Answer: Our company uses a precision programmatic platform that leverages unstructured data to bid, optimize and report on display and mobile inventory in real-time bidding environments. Because we access unstructured data directly from data sources, it does not rely on pre-packaged audience segments purchased from data brokers or noise reduction algorithms to target audiences. Rather, our company amplifies data signals to build a custom audience based on individual pre and post-impression data including keywords searched, domains visited, contextual content consumed and recency. The use of unstructured data combined with direct access to data sources enables us to deliver highly efficient, transparent campaigns at a fraction of the cost of other demand- side platforms. Unlike other best-of- breed DSP vendors, we have designed and developed all of its own technology, cutting out the middle men of the advertising technology ecosystem, to deliver direct value. This makes it well suited for use by small and medium size businesses looking to augment and extend reach through hyper-targeted digital display and mobile advertising. We access inventory from all major exchanges including Rubicon, Pubmatic, Casale Media, Federated Media Group, Facebook Exchange and many more. This system sees more than 600 million unique user profiles across desktop, smartphone and tablet devices and over 12 billion search events per month. Our company offers site retargeting and keyword-level search retargeting as well as tradition demographic, geographic and device targeting capabilities. We are also able to conduct category and keyword-level contextual campaigns based on its proprietary contextual classification engine.
Answer: Geo-targeting can be extremely tricky, especially with mobile. Most geo-targeting makes the mistake of trusting a single source of information to determine location. Our geo-targeting cross-verifies location, such as the IP, POP, setting within the browser, and additional types of information so you can trust that we are serving ads to the targeted area.
Answer: Landing pages are not recommended for display campaigns.
The reason is simply that most people who are influenced by display do not click on the ad, but find their way to the website later by navigating directly to it or by doing a branded name search. That means there is a lot of LEAKAGE when you use a landing page as you are only capturing the small percentage of people who click the ad and missing the larger percentage of people who see and are influenced by the ad.
Answer: Keywords are chosen systematically and by our experts. They are also added, removed, and adjusted constantly. Suggested keywords, such as competitors, are encouraged, but will not be the only keywords used to target.
Answer: Every day, more mobile inventory is added to the exchanges and we bid on mobile inventory on each campaign as we deem it appropriate and effective. (We average approximately 10% on most campaigns.) We serve a lot of our ads on mobile tablets viewing standard desktop versions of websites, as they get the best results at this time. Clients are welcome to provide mobile- specific creative and we will run and test it for effectiveness. It is important that ads can fit in a clear branding message and call to action in such a small visual. We have found that the visual of the mobile ad is even more crucial than with our desktop and laptop campaigns.
Answer:
1) The first reason we don’t see more “ads in the wild” is simply the size of the Real Time Bidding environment. Working on 14+ exchanges, that’s thousands and thousands of sites. That’s like running TV commercials on every single channel at random times throughout the day. Grab a remote and start channel surfing, and you’re still unlikely to find your commercial even though we know that it is running.
You can limit the inventory on which the ad is served. Run the ads on a white list of popular sites. You can even ask the business owner their favorite sites and include them on the white list to increase the chances that they will see their own ad.
2) Another reason can be that we are bidding low and not winning ads on the more popular sites. It’s a choice one has to make. Get ten impressions on lesser known sites for $X or get one impression on a popular site for that same amount? By default, we look for more impressions on the lesser known sites because we are more interested in targeting the user than we are the property – one of the main features of targeted display.
Increase bid. This may result in fewer impressions for more money, but it may also allow the ads to turn up on more popular sites.
3) In a blended retargeting campaign that includes site, search and keyword contextual, we may not have allocated very much of the budget to site retargeting because there isn’t much site traffic. So even when the business owner visits his own site and then expects to see his ad, the very small budget we have allocated to this part of the strategy is already spent by the time he is expecting to see his ads.
Increase site retargeting budget. Caution, if there isn’t a lot of site traffic, this could negatively impact delivery.
4) Frequency caps limit the amount of ads that we show to each user. Our current default is four per day. It’s possible the user simply didn’t notice one of these four ads while surfing the web.
Increase frequency cap, or even remove it completely.
5) Search activity that one would expect to put them into the targeted audience may not be happening on Data Network. Although this network is made up of thousands of thousands of sites, it’s possible that the user is doing searches on sites where we don’t get data.
Because we cannot disclose our data partners, it can be difficult to “trick” us into putting the user into an audience to be targeted. Rest assured that the network is vast and will therefore find plenty of potential customers to target.
It should be noted that all of these strategies may improve the chance that an ad can be seen in the wild, while not actually improving the value of the campaign. If the goal of the campaign is to get the ad seen by as many potential customers as possible, using these strategies so that the business owner can see his own ad, could have a negative impact on that original goal.
Facebook Exchange, Google, Rubicon, Appnexus, Pubmatic (Yahoo!), MoPub, Open X, DoubleClick (by Google), LiveRail, Cox Digital Solutions, Sovrn, PulsePoint, MillenialMedia and more