Digital Media News

Before 2011, it was thought that the problem of online advertising fraud was more or less contained. Pay-per-click advertising was still experiencing huge growth, but much of the fraud activity and many of the practices had been seen and countered.

Google themselves have long since acknowledged the need to clamp down on fraud. Google is a business like any other; people need to trust them. For instance, they knew that if they failed to detect click-through fraud, then advertisers would lose faith in their brand. There’s nothing quite like a potential drop in profits to kick-start a company into taking action.

Bots, click farms and the like were treated as a priority for the company. And for good reason. Google used experts like Professor Alexander Tuzhilin to draw up best practices for preventing click fraud and things seemed to be working.

Online advertising is a broad term. Sometimes unhelpfully so. But it encompasses a lot of different factors. And it’s crucial to understand the different types of online advertising out there, because what works for some businesses often doesn’t work for others.

A lot of businesses waste money on their advertising campaigns because they effectively throw lots of different ads out, hoping something sticks. In reality, brands need to accept the current landscape – the sheer amount of content out there has flooded customers’ brains.

Take Google Ads for instance. Search ads have helped Google become the richest advertising company in history, yet research tells us that most people don’t click on sponsored ads. As humans, we place a huge emphasis on trust and the fact is, we don’t feel entirely comfortable with the paid-for spots on a Google search results. We vastly prefer an organic result.

Would you like to grow your ad business? Then why not check out LiveRail? LiveRail, a Facebook company is a monetization platform for publishers, broadcasters, and app developers. Put simply, LiveRail’s technology helps businesses maximize their ad revenue. And let’s face it, that’s music to a lot of ears.

Setting up a business to take transactions is one thing, while effectively monetizing a product or service is quite another. But while those tasks are difficult enough, getting the most out of your online advertising campaign is a great way to monetize something. Businesses need to sell their inventory in a smart and safe way, but that’s often quite a complex challenge, regardless of how big the publisher in question is.

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.

When it comes to online advertising campaigns, effectiveness is clearly everything. No business wants to waste any of their ad spend, that much is obvious. But what other areas can we look to improve ROI? The trouble with many online ad campaigns is that there is often a lack of visibility. It can be hard to make data actionable and to create consistent, meaningful measures. That is to say, there’s often a lack of accountability. ExactDrive's partnership with DoubleVerify helps us provide our advertising clients with media transparency and accountability that delivers the absolute highest level of impression quality for maximum advertising performance.

Campaigns are very much seen as either a success or a failure. But like a lot of things, it’s not always black and white - there are also shades of grey. And with online ad campaigns, there are lots and lots of shades.

However, why not let DoubleVerify shed some light and help you out?

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.