Trying out AuctionAds
As a result of reading the hype around AuctionAds on this post, we've added AuctionAds to the SuperMotors ad system. Our experience with programs like Commission Junction have yielded no revenue, which is surprising considering our ability to specifically target our site visitors with ads that are highly relevant to the vehicle information they are viewing on SuperMotors.
However, I'm hoping for better results with AuctionAds because we have the ability to create very targeted ads that are relevant to what our visitors are looking at on SuperMotors. For example, I created a campaign for "Ford Bronco" and am able to setup individual, targeted ads in AuctionAds for each keyword I want. So, to start off, we are have ads running that target "1978 Ford Bronco," "1979 Ford Bronco," ...all the way up to 1996 Ford Bronco.
Highly Targeted eBay Ads with AuctionAds
With the ad system we've built on SuperMotors, we can serve up ads targeted to the year, make, and model of content being viewed on the site. So, if you link to a page like this (a picture of a 1988 Ford Bronco), you'll be able to see the relevant eBay ads served up by AuctionAds for 1988 Ford Bronco items (You may need to refresh the page depending on the rotation of ads -- we're only serving up 160x600 AuctionAds at this time).
Our fingers are crossed that these highly-relevant ads translate to clicks and sales. We'll run this test for 2-3 months and slowly expand the selection of AuctionAds and year/make/model targeting we do. My favorite feature is the ability to specifically select the keywords in AuctionAds, so you know you will get relevant results based on where you're running your ads on your own site. This makes it an incredibly powerful tool for us -- provided that it produces revenue, of course. 
Applying Six Sigma to Web Development, Design, and Usability
A few weeks ago while analyzing the results of an internal test on a new web design we're testing, it was brought up about how manufacturing is guided by Six Sigma standards. It was suggested the website live in a similar realm of excellence.
What is Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company's operational performance by identifying and eliminating "defects" in manufacturing and service-related processes. Commonly defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities, Six Sigma can be defined and understood at three distinct levels: metric, methodology (DMAIC/DFSSstructured problem solving roadmap and tools) and philosophy (Reduce variation in your business and take customer-focused, data driven decisions).
Can Six Sigma be applied to web development, design, and usability?
This is a very logical question. Yes, it can be applied, but achieving it is another issue altogether.
Pulling from Jakob Nielson's November 2003 post, Six Sigma engineering relies on a five-step process called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control). He was really ahead of his time in this article. A google search does not pull up much information on applying six sigma to web development, design, or usability. This tells me the concept has not been discussed too much and it makes sense -- the web is still in its infancy, and the more experienced developers within organizations today are now moving into upper management where they are beginning to look at the website from a higher view within the company.
As the web becomes more of a vital tool for most businesses today, upper management (who often times knows little about how exactly a website goes together or how to build a successful site) is seeing the value in applying other business practices and methodologies towards the design, testing, and execution of their websites.
Why Six Sigma is difficult to achieve in web development today.
In manufacturing, the amount of variables encountered in an assembly line is not as vast as a complex website. Manufacturing doesn't deal directly with consumers, either, and the manufacturing process has very strict processes and tolerances for how things are assembled.A website is dynamic in nature and also navigated and operated by your customers -- customers who may not know a thing about your product and have had no training on your website. Manufacturing lines are staffed by duty-specific workers, trained to perform specific tasks accurately and efficiently.
A website on the other hand can be navigated in millions of different ways and combinations by millions of different people. Testing each of these combinations is impossible and will result in you testing your website into eternity without ever releasing it to the market. Add on top of this a team of people who are most likely very diverse in their backgrounds: developers, designers, and marketers -- each come with their own education and experiences and often time have no visibility into what their other team members' job responsibilities really entail (how many developers do you know that can truly do graphic design? how many designers do you know that can write complex database queries?).
Accept the variables in web development, and apply the concepts of Six Sigma
The key is applying the Six Sigma mentality to web development, design, and usability so you can get the best balance of accuracy and conversions. The problem most developers and designers have is that they get "tunnel vision" and focus exclusively on just one piece of the entire web application. This is a problem for any type of site which has multiple conversion funnels (sales, registration forms, contact forms, etc.).
Next Segments:
More on this topic over the next several days as I cover each phase of the DMAIC process in individual blog posts in an effort to keep the posts spread out and on-topic, rather than one long, rambling post. I'll provide links at the end of this post as each phase of DMAIC is evaluated.
Tribal Fusion not accomodating towards (some) social media sites
At the risk of poo-pooing any chance at rekindling our relationship with Tribal Fusion, we (SuperMotors) were taken back by an e-mail we received from our (new) account executive on Friday morning, February 16th and 3:23 AM. In what appears to have been a standard form letter used to contact sites that have "fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network," we were notified that adult content was found on SuperMotors.net and that this was in fact a violation of the Tribal Fusion Terms of Service. This as the first such notification in our almost 5-month relationship with Tribal Fusionnnn.
Fair enough. They have every right to be monitoring the quality of their websites and I applaud them for enforcing this. This is what we received:
Hello Eric,
I am contacting you because it is our belief that the quality of the content on SuperMotors has fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network. In particular, the content found on these pages:
(page link removed)
Content like this is a violation of our publisher contract; and as a result SuperMotors has been removed from the Tribal Fusion Marketplace and we are currently serving only defaults or PSAs. We value the relationship we have had with you up to this point, and if you would like to speak with us regarding ways to potentially continue working together, please don't hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, I have to ask you to please remove Tribal Fusion's ad code from the SuperMotors website and/or from your adserving system by the end of the week. Failure to do so will result in broken images appearing through our ad tags.The clause in our publisher contract for termination (for your reference):
6.2 Termination. Publisher may discontinue participating in the marketplace after the initial term by providing 30 days written notice to Tribal Fusion™. However, Publisher has an obligation to fulfill any advertising campaign configured to run on their site in its entirety prior to termination. Tribal Fusion™ may terminate a Publisher's participation at any time if Publisher's website quality falls below the standard set by other websites in the marketplace, fails to deliver the minimum number of impressions, or if Publisher fails to comply with any other provision of these Terms and Conditions.
2.2 Right to Refuse. Tribal Fusion™ reserves the right to refuse to accept any publisher at its sole discretion, as a member of the Tribal Fusion™ Marketplace. Publisher websites shall not contain (or have direct links to) any content deemed inappropriate by Tribal Fusion™ at its sole discretion, which includes but is not limited to the following: content promoting the use of alcohol, tobacco or illegal substances; sex, pornography or adult-oriented content; violence, expletives or inappropriate language; content promoting illegal activity such as copyright infringement, racism, hate, mail fraud, spam, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other advice not permitted under applicable law; content that is libelous, defamatory, contrary to public policy or otherwise unlawful.
Should you have any questions regarding this issue, feel free to contact me
Since adult content is also a violation of our own Terms of Service, we immediately removed the material referenced in the link they provided us (which had been available online for less than 24 hours), issued the offending user a "strike 1" (we utilize a "3 strikes and you're out" policy for our users) via e-mail, and responded to Tribal Fusion informing them the matter had been resolved. My follow-up e-mail:
Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention. We have removed this photo as well as another photo from this user's account that were in violation of our terms of service as well as Tribal Fusion's. We take issues like this very seriously and have sent the user a warning about posting future content like this.
SuperMotors.net is a site with user-generated content. Due to the volume of newly posted photos every day, it is impossible for us to monitor each and every photo, sound, and video for quality. For this reason, we rely on our members to help us police other user-generated content (pictures, sounds, videos, comments, forum posts, blog entries, etc.). We have a clause in our terms of service which specifically states that adult content is not allowed to be posted and if it is, it will be deleted and a warning will be issued to the user. If the user is found to violate this rule a second time, their account is temporarily suspended. A third time results in permanent account deletion, along with all of their posted content.
The image at the URL below was posted on 2/15/07, less than 24 hours ago. I hope that we can be reinstated and continue to be a part of the Tribal Fusion ad network as we have now resolved this issue as soon as we were made aware of it.
To our surprise, there is no leniency. My intent on this follow-up e-mail was more to issue a formal apology and to state that, "Yes, hosting adult photos is not how we do business, nor is it something we permit." The response from Tribal Fusion:
Unfortunately we cannot have our ads running on unmonitored user-generated content. We have looked at your site more closely and have found numerous pages with this type of content. Because of this, we will be forced to deactivate your account. I have decategorized your site so you should now be showing either PSAs or the defaults you have set up in our system. Later today, I will have to deactivate your account completely. At that time you will serve error messages.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
So, in a span of just 12 hours, this revenue source has completely gone away. While Tribal Fusion isn't our primary source of income, we are diversified enough among our own sponsorship dollars, subscribers, and Google AdSense, it still is an unplanned loss of revenue especially entering a weekend on a record-setting month for us. Revenue is still revenue, and we really take this seriously. Finding another ad network is not only time-consuming, but really painful when a company like Tribal Fusion is regarded as one of the best in the industry. How and why would we want to switch in the first place?
I did some further digging and looked other sites in the Tribal Fusion Automotive Channel. One of them is YouTube.com. I proceeded to reply to the message above explaining that even YouTube.com, backed by Google, is unable to deal with the overwhelming demand of user-generated content. They do their best by implementing a "report as inappropriate" link on every posted video to allow the community to help report offensive content. We've all seen the headlines that YouTube has droves and droves of copyrighted material. There currently isn't a magic formula to policing user-generated content other than providing the necessary tools for the community to report inappropriate content and to deal with it in a timely manner (if you or your staff don't discover it on your own).
Another site, which shall remain nameless, has one of the racy Tribal Fusion Ad Network Ads for True.com dating service running on a page where there is a link to view illegal street racing videos as seen in this screen shot:
It just seems that we are being held to unreasonable standards when other sites on the Tribal Fusion Automotive Network are obviously violating the Terms of Service. We fixed the problem on our end in a timely manner and are more than willing to work towards a better solution that will keep Tribal Fusion happy and more importantly, their clients (advertisers) happy.
I've asked Tribal Fusion how we can strive to meet their standards for providing sufficient moderation for on a user-generated content site. Unfortunately, our account exec is unreachable for the next two weeks, so I will be attempting to get a hold of another account exec this week to see if we can't come to an agreement. It really seems like this is a misunderstanding. Maybe my e-mail was interpreted as "we don't moderate our user-generated content?" Regardless, we can modify our moderating policies and procedures to meet Tribal Fusions needs. I just hope they are open to making this consideration.
Quantcast Internet Ratings – A publisher & advertiser’s dream
MarketingVOX ran a blurb today on a new company called Quantcast. Quantcast is described as follows:
Quantcast is the world's first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of a half million web sites here. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
This service is what Google Analytics (light-weight, free web analytics) is to Omniture SiteCatalyst (heavy-duty web analytics). It functions on a similar methodology of partnering with ISPs for aggregate data and crossing it with panel data to provide a higher-level overview of your target audience such as:
- Gender
- Age
- Household income
- Ethnicity
- Head of household education
- Children
This is similar to the data that Hitwise provides, but the very tip of the iceberg and best of all, free. Where it's extremely valuable is you can analyze the stats of other sites (partners, competitors, potential sponsors, etc.). Hitwise, through their contractual structure, will typically limit your reach within the data to just the pre-defined categories that sites are lumped into. Hitwise also provides a much deeper dive into the data. Quantcast is a superb service for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Sitegraphics & Common Audience (I love these!)
What is also provides is a snapshot of the sites that index well against your audience (the "Sitegraphics" feature). Additionally, it also provides a list of sites that your audience also visits. Check out the snapshot of SuperMotors.net here. Unfortunately, we changed domain names in July of '06, so there's only 5 months of data (their stats go through November 2006 thus far), so the data isn't 100% accurate. I have however added their tracking code to SuperMotors.net in an effort to paint a more accurate picture of our visitors.
What value does this provide?
As a site owner, this is a very powerful tool, particularly if you sell your own advertising inventory. On SuperMotors, while we run Tribal Fusion and Google AdSense ads, we also have our own ad serving system and subsequently sell inventory in it. We do not have a dedicated sales force, so we rely heavily on ad networks for revenue. That said, selling our own inventory offers the greatest ROI.
In looking at the "Common Audience" chart:
We have data that supports which sites our visitors also frequent -- thus we have data to bring to potential sponsors to help sell ad inventory
Here we see where our visitors are also going. I know of a lot of these sites and personally visit them quite often. You can see a trend of Ford and Bronco-related sites, primarily because our userbase indexes heavily towards those makes and models of automobiles. Those sites aside, we also see retailer sites such as Summit Racing, 4 Wheel Parts, Edelbrock, Bronco Graveyard, James Duff, and BC Broncos. Fortunately for us, Bronco Graveyard is already a sponsor on SuperMotors.net (where we sold directly out of our inventory). We now have data that can help us craft a story to approach these other retailers and manufacturers. This shows that our visitors also visit their sites. This has nothing to do with referring links, it simply tells us over time that these sites are also visited by our members.
But, if they're already visiting these retail/manufacturer sites, why would they want to advertise on SuperMotors.net? They already are getting the traffic.
Sure, this argument could be made. However, one of the driver's behind choosing where to advertise is qualifying the sites you advertise on. What better way than to advertise on sites that you know is already a match for some of your consumers. Leverage this demographical data and expand your reach to this network that is already proving it has qualified consumers.
As a sponsor or someone who spends ad dollars, this tool is great to identify sites on which you would consider advertising on.
On the flip-side of this coin, this also means we could pursue partnership opportunities with the non-retail sites who have visitors that use our services. Perhaps even we would advertise on these sites to further promote our services. We are much better off advertising where we already have advocates than trying from ground zero. The same holds true for retailers who are looking to advertise online. Examine the sites where your users are currently visiting and tap into the visitor bases of those sites.
Moral of the story: Use data to support your advertising pitches
Ad networks frequently approach advertisers and pitch them on demographics, ages, incomes, education, and all of the metrics that align with an advertiser's target market. If you sell your own advertising on your site like we do, use this tool to identify potential sponsors and leverage the data in your sales pitch. It's a much more compelling if visitor data shows that users who visit Yoursite.com also visit TheSponsorYouWant.com. It's hard for a potential sponsor to tell you, "no" because it's hard to argue against data. This levels the playing field for you if you're a smaller company -- get them hooked with the data and talk about the sponsorship package you can put together for them.
Blog by Eric Long
I'm an experienced digital product & marketing strategist and am passionate about providing outstanding cross-channel, mass customization (product configurators), and considered-purchase experiences.
About Eric Long
Recent Tweets
- @proskweeto You too, Ben - good luck with the new gig 3 days ago
- @BeParticular Thanks - enjoyed talking shop. Also, good luck with your pursuit of additional equipment to accompany your guitar! 3 days ago
- @whoisvince Thanks for the invite and organizing tonight's @aUXg meetup. 3 days ago
- @whoisvince Sure thing - I can be available for the @aUXg event Monday evening. (Thanks @juliemtaylor) 1 week ago