Digital-News on Scoop.it today

Ad Serving is so much more than you think. If our we design future is a series of contingent creative modeled to display based on predictive analytics then the existing very close to that idea is sophisticaed ad serving. 

Ad serving is knowing who is looking at what and how often they've seen it, but ad serving also forms the core of predictive modeling. When we show this ad to this person aor segment in this kind of environment it converts and that is exactly the way we will think of our content soon (as either converting or not).

The problem now is the top of our content marketing funnel  insn't connected to our bottom so traffic generation isn't related to conversion. Traffic is such an interesting problem.

When I sold my house only one person looked at it. Traffic LOW but converison HIGH. When I was an Ecommerce director we needed 12,000 unique visitors a day to sell 400 or 500 customers. so  Traffic HIGH but conversion LOW.

In our new GOOGLe world washing 12,000 uniques a day through for so few conversions would slowly lower your website's value. These days you want your heuristic measures (time on site, pages viewed, conversions such as downloading or signing up for something or buying something to go UP). 

Better to move LESS traffic through your website and get more from them. Sales were interestingly tied to traffic. On the one hand traffic reduciton move the conversion needle down, but that was only because our analytics weren't sophisticated enough to know who to court and who to let go.

By "court" I mean use sophisticated ad serving to model and convert the visit. With Google's new thinking about value and content marketing any websites HEURSTIC measures must improve and in an ever increasing pattern, so can't we use sophisticated ad serving to focus the right content to the right audience and so move heursitcs up.

I can see a financial person doing the, "Sophisticatd ad serving costs X, what does it get us?" Thing and boy do I hate gatekeepers like that because we are on the BLEEDIG EDGE now talking about something that cost NOTHING in relation to its potential benefits such as:

* More Page Views Because More Relevant Content Presented.
* Lower Bounce Rates As You Model Out Crap Traffic.
* Faster pattern recognition on content (ads) that are working.

 Last idea is very important because what is our content OTHER than long form ads? A: Our Content Is Exactly A Long For Ad. what DMers used to call "advertorial". The role of our content in an inbound marketing world is the same as advertorial. It doesn't look as "sell you a a used car", but don't kind yourself if your company is spending millions there better be some clear ROI somewhere. 

Clear ROI is why I want to speak with ADZERK about sophiticaed ad serviing for http://www.curecancerstarter.com.  I suspect we will find so many unintended benefits that building a ROI case won't be a problem. Stay tuned. 

Working on http://www.curecancerstarter.org has been a lesson in web 3.0. Not QUITE here yet but BIG hints of What's Next include:

* The Cloud changes what and how we store.
* When you change what we store you change information architecture.
* You can see the beginning of "appification" of everything (smaller amounts of code executed faster and then updated frequently).
* Websites are becoming contingent on two THEMS (visitors and users of the Content Management System backend).

This last bullet is where the real design revolution lives. Once we design "what if, then..." contingent frameworks based on the needs of visitors (fully modeled based on personas and segments) and those using the CMS we've built we are DESIGNING less and THINKING more.

Each time we've placed limits on how our CMS will be used we've seen the need for LESS structure and more freedom. The logic of WHAT IT, THEN.... dictates a different approach to "designing a website".

This new approach will be less DESIGN and more flexibility, frameworks and user controlled functionality. Web designers, and this is not a new idea from me LOL, are becoming more like video game designers creating environments and contingent presentations.

So prepare to DESIGN less and LISTEN more as you use the new tools of web 3.0 to think in terms of contingencies and environments.