A Wider Net

Amazon Offers Highly Targeted Ads, Deals Widgets

By Greg Jones December 8th, 2010

Amazon shows it’s aptitude yet again with highly targeted ad widgets called Deals Widgets. Take a look below for three examples of these widgets and what makes them different. Please note, these are live widgets, but I didn’t sign in to Amazon before creating them, so no one here gets revenue from these, they are purely for example. Go slap one on your personal website and tell me how it does!

Deals by Category

This widget allows you to select a category, such as Web Marketing
or in this particular case: All Categories > Books > Professional & Technical > Business Management > Marketing & Sales > Marketing > Web Marketing.

Since it is so highly targeted, this ad might do much better on this site, since the category matches that of our blog.

Gold Box Deals

This widget includes: Deal of the Day (1 deal per day), Lightning Deals (limited quantity, when available), Our Best Deals (best deals from across the site)

Warehouse Deals Deep Discounts (Amazon used)

This widget includes: open-box products sold at deep discounts under the 3rd party merchant Warehouse Deals

Posted in Digital Marketing, Marketing Technology, Measurement & Analytics, User Experience | Comments Off

7 Billionth Person Infographic

By Greg Jones December 6th, 2010

The Economist recently posted a video to YouTube about population rates. In 2011 we are due to see 7 billion people on earth, and although this statistic doesn’t mean much for marketing technology, their infographic sure is cool:

Have any others to share?

Posted in Creative Approach, Digital Marketing, Measurement & Analytics, User Experience, Video Production | Comments Off

Google Refine, Power Tool for Data Wizards

By Greg Jones November 15th, 2010

If you deal with data on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, and if you haven’t heard of Google Refine v2, you are in for a treat!
Excel has it’s uses, and it packs quite a few functions, but when dealing with messy data, it often takes more steps, more hacks, and more time to deal with excel spreadsheets than it is sometimes worth. Google Refine isn’t a replacement for Excel, but it sure is a powerful tool to supplement data related activities.

You can download Google Refine and start using it locally, so your data is safe. The more technically inclined you are, the farther you will likely go with Google Refine. One of the best features is the ability to call and link to databases, and apply a series of complex actions to multiple sets of data to accomplish the same result on a different, but similarly structured set of data.

For some ideas on what to expect, watch all three videos after the break: