Running a retargeting campaign has by far the best performance of any type of online advertising you can buy.  For those of you not familiar with retargeting, the service displays ads to people that have already visited your site but left without making a purchase or submitting their information. Here’s a few tips to get the most out of retargeting:

1. Don’t stalk your visitors – Retargeting works so well because it allows you to recapture someone’s attention after they’ve left your site. People get busy, the phone rings, they get distracted with an incoming email, life happens.It’s great to display banner ads and Newsbullets to these people after they have left your site, just don’t go crazy and stalk them forever by showing your banner.  Typically, retargeting becomes less effective as time goes on.  There’s less of a reason to run your retargeting campaign beyond 30 days.
2. Use Only Two Ad Networks at Most – Work with an ad network that has huge reach to increase your chances of targeting an individual. Here at Adblade, we reach 200 million users every month in the US alone. If you want to work with more than one retargeting network, limit your buy to an additional network. Anything beyond two ad networks, and a visitor can be bombarded with too many ads which could become annoying.
3. Use Different Creative Types – Use a bunch of different creative types when running a retargeting campaign to boost its effectiveness. A combination of IAB Standard banner ads in multiple sizes plus text ads, like Newsbullets, has a multiplier effect on performance.
4. Don’t Ignore All the Metrics – Multiple studies have shown that click-throughs are not a great metric when it comes to online banner display campaigns. If you want to understand the true value of your campaigns, you should look at view-throughs, which measure the number of people who arrive at your site after viewing one of your banner ads.

Content-Style Ads have very different properties than other advertising methods on the web. Since they are prevalent on news sites and have a similar feel to publisher content, you need to put yourself in the mind of the user viewing your ad. Continue reading →

Online advertising can greatly affect consumers’ experiences on webpages, with some formats capable of driving consumers away from a page, according to a recent survey Adblade commissioned from Toluna. The danger for advertisers and publishers is that flash-heavy page takeover ads – the ones that advertisers believe engage consumers and provide publishers with more revenue – are the worst culprits for delivering negative experiences.

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Around here at Adblade, we are always testing new ad units to see if we can create something new that benefits both our publishers and advertisers. In 2008, when we first created the Newsbullets, it was an industry breakthrough that is often imitated but never duplicated. Since then, we have updated Newsbullets a few times and we are excited to announce our newest update.

All new ads will now require a 298 wide x 224 high image creative. These new image sizes are very impactful and are delivering better results for both our publishers and advertisers.

These creatives are shown on most publishers but some might show the older image size. Don’t worry; we will automatically scale our photos down in size as needed so all you need to do is just upload the new size.

We will continue to innovate and test a new creative from time to time. We are always looking to improve our service; so, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us at any time.