Firetop

On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis. (more…)

This afternoon I had an online demonstration of Nielsen’s AdRelevance tool, an online reporting interface which enables the subscriber to see which advertisers are running banners across the major media websites. AdRelevance reports show where banners are running, flight durations and stores examples of the creative. From an online ad sales perspective this is wonderful stuff. Auto-triggered email alerts can dispatch emails displaying the latest campaign details from competing websites, enabling a sales person to contact the relevant marketing manager about running a similar campaign on their own network. However, one thing was pretty clear - AdRelevance is generating false clicks on banners when it retrieves creative and URL information, not good news for advertisers. (more…)

Channel Four very kindly broadcast ‘Celebrity Sex Tapes Unwound’ a week or two ago… not a show you deliberately set out to watch but hey, if it’s on late at night you’ll watch it for sheer amusement won’t you? It featured a run down of the top ten celebrity sex tapes of all time. The order was based on the number of returned results in Google, I got quite annoyed (shouting at the TV etc.) because this implies that there are millions of people downloading this stuff all the time. In addition, the programme makers seemed not to understand that the number of text references to a given video, does not dictate real audience popularity in terms of downloads. I decided to take 5 minutes to see what the real order should have been. Channel Four can thank me later.

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One of the web development projects I’ve been working on since 2004 is for UK charity - African Child Trust (ACT). Whilst working this morning on their ’soon to be launched’ website, one of the trustees brought to my attention a relatively new search engine called ’Everyclick’. Everyclick does exactly what I’ve been planning to build for years - it takes affiliate revenue and splits it 50/50 with member charities. By using Everyclick and clicking on the pay per click adverts, you or I can generate affiliate revenue for Everyclick - 50% of which goes to our nominated charity! In addition, by using the Amazon search option instead of buying directly from Amazon, we generate even more commission. (more…)

Sometimes I get asked why I decided to call my company Firetop Ltd; there were two factors influencing this decision. Firstly, I needed a name that was applicable to getting people to the ‘top’ of search engine results, since this was the original web marketing service provided through optimisation techniques or pay per click advertising. ‘Fire’ ‘Top’ seemed to be suitably gimmicky, memorable and short for typing. In addition I was able to register the relevant company and domain names whilst purchasing firetop.com from a ‘wizard workshop’ guy in the US. The reason a ‘wizardy’ guy owned Firetop in the first place does tie in with the second influencing factor. (more…)

So for a good few years we’ve known that the weather influences people’s search engine behaviour; when the temperature rises in summer, searches for ‘air conditioning systems’ increase. Conversely when the temperature drops below average in winter – these searches decrease in favour of ‘heating systems’. In addition, it doesn’t take a genius to surmise that when it’s sunny outside nobody wants to sit in front of a computer screen surfing or xboxing – most of us would rather be out enjoying the sunshine. It’s hardly surprising then that the months of June and July, with their record heat, saw record low online purchasing activity in most sectors (air con and water coolers excluded of course). (more…)

In theory the pay per click networks such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing have had click fraud detection covered for a while by blocking the charging of multiple clicks from the same IP within short time periods – but this has never been explained, or it has to be said, believed, in its entirety. Industry reports say fraudulent clicks range from about fourteen percent to as high as twenty percent of total clicks. Now Google is revealing all and settling claims made in a class-action lawsuit from advertisers at a cost of ninety million dollars.

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One of my UK clients recently received a link to a company that offers ‘multilingual SEO services’ - they build ‘optimised’ (and I use the term loosely!) landing pages in multiple languages.This led my client to ask me if I thought it was worth them shelling out some cash. My answer seemed like it should be posted on here for wider reference in case this ever comes up for you too, in SEO or PPC promotions…

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