Operative Blog

I always thought, the idea of adverts was to ‘talk’ to someone, but not expect any reply. Like a big ‘talking at’ to anyone who might listen, see, sense…ignore. It was a big reciprocal recite, an invite, that expected no real R.S.V.P, just some subconscious triggering, that might sway an individuals future purchase.

We had TV, print, radio, all targeting large audiences. Yet with the growth of the internet, and how this has now pervaded the advertising eyeball, there’s the immense possibility to flip this ‘one ad to millions’ ratio.

Rather than one ad targeting 1000’s, you can have a multitude of ads, all occupying that same space, but targeted to an individual.

With the current economic climate, advertising revenues are struggling, and advertisers want more for their money: they want clicks, conversions. Yet it’s often the case, that publishers still struggle with configuring their ad servers to maximise their potential, and give more back to their advertisers. If anything, an ad server can appear to a publisher, like another layer of complexity, that’s used as a pawn within the ongoing clashes between editorial, online production and sales teams.

Perhaps understandably, many publishers through bad early experiences with CPA deals flooding their inventory over one campaign, shy away from looking at how to create more successful click rates, and user defined wants, and prefer the more sedentary impression based selling of sections, much like a magazine or paper. In many ways, this is just a current compromise, and to be fair it does the job, but can it remain ever so?

Perhaps the key to successful future revenue generation and advertising is to change one’s perspective of it.

Rather than viewing it as a static revenue tool, whose only other purpose seems to be to annoy editorial across the board with yet more webspace given over to ad slots and ‘advertisement’ titles, perhaps it’s better viewed as an opportunity to involve an audience, with a medium that’s bidirectional, interactive and non repetitively un reciprocal?

Ad servers allow such a variety of targeting, and integration possibilities, that should allow the website to build up a record of well trodden ‘paths’ and track their users surfing behaviour. So you should be able to give information to those who want it.

Where paths intersect, gives the chance to layer the targeting of just one ad slot, and the possibility to create a multitude of targeted packages that are more likely to be relevant to a user. Just by doing this, the revenue generation potential of just one ad slot, can be increased immensely. Many websites have a vast amount of information about their users, from subscriptions, buying habits etc, but this is very rarely integrated with their ad servers. This is after all, information that won’t cause privacy headaches, since their users submitted this information freely.

By adding a series of dynamically generated keywords into ad server tags, based on variables obtained by subscription information and past buying habits, adverts can track a user’s behaviour, increasing the chance of an ad having a click through.

For instance a shopping site, that can collect checkout information, can then adapt that user’s future ad experience, related on what their shopping habits have been recently. Adverts become relevant for them, and their user demographics can also be used in conjunction with this; local area targeting, gender, family size etc. So one ad slot, can then serve a multitude of targeted ads, to a whole host of different targeted audience segments, for every one impression it serves, rather than one ad for all, per impression.

With advances in flash and video, these targeted adverts can almost be like ‘microworlds’ or ‘mini info opportunities’, that allow a user to configure, adapt, and research various options for a product, or an idea or even argument, depending on a site’s content. All of these interactions can be tracked and harnessed into meaningful data, and used to sharpen up targeting, and ultimately make adverts more relevant and useful to a user.

Perhaps the key to successful online advertising in future is less ads, and more interaction, with better targeting and a good dose of subtlety.

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Blogged by Mark Hudspith

As an integral part of Operative’s managed services team, Mark is one of our most experienced Ad Operations Managers, working with global and local clients utilising multiple adervers and rich media creatives.

Successful campaign management is essential to generating current and future revenue for all publishers, large and small. Fulfilling the terms of your contract(s) with the advertiser will ensure you have a shot at the total media buy and develop good standing for future IO’s. In addition to full delivery, reaching or exceeding the advertiser’s expected performance metrics will improve the chances of winning recurring revenue with the advertiser. Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions and poor habits in online advertising that lead publishers to ruin their campaigns — sometimes before they even begin. Through many years of experience, the Operative Managed Services team has developed numerous time-tested pre and post-sale campaign management strategies which, if used correctly, can guarantee the successful delivery of all online campaigns.

Many times a campaign is destined to fail even before it begins. There are a few main causes for this situation. One reason is that a website can be improperly tagged and whoever is responsible for determining available inventory simply is not aware of this. Many times it is the sales team’s responsibility to determine available inventory and it is very likely that the sales team has no idea how to validate the tags in a particular section of the site. For example, it’s possible that the section listed in a RFP is Entertainment, but in actuality the Entertainment section on the site includes tags for the homepage. In this case availability may be extremely understated and the campaign will not even deliver to the intended sections, which could lead the advertiser to cancel the IO. Another more common pre-sale problem is overselling the site. Overselling often is the result of numerous sales people selling the same product at the same time. If there is no real-time central record of what has been booked, it is very likely that two different sales people could book a large campaign for the same product for the same run dates. Many times this isn’t recognized until it is too late and when it’s impossible to recover from the mistake. In order to prevent overselling Operative has developed an Advertising Revenue Management (ARM) software solution called Dashboard, which acts as a real-time central record of total and booked inventory enabling all sales people to have accurate inventory avails along with other invaluable information about their campaigns at their fingertips.

Once a website has been overbooked it is the job of the campaign manager to try and resolve the predicament. Campaign managers often believe that adjusting the priorities of the campaigns will resolve the issue, but making these adjustments can begin an endless cycle of priority modifications which ultimately do not solve anything. To explain further, imagine an overbooked website with one campaign that has a higher CPM than the rest. A campaign manager will typically set this campaign to ‘priority one.’ After this increase in priority is made the priority one campaign may begin to perform well and ultimately deliver in full, but the other lower CPM campaigns will continue to under deliver simply because there is not enough inventory. Many times the campaign manager will begin to increase the priority of the lower CPM campaigns thinking they will experience the same improvement, but this is the beginning of the cycle which could eventually result in all campaigns being prioritized at the same level. Making these so-called “optimizations” can effectively undermine the usefulness of the ad server’s pacing algorithm and result in multiple under delivered campaigns.

A successful campaign begins with accurate inventory availability forecasting. In order to accurately assess inventory it is essential that the website is tagged properly and that there is a real-time central record of total and booked inventory. If inventory is assessed properly then overbooking should be avoided; however, this is often not the case and the following post sale campaign management solutions should be considered if the advertiser will permit the change.

• If there is inventory available for another ad size, then reallocate impressions to this ad size
• If the campaign is targeted to a specific portion of the site, then open the targeting to additional similar content or even ROS
• If the campaign is geo-targeted, then open the campaign to more geographical regions
• Extend the end date of the campaign
• Increase traffic using house ads, which redirect to the targeted areas of the site
• Increase marketing spend to drive more traffic to the site

Prioritization should typically be avoided if you are not an expert in deciphering the complicated algorithms used by various ad servers (virtually all of them are proprietary and shrouded in a veil of ambiguity and secrecy), but can be used if done correctly. This approach should only be used if there is one ad under-delivering for a particular ad size per target. Again this approach will not work if a section of the site has been oversold. Instead try using the suggested solutions above and let the ad server do its job, which is to pace the campaigns according to On-Schedule Indicator’s (OSI) and end dates. Another option, which should only be used if necessary, is to change the ad types to “Sponsorship” or set the ads to deliver “As Fast As Possible” (DFP). These solutions must be monitored very carefully because they could easily cause over delivery and eat away at precious inventory that could be allocated to other campaigns.

Likewise, there are other campaign performance techniques that can be executed during the life of a campaign. The following methods can be used to improve click through rates (CTR’s) as well as other performance metrics.

• Generate reports to determine the best performing sections of the site and direct more traffic to these sections of the site. Tools like DART Adapt and others can be a good technological aid.
• Target banner positions above the fold, which are seen by the user more frequently than the banners below the fold. This can reduce wasted impressions and improve CTR’s.
• Implement frequency caps – large numbers of the same ad displayed to the same user do not necessarily correlate to higher CTR’s. Reducing overall impressions potentially results in lower cost and higher CTR (Clicks/Impressions).

If used properly together, these pre and post sale campaign management techniques can greatly reduce the likelihood that campaigns will under deliver. It almost goes without saying that successful delivery of all campaigns is critical to gaining and keeping the goodwill of advertisers. Techniques that depend upon endless cycles of reprioritization are rarely effective. On the contrary, they are usually counterproductive, resulting in digging the grave of poor performance across the entire site even deeper.

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Blogged by Matthew Collins

Matthew Collins is an Operations Manager in Operative’s Managed Services group. Matthew manages one of our crack teams of enthusiastic online pros responsible for providing trafficking, campaign management and best practice recommendations to a wide variety of publisher clients.