Who bought all the ads?

If you’ve noticed recently that the vast majority of the ads you’re seeing on sites that use Google’s Adsense programme for their advertising slots are for the same company? You’re probably being ‘retargeted‘ (remarketed in Google’s parlance) to.

What is retargeting?

Say you go to a website, in my case, Mydomain.com. You look around, but don’t buy anything on that visit (I was just checking my account). Shortly thereafter you’re browsing the web and you start to notice banner ads for that website. Everywhere. You’ve been retargeted. How this works, technically, is the advertiser (mydomain.com for example) has a bit of javascript code on their website that tells Google Adwords that they’d like to retarget you – putting you onto a list that forms a target-able audience in the Adwords interface. Subsequently whenever you’re on a Google ‘content network’ site (site with AdSense) you might see these ads.

Why am I seeing these same ads so often?

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iLike Ads

I like ads. Always have done. Good ones that is. As a teenager my walls were decorated with framed mini-proofs of poster campaigns that my dad worked on. There are some very effective TV and cinema campaigns that I enjoy watching, where each ad is part of a serial and I look forward to the next execution.

Are there any web ads I’d place in the same category? Web ads I’d mention to a friend ‘hey have you seen the latest Acme Widgets banner?’ Um, nope. Mostly they annoy the hell out of me, they make noises or enlarge, unbidden when I mouse over them, (hey. Wired, I’m looking at you) and worst of all are designed to hijack my attention and take me away from the content I want to read.

But the iAds that are demoed in this Stevenote (skip to 45 mins in unless you want to learn about the new features in iPhone OS 4.0), now they looked like the kind of advertising I wouldn’t mind on my phone.

Essentially they’re small ads when when clicked open in a layer over the app you were in. Then what you have could be described as a mini-app within the app, or a micro-site (depends on what paradigm you’re familiar with). Except unlike a standard micro-site there appears to be the ability to interact with the iPhone on a relatively meaningful level – like setting the wallpaper on your iPhone. I can only guess at the other possibilities.

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Domain name housekeeping

An often forgotten aspect of search engine optimisation is centred around various aspects of your domain name. For example Google’s search algorithm takes into account over 200 different factors, categorised as on-page and off-page. On-page is the content of your pages themselves – the visible text and the code. Off-page factors include things like external links and a whole host of things you mostly have no control over.

There are however a number of simple ‘off-page’ domain-related factors that you can control and that search engines consider when ranking sites:

1. Age of domain
   You can’t fake this, but you can buy up older names, sometimes it’s worth making an offer, if the domain you want is up for sale. If it has been registered for a few years, that may help you rank higher, even if it’s not currently in search indexes. Just do your due diligence first – check it doesn’t have a chequered past.
2. Domain ownership details
   Many domain name registrars offer a premium service of domain name anonymity. Google and other search engines aren’t so keen on this. They figure you have something to hide. If you’re worried about privacy and don’t want to put your home address, you don’t have to – nobody’s going to be posting anything to that address (or at least nobody you want to hear from).
3. Domain expiry
   Most people don’t pay for things until they have to. So you wait till your domain name is up for renewal and renew then right? WRONG! A domain with less than a year remaining till expiry is considered as a potential drop-out. Most domain registrars offer multi-year discounts and you don’t have to wait till your name is due for renewal to secure it for 3, 4 or more years more. At around $10 a year for a .com it’s a false economy to hold off on renewing your name till you start getting email reminders.

Now go get your domain in order!

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