Our CEO Aaron had the honor of celebrating at the Space Needle on Wednesday night with his fellow honorees for Seattle Business magazine’s "Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs" list.

Aaron won the award for his pioneering work developing the AdReady platform, which makes display ads work like search ads. The other 24 winners came from many different areas, including Jeremy Lewis and Paul Thelen (the guys behind casual-gaming giant Big Fish Games), Sunil Garg (a student at the UW who helped develop Multilearn, a technology that helps classrooms in the developing world), and another guy you might have heard of, Amazon's Jeff Bezos (he was named "Entrepreneur of the Year").

You can read more about the award and all the winners in the November issue of Seattle Business magazine. Way to go, Aaron!

Posted by Justin Baker on Oct 23, 2009   |   Tweet This   |   Email This

Have you heard about re-targeting yet? There’s been a lot of buzz around this technique in advertising circles—both because it’s extremely effective and because the technology has a certain "wow" factor.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say Beth wants to take a vacation to Hawaii. She goes to the ABC Airlines website to look for deals, and browses through the fares there. She likes what she sees, but thinks she might be able to get an even better deal by shopping around.

So she goes to Yahoo! Travel and starts looking there… and lo and behold, an ABC Airlines banner ad pops up on the Yahoo! site—and it’s advertising a special 20% discount on tickets to *Hawaii*! Magic? No, it’s just re-targeting.

Because ABC Airlines was using re-targeting, they had tagged Beth with a cookie that anonymously logged her visit to their site. So when she left to visit another site—Yahoo! Travel or any other site in their advertising network—she would receive ads tailored specifically to what she had done on ABC's site.

ABC Airlines likes it, because they get to continue a conversation with a potential customer who left their site—and Beth likes it, because she’s getting ads that are relevant to her. (And hey, 20% off!)

So can your company use re-targeting? In the past, re-targeting has taken some behind-the-scenes development work to implement, using third-party re-targeting companies that come with a hefty price tag.

But now the process is largely automated, and the AdReady platform makes it easy and inexpensive to use re-targeting with your campaigns. We let you re-target in a variety of ways: For example, you can serve users the same ad over and over, or you can enhance the offer each time you touch the user, giving better and better incentives.

Whatever your approach, the goal is always to connect with qualified, highly targeted prospects multiple times, so you can convert more missed sales.

Re-targeting is one of the most effective targeting tools available. It can dramatically increase your results, and many of our advertisers have doubled their return on ad spend with re-targeting.

Contact sales@adready.com if you want to learn more!

Posted by Aaron Finn on Oct 22, 2009   |   Tweet This   |   Email This

How do you really ratchet up optimization on a display campaign? One great way is to design at least three to four different creative themes when you start a campaign. Then, after about two weeks or so, you figure out which one drives the highest conversion rate (i.e., the lowest CPA). Next, you want to freeze the design of that ad and make it your "control" ad.

Now, you experiment. Using your top-performing ad as the "control," you create another three to four variations on that ad and try to beat its performance. You can track performance even more effectively with "tractions"—short for action tracking—a feature on the AdReady platform that we’ve set up to help better quantify user behavior on your site. (AdReady customers can log in to the site to learn more about tractions.)

We’ve found that if you devote the majority of your spend to trying to beat that “control” ad, you can put optimization on the fast track and rack up increasingly impressive stats.

Posted by Justin Baker on Oct 07, 2009   |   Tweet This   |   Email This

DailyCandy bills itself as the "insider guide to your city," with carefully curated info on everything that's "fun, fashionable, food-related, and culturally stimulating in the city you're fixated on (and all over the Web)."

DailyCandy started using our hands-on AdReady Premium service as a test, just to see what we could do. They set a budget goal for a certain number of customer actions they wanted to achieve in a given month, and then our account team—including a designer and a category expert—went to work.

The result of the design and preliminary optimization process was the ad you see below, "NYC Tall." This ad performed so well that it blew through its CPA target and monthly response goal in just two days. (Needless to say, everybody was pretty happy with that "test.")

Posted by Justin Baker on Oct 07, 2009   |   Tweet This   |   Email This

What does it mean when search giant Google announces plans to offer a display advertising exchange?

It means that display advertising is big and getting bigger, with long-term revenue opportunities. Google’s news is no surprise to us—we’ve always seen the potential in display—but it might be a surprise to advertisers who thought display ads were a fading trend.

The big question from our view: How should advertisers take advantage of this opportunity?

Google says you can think of the Ad Exchange like a stock exchange that "only the largest brokerage houses actually plug into, say, the NYSE." So where does that leave the average advertiser? Clearly, most advertisers will still benefit from technologies like the AdReady platform to help with their digital marketing.

How is AdReady different? AdReady focuses on each advertiser’s needs, not on any particular network or publisher:

First, we have no financial interest in recommending one buy over another—something we think might be difficult for Google, when they own the inventory in their own exchange. Each recommendation by AdReady is unique and earned.

Second, we think that the sky’s the limit on reach and opportunity. AdReady helps advertisers design, launch, and measure banner ad campaigns across Google, Yahoo!, and other publishers and networks that reach more than 90 percent of all Web users. We provide unfettered access to all sources of media from one platform.

If Google is the "NYSE" (and, say, Yahoo! is the "NASDAQ" and AOL is the "Amex"), then think of AdReady as "eTrade"—a nimble, powerful technology platform that always puts you first and helps you get the most out of your investments.

Posted by Aaron Finn on October 6, 2009   |   Tweet This   |   Email This