster in order to create a mobile web page from scratch. However, AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads provides a friendly wizard that creates a page for you in minutes – which is available immediately after you create it. Google hosts the page for free.

Details are explained here. What a great announcement from Google, this will definitely entice advertisers to run mobile marketing campaigns.

Microsoft’s Testimony Before Congress Regarding Google-Doubleclick Merger: WTF?

So Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith is about to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust regarding Google’s merger with Doubleclick.

I’m quite puzzled by one part of his testimony:

This country doesn’t permit a phone company to listen to what you say and use that information to target ads. The computer industry doesn’t permit a software company to record what you type and use that information to target ads. Yet with this merger, Google seeks to record almost everything you see and do on the Internet and use that information to target ads.

I really don’t get the sentence about recording personal information to influence ad targeting. Isn’t Microsoft doing the exact same thing with their AdCenter program? I mean, Adcenter’s specificity is that it uses demographic data to fine-tune targeting, such as sex, age, or income. If they’re not recording information about their users, where are they getting their demographic data from?

Sorry, Brad, but I don’t get it?

Microsoft Acquires Mobile Ad Company Screentonic

It’s better late than never, Microsoft has decided to purchase Screentonic, a french mobile advertising company.

It’s the second french company that Microsoft adds to its mobile division, the first one was MotionBridge, a mobile search company which has been acquired last year.

Microsoft now catches up with Google and Yahoo, which are already providing mobile advertising offers such as click-to-call or pay-per-click advertising.

Google Adsense Ads Get a New Look

Today, the Official Google Adsense blog announced a new format for their ads.

“You may have noticed that some of your ad units have started to look a little different lately — we’re happy to announce that, just in time for spring, we’ve given our standard ad units a fresh makeover. After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers.”

With this new format, Google hopes that publishers, advertisers, and Google itself will make more money…

The defaul ads’ format now doesn’t have any border, and the “Ads by Goooooooogle” text link has been replaced by an image. The “Advertise on this site” link has also been removed.

MySpace wants to convince big clients to pay for their profiles

After its $900 million ad link-up with Google, MySpace announced that they now want to convince big clients using free pages to promote their products and services to start paying:

Now, advertisers say the company is stepping up its efforts to convince big clients using MySpace’s free Web pages, known as profiles, to become paying customers as well.

MySpace has started to reach out to companies that are setting up commercial pages on the site, encouraging them to reach some kind of financial agreement and forgo the free ride,” says Jeff Lanctot of aQuantive’s Avenue A|Razorfish online advertising agency. “While this could include paying to have the page up, I think buying an ad package to support the commercial page is also a reasonable solution.”

For companies that target young people, MySpace represents certainly the most profitable mean to promote their services – providing the fact that they create something engaging.

I don’t think it will be easy for companies to suddenly accept paying for having a MySpace page. For example, Unilever hooked up with Christine Dolce to promote the Axe deodorant. The gorgeous girl who goes by the alias ForBiddeN has 999368 friends on MySpace…

Hat tip to Scott Karp at Publishing2.

Write tutorials to get links and traffic

If you excel in web design, graphic design, Javascript programming, drawing or even gardening, and if you never wrote a tutorial and published it online, you just missed opportunity to get more traffic and links.

There are literally thousands of web sites that accept tutorials submission. Tutorials present many advantages:

  • Free advertising, tutorials websites usually accept free submissions
  • Traffic: if your tutorials are unique, you’ll increase your chances of getting traffic
  • Links: You will get a link from both the site you submitted your article to, but also from visitors who would have mentioned your link elsewhere
  • Sales opportunities: if you drive people to your site to have them read your tutorials, and if you provide services , you might convert these happy readers into customers.

A good example of tutorials web site is Good-Tutorials.com, the famous Photoshop tutorials site. They accept free submissions for all kind of articles related to the use of Photoshop. If you just found a new trick with Photoshop, you can try to submit it over there.

To find websites that accept tutorial submissions, you could go to Google and type this query:

“submit tutorial” “business”

Replace “business” by the field your tutorial fits in, for example “web design”, “php”, or even “gardening”.