Why I Like DFP Small Business (a.k.a. Google Ad Manager)

A little over a year ago, we used a service called Open X on TuDiabetes.org and EsTuDiabetes.org, to serve our ads until we found ourselves talking to nobody when faced with a tech issue that resulted in no ads getting served. At that point, I decided to try Google Ad Manager, a free service that does the same thing (help you manage ads) as a hosted service by Google.

More than a year later (now it’s called DFP Small Business, but it is essentially the same service), we continue to be very happy with the platform. It lets you manage multiple orders for multiple clients over multiple inventory locations. This is ideal for us, having two networks to manage ads on and typically having multiple campaigns under way.

The ability to manage an order includes start and end times, % of impressions and targeting by geography, language, browser, domains and much more. Also, their reporting capabilities are as solid as the rest of the Google products you may be used to, which is advantageous to you and to your clients.

All in all, DFP has become a solution that seems to meet all our needs and has been reliable in its delivery of ads since we adopted it.

Top 5 Sources for Blog Traffic

I had never seen it anywhere until today… I am talking about Bing as the #1 source of traffic to my blog with a whopping 30% of the traffic vs. a little over 20% now coming from Google Searrch!

See the screenshot showing all traffic sources since May 1:

Apparently, I am not alone and Bing may be a better search engine after all.

Are you seeing anything like this?

YouTube ads: An Intrusive user experience!

After I saw the video of Michael Jackson’s daughter crying at his memorial today, I saw this:

What is wrong with this picture? At least a couple things!
1) From a human standpoint, I find it pretty insulting how commercialized things have become around MJ after his death. There are not 2 but 3 ads appearing in the end frame for this video of his daughter crying her dad’s death…
2) You can’t get rid of the ads to be able to click on the video that is sitting directly behind them. So, they are killing the user experience to make a buck, basically. Reminds me of the popups of the early days…

Tribes: Unimpressive and lacking substance

I don’t consider myself a fan of Seth Godin, but I have enjoyed many of his books. When I saw a video of him talking at TED Talks recently, I decided to order Tribes. The truth is that the book was more than adequately summarized by the speech he gave @ TED.

Beyond that, I cannot help but agree with the reviewers that point out the lack of substance in this work by Godin… By the end of the book, you are inevitably left wondering why did he need to publish an entire book about it. There’s really indeed an unfortunate lack of substance in Tribes.

Instead, I recommend The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) and Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.

Very impressed with OpenX!

I just finished setting up our communities to use OpenX, as a step in the direction of getting rid of Google Ads. As they describe on their home page:

“OpenX is a free, open source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of your online advertising inventory. You can get OpenX as a hosted service or as downloaded software.”

I am VERY impressed with the backend to help you set up advertisers, campaigns and banners. The only hickup I encountered was related to a delay due to caching of ads that prevents them from appearing for 20 minutes after you first set them up. Otherwise, it worked like a charm.

Here is a video tour of the platform, so you can see what I am talking about:

Getting Started with OpenX from OpenX Limited on Vimeo.

Annoyed by Google Ads with changing domains

I know I am… There’s this “wrinkle removal” web site that keeps appearing once and again in our Google Ads, in spite of us having removed about 7 different domains that it was connected to. Have you seen it?

Sounds like an opportunity for some Google Ads intelligence to be put in place, where destination pages get parsed for content and if a domain has been blocked for a particular site, any other domains that point to the same content get blocked along with it.

There you have an idea, Google Ads folks! Hopefully soon we will not have to carry Google Ads any more.

He Hates Sarah Marshall

As some of you know I practically watch no TV (since we moved to CA, from practically it’s turned into none). So, understandably, I was confused by this sign in San Francisco that we ran into as we were getting into the city yesterday:

I guess this could very well be a publicity stunt for Sarah Marshall or could it be the blog of a guy who claims he “was going to dump Sarah Marshall” but she beat him to the punch. I am leaning more towards the first case… otherwise this guy probably deserved getting dumped for being willing to spend so much money on a sign! :)

Made to Stick: Sticky Concepts, From Cover to Cover!

The Heath brothers present us with an amazing title that automatically becomes an essential part of the toolkit of any marketer or anyone seeking to influence others. Complementing very nicely the concepts introduced a while back by Gladwell in “The Tipping Point”, this title offers the reader a very easy-to-follow framework to help in the creation of sticky ideas.

Each chapter focuses on one of the six dimensions of the framework (SIMPLE, UNEXPECTED, CONCRETE, CREDIBLE, EMOTIONAL and STORIES) which you can easily remember through the acronym SUCCESs. They spice up each element with examples to illustrate the points they make, building up on the concepts covered earlier on and periodically inserting what they call clinics, which are great stopping points to see the new material put in practice.

The end-result is a sticky book that you will devour in no time (as powerful of a methodology they present, they don’t take too long to do it -thus applying their own method, making the content CONCRETE). It will also be a book that you will find yourself applying instantly to whatever idea you want to influence others about, whether you are presenting in person to an audience of investors or to over the TV in the form of a commercial.

Make sure to get your copy of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” -you will thank me for it!

And if you already read the book and you want more stuff from “Made To Stick”, make sure to visit the authors’ blog at http://www.madetostick.com/blog/.