What are the best practices in display ads?

Hey, I'm a conversion optimization consultant so I can offer some help here. Whether a conversion rate is "good" or not is a relative measure. If you run a test and get it to 35% from 26%, that's good! If if go from 26% to 10%, then you know you could be doing better. Comparing your conversion rate to industry averages rarely tells you anything meaningful or actionable, so the best thing you can do is continue testing and compare to your old baseline. The confidence level is the likelihood that the detected result actually exists. For example, if you flip a coin 10 times it will likely land on one side more than the other. If you stopped testing after 10 flips, you might assume that one side has a higher probability than the other... But we both know that's wrong. The real result (50/50) would only begin to emerge after 20 flips, and even then you would not have 100% confidence. So you don't want to start flipping (ie, testing) too soon because you might draw the wrong conclusion ("the coin landed on tails 6 out of 10 times, therefore tails beats heads by 20%"). You also want to know when to stop and what is the smallest meaningful difference ("the coin landed on tails 49 out of 100 times, and the 2% difference is not significant, so we can confidently say the probability of landing on tails is the same as landing on heads.") The confidence level tells you when you've reached this point. Before you start any A/B test, you need to know how many "flips" (sample number, ie, visitors) are need to reach a result that is likely to be true, and what is the minimum significant change (is a 2% increase significant, or is that just random fluctuation?). Here is a handy calculator to calculate this before you start your test: http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html If you (or anyone reading) would like some help in setting up and running A/B tests to increase conversions, get in touch!

Paid option: Do a paid press release on prweb.com. Free options: 1) To respond to reporters that are looking for content related to your product, subscribe to HARO (helpareporter.com) and check it daily and respond to relevant requests with information on your product. 2) To actively pitch your product story to reporters, first find the right ones: A) In google type in keywords relevant to your product. B) Click on the 'news' category C) filter the results by 'recent' or 'blog' Some journalists cover a particular topic, others cover particular region. Find the ones in each category relevant to your product. To contact them, look them up on Linkedin, Twitter, etc. In your correspondence, make sure you show them that you've read what they've written about in the past and describe your product and how it's relevant. They need reads / hits on the article to get paid, so make sure to frame your story in a way that would help them do that. If you'd like more specific advice on how to frame your product for particular stories, etc. let me know, Lee

Yes. Use the "Link Text" in your facebook ads to A/B test various domain names. To do this, simply launch a few identical ads, and only change the link text to say the variation of the domain name you are considering. The ad with the highest CTR (not conversion rate or other KPI) will be the one that sparks the most interest in your target audience. Note: one domain may have a high relevance to one audience, but low relevance with another. So this tactic should only be used if you have a very specific demo you are targeting.

When you publish information about someone without permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. Most states have laws limiting your ability to publish private facts about someone and recognizing an individual's right to stop you from using his or her name, likeness, and other personal attributes for certain exploitative purposes, such as for advertising goods or services. You can read more here: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/publishing-personal-and-private-information Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)