Digital Media News

How would you feel if up to 20% of your price-per-click (PPC) budget was being regularly wasted as a result of fraudulent activity? Most marketers today know that Pay-per-click advertising is a useful, and effective marketing tool that can drive traffic towards your website, improving search visibility and enhancing customer conversion. In fact, almost all websites and businesses online today that engaged in serious online marketing schemes will take advantage of PPC programs like Google AdWords at some point.

Unfortunately, although a targeted PPC campaign can be an ideal way of boosting your online traffic, it is not immune to the unscrupulous marketers out there that abuse the PPC model to sabotage competitors. Click-fraud is a serious issue to anyone unlucky enough to encounter it, and unnoticed click fraud can drain money from your marketing budget, while providing the false impression that your schemes are successful - thereby creating an even bigger problem.

ExactDrive was recently interviewed by Giga Startups. Founded in 2013, GigaStartups is one of the leading global voice on emerging technologies. Their publications aims to provide deep insight on disruptive companies and trends.

Most of us experience fear every single day. While some people spend their whole lives avoiding fear, running away from it any way they can, others decide to take it on, fight against it, and develop the necessary skills for overcoming it.

By the very nature of the entrepreneur’s game, fear will become a central force that must be reckoned with. Most of the time, the entrepreneur’s number one fear will be that of failure. What if I don’t succeed? What I’m just wasting my time on a failed idea? These are legitimate concerns, they must be addressed in a rational, controlled manner because without a rational approach, fear takes over, and will leave its victim debilitated.

We spoke with some entrepreneurs about what strategies they have used to overcome their fear of failure and continue on towards their goal of building a successful business.

In an ever-changing digital advertising space, marketers who don't get on board with mobile video advertising, native advertising and analyzing consumer behavior will be left behind.

With advances in technology and constant changes to the digital world, advertisers must stay on top of what's hot and what's not. People have long since started to tune out to traditional marketing methods, so as old tactics become more and more obsolete, how should online advertising strategies be optimized?

We've got three trends in the online advertising sphere that will open up a plethora of opportunities and give you the chance to reach new audiences:

Why is Facebook Advertising so great? Well, mainly because most people have a Facebook account. Facebook still has the greatest number of members out of all the social media platforms and, crucially, the highest proportion of active users.

But there’s more to it than that. Depending on which privacy settings have been set, advertisers can access a gold mine of information about you: everything from where you live to your favorite sports team. Now, we all know that a bespoke approach makes for the best advertising strategy, so armed with these details, you can segment your target audience like you wouldn’t believe.

Facebook (via their ever-improving technology) continually strives to serve up relevant content. That in turn increases the chances of advertisers displaying an ad to an engaged user. But what else should be across? Here are 5 things we think are vitally important before embarking on any Facebook Advertising campaign.

This article appears as a guest post on StartUpBeat.com.

It’s been almost half a decade since the Internet overtook television as the preferred medium for advertising, and with the advent of ever-more sophisticated mobile delivery mechanisms, 2015 promises to be yet another big year for online marketing. Perhaps the only thing getting in the way of this otherwise inexorable momentum, however, is the persistent lack of transparency undermining the industry.

First, the good. Most businesses have already established some sort of online advertising presence–even if that only extends to do-it-yourself social media outreach–and those businesses that haven’t increasingly understand the need to take their advertising arms digital. Spending continues to rise, both in raw terms and in relation to the overall marketing and advertising sector. And given the deepening popularity of e- and mobile commerce, there is no reason to expect demand won’t, also.

More transparent than print, more potential to go viral than banners and non-disruptive to users, "native advertising" is a term every marketers knows. But do they all understand? them?

Broadly speaking, native advertising is a form of online advertising. More specifically, it’s advertising that seeks to provide content in the context of the user’s experience. For example, a sponsored Tweet on Twitter, a suggested post on Facebook or one of those full-page ads between Flipboard pages.

Native advertising as a technique is great because the quality and scalability of it means that it’s filling the gap between brand publishing and banner adverts. We now live and operate in a content-heavy world, so native advertising offers advertisers a degree of flexibility.

ExactDrive recently got interviewed by Young Upstarts, a leading business and startup news source.

ExactDrive had the pleasure of being interviewed by Digital Connect Mag, who was started by a group of tech enthusiasts with the sole purpose of helping consumers, businesses and IT professionals. They aim to cover pretty much every topic under the sun which is related to Technology, Business and Information Technology.

Generating leads is one of the most critical tasks for any startup. Whether your looking to scale your services and grow your customer-base, or you just had a bad month and desperately need the revenue, developing strategies that drive up sales leads will be one of the most important factors in determining your startup’s success. Effective lead generation however often involves offering your services for lesser value, which may be worthwhile in the short term, but is by no means sustainable in the long run. To see what other alternatives exist, we spoke with six different startup founders and asked what their favorite promotional strategies are that drive up sales leads without affecting the value of their services. Here’s what they had to say.

Do you want better results from your ad campaigns? Well last year, Oracle bought BlueKai as an investment, because it wanted to remain the world’s largest marketing cloud. So, what is BlueKai? Well, BlueKai is essentially a data management platform that provides third-party data to companies so that they can advertise online more intelligently.

But that doesn’t do BlueKai justice really. We’re actually talking about a data solution that can draw on a huge resource of customer data quickly and easily, allowing for effective and laser-targeted online ad campaigns. Expect a high ROI and a real transformation to your bottom line.

Let’s drilldown into the details. BlueKai’s big data platform allows companies to personalize online, offline and mobile advertising campaigns. And we all know how important bespoke, personalized marketing is in today’s world, don’t we?

Business is tough in almost every industry these days, but if online advertising is your thing, help is at hand. We think there are 5 online advertising tools that you must take advantage of if you are to leap ahead of your rivals and super-charge your profits.

1. The ExactDrive Advertising Platform

Your first priority is to use the ExactDrive ad platform. Okay, so we’re blowing our own trumpet somewhat, but it’s a pretty powerful service.

Put simply, we built a simple and transparent real-time media buying platform that makes Internet advertising easier for small to medium-sized ad agencies (note: we love helping large ad agencies and brands as well). From selecting your specific demographics and choosing the ideal website inventory to target, through to actually scheduling your ads, the ExactDrive ad platform is an intuitive tool that will automate all your campaigns and help you regain control over your business.