Niel Robertson
Breakfast Rules
Recently Mark Suster wrote a great post on how to use people’s time wisely. I could not agree more. As anyone in Boulder will tell you, the best thing about Boulder is the humility of its community. Everyone is open to meeting anyone else. It’s one of the things I love the most about being here [...]
How Customer Buying Cycles Affect PPC CPA
One of the hardest things for an advertiser new to PPC to get comfortable with is what we call the “CPA roller coaster”. This is the time in a new campaign when you’re spending money on clicks and have not yet seen conversions (sales/leads). If you’re calculating your CPA every day in this phase you’ll [...]
Why Groupon Would be a Good Idea for Google
There has been a lot of speculation lately about a pending purchase of Groupon by Google. A lot of the more recent news recently has focused on all the reasons why this is a bad idea, especially around the purchase price and Groupon’s human-intensive sales model. I wanted to share a few thoughts on this [...]
Crowd Mechanics
Trada recently celebrated its second birthday. It’s been an amazing ride helping our company grow and learning – in real time – about the product that we’re making. Any good organization these days is a learning organization, and I think in general we have a pretty humble attitude about how far we’ve come. While we [...]
Halfnimity
One of my favorite topics in crowdsourcing is the debate between anonymous and non-anonymous approaches to the crowd. While I think in the end it will take all strokes, I definitely feel that the trend is moving towards non-anonymous. The primary reason is that as crowdsourcing systems become more sophisticated, personal reputation can actually be [...]
Got Google (Ventures)?
Today we welcome Google Ventures to the Trada family. Can I just say for one second, “Woot!” For those of you who have not read the news today, we announced that Trada closed a $5.75M Series C round of financing lead by Google Ventures and participated in by our other existing (and awesome) friends at [...]
When Ads Become Content
Okay fine, I’ll admit I have been a bit curmudgeonly about the iPad to date. I even went as far as saying on TWiST that I thought it was going to have a great come out then sort of languish in new device category limbo. This week I finally actually played with an iPad care [...]
Stupid Analytics Tricks: Picking Display Ad Placements Based on Numbers
We use Google Analytics for everything. We track all of our inbound marketing, performance-based marketing and social media efforts. We’re lead focused, so we do our best to track how each source of traffic performs for us and through this, where we should be spending our time and energy. We use this to source PR [...]
Crowdsourcing is the New Internship
In a conversation with my friend and crowdsourcing industry leader, John Winsor (@jtwinsor), we were talking about some of the non-obvious intrinsic benefits of participating in crowdsourcing. John runs a revolutionary agency called Victors and Spoils, which is a ground up brand-focused agency using crowdsourcing techniques to produce innovative solutions for their brand clients. They [...]
Anonymity in the Crowd
One of the important tenants of the Trada marketplace is that all optimizers (our paid search experts) must use their real names. We thought it was very important for our advertisers to know exactly who was working on their campaign. In addition, we felt if real names were out there it would encourage them to [...]
