Marketing
Just Released: Google AdSense for Online Gaming
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Beta, Business, Games, google, Marketing, News | No Comments
Google just announced the release of Google AdSense for Online Gaming. It works pretty much the same as your pre-existing AdSense program, where you place video, image or text ads within your application/game and it displays contextually targeted advertising based on the surrounding content.
From the official Google AdSense blog:
You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Now if you’re a budding flash developer, don’t go getting your hopes up just yet – in order to be eligible for this beta program your games must have a minimum of 500,000 “game plays” with at least 80% of the traffic originating from the US or UK. If you fit the mold, here’s a direct link to the application.
So far there are only three marketers listed as partners on the info page: Sprint, Sony Pictures and esurance. I’m sure it won’t be long before that list starts to grow, the publisher round-up is already full of major players in the online game realm: ArcadeTown, Konami, Armor Games, Boonty, Demand Media, Heavy Games, Grab.com, Mochimedia and cafe.com.
This move was inevitable for Google seeing how they recently acquired Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising startup based out of the San Francisco, CA area.
Surprisingly, they already have a “Success Story” listed on the about page for social networking game developer Playfish. These guys primarily produce games that you can add to your Facebook or MySpace profile, so it’s a ‘little’ deceiving in nature.
Sell advertising space on your Twitter account!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 | Affiliate, Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter | 1 Comment
It was only a matter of time before people started finding ways to monetize Twitter, last week announcing the arrival of a short-url CPC program and this week announcing the arrival of Twittad.
Twittad.com lets you put up your twitter account on their marketplace where advertisers can see the number of folks who are following/followers as well as the price you are asking to allow their products/advertising to be displayed on your twitter page.
If you’re a Twitter user looking for advertising – You get to select the duration that the ads are displayed as well as the price. Anyone interested in purchasing that space will then contact you through twittad.com, giving you the ability to accept or deny the offer.
How does twittad.com make money then?
They get paid a 5% service fee on the total purchase price (minimum of $0.99 cents).
What’s to stop an advertiser from contacting the user directly, skipping twittad altogether?
NOTHING! You’re given the user’s twitter profile, there you have any number of ways of contacting them without twittad even knowing! Email, through their website and even through twitter.
Right now the most expensive twitter account only has 599 Followers/605 Followings. Get this, it’s going for $100!! The highest paid twitter account though is only $25 for an user with a following of 351. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the developers who purchased the account!
I can’t see how this will last… but it’s an interesting attempt at monetizing Twitter. I give it a week before script-kiddies with auto-generated twitter accounts take-over the site. Good luck.
Free Website-Blog Analytics – What should you use? Google Analytics vs. Clicky
Monday, August 25th, 2008 | google, Marketing, SEM, Site Information, Tools, Utilities | 1 Comment
Website analytics are key to any successful website. If you are trying to increase traffic to your blog or website then you’re probably using some form of tracking software. Now in the free/cheap market there are a lot of choices. Over the years I’ve used a variety of different services and/or software to track visitors to my websites however I always tend to gravitate back to two specific programs – Google Analytics and Clicky.
Every now and then I get an email asking me what analytics service is “better” or which I’d recommend for their website. This post should answer those questions as I try to compare key features of the two services in a head-to-head matchup. Let’s get it on!
Google Analytics vs. Clicky:
(Disclaimer: I’ve only reported on features that make the two services unique from each other, each service has a lot of shared functionality)
Google Analytics
Cost: FREE
Users: Unlimited
Websites: Unlimited
Traffic Limitations: 5 Million Pageviews/Month (Removed if you’re an active AdWords customer)
Works without Javascript? NO
Affiliate Program: No
Reports: PDF, XML, CSV, TSV
Latency (How often is it updated): 1-24 hours
Goal/Conversion Reporting – The ability to setup goals/conversions to record specific visitor actions (i.e. filling out a form). You can then segment your conversion goals based on any number of variables including Geography (i.e. how many people from Pasadena filled out the form).
Adwords Integration – Yes. You can link-up your AdWords account to any website for automated integration. The non-adwords PPC tracking is great although sometimes it can be unreliable.
Email Reports: Custom reports that will trigger at specific time/days (i.e once a month).
Visitor Data - You can see the connection speeds of your visitors, this can help you determine what type of content you can display without increasing load-times for your users.
Clicky Web Analytics
Cost ($ is per month): FREE (3 sites/1k daily pageviews), $4 (3 sites/10k daily pageviews), $9.99 (10 sites/30k daily pageviews), $16.99 (20 sites/50k daily pageviews)
Users: Unlimited (by enabling “Public Access”)
Websites: Depends on plan, see above
Traffic Limitations: Depends on plan, see above
Reports: CSV, XML and JSON
Latency (How often is it updated): Real-time
Email Reports: Yes. Sent at a user-defined action (date/time, # of visits, etc..)
Works without Javascript: YES
Affiliate Program: Yes
Custom User Tracking – Yes. Clicky lets you give your users custom names, tracking their every visit to your website in an easy to review “User” page.
Real-Time Statistics – Yes. Spy lets you view real-time statistics of visitors currently on your website.
Traffic Sources - Segments out social media and email sources – View all visitors who came from a social media website (twitter, Stumbledupon, Facebook, etc..) or from a link found in an email.
Visitor Information – Clicky can automatically convert visitor IP’s into hostnames (e.g. comcast.net) and Organizations (e.g. Microsoft Corp).
Whitelabel: YES (You can setup your own white-label version of the tracking software to sell to clients)
Developer API: Yes. You can pull just about any data/statistics from your account via their API.
Extras: Clicky sponsored widgets (for your own tracking and for public bragging rights), official WordPress plugin, integrated with FeedBurner RSS stats and the ability to get any statistics via a customized RSS feed.
Things both Google Analytics and Clicky share:
Which should I choose for my website or blog?
- Small blog with no affiliate or PPC marketing: Clicky
The free version of Clicky is a lot easier to use for small website publishers. If you don’t have a need for advanced user or source segmentation, then there’s no real need to use Google Analytics. You can also use the SPY feature to view real-time visitors on your site.
- Medium-Large website or blog with PPC or other marketing campaigns (visitor generating): Google Analytics
Until Clicky implements campaign tracking, Google Analytics will win if you’re trying to track multiple PPC campaigns.
- Medium size website or blog with affiliate or other 3rd party advertising (revenue generating): Clicky
This was a tough choice. They both are great in tracking the path that users take on your website, which is useful in seeing at what point in the visit are they clicking on your advertising/affiliate links. While Google may give you the ability to track specific actions as Goals, it only allows for 5 and because of its reporting latency, makes it not a viable source for account purposes. Clicky won because of its ability to track and tag visitors. You can take the users who clicked on your advertising and put them in a custom group, giving you detailed analytics on their demographic.
- Large website or blog (regardless of whether or not it has advertising): Google Analytics
Clicky’s Professional service can be expanded to work on websites that get up to 300,000 daily page views, however by then you’re paying enough to go with a more detailed reporting service like WebTrends, ClickTracks or Urchin 6 (There’s also Omniture, who makes a variety of different tools but is also very expensive!). Google Analytics also offer a more robust campaign segmentation compared to Clicky.
To note: Both of these programs use either Javascript and/or image tracking to report website traffic. There are a lot of free log analyzers available that can give you a different view on your website visitors. It’s always a good idea to use both a back-end log analyzer, like Awstats or Webalizer, in conjunction with one of these services. A log analyzer won’t give you as much information as products like Google Analytics or Clicky can, but it will report on ALL the visitors to your site, regardless of whether or not they have javascript enabled.
Get Your Very Own Personalized Firefox 3 Certificate
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 | Marketing, News, Promotion, Random | No Comments
Firefox 3 was released with much fan-fare last week, including a marketing campaign from Mozilla to set a new record for “most software downloads in 24 hours” in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to their “World Record FAQ,” they hoped to beat the number of downloads that version 2 of Firefox saw, which was 1.6 million. Well they’ve recently updated their “Download Day” site, indicating that in the 24-hour time period after publicly releasing the new version, the software was downloaded over 8 million times. Since then they’ve counted over 20 million downloads and that’s just from their official site (due to server lags, the release was quickly put up on private mirrors, so the real download number will never be known).
Want to celebrate your participation in this event? Why not (other than for the obvious reasons)? Mozilla now lets you print out your very own “personalized” Firefox 3 Download Day certificate by entering your name on their “Flaunt It” portion of the website. Click on the image posted above for an example of what it looks like (it will open in a new window). Now you can be the envy of your IT staff… this will surely show them you’re hip to the latest software releases and maybe they’ll show you how to install that cool screensaver you’ve been having trouble with!
Sooooo corny… but i couldn’t resist.
StartupSchwag.com – Blogger Payola Or Just Good Customer Service?
Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | iPod, Marketing, Promotion | 1 Comment
For the last year, I’ve been a subscriber to a new venture called www.startupschwag.com. For a nominal fee they send out a monthly mailing that is similar to any gift bag you’d get at your typical web related conference – tshirts, stickers, keychains, etc.. all from new companies trying to get their name out there to the masses in hopes of angel funding. Well, when the service was first offered I was one of the original people to sign-up, figuring in the least I’d get something “interesting” from time-to-time, however have up until now been rather disappointed. The shirts are hit-or-miss, the stickers have repeated themselves, and I’m pretty sure the first package had 10x more content than this last one. Included with each mailing is a sheet explaining the contents of your bag and a brief bio behind the company that provided each product.
This week however I opened the bag to find a nice little surprise. Along with the usual tshirt (for Pownce actually – making this one of the “good months”) was the sheet explaining the contents but also including a line that there was also a “little something extra for a few subscribers.” I guess I’m just that lucky because the extra piece of schwag that was found in the mailing bag was none-other than a brand-new iPod Shuffle.
If this was meant as a way to get me posting about your service, well……it worked.
If not – then I’m happy to see that the monthly fees for products you probably get for free has finally come back around and you were able to provide those of us who’ve shelled out enough of our money for a service (which adds up to a lot when you consider the # of months in service and compare it against the quality of merchandise that was sent in return) with something that is in fact, pretty f’in sweet schwag.
Kudos, and thanks for the ipod. I already have one, so am currently thinking of what kind of contest I could offer it up as the grand-prize that would creatively benefit a non-profit. So far I’m thinking along the lines of finding a charity that could use a light homepage refresh/logo redesign and offering up the ipod + other prizes in exchange for contest submissions…. any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.
In the meantime, go check-out www.startupschwag.com (and thanks).
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