Posted by Bart on November 18, 2010
The problem with Online Advertising when it’s paid per impression or per click is that the same person may see the ad or click on it several times when one, two or three times would be enough. Of course it’s the same with TV or radio advertising, but with the Internet everything can be measured and optimized. Therefore, people who use it are more demanding.
For payment per impression, the advertiser wants to limit the number of impressions per unique visitor in order to not repeat the same message all the time and weary the users, and also because if a unique visitor doesn’t click after 2 or 3 impressions, there are very few chances that he ever clicks.
For payment per click, the advertiser is also willing to limit the number of clicks because if a visitor doesn’t buy or doesn’t register after 2 or 3 clicks on the same ad, there are virtually no chances that he ever does it.
Fortunately, technology now allows publishers and networks to use “Frequency Capping“.
Frequency capping means restricting (capping) the amount of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. This restriction is applied to all websites that serve ads from the same advertising network.
Frequency capping is a feature within ad serving that allows to limit the maximum number of impressions/views a visitor can see a specific ad within a period of time. For e.g.: 3 views/visitor/24-hours means after viewing this ad 3 times, any visitor will not see it again for 24 hours. This feature uses cookies to remember the impression count.
Frequency capping is only possible when the website publisher manages its advertising with an Ad Server, not when he codes the advertising with the website.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 8, 2010
There are 2 ways to manage Advertising on a website: either you program the banners and text link directly in the website code, or you use an Ad Server. This second option offers much more flexibility. But what is an Ad Server?
Wikipedia says:
Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.
An ad server is a computer server, specifically a web server, that stores advertisements used in online marketing and delivers them to website visitors.
The content of the webserver is constantly updated so that the website or webpage on which the ads are displayed contains new advertisements — e.g., banners (static images/animations) or text — when the site or page is visited or refreshed by a user.
In addition, the ad server also performs various other tasks like counting the number of impressions/clicks for an ad campaign and report generation, which helps in determining the ROI for an advertiser on a particular website.
Ad servers come in two flavors: local ad servers and third-party or remote ad servers. Local ad servers are typically run by a single publisher and serve ads to that publisher’s domains, allowing fine-grained creative, formatting, and content control by that publisher. Remote ad servers can serve ads across domains owned by multiple publishers. They deliver the ads from one central source so that advertisers and publishers can track the distribution of their online advertisements, and have one location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web.
The typical common functionality of ad servers includes:
* Uploading advertisements and rich media.
* Trafficking ads according to differing business rules.
* Targeting ads to different users, or content.
* Tuning and optimization based on results.
* Reporting impressions, clicks, post-click & post-impression activities, and interaction metrics.
Advanced functionality may include:
* Frequency capping so users only see messages a limited amount of time. (Advertisers can also limit ads by setting a frequency cap on money-spending)
* Sequencing ads so users see messages in a specific order (sometimes known as surround sessions).
* Excluding competition so users do not see competitors’ ads directly next to one another. (Usually done by bidding on keywords)
* Displaying ads so an advertiser can own 100% of the inventory on a page (sometimes known as Roadblocks).
* Targeting ads to users based on their previous behavior (behavioral marketing or behavioral targeting).
* Targeting specific IP-adresses i.e. targeting specific individuals or companies
One aspect of ad serving technology is automated and semi-automated means of optimizing bid prices, placement, targeting, or other characteristics. Significant methods include:
* Behavioral Targeting – Using a profile of prior behavior on the part of the viewer to determine which ad to show during a given visit. For example, targeting car ads on a portal to a viewer that was known to have visited the automotive section of a general media site.
* Contextual Targeting – Inferring the optimum ad placement from information contained on the page where the ad is being served. For example, placing Mountain Bike ads automatically on a page with a mountain biking article.
* Creative Optimization – Using experimental or predictive methods to explore the optimum creative for a given ad placement and exploiting that determination in further impressions.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on October 22, 2010
The Banner Ad or Web Banner is probably the most obvious form of Online Advertising.
A Banner Ad is a still image (JPEG or GIF file), an animated image (GIF file) or a Flash animation with texts, images, pictures and/or videos.
The Banner Ad features a message promoting a product or a service.
When an Internet user clicks on a banner, he opens the web page of the product or service. The link between the banner and the new web page is an hypertext link.
The first Banner Ads to appear on the World Wide Web were not always clickable, because at this time not all advertisers had a website. Nowadays, publishing non-clickable banners would not make sense because each and every advertiser is supposed to have at least a web page. Internet user could even become frustrated of not being able to click on the Ad when they are interested in the product or the service.
An Ad Banner may be seen (or not), clicked on (or not) and generate an action from the Internet user (or not). Because all these options are not only possible, but also traceable (thanks to tracking), different type of Online Advertising payment have appeared : the most common ones are Cost per Impression (CPM), Cost per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Action (CPA, or per Lead, CPL).
These models have quickly replaced the old form of payment that was based on the duration of the Ad being displayed (per day, per week, per month, etc.). However this model (cost per duration) is still strongly in use for small websites or in emerging Internet markets (Africa, South America, some parts of Asia, etc.).
To display the banners on their website, webmasters have 2 choices: Either they put the banner code directly on their website, or they use an Ad Server. The Ad Server is a tool that will allow webmasters to manage several different banners on the same spot, to define the frequency, the duration, the number of impressions, etc. and even to target only a part of the website audience.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!