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.

Quite simply, it’s mobile advertising. The mobile advertising industry is growing far quicker than its desktop counterpart. It grew by 34% as opposed to 11%. Yet for many businesses, mobile advertising enjoys less advertising spend.

The fact is, consumers are looking at content on mobile devices all the time and most advertising platforms know that their users are much more likely to watch a video these days. And because video ads are often more powerful than static ads, there’s a lot of potential profit out there for you.

Recent research shows that 55% of mobile data traffic now stems from video, aided by the likes of Facebook and Snapchat. For instance, Facebook alone enjoys an average of 4 billion daily video views – a staggering amount. And of those 4 billion views, 75% of them are seen on a mobile device. Mobile app Snapchat boasts of 2 billion video views every day. And this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

To put it simply, search stats are a great indicator of consumer intent. You can’t argue with the stats: Google alone handles over 40,000 searches every second. To put that into perspective, that’s 3.5 billion searches every day and 1.2 trillion each year. Businesses plow millions of dollars into market research, yet one of the most powerful pieces of market research lie at our fingertips. And, quite often, the data is free.

That’s why search retargeting is so powerful. When you take the masses of search data out there and combine it with creative, intelligent digital advertising, the results can be outstanding. As we know, with online advertising, context is everything. As such, advertisers can use search retargeting to drive huge amounts of customer acquisition, not to mention acquiring new leads and a new audience.

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.

Back in November last year, Facebook made some important changes to their platform; changes that affect lots of businesses. However, many companies aren’t even aware of anything different.

Due to feedback from hundreds of thousands of people, Facebook have decided to alter what appears in a news feed. Research suggested that users wanted a reduction in the number of promotional posts showing up in their feeds.

What’s interesting is that promotional posts are usually driven from pages that users have actually been to. But the fact is, people may head to a page to read or watch something specific, but that can be a very isolated experience. It’s a bit like the fuss made over recommendation engines for the likes of Netflix and Lovefilm. Just because you’ve watched Sleepless in Seattle, it doesn’t mean you want to watch a romcom every night of the week. Essentially, we’re just talking about platforms delivering a more natural service.

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:

If you own or run a business, then it’s only right that you should use online advertising. While referrals, organic search traffic and growing popularity with your brand will bring in customers, it’s never wise to rely solely on them. For some businesses, they boast about their lack of advertising spend like it’s a badge of honor. Put simply, ‘natural’ revenue can’t be depended on.

Online advertising can yield a huge ROI, but there are a number of things to be aware of before creating your first campaign. Initially, since there are loads of places to buy ads, it’s important to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. And that’s in relation to your target customers, not someone else’s.

The thing with marketing is, everyone seems to have an opinion. We all know that ExactDrive sure does. Click-baiting and the regurgitating of second-rate information is commonplace, so how do you separate the marketing masters from the self-appointed gurus? Let us help. We’ve got 5 of the top marketing blogs on the internet and, without further ado, here are some of the most valuable best-kept secrets…

1.Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog

This is a great, diverse resource for all aspects of digital marketing, from conversion rates and retargeting, through to analytics and mobile advertising. Today’s digital marketers have too many options when it comes to software and advertising tools, so find out what’s best for you. With a huge amount of content on the site, don’t worry about usability – Adobe have clear categories making it easy for you to delve in and out.

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.

comScore knew they were buying a great brand when they agreed a deal to acquire MdotLabs last summer. Technology and the Internet have combined to create a vast digital world that’s growing every day – and MdotLabs used innovative techniques to focuson something very important: helpingfight online fraud.

More specifically, we’re talking about protecting advertising companies from potentially malicious web traffic and ExactDrive is excited to be in partnership with mDotLabs (comScore).

Fraudulent attacks on the digital advertising industry are a big issue and, as such,protecting an advertising campaign has never been more necessary. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other shady bot-related activities gobble up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend. That figure is thought to amount to between 25% and 50% of ad spend per campaign.