Online Advertising: Remnant Traffic

What is “remnant traffic”, and why it is good for advertising?

‘Remnant traffic’ myths.
There are a multitude of myths and misconceptions concerning different aspects of online advertising which are still misleading for both Internet users and advertisers alike. One of these misconceptions is the definition of ‘remnant traffic’. Some advertising networks and agencies have their own glossary open for public use, where remnant traffic is often defined as “the most inexpensive ad inventory traffic by disreputable sites or empty ‘parked domains’ advertising inappropriate content”. Is remnant traffic really as bad as we are led to believe?

In order to understand what remnant traffic truly is let’s look more closely at what the traffic is the remnant of.

Premium traffic: The easiest way to understand is to imagine the banner of a famous brand on a top website’s homepage. In fact premium traffic is the “cream” of a website’s audience. Websites that provide premium traffic are guaranteeing to the advertiser that the audience will note the ad. They will primarily display the banner at notable places so ALL visitors to the site will see it.

This gives us our opposing definition of ‘remnant traffic’. First of all this term had been considered as the unsold inventory of our big brand advertiser above. Another stereotype is that historically remnant traffic was thought of as sold by low traffic ‘unpopular’ websites only, as they have no hope of attracting big name brands as advertisers. In the absence of alternatives these low traffic sites place banners from blind networks, which offer inexpensive ads often of doubtful content and quality.

Thus there formed a situation where premium traffic is considered as top websites traffic and remnant traffic is the traffic of the other less popular resources online. That would sound quite reasonable if it wasn’t found to be largely untrue under detailed consideration. In order to sort out the fact from the fiction let’s look at the nearest relation of online ads – advertising on TV, radio and traditional print media.

As it turns out there was already a very close definition of ‘remnant advertising’ in TV, radio and print media.

Is there ‘remnant advertising’ in the other media?
TV remnant advertising is advertising at any time except prime-time. The further from prime-time an advert is shown, the more discounts a channel offers to advertisers. Discounts on TV may reach 90% for unsold inventory. Discounts on radio are also prevalent and depend on time of broadcast and usual audience listening figures. These discounts may range from 25% to 75%.

Another rule operates for printed media as they are selling physical advertising space. Advertising space nearer the middle of the newspaper is priced vastly differently from a front page advert cost. In this case a direct comparison can be made between advertising on the front page of a newspaper with a banner on the homepage of a popular website.

The win-win nature of remnant advertising was accepted long ago in traditional media advertising and so the approach to premium and remnant ads was formed as the market matured. It is obvious and logical that those media may offer discounts up to 90% for unsold time or space. This is called remnant advertising. In this case both the channel and the advertiser are gaining. The channel covers 100% of scheduled advertising inventory; the advertiser is placing his advert with resources required with a great discount. So as we can see the place for remnant advertising was found in traditional media. Further remnant advertising is working effectively and not giving rise to the rejection of potential participants whether they be advertisers, advertising agencies or publishers.

‘Remnant traffic’ as it is.
Now let’s return to the Internet. If you look through the homepage of any top website, you will usually see only big-brand advertising in all the most notable places. Obviously this is premium traffic, somewhat analogous of prime-time on TV or magazines’ or newspapers’ front pages. If however you leave the page and return to it once or twice, the displayed advertising begins to change before your very eyes from a big brand to smaller or less well known advertisers or brands.

It turns out that as well as TV channels sell their prime-time, large websites sell impressions with a ‘first demonstration’ privilege. By refreshing a page several times we leafed through the big brand premium ad traffic and may now in fact see true ‘remnant advertising’ on a popular website. So that means top sites also have remnant traffic don’t they? Undoubtedly they do and they monetize it as well as traditional media do with their remnant advertising through great discounts. Separately it should be noted that this is the same mythical remnant traffic, which some networks and agencies associate with something inexpensive, negative and full of inappropriate content. These terms are obviously mismatched with the reality of remnant ads on top websites. On these top websites, remnant inventory may still be very expensive and high quality both for ad placement and ad content. Thus we have dispelled this particular myth.

But what should small low-traffic sites do? They do not attract huge site traffic numbers and thus cannot place premium class brand advertising. Are there any alternatives except the placement of inexpensive ad of sometimes very doubtful content, as described at the beginning of this article’s?

Can we benefit from using ‘remnant traffic’?
There are currently four main alternatives each with different pros and cons:

(a)You may place contextual advertising from one of the big search engines. Such services offer banner display advertising too. Among the advantages we should mention flexibility and adaptability of ad settings, rotations, localization etc. The disadvantages include delays with site verification and authorization to collaborate this program and delays with revenue payouts for displayed ads. Example: Google AdSense

(b)You may place a banner from one of the ‘blind’ ad networks. The principal advantages are that it is fast, simple and will generate money for anybody without exception. The disadvantages are lower revenues and the very real possibility of the appearance of inappropriate or shocking advertising content. Example: Clicksor

(c)You may register at a specialized remnant traffic ad network. These networks specialize in monetization of remnant traffic only. Both medium and high traffic sites use their services to fill their remnant ad inventory. The principal advantages are a generally high return in comparison with the alternatives and guaranteed clear and appropriate ad content. The main disadvantage is the current inability to monetize Chinese, Korean or Indian traffic sufficiently using these ad networks. Thus this alternative should be chosen in the case of sites with predominantly European or US traffic. Example: Fidelity Media

The Finer Points of Internet Auctions

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.

The Point of Budgeting In Small Business

Too many small businesses operate without budgets. And many small businesses that do have budgets aren’t getting as much out of them as they could. We’ve seen it time and again.It isn’t because the mechanics are difficult to manage. Everyone knows the basics of how budgets work: you track money coming in, you track money going out, and you do your best to plan for the future. In fact, the very simplicity of that formula is what leads some small-business owners to consider budgets not worth the trouble.Therefore, what we’ll discuss here isn’t what budgeting entails, because if you don’t already know that, you can find it out with ease. We’re more interested in why you should budget in the first place. Our suggestion, to put it plainly, is that budgeting is a way to amplify the very creativity and adaptability that allow small businesses to thrive.Budgets’ ReputationYou don’t become an entrepreneur because you have a burning love of spreadsheets. At least, not usually. Being an entrepreneur isn’t supposed to be about budgeting. It isn’t supposed to be about paging through endless columns of variable costs or putting caps on spending. It’s supposed to be about having the freedom to blend innovation and risk-taking with passion and expertise. It’s supposed to be about removing barriers, not building them.That being the case, small-business owners often see budgets as antithetical to the very spirit of entrepreneurship. According to this perspective, budgets impose stifling limitations. They’re artifacts of mega-corporate culture devised by clammy-handed people in windowless rooms with poor lighting. They may be necessary evils for sprawling, inhuman conglomerates, but when it comes to organizations that rely on individual personalities and individual decision-making, budgets are more burdensome than helpful.You might say the constraints imposed by budgeting make small businesses less nimble. Since nimbleness is one of their main advantages over larger rivals, budgets actually decrease small businesses’ ability to compete.Or so the story goes.Some of it is accurate. For instance, it’s true that passion and innovation go hand in hand with entrepreneurship. It’s true that small businesses should strive to leverage their size into a competitive advantage. And it’s true that budgeting for small businesses is much different from budgeting for colossal corporations.What’s not true is that budgets impose constraints. Budgets don’t actually impose anything. They merely describe constraints that are already present. Perhaps more importantly, they describe a business’s ability to cope with and even manipulate constraints placed on it by forces internal and external.Constraints and Entrepreneurial CreativityIf you’re an entrepreneur, you’re aware that your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It’s part of a staggeringly complex system. For instance, you have your relatively immediate concerns, such as your employees and your local government. You also have your relatively big-picture concerns, such as national debt and foreign trade policy. No matter what, when you start a small business you’re going to be hemmed in by laws, regulations, and unavoidable economic realities, all of which will have a major impact on how you operate.In other words, no small business starts out in a position of unfettered freedom. The very conditions that allow small businesses to exist also impose a variety of constraints. Working capital, interest rates, the minimum wage, the minimum competitive salary for professional employees-there are countless factors that limit what you can do and how much money it takes to do it.You can acknowledge the reality of these factors, but if you don’t have a budget, then you might not know the exact ways they’re affecting you. What particular constraints does a business in your industry have to deal with? Are there some that have a disproportionate impact on you because of the way your business functions? Can you make changes to reduce their impact? Are there constraints that you handle in an especially productive way? Can you turn this productivity into an advantage over your competitors? Do you approach some constraints the way everyone else does, even though you could be doing a better job with them?These are the sort of questions a budget helps you answer. It doesn’t create limitations that weren’t there before. Rather, it gives you a way to assess the pre-existing limitations that every small business in your industry has to deal with. The more thorough your assessment of those limitations, the greater your ability to work within them, work around them, or in some cases, make them work for you.Making limitations work for you is where entrepreneurial creativity comes into play. If you have enough details on your business’s limitations, then you’ll be better able to turn those limitations into innovations. A budget will help you marshal your creative energies and find the opportunities for profit embedded in the market’s constraints. It tells you exactly what assets you have to work with, and helps you map out how those assets can be put to the most productive use given the rules of the industry.After all, most of the market-based constraints you experience will be shared by your competitors, who also have limited amounts of money and freedom. Which of you comes out on top won’t be determined by who has the fewest constraints, but by who does the best job of manipulating common constraints to find the possibilities they hide.Speed, Spontaneity, and ProfitSmall businesses, precisely because they’re small, tend to be better than their larger competitors at taking quick, decisive action. It’s one of their vital advantages. By the same token, it’s one of the challenges that all entrepreneurs are bound to face. You’ll be forced to react on a moment’s notice to emerging opportunities or perils in the market-that’s a given.What’s less certain is the profitability of your reactions. Obviously, acting or adapting fast doesn’t do much good if it yields a loss.So what information will you use to make your quick decisions? Do you have a detailed, practical breakdown of your business’s strengths and weaknesses? Do you know exactly how many resources you can afford to redeploy at a moment’s notice? Do you know how efficiently different aspects of your business tend to use the resources you devote to them? Are certain aspects of your business already strained? Are certain aspects flush with the potential for expansion?A budget gives you a diagnostic readout of your organization. It tells you how much stress the business can handle and which areas can handle it. Hence, it helps you decide whether acting conservatively or aggressively in the short term will enhance your performance over the long term. Without a budget, you’ll be relying too much on guesswork, and many of your quick decisions may be needlessly risky.Supply-chain RelationshipsA budget not only helps you assess yourself, but also helps you assess your relationships with other entities, like vendors and subcontractors. This will be especially important when the market is in flux.As you know, successful entrepreneurship entails evaluating the vast array of forces that constitutes the market and determining where-for someone in your industry, someone with your passion and expertise-the opportunities and roadblocks lie. But no one can predict with any certainty how the market will behave tomorrow. There will be surprises. Sudden chances and sudden setbacks.We’ve already noted that the way you respond to these inevitable surprises will play a critical role in the profitability-or survival-of your business, and that your ability to make the right call at the right time will be drastically greater if you have a budget in place. This is not only because a budget tells you about your own resources, but also because a budget helps you deal with other organizations that affect you.Let’s say you experience a sharp increase in demand for your product. It’s good news, but it brings up questions: Do you have enough working capital to provide your product to a large number of new customers/clients? What are the current resources of each division of your business? How many more resources does each division need if it’s going to ramp up its activities? How efficiently does each division tend to use its resources?These are all internal questions that may well lead to others, such as: What do your vendor accounts look like? How much new inventory can you afford to purchase? What type of sales will you need if you’re going to pay off the new purchases on time? Can you afford to hire subcontractors to help with the push?And, of equal or greater importance: What’s your plan for a downturn in demand? Will you find yourself in a precarious position with your vendors? Will you be able to keep promises to new customers? Will you be able to pay your subcontractors for the hours they’ve put in?Indeed, budgeting can provide invaluable support for all your relationships. As noted on Inc.com, “your suppliers are in all likelihood mapping out their expectations for the year and you can help them do so by providing your outlook. As a best practice, you should share your budget and the variety of scenarios you might face to see whether they can handle each level of demand” (Field 2010).Since your business is one element in a network of other businesses, it’s important for you to be able to communicate both your capacities and your expectations to the people you rely on. A budget serves as a tool for facilitating such communication. It gives you a concrete way of describing not only where you stand, but also where you will stand in a given scenario. Thus, it helps foster strong partnerships and avoid uncomfortable conversations.This doesn’t mean sharing every detail of your budget, nor does it mean sharing some details with everyone. It simply means that guarding your budget like a state secret takes away some of its efficacy. You can use select portions of your budget to assist you in negotiating with critical partners-i.e., you can be prudent about the information you divulge without being obscure. How much do your current business partners know about your budget? Is it enough for them to understand your capacities and your needs?The BankSpeaking of business relationships: you don’t want to mess around with the bank. Plain and simple. This is a relationship that should be as friendly and open as possible. And what do bankers like? Budgets. As the American Bankers Association (ABA) says, “You are flying in the dark financially if you don’t have a budget for all income and expenses.”Come to them without a budget, and bankers are going to feel like you’re wasting their time. They’re certainly not going to be interested in loaning you money (or more money). “Prepare for your financial review with your banker,” says ABA. “Have current inventories, cash flows and balance sheets ready.”When your banker asks you how your debt is structured, and whether you have an imbalance between long- and short-term debt, what are you going answer? Trust us: if you show up to that meeting with a budget, you’ll be glad you did.FlexibilityJust as the market’s unpredictability makes budgets useful, it also makes them fallible. A budget is like any plan: it will contain inaccurate predictions and require ongoing revision. That’s simply a condition of commerce; some academic models are predicated on entrepreneurs having perfect foresight, but we all know that’s not the case. Businesspeople, even the world’s most celebrated financial prognosticators, get it wrong sometimes.That doesn’t render planning completely useless. Even if your plans don’t entirely match the way reality unfolds, they serve as benchmarks against which you can assess your progress. They record where you wanted to go, where you actually went, and why the two didn’t coincide. In that way, they indicate which areas of your business are performing well, and which need to be modified in order to meet next quarter’s goals.When it comes to small-business planning, certainty is off the table. Nothing is guaranteed, including budgets. But setting expectations and monitoring progress remain indispensable to long-term survival. They help small-business owners analyze why they’re drifting off course, and also help them formulate corrective measures.How do you see a budget? As a static report that turns old news into flimsy predictions? Or as a series of living documents that records how you adapt to change?PersonnelThorough budgeting calls for a great deal of effort, and many small-business owners can’t spare the necessary time or energy. Frankly, while the minutiae of budgeting are of interest to the entrepreneur, they are not the entrepreneur’s main job. If they were, then a good head for numbers and a background in financial analysis would be prerequisites for entrepreneurship. Yet plenty of small-business owners have succeeded without an affinity for mathematics or statistics. Entrepreneurs don’t all begin as certified public accountants.That being the case, most small-business owners hire a bookkeeper. A bookkeeper collects and organizes your financial information, which, again, is time-consuming and requires close attention to detail. Too much time and too much attention for small-business owners to sacrifice. But even if you’re not involved with gathering and sorting your financial information, you needn’t remain aloof from it. To get the most benefit from budgeting, you’ll want to be accustomed to reading your financial statements and locating important data in your financial system. When you meet with your bookkeeper, are you talking about his or her methods? Is he or she showing you how your financial information is organized? Are you able to navigate your bookkeeping software on your own, so as to pull up specific pieces of data without your bookkeeper’s assistance?Proper bookkeeping is important, but it rarely goes far enough in the analysis department. You’ll notice that the bulk of our discussion has revolved around using budgets to orient yourself in the market-i.e., using them to take advantage of opportunities and to minimize risks. That requires more than tabulating numbers; it requires interpreting them. It requires fitting your numbers into a larger picture.Is there anyone in your organization besides you who (1) monitors your finances on the close-in, detailed level, and (2) relates the details of your finances to your big-picture performance? If not, chances are you’d benefit from a dedicated financial person. Someone whose duties involve painting a comprehensive picture of your financial universe-more comprehensive, that is, than the picture you’re able to paint on your own, simply because you have other things to do.As with most aspects of running a small business, getting the most out of budgeting requires skillful delegation. If a budget is going to inform your decisions at major turning points, then it’s a good idea to have someone to consult with, someone who’s been looking at the same numbers as you while also looking at the same problems.TakeawayThe value of a budget doesn’t rest on the accuracy of its predictions or the stringency of its cost-cutting. Instead, the value of a budget rests on how well it articulates your business’s financial strengths and weaknesses. A budget exists to help you balance risk against opportunity, to help you determine whether aggressive or conservative action is the right thing for the moment. It also exists to help you communicate with your business partners-to, in other words, cultivate healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with the organizations you rely on.Above all, a budget exists to de-mystify, or express in concrete terms, the limitations imposed on your business by the market. Thorough budgeting, especially when undertaken with the right personnel, can enhance your creative initiatives and merge adaptability with profit. In short, budgeting is a way to sharpen, not blunt, a small business’s advantages.CitationsAmerican Bankers Association. Ten tips for small business owners during tough financial times. http://www.aba.com/Press+Room/PR_Small_Business_troubledtimestips.htm.Field, Anne. 2010. How to budget and manage inventory for 2011. Inc. http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/10/how-to-budget-and-manage-inventory-for-2011.html.