Where You Can Go Right, And Wrong, With Native Ads. Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Follow him on Twitter at @dgreenberg. James Navin is the vice president of Strategic Operations for Sharethrough. Follow him on Twitter @jnavin. There has been a lot of talk in the digital media trade press about native advertising and the opportunities for advertisers. Yet, much less has been written about the opportunities and implications for digital publishers. But, first things first… What Is “Native Advertising”? Native advertising is a concept that gained traction in the digital ad industry in 2012. Over recent months, the conversation about native advertising has focused largely on the pros and cons of just one facet of the larger movement: publisher-produced sponsored posts on editorial sites. Native ad executions are not new. Benefits Of “Native” To Advertisers Brand advertisers are expecting to benefit from native advertising in at least two ways: The Native “Adscape”
Tongal Raises $15M For Platform That Lets Anyone Compete To Make Branded Video Campaigns. Tongal has raised $15 million for its video content and social platform, which rewards people for making video advertisements for consumer brands. With the investment, which was led by Insight Venture Partners, Tongal plans to build out its global creative community. Tongal, founded in 2008 and based out of Los Angeles, has developed what could be described as a gamification and social platform for developing online video campaigns for brands. People who want to compete go through a process from idea to final selection. The winners receive cash prizes for their work. CoFounder James DeJulio said that the process starts with an idea, which requires no technical background to submit.
From the Tongal web site: Most Tongal projects are broken down into multiple phases, for example, Ideation, Production and Distribution. The market for fresh video continues to increase, as the number of channels for content also increases. DeJulio said social media compresses the shelf life of video. Advertise. Mashable. Do better click through rates deliver bigger profits? - Jellyfish. Of the numerous campaign settings available to PPC practitioners, the one that seems to garner the most debate amongst Adwords users is the ad delivery setting – i.e. whether to allow Google to optimise by clicks or conversions, or to just rotate the ads evenly. There are good arguments for both options.
Using ‘optimise for clicks’ means that the ad with the best CTR gets rewarded with more impressions, which not only delivers more traffic to your site but also a better average historical CTR and hence cheaper clicks. However, this doesn’t take into account conversion rates. So maybe rotate is better because it gives each ad a chance to get enough data to measure which one converts better, and hence (theoretically) could drive more sales and more profit for your ad spend. Bear in mind that ‘optimise by conversion’ sounds good, however it takes a long time to gather enough data to make decisions; for clients with average conversion rates, it’s just a glorified version of rotate.