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Tim Nichols

Tim Nichols

Tim Nichols is a founding partner at ExactDrive, a digital media buying agency with white label, reseller and managed service options available. ExactDrive plans, manages, and optimizes online advertising campaigns with the objective of delivering measurable value and empowering clients to find precisely targeted audiences. ExactDrive has offices in Minneapolis, MN, Milwaukee, WI and SouthWest Florida.

Tim Nichols is also a contributing author on Forbes.com.

Recent Posts

Dec 22, 2015 9:00:00 AM

How To Overcome Popular Media Buyer Roadblocks

Sometimes knowing the right decisions to make as a media buyer can be difficult, but implementing these five basic strategies will drive any campaign towards success. 

As a professional media buyer, you’re responsible for purchasing, negotiating, and monitoring the various types of advertising space and air-time a client uses when establishing their brand presence. The idea is to give your customers the platform that they need to reach the largest number of people within the market that is most relevant to them for the lowest possible cost. Sometimes this will mean working throughout a wide range of different platforms from magazines and posters, to online videos and social media campaigns. In other circumstances, the job may require you to buckle-down and focus on a single platform for an extended period of time. But what do you do when you’re forced to grapple with an especially challenging campaign – or, as I like to say, when you come down with a case of the media buying blues?

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Dec 17, 2015 8:30:00 AM

10 Significant Advertising Topics of 2015

Over the course of 2015, a number of important trends have emerged in the world of online advertising and digital development. From understanding ad viewability, banner fatigue, and dynamic ads, to making use of new concepts like mobile advertising, video, and social media, every brand is constantly on the search for new ways of making their particular product or service more appealing to the masses.

In the world of marketing, online advertising is always going to be an essential way to improve your brand presence, get your voice heard, and enhance conversions, but in order to stay ahead of competitors, it's crucial that you know the latest tactics and trends in place. For instance, do you know how to utilize retargeting and behavioral targeting as a way of reaching out to your audience on a more personal level? Do you understand the risks that you face with advertising online, and how to fight back against threats like click fraud?

As we approach the New Year, now is the perfect time to cover some of the most significant advertising elements that continue to be in play, so that you can start your upcoming campaign with support from the latest, and most relevant information.

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Dec 2, 2015 1:06:41 PM

4 Tips For Improving Your Search Retargeting Efforts

Any business with an online presence knows the challenges involved in directing new traffic to their website. Unfortunately, the difficulty doesn't stop there, as once you've enticed a visitor onto your site, you also need to convince them to convert into customers. Less than 5% of website viewers will actually take action towards a purchase the first time they visit your site - but retargeting can help to entice the remaining majority to return and convert.

Retargeting is a technology that relies upon digital cookies to track your audience's movements across the webInternet. By placing a piece of code on your website, you can have a cookie dropped into your viewer's browser when they arrive on your landing page, and that cookie will inform your retargeting provider of which ads should be served. Similarly, search retargeting tracks users according to the previous keyword searches they have conducted, allowing you to display personalized advertisements to your visitors.

Search retargeting can be a powerful tool for conversion optimization, but just like anything else in advertising, there are usually ways that you can improve and maximize your search retargeting efforts. If you want to make sure your search retargeting campaign is primed to get the right results, consider the following 4 tips.

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Nov 9, 2015 9:00:00 AM

Ask These 3 Questions To Improve Your Click-Through Rate

Running a business is difficult enough, so dealing with a low click-through rate on your banner ads and pay-per-click advertising shouldn't be another factor adding onto your stress. Most companies today are aware that having a high click-through rate is beneficial for numerous reasons - delivering better site traffic, increased quality score (as rated by Google), and reduced cost-per-click for PPC campaigns. A good click-through rate makes up the center of the algorithms used by search engines to decide which ads viewers should be displayed. The formula to calculate your rate is simple: Divide clicks by impressions, and you'll get your click-through rate - however, just because you understand what a CTR is, and how you can calculate it, doesn't mean you know how to improve your results.

If you want to drive more beneficial traffic to your website - asking yourself the following three questions could help.

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Oct 12, 2015 4:04:41 PM

Online Advertising Campaigns Fail For 3 Main Reasons

There is a fine line between success and failure in the digital marketing industry. Ensure your brand strategy is primed for prosperity by avoiding these mistakes in your next campaign.

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Sep 14, 2015 8:00:00 AM

Ad Viewability Versus Above-the-Fold Targeting: Which Matters More?

What does the concept of ad viewability mean in the context of strategy? And what makes it more significant than above-the-fold targeting? Viewability is more important in digital marketing than ever before. But why? A large percentage of marketers still judge the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns by tracking the cost per thousand and click-through rates. Though this may work for some, unfortunately, the results of such an analysis are easy to skew. Various forms of digital advertising are beginning to see an increase in fraud, thanks to bots.

Lately, many scientific studies agree that "your ad being seen" is more important than your ad getting clicked. The simple reasoning behind this is that an advertisement is useless unless it can be seen. With this in mind, the concept of ad viewability continues to gain momentum within the tech industry.

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Sep 8, 2015 9:13:00 AM

The 4 Real Reasons Your Retargeting Campaign Isn't Working

If you know how to use it, advertisement retargeting can be a valuable and powerful resource in drawing consumers back to your website if they weren't ready to buy the first time they visited. Usually, people like to click around different websites and do some comparison shopping before they make a final decision about their purchase, and retargeting helps to increase the chance that when your potential customers are ready to buy - it's you that they'll come back to.

Retargeting campaigns rely on browser cookies to work, allowing them to create an anonymous list of the people that visit your website so that they can be targeted with ads as they move through their online experience. Because retargeting ensures you only deliver advertisements to people who have already visited your site, you can usually save money, and ensure your brand remains fresh in the minds of your prospects.

Unfortunately, not everyone will find that their retargeting campaign is an instant success. There are plenty of reasons why your strategy may fail to hit its mark, leaving you to wonder where all of those conversions have gone. If your retargeting campaign just hasn't worked out the way you had hoped - the following four reasons may explain why.

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Sep 2, 2015 9:00:00 AM

How To Make Advertising Online Not Suck

In today's technology-driven world, online advertising has become a huge component of all effective advertising strategies. Regardless of whether your organization is B2C or B2B, implementing digital advertisements correctly ensures that you'll be able to successfully develop your business online, fostering more sales, conversions, and brand awareness. However, if your ads aren't well-planned in everything from the channel that you use, to the design and copy, you could miss out on the results you've been hoping for. So how do you make sure that your advertising online doesn't suck?

1. Focus on Delivering Fresh Creative

As the name suggests, the primary focus behind your creative should be creativity. Incorporating fresh ideas, unique elements, and innovative visual elements into your advertisements is crucial to fostering success. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that although you should be willing to change your advertisements up as often as necessary, you will want to ensure that certain parts of your creative remain consistent. In simple terms, offer your audience something engaging to look at - but make sure that they know it's you behind the ad. Altering your creative is particularly important if you choose to extend your marketing efforts to social media - as users in these avenues hate seeing the same post over and over again. Test out your new campaigns thoroughly, and make sure to use images with a consistent aesthetic so that your campaign continues to feel familiar for customers that are already aware of you.

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Aug 19, 2015 8:00:00 AM

5 Mobile Advertising Blunders to Avoid

Today, mobile advertising may be the ultimate way to ensure that you build traffic and create leads online. A few years ago, we'd never even heard of digital tablets, and a few more years before that, nobody even had a smartphone. In simple terms, absolutely everyone is new to the concept of mobile advertising - but that doesn’t mean that it's any less important. Over the past few years, companies both big and small have made a habit of falling into the same old blunders when trying to make their mobile advertising strategies work. It's no surprise that we're still working out the kinks in these early stages, but if you want to save some time and money, then you may benefit from learning where you're most likely to hit your first hurdles. Following are the five most common mobile advertising mistakes people make today - and how you can avoid them.

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Aug 5, 2015 9:00:00 AM

The One Campaign Setting That Guarantees Retargeting Failure

Are you aware that about 90-98% of all website visitors don't convert? Getting a slew of traffic to visit your site and check out your services is a great thing - but it doesn't do much if none of that traffic generates sales. Retargeting is a marketing technique that can help you stay connected to bounced traffic, recreating chances for you to turn visitors into customers. With the complex customer journeys and long sales cycles that exist today, creating numerous touch points with your prospects is essential to maximizing your ROI.

Retargeting has been a hot topic in the World of advertising and marketing for the last couple of years. As a solution that enables brands and companies to interact with individuals who have already shown interest in their websites, retargeting goes beyond PPC and traditional online advertising by taking customer involvement to a new level. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that retargeting is a guaranteed method for success. In fact, a lot of companies learn that failing to retarget correctly can leave them with complete campaign failure.

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