Many a parent has angrily warned their children “Don’t push my buttons!” and of course what they are implying is that the children know exactly what to do to create a certain response, or reaction, from Mom or Dad. When you think about it, isn’t it funny that an expression that has been around for generations is so applicable to web design and conversion optimization today?

Most landing pages include a button as part of the main call to action. So the question is: do your visitors know exactly what to do? Are your buttons so clear that it leaves no doubt in the visitor’s mind as to what will happen when it’s clicked?
Here are some guidelines you can keep in mind when creating buttons that beg to be pushed.
First, Prioritize
Ideally you should have a single, clear call-to-action button on your page. If you have more than one, you need to create a visual hierarchy so that their importance is clear to your web visitor. One way to do that is to change the color or size of the non-primary buttons to something visually less interesting (make those buttons duller and smaller).
Read more: ClickZ

What Sells the Digital Magazine?
A magazine is a pretty amazing work of art. It consists of a collection of the most incredible curated insights, editorial opinions, and photographs for a specific genre. In the print world, everyone knows that the cover of a magazine needs to be very carefully crafted in order to compel you to purchase it at the newsstand. Anywhere from 10 to 45 percent of a print magazine’s sales can come from single copy sales (aka, at the traditional newsstand). With this heavy reliance on sales by cover, I wondered…is the same true for success on the digital newsstand?
A few weeks ago I noticed that three digital publishing apps changed their icon on the iPad from a static image representing their company to a dynamic image showcasing their “cover news” for the day. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out how The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Daily all showcase their app. In it, each day you see a very clear cover line and image that is meant to be compelling enough for you to stop and download/buy the app.

Interestingly, at my company, we have been seeing a different phenomenon where it isn’t just the cover but the content inside of the issue that is driving a digital reader to discover a magazine they never knew they couldn’t live without.

Recently we posted a collection on the Titanic. In this collection the visitor was exposed to free articles about the Titanic. Quietly in the corner of the article was a reference to the name of the magazine the article came from. In this case, magazines like Town and Country and Popular Science were successfully able to engage new potential subscribers through the content locked under the cover by sharing it to an audience who followed a common theme.

Read more: ClickZ

What is adnxs.com?
Adnxs.com is run by AppNexus, a company that provides technology, data and analytics to help companies buy and sell online display advertising.
The technology it uses can plug into other advertising serving platforms, such as Google’s Doubleclick, and “data aggregators”, such as Quantcast, which provide behavioural targeting. In essence, this makes AppNexus an an “advertising exchange for advertising exchanges”.
AppNexus offers a number of different services, including:
Ad exchange An auction marketplace where advertisers can bid for ad slots on certain websites.
Data aggregator/supplier The company collects data from a range of online and sometimes offline sources and provides data to advertisers directly or via its exchange.

Demand-side platform Technology provider that enables advertisers to buy ad inventory from other ad exchanges.
Read more: theguardian
How to Manage Your Brand’s Social Life
Consumers are investing serious amounts of their time in social-media platforms, with 16.6% of all online minutes now spent on social networks. With so much focus on social as a marketing tool, it’s worth stopping and mapping out a smart social strategy. A new Ad Age Insights report, “Managing Your Brand’s Social Life,” aims to help brand managers plan for which platforms should get the investment of limited staff and time, what to consider when creating internal social-media guidelines, whether to handle social media in-house or outsource it and what measures a brand should be looking for to get at return on investment. You can measure the ROI of social media, but it may not get you far.

“There is definitely a quantifiable ROI, but the truth of the matter is that it’s very difficult to measure ROI within social media,” said Edelman Digital Senior VP Michael Brito. If a straightforward numbers game is what you’re after, Olivier Blanchard, author of “Social Media ROI” notes that the ROI numbers game remains the same: “It’s still purely a financial measure.” But, he adds, “engagement is not a measure of ROI. There’s no way to actually calculate the relationship between a dollar investment in a particular activity and the number of likes.”

Read more: AdAgeDigital

At a time when data and technology are an integral part of the advertising/marketing chain, the concept of the traditional ad holding company is changing.

Once thought of as mere tools to be accessed on an ad hoc basis, data and tech are now central to the process of media buying and planning. That was probably part of the thinking of WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell five years ago when he surprised many tech M&A observers and beat out Microsoft to acquire interactive shop 24/7 Real Media for $649 million, which last week shortened its name to 24/7 Media. It followed that small, but noteworthy, bit of news with word of a strategic partnership with DG’s MediaMind, that is intended to put third-party online ad serving and TV ad delivery squarely in 24/7 Media’s hands.

Although unrelated, the two announcements reflect the changes taking place in the larger business of advertising: on the one hand, it’s about the nature of expanding the function of the interactive disciplines within the agency realm.

It’s also about figuring out how to constantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of digital buys along audience buying by asking whether its best to build these skills in-house or out. The answer, Dave Moore, 24/7 Media’s chairman and CEO, told us, is sometimes all of the above.
Read more: AdExchanger
7 Ways to Make Your Brand More Pinteresting
Pinterest has recently emerged as a top social media site, and last month it was officially the third biggest online web property. It seems that Pinterest emerged from nowhere, and it is now the quickest growing independent web property ever.
For those who are new to Pinterest, it is an online pinboard where you can pin content that is interesting to you, organized on different boards.
Why Is Pinterest Great for Marketers? Pinterest is powerful for marketers for a few reasons. First and most importantly, people are on Pinterest and when they are there they are open to exploring. Fish where the fish are.

Marketing is about building awareness and getting in front of your audience, and as your audience flocks to Pinterest, so should you. Second, and perhaps surprising to some, Pinterest refers more traffic to other websites than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined. This is because people in Pinterest are in browsing mode – they are looking for new sites and interesting content. The content on Pinterest is all linked to the originating sources. This means that it can be a huge source of traffic to your website. ”Pinterest is the #1 source of referral traffic to my website…”
Read more: ClickZ

There’s a significant amount of cross-pollination in the digital media space. Brands like to help each other out. They do it because they’re drawn to success – the success of social media properties, for example, in obtaining a critical mass of users. Like those users, consumer brands also have the capacity to recognize the potential in a good online product or service. Hence, they create Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and YouTube channels galore.
Whether they realize it or not, consumer brands endorse media brands by utilizing their services. Media brands, in turn, rise in stature due to their usage by consumer brands. It’s a win-win situation made even more promising when digital marketers choose to actively leverage it. Promoting a brand’s participation in social media helps to increase exposure and create a following, yes. But it must be taken seriously. In other words, as important as it is to create a campaign around your product itself, the value of doing the same for your media affiliations shouldn’t be overlooked. Treat them as a media buy in their own right and you can earn a sizeable return on investment.
Read more: Click Z

New Video Ad Metric Doesn’t Have You At Hello, Suggests You Complete Me
Forget about click-through rates. When it comes to online video advertising, it’s the “completes” that count, according to new research from Vindico. “Click-through rate was created in a neophyte ad world dominated by display and search,” according to the video ad platform.

“It should play a small part in measuring the success of a video campaign alongside other more powerful measures, like completion and engagement.” Rather, advertisers should evaluate a range of variables when evaluating performance, such as whether their video ad ran as in-banner alongside content or “below the fold.”

These situations would likely account for high impressions with low CTR as viewers are most likely not viewing the ad when it’s playing at the bottom of a page. Judging by “completes,” mid-roll is the clear way to go, as they achieve the highest completion rates (94%) of all ad positions in 2011, Vindico found, based on tens of billions of ad impressions served in 2010 and 2011.

Video ads placed during long-form content had a higher completion rate — 88% — than those placed with short-form content, 76%. In other words, a viewer who makes the commitment to watch a 30-minute episode is more invested in watching the associated ads, while a comparatively less-invested viewer “snacking” on short-form videos is somewhat more likely to click away when presented with an ad, Vindico finds. Completion rates across site types indicate that premium content on video centric sites yield higher completion rates.

Read more: MediaPost

Aiming to remain a key hub for sharing photos, Facebook acquired mobile photo application Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. The transaction — Facebook’s largest to date — also underscores the company’s efforts to bolster its mobile offerings. Instagram will continue to operate as an independent business under the same name.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that the acquisition would enhance the ability of Facebook users to upload and exchange photos among family and friends.

“We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook,” wrote Zuckerberg. “That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. ”Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.” Launched in October 2010, the Instagram app now has more than 30 million registered users.

Read more: MediaPost
One Year Later, What We’ve Learned About Private Ad Exchanges
If 2011 was the year of testing for publishers who operate so-called private ad exchanges, 2012 looks like it may be the year of putting lessons into action. Private exchanges began popping up in late 2010, with the goal of increasing the price of online-ad inventory that was going unsold by direct-sales teams.

To accomplish that, publishers license real-time bidding technology from tech partners. It helps them orchestrate auctions for ad impressions and determine which buyers get access to inventory, as well as what inventory is made available at what prices. Though exchanges have perhaps dozens of other characteristics, that’s where the standardization ends.

That’s because publishers who have taken the leap have charted vastly different paths, employing sometimes contradictory business rules, forcing advertisers and the trading desks and technologies through which they bid on audience segments to learn about each on the fly.

Take, for example, the thorny problem of whether to sell private-exchange inventory to advertisers already making more-expensive ad buys from the sales team. Some publishers fear that big-spending direct advertisers will spend less or stop spending altogether on reserved inventory if they see how much cheaper the unreserved inventory is in the private marketplace.

Read more: AdAgeDigital

In 2009, comScore and Starcom produced a joint study of clickers that concluded 8 percent of the Internet audience is responsible for 85 percent of the clicks.
This report elicits an examination of your frequent clickers and whether they are the audience your brand is looking to reach. This is fundamentally important to consider before selecting click-through rate (CTR) as a campaign metric.

My own research suggests something similar to comScore/Starcom. The analysis is constrained to an audience of just clicks and not Internet users.

However, the results show a similar skew to the comScore/Starcom results. In a sample of 200,000 random clickers taken in March 2012, I found that 40 percent of the clicks were produced by 20 percent of the clickers.
Read more: ClickZ
9 Steps to Building a Content Marketing Strategy
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of buzz about content marketing. Blog posts touting that the key to social media is good content abound and many books have been written about it. It should be obvious that content is important to social media, or any marketing for that matter. The actual commercial that you put on the air is vital to your television strategy and the actual advertisement is vital to your print strategy. Yet, because social media is free, and because the technology creates a barrier for some, we seem to have forgotten the importance of content.
Content is vital to the success of any social media effort – what you actually talk about matters. As we have become more comfortable with the tools of social media and amassing our friend/fan/follower counts, we’re now figuring out that content, or what we actually say, matters too.

Why Content Marketing?

But developing a solid content marketing strategy isn’t just important as a social object to be posted in Twitter or on Facebook. It’s also a strategy that can support search engine marketing and branding and positioning.

In an era of permission-based marketing, brands need to provide value in order for consumers to pay attention to them, and increasingly, that value is found in content. Providing the right content when and where your consumers want it in a format that is easy for them to digest is key to content marketing.
Read more: CLickZ

CPX Interactive Rolls Out Social Media Advertising Solutions
New York, NY, March 20, 2012 –(PR.com)– Digital advertising company CPX Interactive today announced the second in a series of 2012 product launches – a suite of social media display advertising strategies. CPX leverages its unparalleled online reach to deliver social media solutions that include a dedicated social media network vertical, custom social integrated ads, in-app and in-game display units, and a managed cost per fan program for the Facebook platform. The packaging of these services is designed to help advertisers better understand new options, metrics and ROI strategies in the emerging social media landscape.
“Since the early days of the digital advertising industry, CPX Interactive has proven its ability to successfully optimize display advertising campaigns against any desired metric. Social media is simply the latest environment for online display, but the fundamentals remain the same,” said Mike Seiman, CEO and founder of CPX Interactive. “Ultimately, successful execution of these strategies is predicated on our ability to target and optimize huge amounts of quality inventory. We are now packaging them in a way that more clearly illustrates the potential for display advertising within social media.”
Read more: pr.com

Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

Founded in 2008, Posterous, which has gone head to head with Tumblr (a more popular simple blogging site), emerged from the well-known Silicon Valley technology incubator, Y Combinator.
The company’s team will be joining Twitter’s developers, as part of the deal, the company announced in a blog post.
Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman wrote on the company blog. “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Read more: The Telegraph
3 Proven Ways to Convert Traffic From Search
Most marketers have discovered effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their websites by optimizing paid search campaigns. But for all of the effort that organizations put into testing and optimizing AdWords buys, many overlook ways to improve the rate at which traffic converts after a search campaign successfully brings them to their website.
Currently there is a 92:1 ratio in the amount of money spent to encourage consumers to visit a website versus the amount spent to convert them after they’ve clicked through to the brand. With an average online conversion rate of just 2.5 percent, marketers are presented with a huge opportunity for improvement by investing additional resources into making the website experience more relevant for traffic driven to their sites via paid search.

Here are three ways for brands to optimize the website experience to maximize conversions from paid search traffic.

1. Make Every Page a Landing Page An important first step toward maximizing conversions from search traffic is echoing keyword copy with website messages that reinforce the trigger that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Keyword copy can have multiple triggers up front, but the key is understanding what will resonate with visitors when they arrive at your website after clicking on an ad and carrying that messaging throughout the entire user session.

To optimize the customer experience and achieve improvements in everything from your add-to-cart rate to the total number of conversions, marketers must find the right messages that resonate with customers and be agile enough to change those messages.
Read more: ClickZ