B1BLOG

The social net­work Face­book admits that it uses file trac­ers, even for peo­ple who are dis­con­nected from their plat­forms, and will not change their habits.

With the help of Face­book engi­neer Arturo Bejar, an arti­cle enti­tled “Face­book track­ing is under scrutiny” on the USA Today web­site reveals details of how mem­bers are tracked on the social net­work, whether con­nected or not, and how their stored data is used. Vis­i­tors who do not have accounts on Face­book are also involved. The social net­work uses track­ing codes, also known as cook­ies, which are placed on the user’s com­puter dur­ing a web­site visit. Wide­spread, they are use­ful to sites and online ser­vices to see if a user is logged-in, or if they have already vis­ited the web­site. A good exam­ple being when you shop on Ama­zon, the prod­ucts you were shop­ping for last week are star­ing you straight in the face this week.

Read the full post »

We’ve been using behav­ioural tar­get­ing for a num­ber of years. It opti­mises media spend and ampli­fies cam­paigns to the peo­ple who count. And, if done well, your prospects won’t realise it’s hap­pen­ing. But the EU believes con­sumers need to be pro­tected and made aware of the meth­ods used to tar­get them. That’s why there’s new leg­is­la­tion com­ing into effect on 25th May.

So, what to do? Well, the gen­eral con­sen­sus out there is the fol­low­ing: If you’re adver­tis­ing through pub­lish­ers and affil­i­ate net­works you need to make users aware that you’re track­ing their behav­iour to serve tai­lored adver­tis­ing. But what’s the best solu­tion? It could get messy with mul­ti­ple alerts, pop-ups and over­lays.

Read the full post »

Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.


Read the full post »

Even if search has matured incred­i­bly over the last few years, both from a tech­ni­cal point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coor­di­na­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all lev­els of the organisation.

Ear­lier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Hud­dle. This was an inti­mate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

Read the full post »

With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.

Read the full post »

One of the big themes of our upcom­ing Sum­mit is going to be the impor­tance of con­tent when it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads. My favourite quote on the topic comes from the peo­ple over at the adver­tis­ing giant JWT, who pro­claimed when relaunch­ing the agency that we needed to “stop inter­rupt­ing what peo­ple are inter­ested in, and be what peo­ple are inter­ested in.” Two years on and it still rings true as a clar­ion call to our indus­try. But the fact remains that the bulk of demand gen­er­a­tion spend­ing still gets piled in to intru­sive, inter­rup­tive mar­ket­ing.

Read the full post »

We’re really excited about an upcom­ing event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded part­ners. On Novem­ber 4th we’re launch­ing the Euro­pean Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit in part­ner­ship with Google, Elo­qua, BrightTALK and Mar­ke­tOne. It’s going to be held in Lon­don at Alti­tude, which is on the very top floor of Mill­bank tower with views across Lon­don. Speak­ers include Amanda Job­bins, Omniture’s Neil Mor­gan, Jeremy Bevan from Nov­ell and Justin Gale, a senior online mar­keter from HP.

Read the full post »

We all know that the pace of change today is get­ting faster and faster. It’s almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me that going back a cou­ple of decades or so, when I first got into tech­nol­ogy, there was for most peo­ple no inter­net and no mobile phones. PCs were just get­ting started prop­erly (my first PC had no Win­dows OS, an awe­some 30Mb of hard disk space and floppy disks as big as your head). And if you wanted to find some­thing out, your local library was prob­a­bly the best bet.

To put where we are today into some con­text, take a look at the fol­low­ing video:

Read the full post »

Life­hacker points to a handy new site – with yet another ridiculo.us name – popuri.us. Essen­tially the site aggre­gates a bunch of sources to give you a pic­ture of how pop­u­lar your site is. So you get its PageR­ank, Alexa rank, Tech­no­rati links and a bunch more. See the BBC exam­ple below:

While this isn’t rocket sci­ence, it does bring it all together in one place. One for the bookmarks.

This is a rather lovely piece of film.

Pro­fes­sor Michael Wesch (who’s Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Cul­tural Anthro­pol­ogy at Kansas State Uni­ver­sity) has put together a four and a half minute piece trac­ing the path from text on paper through hypertext/HTML and on to XML in a really charm­ing and engag­ing way. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about being in tech.

Source: Another plan­ning blog