Ad Networks vs. Premium Publishers

I was reading an article last night and was shocked to hear the results of the IAB/Bain Digital Pricing Research study from August 2008.

In summary I took away a few key points, for anyone buying banners:

Premium Direct Sales Publishers have about a 10% share of total impressions but have about a 75% share of $.  Non-Premium or ad networks, and non direct buys have almost 90% share of all impressions, but only account for roughly 25% of the total spend.

Premium Publishers on average charge $12-18 CPM whereas Ad Networks are charging on average $1 as their CPM.  

Maybe this is why use of ad networks has increased dramatically, from 5% of sold inventory in 2006 all the way up to 30% in 2007!!

I know the best way to  advertise in premium content on premium sites is to buy direct, but I had no idea the amount of inventory that was being sold to Ad networks.  I think as these networks grow, the amount of hyper targeting advertisers that will be possible will grow dramatically.  No longer will I have to settle on telling clients "Your ads will appear on sites such as". We may be able to say "You will be on these sites, in these positions, found in these sections!"  

The growth in marketer use of ad networks will likely lead to the erosion of premium CPM's if publishers maintain the behavior of selling their inventory at rates 10x higher than networks.  

It all makes sense that the growth of inventory being sold via ad networks is growing at such an incredible rate.  Publishers keep adding content (more ad inventory) but their content building is outpacing their direct sales of ad inventory.

Here is a link to the Bain/IAB study I summarized.

www.iab.net/media/file/Bain_IAB_Digital_Pricing_Research.pdf

  

Twitter

I have had a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/Peteyd18) now for about 10 months, and the more I use it the less I understand it.

I think it makes all the sense in the world for P.R. I use it to follow MarketingCharts, MarketingVox, MediaPost, eMarketer, JupiterResearch, because I am looking for more than what someone is eating for lunch.  It its funny thought that if you type an article into Twitter search, there a dozen or so people posting the same article!  I guess Twitter is broken down into subgroups where authorities post and followers follow. 

The beauty of Twitter is that is user-defined.  It can be whatever you allow it to be (whomever you choose to follow).  I went through my account 2 months ago and de-clogged my account of who I deemed to be useless follows, providing nothing to me but irrelvant words on page.  

SEO Tactics

Spend a bulk of today learning more about top SEO Tactics.  Our agency has spend countless hours optimizing paid search for clients, but not nearly as long with SEO.  Client and prospects have told us that some of them have taken money out of paid search to improve their seo, and their traffic numbers went down substancially.  The way I see it clients are spending money one way or another: either paying an SEO firm to move up in the organic ranks, or paying Google (or Yahoo! to be fair) for sponsored search.  The difference is that people that choose to pay SEO firms, have to realize that SEO is an ongoing process, and that it's not good enough to just pay a firm for a few months on and a few months off.  SEO firms need to be continusually used to improve organic search results.  

In my search for finding the best tactics for improving SEO I have found a few main common themes:

1). Linking - from what I have read Google's page rank is done via inbound links (i.e. how many sites link to yours)  Outbound links (links to other sites) is also important, because it allows uses to continue, and not dead end on your site

2). Content - having what people are searching for ranks high

3). Social environment - Ties in with linking. having links to your site via social media (i.e. Twitter, blogs, message boards, etc) will increase the number of places linking to your site.

I have found some great SEO tactics and saved them to my delicious account, check it out.

http://delicious.com/ZigIT/SEO_Tactics

If you have any "no brainers" for improving SEO I am all ears. Please comment