Posts tagged advertising

How to stop holiday advertisers from following you

Now that your gift giving has slowed, you’ll begin to notice a lot of “re-targeting” by advertisers that you may have visited during your online shopping. I personally was being annoyed by the frequency of ads from the same advertisers that I had visited and not purchased from.

Here is a simple way to remove yourself from behaviorally targeted ads that attempt to get you to come back and buy from them.

Note: many of the companies bury the opt out link on the page, simply scroll down and look for the OPT OUT or use your FIND function to search for it on the page.

OPEN X (click on SET OPT OUT COOKIE)
http://www.openx.com/about/privacy-policy

GOOGLE AD NETWORK
https://www.google.com/settings/ads/

ADBRITE
http://www.adbrite.com/mb/behavorial_optout.php

AD ROLL
http://www.adroll.com/about/privacy

APP NEXUS
http://www.appnexus.com/platform-policy#choices

AOL
http://advertising.aol.com/privacy/advertisingcom/opt-out

As in-feed ads appear, Facebook attempts to educate users on “how they make money” (click through for landing page)

As in-feed ads appear, Facebook attempts to educate users on “how they make money”

(click through for landing page)

How I drove 1000+ fans to a new Facebook page in 1 week

Concept: My Fat Pet (facebook.com/myfatpet)
Time period: April 26-May 3 (1 week)
Hours invested: 4.5
Media budget invested: $36.56
Fans recruited: 1,000+
Page Views: 7,280
Page interactions: 84 (comments, fan posts)
Supporting Platforms

My Fat Pet on Facebook

    While I consult companies and brands on social media marketing, the layers of bureaucracy within their organizations usually prevents them from being as successful as they could be. The internet in general is a fast moving, ever changing environment, so if things are taking weeks or even days to get approval, truly engaging people through social media becomes nearly impossible.

    The other thing that I find holds companies and brands back from truly engaging in social media is the hesitation to dedicate resources to the channel. Having an over-worked brand manager engaging with people online is not only a bad use of their time, but usually a doomed project since they can’t truly get their head into the dozens of conversations happening at any given moment. True engagement takes a semi-dedicated resource or an agency with the tools and people to deal with the day to day tasks.

    I regularly experiment on my own in order to take down these barriers and gain a better understanding of the levers that I have at my disposal. Here are a few tips that came from this social media experiment. For the purposes of this write up, I am focusing on Facebook, although other integrated tactics were used on other social platforms. Also, I need to point out that “getting fans” was not the primary goal of this exercise, it is simply a byproduct engagement with people on a relevant topic that compelled them to participate.

    1. I used an intriguing concept, but was sure to have depth and an underlying, positive message. In this case, fat animal photos can be funny, but pet obesity is a real issue that deserves awareness.
    2. I provided an immediate payoff in the form of funny fat pet photos within the filmstrip of the Facebook page.
    3. I provided additional resources for people that want to go beyond the “lol” in the form of pet diet and exercise articles.
    4. I requested sharing by using messaging with positive connotations, such as “Share this with other caring dog owners” or “If you care about healthy cats…”
    5. I manually posted the most relevant and compelling items on other platforms - as opposed to simply tying in all of the platforms to auto-echo one another.
    6. I encouraged submissions by immediately re-posting the photos submitted to the Tumblr blog and then commenting back a short link to the photo in the gallery. This not only shows others what you want from them, but also pushes up the story in everyone’s feed (including the friends of the original submitter) since there is more activity on that thread.
    7. I toggled between my personal and page account to create even more activity on posted items and push up the story in my own personal activity feed, which is seen by my friends.
    8. I used Facebook “social” ads to propel social stories in front of the friends of people posting or liking the page. I did this after I reached ~200 fans so there was enough inventory (200 x # of friends) available to use minimal per-click bidding and still hit my $10/day budget. Cost per fan was about $.18 through this channel.

    Over the next week I’ll be experimenting with alternate sharing messages, further repurposing submitted content and attempting to increase interaction time + frequency.

      If you’d like to know more about my tinkering with My Fat Pet or other interactive experiments, feel free to reach out via Twitter or good old email (tinkering@williamfernandez.com)

      What do they know about you? 4 online privacy resources you should visit today

      Simple tool that shows you which tracking cookies are on your computer and allows you to “opt out” of the behavioral advertising delivered by the companies included in the tool.

      Note that opting out of a network doesn’t mean you will see online ads. Rather, it means that the network from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your web preferences and usage patterns.

      View and edit the information Google uses to show you interest-based ads on websites in Google’s ad network. Add or remove interest categories associated with your web browser, or opt out of seeing behaviorally targeted ads altogether.

      Find the answer to the question, “What does Google know about me?” with this service, which shows you information stored in your Google Account. From one central location, you can easily change your privacy settings for services such as Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Picasa, and Google Profiles.

      2o7.net and omtrdc.net are domains used by Adobe to help provide portions of its SiteCatalyst, DataWarehouse and SearchCenter products. Specifically, these domains are used by Adobe to place cookies, on behalf of its customers, on the your computer if you visit one of their customers websites.

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      From my tea bag. Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

      From my tea bag.

      Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

      LIKE means SHARE for Facebook users

      We’ve all seen it, the Facebook SHARE and LIKE buttons on blog posts, videos and other content throughout the web. Until now, LIKE meant a small story posted on your newsfeed and Facebook could get an idea of how important that content is. 

      It seems that Facebook has released an update that changes the LIKE button’s functionality also SHARE the content. Now, after clicking the LIKE button, a full story with a headline, text snippet and thumbnail will be posted to your profile wall and into your friends news feed. You’ll also be given an option to comment on the story link.

      I would imagine that Facebook users may not be so whimsical with their LIKEs, given that it will appear on their walls and in their friends’ news feeds, but for publishers with compelling content online, they should get a boost in traffic.

      My prediction - forced LIKEs will anger the friends of non-discriminating Facebook users almost as much as Farmville updates. 

      Google AdWords launches contextual targeting tool