Questions and Misconceptions

As we have been working with customers, we have begun seeing common misperceptions and mistakes with the industry that companies seem to be consistently making. It’s interesting that many companies are repeating the same mistakes as previous clients based on a lack of internal domain expertise.

Below is a list of common misperceptions about Online Advertising, Online publishing, Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing that we have begun to compile – if you see your company facing some of these common question – SearchOctane can make sure you avoid the land-mines of misperception.

Common Misperceptions:

Your Advertisers:

  • I’m building a self-self Advertiser system for large advertisers/agencies so they can access my ad network–
    • Not a good idea – typically those advertisers never access self serve systems.
  • My advertisers want to be able to target on 20 different targeting variables–
    • This may cause you to be able to charge more for miniscule amounts of inventory – wrecking your pricing model
  • The bid price for my CPC marketplace is totally transparent to advertisers- why is it stuck at our minimum bid?
    • Transparency can create less competition than opacity
  • Our internal team will optimize our advertiser accounts – we don’t need to provide advertisers with tools to optimize their own account
    • Be prepared to hire and army of account managers

Your Publishers:

  • My service is totally free which will allow anyone to easily sign up and access my network!
    • But what is it about your service that is Sticky that will keep your users in your network?
  • We are going to compete with AdSense by allowing publishers to more precisely target advertising
    • We hear this ALL the time. Increased targeting does not mean higher CPMs with more relevant advertising. Sometimes, highly competitive, branded marketplaces will generate a higher CPM.
  • We are going to manually categorize and match our advertiser inventory to our publisher inventory.
    • This simply will not scale and at some point you are leaving so much money on the table that you will be able to hire some research scientists to build a system that will do this algorithmically.

Your Users:

  • Our CTR is below the industry average – why aren’t our users clicking on our ads?
    • Advertising needs to be VALUABLE to your users – you can only trick them into clicking on your ads for so long. You need to figure out how to maximize the value of the ad (not just relevance) for the user.
  • We know what are users want and we are giving it to them.
    • Are you sure? For what market segments? Do you talk to them EVERYDAY? Do they directly influence product design decisions? Do you give them a voice on your product team?

Copyright © 2007 Search Octane. All rights reserved.

Notice we don't optimize our own site? Contact us and find out why...