Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts

Google Adwords Quality Score Explained

Google marketing specialists are familiar with what is known as the "Quality Score" and there is extraordinary clarification behind this.
How To Google Adwords Quality Score Explained
How To Google AdWords Quality Score Explained

Your quality score will particularly affect the total you are obliged to pay for every a single click to your site. The higher your quality score is, the cut down your cost each click will be. 

Orderly directions to Google Adwords Quality Score Elucidated 

Also, in case you focus on getting an incredible score will your campaigns be more direct And additionally you will get the same presentation as you were the time when you were paying all the more every click! 

The inspiration driving why Google executed a quality score into their PPC business focus was deficiently due to esteem control.

 They understood that by organizing a system in which promoters were assessed concentrated around their fights execution, they would fundamentally shorten false battles and superfluous critical words and notices from being stressed. 

Since the quality score is concentrated around your CTR (Dynamic guest clicking rate), backers require their battles to change over into clicks as every now and again as could be normal the situation being what it is at whatever point they are underlined all through the PPC business focus. 

Likewise, as a PPC sponsor, paying little respect to the likelihood that the quality score didn't exist regardless of all that you have to ensure that the people who are study your notices clearly fathom what it is that you are advancing, because since you are paying for every a single click to your site, there is no sense in yielding visitors who have essentially no energy to your thing. 

This is the reason its imperative to focus on making concentrated on battles that unite essential vital words with solid notice substance, for instance, a persuading title, realistic business body, and a high changing over welcome page. 

Every part of a PPC battle is a basic one that ties everything together. 

In case one piece of your battle is requiring, it can radically influence your results, which is the reason such a mixed bag of people experience disillusionment when from the beginning progressing through PPC business focuses. 

They throw their campaigns together, accumulate enormous postings of insignificant enchantment words, and make plugs that attract freebie seekers as opposed to preselling prospects and concentrating on simply potential buyers, not visitors. 

Something else to recollect when striving for a first class score is that regions like Google hold information with respect to your PPC showcasing history. 

This intimates that paying little respect to the way that you stop or remove a deficient battle, it can particularly impact your quality score so its basic to focus on making effective fights right from the start. 

On a last note, when you from the beginning make campaigns inside Google Adwords, you will be given a normal CTR for every one fight. 

This will happen at whatever point you name an alternate conclusive word to your battles additionally, and would you have the capacity to quickly make sense of if a specific catchphrase declaration is inclined to preform well or not. 

While this is a general control and is not by and large exact, it can bail you take out fundamental word expresses that are not going to preform well.

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Everything Facebook Has Said Over The Past Year About News Feed Ranking

You've probably noticed that the organic reach of your Facebook Page posts has declined significantly over the past year or so. Probably not coincidentally, Facebook has been running a series of "News Feed FYI" announcements since August of 2013. While it's pretty much an accepted fact at this point that Facebook is more of a pay-to-play game now, Pages are still desperate to find ways to get in front of the people that took the time to "like" them because they wanted to get updates in their News Feed. Sometimes, especially for smaller businesses and those that aren't even making money, "pay-to-play" just isn't in the budget.

Can you effectively play the Facebook game without paying for reach? Let us know what you think.

With that, it's a good time to stop and take stock of just what all Facebook has actually said about News Feed ranking over this time. Following are some things you need to know – straight from the horse's mouth. While it's obviously good to try and read between the lines, it may also be helpful to remember exactly what Facebook has said in the first place, as countless marketers and blogs have provided so much analysis and speculation.

1. Facebook Only Highlights "Major" Updates

When Facebook first announced its series of blog posts last year, it noted that it was only highlighting "major" updates. Obviously businesses would like to know about all the algorithm's signals, but that's just not going to happen. The point is that while Facebook will tell us about specific signals from time to time, you have to remember that that these are only small parts of a big thing. They're also the things Facebook feels comfortable enough to share with people without worrying that the signals will be gamed. They're not going to highlight those that can be best taken advantage of.

2. Each of Your Posts Is Competing With Roughly 1,500 Others, And Facebook Prioritizes 300 Of Them

On August 6, 2013, Facebook said, "Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don't have enough time to see them all."

The company went on to say that it prioritizes an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 to show each day. It said it was taking the following signals into account: how often the user interacts with the friend, page, or public figure; the number of likes, sahres, and comments a post receives from the world at large and from friends in particular; how much the user has interacted with the post type in the past; and whether or not the user and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post.
Facebook also introduced an update at the time to show organic stories people didn't scroll down far enough to see at the top of the news Feed.

3. The "High Quality" Algorithm

On August 23, 2013, Facebook announced that it developed a new algorithm to factor into News Feed, aimed at determining "high quality content". Factors mentioned as taken into consideration include: timeliness, relevance, trustworthy source, likelihood of sharing/recommending to others, how interesting it is, whether or not people would complain about it, how frequently content from the page is reported as low quality (hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and fan-base overlap with other high quality pages. Still, the system uses "over a thousand different factors," and that algorithm itself is just a factor in the overall ranking of a News Feed story.

When this algorithm was announced, Facebook specifically told pages to: "Make sure your posts are timely and relevant," "Build credibility and trust with your audience," "Ask yourself, ‘Would people share this with their friends or recommend it to others?," and "Think about, ‘Would my audience want to see this in their News Feeds?"

4. Facebook Suggests News And Publishing Sites Post More Frequently

With all the posts Pages must compete with, it was interesting that Facebook implied that posting more frequently sent sites more traffic. In October, Facebook talked about how it was working "closely" with some news and publishing sites to understand how to drive more readers to their sites. I've asked Facebook for the complete list of publishers involved in the past for more analysis on this, but the company would not disclose it. We do know that Time, BuzzFeed, and Bleacher Report were among participants. It worked with 29 publishers in all.

Facebook did say this at the time: "We worked with 29 media sites over a seven-day period to find out exactly how their referral traffic could be impacted if they increased the number of times they posted to their Facebook pages. The net result: posting more frequently increases referral traffic by over 80%."

This is particularly interesting, as we've seen various people recently claiming that posting less is helping their reach.
"Within that week, the media sites averaged an increase in the number of articles they posted to their pages by 57%," Facebook said. "This resulted in an 89% increase in average outbound clicks to their domains. Additionally, the amount of Likes per post increased by over 10% and the number of net fans per page went up by 49%."
The company did make a point to note that the test it ran with this small number of media sites doesn't represent every type of Facebook page. It also said there's no magic number of how many more posts will impact referral traffic.

5. Facebook Wants To Show More Articles, Mobile Clicks Matter

Facebook said in early December that it would start showing users more links to articles, and that it was "paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from news Feed on mobile

The company also revealed at the same time that it would start "bumping" up stories that have new comments, though a more recent update seems to suggest that they've pulled back on that a little.

6. Facebook Says Organic Reach Decline Will Continue

In December, Facebook acknowledged a widespread decline in organic reach, and said that it expected the trend to continue "as competition for each story remains strong" and it "focuses on quality."

It specifically recommended Pages use a "combination of engaging Page posts and advertising".

That's pretty much your major turning point, and when people really started to complain about the decline of organic reach.

7. Facebook Basically Whitelists Sites For Quality

Also in December,Peter Kafka posted an interview with Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom at All Things D. Kafka asked if Facebook was paying attention to the source of the content when determining if a post is of high quality.

Backstrom said, "Right now, it's mostly oriented around the source. As we refine our approaches, we'll start distinguishing more and more between different types of content. But, for right now, when we think about how we identify ‘high quality,' it's mostly at the source level."

Kafka followed up, "So something that comes from publisher X, you might consider high quality, and if it comes from publisher Y, it's low quality?"

Backstrom said, "Yes."

So that's pretty much a whitelist. If you're lucky enough to make it onto Facebook's list of high quality sites, you should be good to go. Congratulations, BuzzFeed.

It's unclear how much Facebook's algorithm has evolved on this since then.

8. Text Updates From Pages Are Officially Rendered A Lost Cause

In January, Facebook said that in testing, people who write more text status updates see more text status updates from friends on Facebook. It also said that the effect wasn't the same for text status updates from Pages. At that time, Facebook launched an update to News Feed ranking to treat text status updates from Pages a a completely different category to such updates from friends. The company said flat out that Page admins can "expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates". They also said, however, that they may see increases in engagement and distribution of other story types.

9. The Best Way To Share A Link Is To Use A Link-Share

In that same announcement, Facebook said: "The best way to share a link after this update will be to use a link-share…We've found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds."

10. Facebook Encourages Pages To Tag Other Pages

In February, Facebook said that when a Page tags another Page, it may show the post to some of the people who like or follow the tagged page. For users, that means seeing more content from Pages they didn't actually "like," but for Pages it means a chance to get in front of some other users, and possibly get some more likes.

For this, Facebook said it considers which posts are getting the most engagement from people who like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.

11. Facebook Doesn't Like Like-Baiting, Frequently Circulated Content, or Spammy Links

In April, Facebook announced that it was specifically targeting these three types of content to stop showing people in their News Feeds. It doesn't want to show users posts that explicitly ask readers to like, comment, or share a post. It doesn't want to show photos or videos that have been uploaded to Facebook over and over again, and it doesn't want to show spammy links that attempt to trick users.

12. Facebook Says There Are 2 Reasons Organic Reach is Declining, And Money Isn’t One of Them
Controversy surrounding organic reach had been rampant all year long, and in June, Facebook finally addressed the situation again. The company said that there are two main reasons for the decline. The first is that more content is being created and shared, so the competition is high. The second is that the algorithm wants to show relevant content as opposed to all content.
According to Facebook, it’s not dropping organic reach because Facebook is “trying to make more money.” Obviously some are skeptical about that, especially since the company used a good portion of the blog post in which it said that to talk about all the ways to use Facebook ads.
13. Facebook Combats Click-Bait Headlines by Looking At Time On Page And Reader Engagement
In August, Facebook announced that it would be trying to reduce click-bait articles in News Feed because readers want more valuable content. It said it would take a couple of factors into consideration to determine whether or not a post was of the click-bait variety. One factor is how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook.
“If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable,” the company said. “If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.”
The other factor is the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and liking/sharing it with their friends.
14. Facebook Doesn’t Like Links In Photo Captions
Also in August, Facebook reiterated that it wants Pages to use link shares to share links, rather than post them in status updates. This time it also made a point to say it will show fewer links shared in photo captions. It had become popular for Pages to do that, as photos tend to see better reach than link posts. After this update, Facebook would supposedly prioritize links shared in the link format.
15. Facebook Says Users Are Ultimately Responsible For What Appears In Their News Feed
Regardless of all of Facebook’s ranking signals and algorithms, Facebook told us last month that users are ultimately responsible for what appears in their News Feed. That was their reaction after an article depicting some major flaws in the algorithms became highly publicized thanks to sometesting by Wired’s Mat Honan. Facebook told us in an email:
Your News Feed is made by you. If you like it, you will see more of it. When you become friends with someone new, or add a new Page, you will begin to see content from them immediately. In the example you reference, a person connected with over 1000 new pages in 48 hours, and his News Feed changed to show him mostly Page content, triggered by these new connections. If he had made 1000 new friends in 48 hours, his News Feed would be mostly new friend content.
What your friends see is determined by what you share with them, and whether or not they like it.
For example, if you typically post a new photo every day, and when your friends see that photo in your News Feed they like and comment on it, this tells News Feed those friends like seeing photos from you. If you suddenly starts posting 20 photos each day, News Feed will show your friends these photos. If your friends stop liking your photos, (or even better, hide them), News Feed will quickly learn that your friends prefer not to see these photos from you in future, or that they prefer to see fewer of them. In the example you reference above, the person’s friends had probably liked seeing articles and Pages he’d connected with in the past. However, when the volume increased dramatically, they saw too many of them. News Feed will learn over time not to show this kind of content to his friends.
16. Talking About Trending Topics Matters
In its most recent News Feed update announcement, Facebook said that when a friend or Page a user is connected to posts something about a current trending topic, it is more likely to appear higher up in the News Feed. This would seem to be an incentive for Pages to post about current hot topics. It’s probably a good idea to save this for when a topic has some relation to what you actually do.
17. When People Like or Comment On Your Post Matters
Another part of the most recent update factors in when people comment or like a post. Facebook is more likely to show a post that gets likes and comments quickly, and less likely to show an older post as it gets new likes or comments.
18. Facebook Hasn’t Said Much About Recent Manipulations
There have been some articles in the media about people gaming Facebook’s algorithm using certain trigger words, and forcing content to users’ News Feeds. Facebook has been oddly quiet about this, even when asked about it. That email they sent us, which I referenced above was in response to the Mat Honan situation, but in that same inquiry, we also asked about this kind of gaming, and they just didn’t respond to that part of the question.
My guess is that they’ll get better at this over time, and frankly, the tactics that have been used in these tests would probably only serve to annoy users, and therefore wouldn’t be that valuable to a Page abusing them. That said, this could potentially be problematic.
Wrapping Up

This is just about everything I can find that Facebook has actually said on the topic of how it ranks content in the News Feed over the past year or so. Of course, there are a whole lot of people doing their own testing and forming their own theories, about how to restore reach and visibility on Facebook. How much of it is in line with what Facebook has told us?

After all of this, do you feel like the Facebook experience has become better? Can you get any significant marketing power out of Facebook Pages without paying for it?

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This Is How Facebook Tried to Make Money Off You

Mark Zuckerberg
At a Glance
  • Cofounder, Chairman and CEO, Facebook
  • Age: 28
  • Source of Wealth: Facebook, self-made
  • Residence: Palo Alto, CA
  • Country of Citizenship: United States
  • Education: Drop Out, Harvard University
  • Marital Status: Married
Forbes Lists
For better or worse, this will go down as the year that Facebook really put a dollar sign in front of its users.
Facebook has been under immense pressure from investors to come up with ways to monetize, which has led to a fundamental shift in how it operates. When the company first filed to go public in February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated very clearly that profit is not his or the company's first priority. "Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services," he wrote in the public filing. Eight months and plenty of bad stock trading days later, Zuckerberg revealed in an earnings call that every team at Facebook is now responsible for coming up with a revenue strategy for their product.
In the past year, we've seen Facebook try out a range of tactics to make money from its users, whether it's inserting more advertising into the News Feed or the recently announced option that lets people you don't know message your inbox for $1. Some of these efforts, like the messaging option, have been met with heavy criticism from users while others have largely been accepted as par for the course.
What matters now to Facebook from an investor standpoint is how much it can increase the money it makes from each user. Facebook generated about $1.25 per user on average in the third quarter, up from about $1.19 in the same quarter last year.
To put that another way, right now you're worth about $5 a year to Facebook and the company would really like to see that number go up.
To put that another way, right now you're worth about $5 a year to Facebook and the company would really like to see that number go up.
For that reason, don't hold your breath for Facebook to stop trying out new ways to make money off you in the new year. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, says that some features introduced this year like Sponsored Stories for mobile will likely stick around, while the company continues to test out others to see what works and what doesn't.
"I think you should expect just an ongoing testing and learning from an ad sales perspective about what balances near-term revenue growth with durability," Wieser said. With that in mind, here's a look back at all the ways Facebook tried to make money from you this year, as well as a glimpse at what they might do next year.

Putting Sponsored Stories in Your News Feed


Image courtesy of Facebook
Facebook launched Sponsored Stories in the beginning of 2011, in an early effort to monetize activity on the desktop website by turning users into quasi-brand promoters. This year, Facebook took that effort a step farther by placing these promotions in the user's News Feed, where they are more visible and presumably generate a higher click-through rate. This has been a big money maker for the site, bringing in more than $1 million a day, but it has also proven to be a bit of a headache. Users filed a class-action lawsuit against the company earlier this year, objecting to the having their names and pictures used in the ads.

Mobile Ads in Facebook's App


Image courtesy of Facebook
From the perspective of investors, nothing was more important for Facebook than proving it could monetize on mobile. It did just that starting in the middle of this year by introducing Sponsored Stories, app install ads and Offers into the mobile feeds of its users. In the third quarter -- just a few months after Facebook launched these mobile ads -- it generated $139 million from mobile ads, or 14% of its total ad revenue.
Facebook now makes $3 million a day inserting promotional content into your mobile News Feed and, as Zuckerberg noted during a conference call with analysts, "We're just getting started."

Mobile Ads in Third-Party Apps


Image courtesy of Flickr, Jason A. Howie
Even after you leave Facebook, the company can still find ways to make money off you. In September, Facebook began testing placing mobile ads in third-party applications. The ad exchange allowed certain websites and apps to use Facebook information to better target users with ads promoting a website or providing a link to download an app. Facebook recently put this ad product on hold, but that doesn't mean it's going away for good. As a Facebook rep told Mashable, "We have learned a lot from this test that will be useful in the future."

Promoted Posts


Image courtesy of Facebook
As the social network gets more crowded with posts from users and advertisers, some of your updates may get lost in the clutter. So Facebook decided to give users a new option in October to ensure that their posts are seen by more people. For the low, low price of just $7, Facebook allows users to "promote" their posts in their friends News Feeds. As Mashable's Matt Silverman wrote at the time, Facebook is now applying the "freemium" model for its service.

Facebook Gifts


Image courtesy of Facebook
After trying and failing to operate a gift shop two years ago, Facebook decided to give the gifts idea another shot. In September, the company launched Facebook Gifts, helped by its acquisition of the gift-giving app Karma earlier in the year, in an effort to create another revenue stream. As mentioned, Facebook currently makes just $5 on average per user per year. If every user makes just one small purchase through Gifts, that amount will skyrocket in the coming year. That's why you've likely seen more than a few prompts on the site to buy someone a gift for a particular occasion.

Paid Messages


Image courtesy of Facebook
Facebook decided to squeeze in one more money-making attempt before the end of the year, announcing this week that it is testing a new option that lets users pay $1 to ensure that a message is delivered to someone's inbox, even if it's not someone he or she is connected to on the network. Until now, messages are only delivered to your Facebook inbox if it is sent by someone you are friends with, or who you share mutual connections with. Otherwise, the message goes to a subsection of your inbox called Other, which essentially serves as a spam folder.
Facebook is billing the option as an effort to crack down on spam by seeing if imposing a financial cost on users stops them from messaging people they don't know. But it seems just as likely that this could lead to an influx of spam from marketers and others who may be eager to get access to your Facebook inbox. While the plan is subject to change, a Facebook rep told Mashable that as of right now, a user could pay a one-time fee of $1 to message your inbox an unlimited number of times until you decide to mark it as spam.

Video Ads in the News Feed

The next big attempt from Facebook to make money may be placing video ads in News Feed. Advertising Age recently reported hearing from "several industry executives" that Facebook is planning to let advertisers place 15-second ads in users' News Feeds on desktop and mobile by April, 2013. Worse still, the ads will reportedly be on autoplay, meaning they will start playing once you open up the page, whether you want them to or not.
Welcome to the new era of Facebook.

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 high Tech RoadShow Blog inventions of today. Enhanced by Zemanta
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Poof! $1 Billion Slashed From 2012 Facebook Revenue Forecast

Facebook‘s revenues, particularly from advertising, won’t grow as fast as expected this year, according to a revised forecast from market researcher eMarketer.

EMarketer today said the No. 1 social network will just break $5 billion in revenues this year, with $4.2 billion coming from advertising and the rest from payments and other revenues. That’s down $1 billion from the research firm’s estimate from last February, several months before Facebook’s initial public offering in early May. Even so, Facebook’s ad revenues are still forecast to jump 34% this year from a year ago, and rise 29% next year.

The key reason for the change actually does not reflect a key concern of investors: mobile advertising. [Corrected; I initially misread the release to say mobile was a key factor.] Although Facebook has been slow to roll out advertising on mobile devices, eMarketer had not factored that into previous forecasts either. Instead, the estimate cut reflects building concerns about the effectiveness and measurability of Facebook ads.

The revenue estimate cut isn’t entirely a surprise. Facebook reported less-than-expected revenue growth in its first and second quarters this year. And eMarketer’s original forecast was higher than that of many other analysts, whose recent estimates came in at around $5 billion.

Still, the new forecast could add to investor worries that Facebook’s growth is stalling as its advertising sales, especially on mobile devices, come up short. In a market that was down about 1% today, Facebook’s shares fell a penny, to $19.09. That’s about half their IPO level.

“Major marketers are still questioning the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook, and they are concerned that their ability to measure results is underdeveloped,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in the release. “Facebook is working on addressing these concerns, but it must move even more quickly.”

Lately Facebook has been launching a flurry of new ad formats. It also recently introduced an ad exchange that holds promise to juice revenues by making ad buys more automated. And in an attempt to counter bad publicity such as General Motors‘ pullback of Facebook ads just before its IPO, Facebook has released a series of reports and case studies showing how marketers have gotten returns from Facebook advertising.

EMarketer says Facebook’s Marketplace ads that appear on the right side of the page are effective, and that Facebook is likely to provide similarly automated ad buying for so-called premium ad formats such as Sponsored Stories, which appear to perform better because they contain the implied endorsement of people’s friends.

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The Evolution of Advertising: From Stone Carving to the Old Spice Guy

In 2011, online advertising has beaten out print and radio as the number two place ad dollars are spent. But how did it come to be that way? Four thousand years ago Ancient Egyptians invented advertising by carving public notices in steel. Fast forward to the present day, and in-text online ads, Facebook Like-driven campaigns and viral commercials, such as the Old Spice Guy, are common form.

This illustrated timeline, created by Infolinks, takes a walk down advertising’s memory lane.

The evolution from steal to digital took many turns along its way, such as print fliers hoping to get young men to fight in the Revolutionary War, billboards spurred by the rise of automobiles, electric banner ads following the invention of the light bulb (Times Square’s first went up in 1882) and direct marketing with the nascent postal service.

But we don’t want to give everything away. Take a look at the graphic below. Do you think any of these older forms of advertising would be successful today? Let us know in the comments.

history of advertising
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Startup Aims To Build Billboards That Target You, Personally

Cover of "Minority Report [Blu-ray]"Cover of Minority Report [Blu-ray]

Digital billboards that display different ads depending on who is looking at them were once only found in Minority Report. But a recently launched startup aims to make targeted billboard advertising as ubiquitous as targeted online advertising.
Immersive Labs introduced its smart billboard technology at TechStars‘ Demo Day in New York on Thursday. The software combines video analytics with environmental factors and Twitter and Foursquare information to decide what the best ad to display at that moment is.
If a young man is looking at an ad, for instance, the billboard will know to show an aftershave ad instead of a tampon ad. If the room is loud, it might not show an ad that has an audio component. If Twitter or Foursquare data indicate that there’s a sports game going on in the area, it might show a Nike ad instead of a FedEx ad.
The video analytics technology that Immersive Labs uses is not new. Many digital billboards already have web cams that can determine the relative age and gender of people who are looking at them, as well as how long each person stands in front of them or looks directly at them. Advertisers use them to gauge the effectiveness of ads and decide which ads to post in what areas.
Immersive Labs’ innovation is the technology that instantly changes a billboard ad based on this video identification and other enviornmental information. The software learns what works and improves over time.
In a test at a Boulder Prana store, changing ads in this way resulted in a 60% improvement in engagement (as measured by time that people looked at the ads according to the video analytics system). Several pilot locations are in the works including the St. Louis Rams stadium and JFK International Airport. CEO Jason Sosa says he expects to have a product ready to sell on a larger scale in three to six months.
You might remember the scene in Minority Report when ads change to target the people who are walking past them. It’s half amazing, half creepy.
Sosa says he hears the name of the movie every day in relation to the project, but he doesn’t think that Immersive Labs’ smart billboard is similarly creepy. The billboards save anonymous data, but not images.
“If you use a service like Amazon, have a Facebook Page, or even carry a cellphone, there is data being collected about you that is a lot more personal than anything we’re collecting,” Sosa says.


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6 Ways to Sell a Website, and 4 Ways Not to Sell One

This guest post is by Mathew Carpenter of Sofa Moolah.

It’s gotten harder and harder to generate a stable income as an affiliate over the past two years. From Facebook’s decidedly anti-affiliate mindset, to the lengthy list of regulations that search engines such as Google have released, generating stable, consistent, and stress-free paid traffic isn’t as simple as it once was. For thousands of affiliates, it’s been a major frustration and a potential business killer.

But alongside the “Google slaps” advertisement disapprovals and the massive flock to second-tier ad networks is a change in the mindset of many affiliates. Instead of focusing on the hustle of direct-response advertising, many successful affiliates and product owners alike are looking to search or socially-powered websites as a source of traffic, a source of sales, and as a source of income.

I’ve been following this same formula—alongside some other online business models—for the past few years, and while it’s far from the cash cow that a giant advertising campaign can be, it’s a form of income that’s significantly more reliable and steady. Advertising and sales checks from blogs and search-powered websites tend to be quite constant—at least more so than the average ad campaign.

Six steps to a successful site sale

These six rules—and four anti-rules—can help you develop and sell your own web properties, to generate a strong and reliable sideline income in addition to your main online venture. Despite the comfort of steady and recurring passive income, it’s often the case that you need short-term cash to fund other websites or advertising projects. In that case, be sure to put these six tips for selling your website into action.

1. Understand your website’s long-term value in advance

The average sales price of a successful website tends to range from six to ten times its profit on a monthly basis. While this can sound fairly hefty—particularly for a website that generates several thousand dollars monthly—it’s really a fraction of the type of value assigned to offline businesses.

Think about Facebook’s current valuation—the ludicrously high $50 billion. Does this reflect the website’s current earnings? No. While the website is profitable by all accounts, it’s far from those levels of profitability. The valuation reflects the website’s long-term value—something that can be applied to your own websites too.

So instead of thinking in terms of short-term revenue for your website and monthly profit, think in terms of your website’s potential for revenue growth over time. If you’re trying to sell a site that’s a real social media hit, for example, or a website with a growing search presence, use this potential as an indicator of its value and price it accordingly.

2. Know your audience, and know how to sell them

The biggest mistake I see being applied to website sales is one that’s repeated in almost all aspects of online marketing: using the same tactics for very different audiences. Just as you’d use different sales tactics to sell a car than you would to sell a bag of candy, you need to use different tactics to sell different types of websites.

Know your audience, and understand how they’re going to respond to your website auction. On one of the bigger marketplaces like Flippa, it’s important to remember that people value revenue data or profit information above anything else. For an independent website investor, information about your website’s potential for growth may be more important.

3. Research successful website sales before listing your own

When asked about how he acquires new skills quickly, productivity guru (and now fitness author) Tim Ferriss explained that it’s best to look at people who have achieved massive success in a short amount of time. It’s a philosophy that can be applied to everything from online marketing to selling your own websites, and it always produces good results.

Instead of going with your gut when deciding on how to present your website for sale, look at other websites that have achieved high sales prices in the past. What information do they disclose? Which sales tactics and pitches do they use to frame the auction? By reverse-engineering sales information from successful website auctions, you can vastly improve the results of your own.

4. Take steps to optimize profits before making a listing.

There’s nothing worse than seeing a website for sale that’s barely been optimized. From blogs that lack even the most basic advertising to affiliate websites that reek of poor conversion testing, if an online property hasn’t been optimized, it’s never going to reach its true value at sale. If your site is on the market without any profit optimization, you’re making a huge (and potentially costly) error.

Test different advertising networks, different ad creatives, and different affiliate offers on your site before you put it up for auction. Test different ad placement, different monetization methods, and a lengthy list of different lead capture strategies. Unoptimized (or poorly optimized) websites can be great deals for buyers, but they’re never a good option for you as the seller.

I’ve optimized many of the websites I’ve sold to increase profits by as much as 415% before making a sale. Small changes, particularly to the wording surrounding your call-to-action text or ad placement, can make a huge difference in the amount of income that your website generates.

5. Use a popular outlet that attracts the right audience

There are hundreds of auction sites out there that allow you to list your website, but only a select few are worth your time. The most popular is Flippa, which, despite its reputation for occasional shady websites, is actually the best option out there. I’ve sold two websites on Flippa for mid four-figure sums recently, one of which achieved an ROI of over four hundred percent.

Don’t, however, confuse a large audience with a good audience. If you own a website in a specific niche, for example, it’s almost always better to appeal to others in your niche directly instead of an all-purpose outlet like Flippa. As I said in step two, it’s important to know the type of people you’re marketing to, not just the amount of potential buyers that you have access to.

6. Minimize “fluff” statistics, and focus on the substance

“Fluff” statistics are, to me, information that’s impressive when explained in an auction, yet utterly meaningless when it comes to your website’s ability to generate income or influence change. The types of statistics I’m talking about are total pageview information—generally information that has no tie to real profitability—or data about how much traffic your website generates in total.

Instead of offering this type of information to potential bidders, highlight your website’s strengths and offer real data to buyers. Talk about how many unique visitors your website gets, your biggest traffic sources, and the value of a visitor to your website. “Fluff” statistics are only worth mentioning in one situation: your website is overvalued and you’re desperate to complete the sale quickly.

How not to sell your website

I’ve mentioned what you should do when selling your website. Now, it’s time to cover some of the most common errors that are made by those auctioning websites. While some of these tactics can help you, particularly if your website isn’t valuable, most will push away the types of buyers you want to attract. Ignore them at your own peril, as they’re definitely techniques to be avoided.

1. Load your auction with worthless data and needless hype.

Nobody cares about your blog’s unique design, its flashy navigation system, and the level of praise it has received from others in your niche. They do care about its potential for generating revenue or, in rare circumstances, its level of influence in its niche. In most cases, it’s best to leave subjective data such as critical praise or “best blog in ___” type feedback off your website’s auction page.

On the same note, don’t load your auction page with fifty-point red headers and sales copy. Look at rule two again—you’re marketing your website to other marketers. Instead of pulling out every last direct response trick in the book, offer information that’s of value to people. It’s very hard to sell to marketers, and it only gets worse when you employ the same tactics that they use on a daily basis.

2. Capitalize on temporary fads, short-term events, and crazes

I see this type of mistake all the time on Flippa. Marketers—typically newbies—buy a domain that is loosely related to the latest celebrity death, put up a generic two-page WordPress site, and think it could be the next big thing. These auctions tend to be loaded with potential-driven sales copy and an overwhelming contempt for their potential customers, all in an effort to make a quick buck.

Here’s what they all have in common: they rarely, if ever, make a decent profit. While the owners of these websites may make a few dollars on the sale, it’s rarely enough to even consider. The best type of website for onward sales is one that’s loaded with long-term potential, not some hyped-up spur-of-the-moment domain name.

3. List your website but make little or no effort to monetize it

The only thing worse than overselling a website, as above, is underselling it by failing to spend any time on monetization. This mistake is constantly be made on Flippa, although unlike many of these errors, which are made by newbies, it’s the professionals that tend to make this one. Always short on time and challenged by other projects, they list websites without even trying to monetize them.

Any signs of profitability—even a Google Adsense block atop your page—are a good thing for lifting your sales price. While websites occasionally sell based on their unrealized potential alone, it’s not at all a common occurrence. Take the time to test your website’s profitability level, and even when it’s not a winner, let people know that it’s at least capable of generating income.

4. Defining your website’s potential without thinking long-term

Browse any auction website and you’ll see descriptions where the merchant has been, shall we say, a little too optimistic about their website’s future. No, it probably won’t become the next Facebook, and no, it probably won’t triple its revenue in two months. While these examples take long-term prediction to its extreme, they’re a good indicator of how a little long-term thinking can help with your sales.

Website aren’t bought to immediately be flipped—at least, not in most cases. For the most part, they are bought as a fairly long-term investment (by online standards). Be upfront and clear about how your website is performing now, but don’t forget to include a description—even quite a salesy description—of how it could perform in the future.

Have you successfully sold a website before? If so, how did it go? Did you break even, lose money, or make a profit on the sale?

Leave your own experiences in the comments and let me know if you’ve got any suggestions on how to sell websites more effectively. I’ve seen plenty of very different techniques do well in this field, and it’s always an interesting to experience how well people are doing with less orthodox tactics.

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