How AdSymerix Can Help You Sell Your House - Even In This Market

Today's surprise interest rate drop by the Federal Reserve may pry open the tight fists of mortgage lenders and reignite the sluggish real estate market. If you're a realtor, you know that the problems in the mortgage industry are making it harder and harder for even the most qualified buyers to get the money they need to close a deal. If you're actively trying to sell a home, you can only hope that your house is noticed by someone who has not only the interest but also the means to buy.

AdSymetrix knows that there are hundreds of ways for you to market a home. The question that you're faced with is figuring out the best way to market the home you want to sell.

Realtors, and For-Sale-By-Owners, can use AdSymetrix to monitor the effectiveness of any kind of marketing material imaginable. You can track phone numbers from the sign in the front yard, ads placed on Craig's List, listing on your local MLS, even flyers that you hand out at open houses.

When you know what works, you can focus your efforts and -even in this market- give someone a chance to finally buy their dream home.

AdSymetrix is easy to use, simple to sign up and amazingly powerful. Give AdSymetrix a try, signup, click and email tracking are all free.

Becoming Our Own Clients - Using AdSymetrix to Gauge Advertising Effectiveness

AdSymetrix, the company, has just launched. Our goal is to help advertisers make smarter advertising decisions by providing them (you hopefully) with the information they need to know what works and what doesn't when it comes to their marketing.

When it comes to marketing our business, we're using the same tools we're offering you to determine what works best and what wastes our time. For AdSymetrix, we're looking at a few new ways to get interest into our business and we're tracking each of them.

First, we're looking at some of the pay - per - posting website networks. These networks provide a payment based on whether someone writes a post about your topic. We put a small amount of money in an escrow-like account and give some information about our service. When someone decides that they want to write about us, they grab the necessary information, write whatever they want and some money is deducted from that escrow account and sent to them.

Secondly, we're creating a referral network. Using a company we like called ReferNow, we've created a way to offer our friends and clients rewards for referring their friends and clients to AdSymetrix.

For each of these systems, we've created AdSymetrix Tracking Tools, and over the next few weeks will be able to definitively know which of these systems work for us and could work for you.

So keep an eye out, and let us know what you're doing in your business. Advertising should work, and together with AdSymetrix, we can all make smarter advertising decisions

Follow Your Leads

When you're looking for new business, you have lots of options. You can buy an email list and blast out a hopefully targeted message, create a referral program and entice your current customer base to somehow bring new people to your door, you can advertise in new publications, buy outdoor ads or hire a kid from down the street to walk around town in a sandwich board.

All of these options could work, but how will you know? How do you know whether the person who made a new appointment for next week saw your number in their email, or was given it by a friend or saw your sandwich walker?

AdSymetrix is here to help. We give you the tools you need to tag all of these ads and then track and monitor the responses.

Our system also gives you the control you need to manage the creation of each new lead. Say you do choose to go the sandwich board route. Aside from the fun of humiliating the guy in the sign, you can learn a lot from the responses you get from the ad. Tag your ad with AdSymetrix and every time you get a call from that sandwich board you'll know who's on the other end of the line. We've integrated Google Maps into our application, so you can determine where your new business is geographically centered. And when someone comes in and says that they've seen your humble sandwich board wearer, you can add their information into AdSymetrix and truly understand the value of your advertising efforts.

Give AdSymetrix a try, sign up, click and email tracking are all free.

Community Newspapers and AdSymetrix Tracking Tools

Put yourself in the mind, today, not of a small business owner who's looking for a place to advertise, but a small business owner who has space to advertise and wants to entice other small business owners into advertising with them.

How can a small publisher, say someone who puts out a weekly community newspaper, create a competitive selling proposition in a field where every day their potential advertisers are bombarded with hundreds of other media choices?

One way is to go head to head against your competition. Provide information directly to your potential advertisers about the value of their placing ads in your newspaper. Of course, to go that route, you'll need to have some kind of information at your fingertips that will make your case. And that's where AdSymetrix comes in handy.

With AdSymetrix, your newspaper could track all the responses for every ad placed. You could then go to your next client meeting and show exactly how many responses the quarter page ad in your schools section generated. And as responses equal opportunity, you could make a powerful case that the Return on their Advertising Spend would be higher with your publication than with any other in the area.

AdSymetrix can help the publisher as much as the advertiser. Knowing what ads - and what publications - work, is just a part of how we help you make smarter advertising decisions.

Because Advertisers Demand Sandboxes

NBC and Universal announced today that they will their new viral video website designed specifically to give advertisers a place to put all their supposedly non-advertisement product.

The value of Youtube isn't just in the size of the audience that visits the site, it's in the content that's uploaded - and the public editorializing that got that content online in the first place.

Creating a new "advertiser oriented" video website is creating an artificial sandbox around content that's already out in the world. An advertiser that goes into this site needs to know that just because they can control what's being seen, they won't be able to control who (if anyone) is seeing it.

Advertisers want to surf on the waves of audience participation. But they (you) need to know where the audience is most inviting. AdSymetrix has been designed to help figure out what placements are best for you to reach your potential customers. Customers that may not want to have advertisements spoon fed to them everyday.

Marketplace Looks at How to Sell Online

NPR offers a lot of great programming. One example is Marketplace. They're a comprehensive financial report radio show wrapped in the warm blanket of friendly conversation. You get the feeling that the people who are telling stories on the show just happen to have this information in their back pocket and are killing some time explaining things to you while you're waiting on a cup of coffee.

Today, they have an article that has some relevance to our interests. Let's Count The Ways To Sell Stuff Online looks at Craig's List, Buy.com and Facebook's latest combined effort, and Reaql People Real Stuff, a new video selling service that's a cross between You Tube and classified advertising.

The options given are interesting, and may be worthwhile for your business. The interesting part of the story, however, isn't the list of new ways to sell online, but the reason why people are looking to sell online. It seems that more and more audiences are moving away from mass market advertising and moving towards smaller entertainment options. That means that the audience for your next ad will be smaller than it was last year.

And the best way to understand how you can still maximize the value of that audience is to know what ads work, and what ads don't. And you can do that with the help of AdSymetrix.

Tag Your Ad - any ad, anywhere - and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know what new ways are working for your business, and what new ways just make for an interesting article on drive-time radio.

Creative that Makes a Splash

When buying an outdoor advertisement (a billboard, a sign on a bus, a park bench) it's important to do anything you can to first get the attention of the person traveling by the ad, and then get them to respond to the message in the ad.

The advertising weblog 2wenty 4our has a great example of a fantastic outdoor advertisement for Air New Zealand:


Aside from the question of whether the kayaker is going to crash into the ground, the idea of New Zealand being the land of extreme sports and Air New Zealand being the only way to get there is imprinted in the viewer's head.

But even this ad can use some AdSymetrix assistance. If Air New Zealand had Tagged Their Ad with AdSymetrix Tracking Tools they'd be able to know whether this beautiful advertisement makes sense to be on the side of a building or inside an art gallery.

AdSymetrix helps businesses who advertise make smarter advertising decisions. Sign up is free.

Expermenting With Advertising

You want to reach that allusive 18-25 demographic. You make cars. You think, "hey, they play immersive video games, what if we were to create an immersive video game that made owning one of our cars the goal of the game?"

If you're Toyota, you're big enough to experiment. Sometimes, the experiment doesn't quite work out. Take for example the latest campaign for Scion. Toyota's hoping to launch a new 'trendy' car model called the xD by using a surprisingly violent message.

Slate looks at the new campaign and game today, and nicely points out that while the overall strategy may be worthwhile, the execution of that strategy leaves mixed messages. The goal of the game associated with the new xD is to kill as many "Sheeples" as you can, ultimately using their blood to fuel your new car.

Toyota would hope that the viewer (or in this case, the player) is left thinking that by owning an xD they've destroyed the sheep-like conformity plaguing the car buying public. But the feeling most people get is that owning an xD makes you a bad person.

Experimentation is good. It helps you understand the boundaries of your marketing message and find new ways to connect with your target audiences. The key to any experiment is to find a way to evaluate the results. AdSymetrix has been created to make that kind of evaluation simple and easy. Just Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors your responses. You'll know what ads are working and what ads are wasting your time.

When Blogging Becomes Dangerous

There's a lot to be said for keeping your clients aware of what's going on in your business via blogging. Open companies breed stronger relationships with the people that they work with. The problem comes in when the people blogging say too much.

Look at the latest problems that have hit the CEO of Whole Foods. He was posting inflammatory comments on stock message boards trying to bad mouth a competitor that he eventually succeeded in purchasing. Now the SEC is looking into the matter.

It's important to remember, as you'll find any of these CEOs will tell you, that when you're blogging you're still talking for the company. You can be open and honest and irreverent, but you have to remember that you're still the voice of the company. And every voice counts.

Still, operating blogs to goose traffic to your website or connect with your customers is quickly becoming good business. Nicely, the responses that you generate from your online activities can be tracked and monitored through AdSymetrix.

Simply Tag Your Ads and entries and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know who's interested in your business and get great feedback about your blog.

With Great Audience Comes Great Responsibility.

Google's finding itself in a bit of a snit these days. There's a new movie out from documentarian Michael Moore called Sicko. It focuses Mr. Moore's cameras at the health care industry in America. As you could probably expect, the health care industry isn't particularly happy about this new movie. What you probably wouldn't expect is that Google - via their Google Health Advertising Blog - is advocating that they provide a first wave of defense against the potential public uprising by offering ideas about how health care advertisers can utilize Google to supply their own information to anyone searching for Sicko based content. A point of view quickly retracted by the writer of the blog post.

The issue that arises is one of editorial conflict of interest. Any publication can set its own editorial policies, and choose what kind of advertising they'd like to have in their pages. Google's advertising network is agnostic, it cannot push one product over another nor one political ideal over another. Doing so diminishes the value of the network.

We bring it up because it is important for advertisers to know how their ad placement decisions effect the potential responses they get from their ads. It probably is a good idea for health care companies to advertise on searches related to the new movie, but thinking up that idea shouldn't be the job of the advertising network.

When you place an ad you need to know if its working. AdSymetrix is here to help. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know what ads work and what ads are just wasting your time and money.

Marketing With A Sense Of Humor

If the web did anything, it brought about a great appreciation of irreverent humor. With sites from The Onion to YouTube using humor to not only present entertainment but also present innovative advertising.

Brand Channel this week showcases how branding and humor go hand in hand. If anything, compelling content gets more attention, and advertising with humor is a way to get people to look at your message.

The important thing to remember is that while it may be hilarious to watch someone fall on their backside, it might not be the best way to get people interested in your product. Work within the limits of your brand and you'll have a better chance of getting not only more people to view your ad, but more people to remember your message.

And of course, when you're driving towards a response, you should have a way to know whether the ad is working. AdSymetrix has been designed to give you the information you need to know about your advertising. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses.

If you'd like to enter our private beta, visit AdSymetrix today.

Advertising in an Adversary World

As a business owner, you have a good relationship with advertising. For your business, advertising is a key way to get new customers interested in the services you have to sell. The annoyances you deal with are substantial, but they are all aimed towards a worthwhile goal: building your business.

Your potential customers have a different relationship. To them, advertising can be an annoyance. Sure it can give them the answer they need just when they need it, but most of the time advertising gets in the way of whatever they were doing when the ad was noticed.

Plenty of new software has been developed to help the customer avoid advertising. TiVo and ReplayTV were initially created to avoid television commercials. In all, there are new roadblocks being built every day that will make advertising your messages more difficult.

And that's why you need to know what works. AdSymetrix has been developed specifically to give you the information you need to make the best decisions for your advertising plans. Simply Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitor the responses. You'll know where your ads work, and where you're money and time is being wasted.

Sign up now and start saving money on your next advertising campaign.

When to trust, and not to trust an online review

Salon has a great article today that talks about the reliability of online review websites. Or more specifically, the un-reliability of these sites.

One of the sites that the article looks at is Yelp. Yelp has scared the pants off your local yellow pages company by bringing to the web not only a dynamic way to find local businesses but by adding a social networking component of ratings to listings. The phone company used yellow page directories to give you the ability to make a call, companies like Yelp let you make your connections within the directory.

But the problem the advertiser finds, and the one focused on in today's Salon article, is that the reviews are given the same level of legitimacy as the content of the listing. Meaning that while your store may sell the best chocolate ever made, if someone doesn't like it, they can talk badly about your chocolate to your customers at the point when those customers are making their decision to buy from you.

As with all things online, it's important to keep an eye on the reviews of your business. They will always tell you something about how people are viewing you. And knowing how people view you is just one of the things AdSymetrix does.

AdSymetrix can let you know when someone has contacted you through any listing, any advertisement, anywhere. And knowing how they're finding you helps you find out what they're thinking about you.

Give AdSymetrix a try, sign up - and email and click tracking - are free .

Maybe This Will Work

NBC has decided that the reason you're fast forwarding through commercials is because they aren't live enough. So, starting this week they've taken another page out of Uncle Miltie's book, and started doing live commericals during the Tonight Show.

The hope, as you're probably well aware by now, is to garner additional audience by offering something more interesting than regular commercial fare. Whether it makes you more inclined to watch, or more importantly buy, whatever is being promoted has yet to be determined.

Ultimately, it's a gimmick. NBC hopes that you'll be intrigued enough by live content to want to pay attention to their advertiser. The advertiser hopes that too.

The only real way to wash away the hope and replace it with results is to understand how your ads are working for you. AdSymetrix makes it easy. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor your results. Then you'll know whether the risk of a live ad is worth anything to your business.

Pushing Your Message Everywhere

In Real Estate, the mantra is "location location location". In marketing the same thing could be said for repetition.

Recognition is but one step towards a sale, but it's an important one. That's why you see multiple locations for individual advertisements from a single organization. The repetition of message increases your ability to recall their services the next time you need something that they can sell.

As the current advertising market continues to splinter in to smaller and smaller groups, advertisers are looking for new ways to bring their message to more people, more often. One way that you're going to see more of is Branded Entertainment.

The idea behind branded entertainment isn't new. In the 1950s, Milton Berle was the biggest thing on television, and his show was called Texaco Star Theater. The brand Texaco taking top billing. Now you're more likely to see actual products showcased inside an episode than merely just the name of the company in the title, but the concept is the same.

Whether this works is still up in the air. Apple's gotten a lot of play out of always supplying Mac's to the good guys in movies and television shows, but their growing market percentage has more to do with their regular ads and innovative products than branded entertainment.

Ultimately, everything comes down to responses. And the best way to know whether your business decisions are the best business decisions is to us AdSymetrix. But you knew that already.

Brand Building - Non-Response Advertising

Advertising should yield measurable results. Everything else in your life does, from your miles per gallon to the calories in your afternoon snack, why shouldn't your advertising?

For the most part, advertising that includes some sort of 'call to action' on the part of the viewer is great for your business. Place a "Call Now" next to a phone number and you'll be one step closer to actually getting that viewer to call you. And AdSymetrix has been designed specifically to help you understand the relationship between your ads and the responses they generate.

But you can put more in your next advertising campaign than just a giant phone number. You can integrate your call to action with something a bit less tangible, your brand.

It's been a while since we mentioned it here, but Brand Strategy is an important part of your marketing mix. Your company's brand is its personality. It's the thing people think about when they think about your company. Not just how they use your products or services, but how they feel about your business and why they trust you with their money.

One of the smartest people in branding is a guy named David Aaker. Harvard Business Review has made available a pamphlet online that shows how some companies have reached out to their customers in ways that expressed the companies' brands while still getting those all-important responses.

Growing your business is tough work. You need to keep your eye on all the ways that your potential customers see you. AdSymetrix has been designed to help. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. And in one simple to understand webpage you can see just how your advertising is working.

Give it a try, Signup is Free.

What the Big Boys in Online Advertising are Thinking.

You buy your music online, you reserve a table for dinner online, you probably even get directions to dinner, why not advertise online?

In the past few weeks, major players in the online advertising field have been gobbled up by even more major players in the online services field. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have absorbed Doubleclick, Right Media and aQuantive respectively.

What's all this mean for the advertiser? The Wall Street Journal sat down for a few answers with David Moore, the chairman and CEO of 24/7 Media, an online advertising company that was itself recently purchased by WPP Group.

While the advertising landscape changes, remember that the best way for you to know how to spend your advertising dollar is to measure the value of every ad you place. And the easiest way to do that measurement is by using AdSymetrix. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses.

We're gearing up for a new beta test right now, stop by and give AdSymetrix a try.

Newspapers Need To Listen

A slew of articles came out today pointing the finger at print publications for their ways of dealing with the new, new media.

From Macy's yelling about the marketplace to publisher's hiding their heads in the sand about the potential of the new marketplace, the hits come from all sides.

It's in this kind of environment where new directions in marketing matter. And for anyone, advertiser or publisher, to know whether their ads work, an independent observer will be needed.

That's where AdSymetrix comes in. AdSymetrix has been developed to allow advertisers and publishers understand the true value of their advertisements. Simply Tag your Ad, and let AdSymetrix track and monitor its responses. Finally, there's a way for anyone in the advertising world to know what's going on with their messages.

Sign up is free.

Place the Ad, But Will Anyone Watch?

Spending a bunch of money making the most creative, most receptive, most entertaining and engaging advertisement and find out that nearly all of your intended audience decide that it's more important to fast forward / skip over/ otherwise ignore your message just to get to the next song, TV show or article can really make you angry.

The New York Times looks at ways that companies are trying to TiVo-proof their advertisements, in a bid to keep advertising relevant.

The story is made all the more interesting when you realize that the company looking to TiVo-proof its ads is in fact TiVo itself.

As an advertiser you need to know that the ads you put out are seen by the people you want to see them. Even better, you would love to know what ads will get those people to actually respond and contact your business.

AdSymetrix is here to help. Tag your ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors the responses that come streaming in from any advertisement anywhere. Sign up is free

Why Networked Ad Sales are Suddenly So Newsworthy

Business Week nicely explains the reason why companies like Yahoo and Google are doing their best to buy up the online ad sales networks DoubleClick and Right Media -- they want to own the advertising transaction.

Simply put, business is driven by advertising. Yahoo and Google know that if they're going to sell advertising, they should create ways to sell as much advertising as they can. By buying the ad sales networks, they're expanding their inventory exponentially. They may not make as much selling an ad on your site as they would on one of their own, but they're still making something. And that something has immense value to these companies.

And for you, the advertiser that wants to buy ads in various media, you have to find a way to manage your advertising buys as economically as possible. That's where AdSymetrix comes in. Tag Your Ad with AdSymetrix and use our tools to track and monitor your ad, in any media, anywhere.

Stop by and give AdSymetrix a try, sign up is free