Even though the ad tech industry is collectively trying to fix the error of their ways—Better Ads standards are proof of that—it's a "too little, too late" kind of situation. Adblock users remain staunchly unimpressed. What a wonderful world – so different we can hardly imagine it. It's only really popups and large sticky ads that are frowned upon by the Better Ads Standards, a … [Read more...]
Google Launches Exchange Bidding to Counter Header Bidding
Over the last few years, header bidding has gained immense popularity with web publishers looking to increase their ad revenue. A concept first developed by AppNexus back in 2009, header bidding allows multiple demand partners to bid simultaneously for ad impressions, as opposed to the waterfall setup, in which unsold impressions were bundled and passed on from one network to … [Read more...]
Programmatic Trends 2018: What Advertisers will be Buying This Year
2017 saw transparency and brand-safety become more than buzzwords—they became KPIs and pivots for media partnerships. The buck didn’t stop there. In 2018, the industry is going to see more of the same push towards draining the ad tech swamp. To that effect, top advertisers are busy re-evaluating their tech stacks and supply partners, and renewing agency contracts to inc … [Read more...]
‘Subscribe with Google’: New Initiative to Simplify Subscriptions
Buying online subscriptions is a bit of a pain. You try to set a username but it's already taken, the password needs one uppercase letter and one special symbol, and you need to fill out your credit card details on every website—which is troubling from a security standpoint—but also just inconvenient. If you happen to forget your password, you have to reset it, but hey, your new … [Read more...]
How to Track Micro- and Macro Conversions in Google Analytics
One of the most useful things you can do with Google Analytics is track visitor engagement on your website. Standard metrics such as pageviews, sessions, and bounce rate can give you a quick glance into overall usage patterns—but they don't offer a lot of useful information beyond that. For instance, what if you want to track how many visitors hit the play button on your new … [Read more...]