
Google AdWords for TV - _pius
http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/index-b.html
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compumike
We've been trying it out on a limited basis. You pick show-level targeting,
set a max CPM (cost per thousand households) bid, and a max daily budget.
Then, after it runs, you get reports about # of impressions, etc.

It clearly brings a lot of traffic when it runs, and those do clearly turn
into some sales (self-reported in our post-checkout survey). We don't yet have
enough data to know whether it pays for itself.

If you want some "orders of magnitude" numbers to play with, we're talking
about a few bucks per thousand households CPM rates, with a "click through
rate" (visitors per watching household) in the few-tenths-of-a-percent range
(hard to track but we try). We're still trying to nail down those numbers, but
it seems to be a fairly expensive way to find visitors (although within an
order of magnitude of other methods, so we're hoping that with tweaking of
bids/message/targeting we can make it comparable, because it scales to massive
volume really well if you can afford it!).

Our current 30-second spot: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTM2AVeyEMg>

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kyro
Did you do the commercial yourselves or hire an outside firm? Also, your logo
is pretty confusing. It took me a while to actually realize that it was the
logo for NerdKits while watching that commercial.

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compumike
I did the sketches (pencil+paper+scanner), my co-founder did the music + video
compositing of the commercial, and we paid $100 for the voiceover. We're DIY
people so we had to give it a shot ourselves first. :-)

You can see an earlier version here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aScFQhwHfyE> with a totally different feel...

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ntoshev
This is like adwords without keyword targeting: does the marketplace by itself
add enough value to be worth using?

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tyohn
I've often thought of trying Adwords for TV. Several years ago I used to make
animated commercials for cable TV and one of the major hassles was getting
airtime on cable stations. Has anyone tried it?

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bemmu
Page says I need to graduate from starter edition to standard edition to try
it. Instructions can be found "here". Click here and I get "page not
available". Some other page says there starter editions no longer even exist.
Maybe the error message is wrong, and should say I cannot use it because I'm
not in the USA.

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j_b_f
This page <http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/how.html> seems to indicate
that the maximum video upload size is 100MB. This seems awfully small for
broadcast-quality video. I guess it's only 30 seconds or so, but still.

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timdorr
That works out to ~26.666 Mbit. That's about the quality of Blu-Ray.

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j_b_f
Wow, that's actually great. Thanks for the info.

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mdg
What is this <http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/index-b.html> and
<http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/index-c.html> ?

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patio11
They're doing an A/B test using Google Website Optimizer. You can see the
Javascript footprint if you know what to look for.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever seen Google using GWO. It is
not good software -- for one thing, this thread exists where if they were
doing good A/B testing it wouldn't. I used to joke that they'd swallow broken
glass before using it on a site which actually mattered to their business
interests. Guess I was wrong. (Although they won't be putting it on any app
anytime soon.)

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rcoder
Have you tried out the multivariate experiment type in Optimizer? Unlike the
"classic" A/B test, there's effectively no risk of exposing the fact that
someone is part of an experimental group to normal users. (Of course, HN types
could still pick out the telltale JS fragments in the page source, but that's
a risk with _any_ testing that has a client-side component.)

We've been pretty happy with GWO's combination of being a) free, b) easy for
marketing+management types to use for reporting, and c) integrated with our
Analytics and AdWords accounts.

Just out of curiosity, though: are there competitive hosted solutions you
would recommend over GWO? More options would be a good thing to know about...

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paraschopra
Actually, I have been working on such a tool: Visual Website Optimizer
<http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com>

Let me know if you would like a beta invite.

