Surely anyone participating in the Pilsner Urquell Challenge will surely experience a temporary but measurable drop in their IQ. Is that the idea?

If you have a bit.ly link, for example http://bit.ly/4dWnCu

you can insert ‘info’ into the URL thus:

http://bit.ly/info/4dWnCu

to get all sorts of facts and figures, like how many clicks that link has had, which sites are referring using it, who’s tweeting about that particular URL, and that kind of thing.

Graze's first delivery

I just received my first delivery from graze.com, a service that delivers healthy (and not healthy) snacks to your home or office regularly. The website’s a great experience (lots of control, rating opportunities, personalised product and some lovely Ajax coding), and the product looks good too. This is the sort of smart innovative new service I really like.

To get a free trial go to graze.com and enter the code G9LMPCM.

Later, I went to Cineworld’s website, to look up when the new Terminator film is on. Cineworld’s site displays advertising for other companies, and I was surprised to see an ad for Lakeland, which included the very product I’d been browsing for earlier. The surprise effect was strong.

Lakeland banner driven by Criteo

I realised what had happened was that I’d been served a banner ad by a company called Criteo. Basically, they track what you do on their clients’ websites, and then run ads across the Internet which become very personalised if you’ve looked at a product on a client site. So the fact that I’d looked at a banana bag at Lakeland made me the lucky recipient of an add for said product when I went to Cineworld.

Some people might be uncomfortable with the intrusive aspects of this advertising, but I was impressed that it’s working, and the results would be very interesting to see. Showing people ads that we know are relevant to them has to increase effectiveness, and when the average banner gets a click through less than 1 time in 100, these must surely be star performers.

Well worth a read.

1. I visit Google.com and search for “cheap flight”
2. I get directed to cheapflights.co.uk, which uses Google Analytics
3. Later I visit experiencewa.com (which uses Google Analytics) to look at some of the interesting things I could do in Washington State
4. I return to Google and search for something new, say “groceries”

Because Google knows I’ve searched for cheap flights, I’ve visited cheapflights.co.uk, and I’ve visited a site about Washington State, it could infer that I’m planning a trip to Washington, and serve a really targeted ad alongside my groceries search results.

The more websites use Google Analytics, the more complete picture Google will have of where I go online, and the more targeted its advertising could be, assuming they take the opportunity.

But it gets better, because most of the time Google knows who is doing the surfing, at least it does if you use Gmail or a personalised Google home page. So not only does it know about activity on a particular computer, it knows about your activity across multiple computers.

The more people use Google Analytics (a free product, I guess we know why now) the more complete their picture, and the greater their advantage over their advertising competitors.

Anxiety about online tracking is generally overdone, and I’m not particularly concerned that Google knows so much about my surfing habits, but it makes all the concern about Phorm look quite disproportionate, at least it does to me.

For an offer to succeed, it doesn’t just have to be good, it has to be relevant to the recipient, either because they generally buy the product or service being offered, or because they are looking for it at that time. I’m very unlikely to go out and hire a car I didn’t need just because someone is promoting them.

I wonder what the offer’s conversion rate was?

Well, the other day, I noticed the enthusiasts had got one of their predictions right. QR codes are appearing on posters, but perhaps not in the way they expected.

a qr code on a poster

But the really interesting thing is that it’s also an ad exchange, where people who have page impressions (like blog owners) can make money from people who have ads.

I’ll write more about this when I’ve had more of a play with it, but it’s impressive so far.

A quick update: the software works well, but I got tired of the Cialis ads, so I’m using OpenX to serve ads on my website, but not the ones they have available in the Ad Exchange. Hopefully the quality of Ad Exchange ads will improve.