Workflow of an online ad campaign

Today I am going to trace the start to finish cycle of a campaign i.e. the work flow of a campaign. To those readers who are not in the online advertising trade, this should be interesting information.

Where does the campaign start?

Good question! A campaign usually starts with a campaign brief, usually prepared by an advertising agency on behalf of a client, at times by clients themselves.

The brief usually gives details of the campaign like –

Product / Service being advertised

Target Demographic – An example could be men between 18 – 40, women between 30 and 50 etc

Target Geography – Campaigns are usually targeted to one or more countries/cities/states – a campaign could thus be targeted to the US, UK or within the UK to the South East etc

Interest of the Demographic - A laptop campaign could be targeted to a demographic of a certain age group interested in technology

Type of Campaign – CPC, CPM….

Campaign Objective – A campaign usually has a campaign objective. For a example a CPM campaign could have a CPA goal of £ 40 i.e. for every £ 40 spent, the client would expect an action – a sale, a registration etc

What does the network do with the brief?

On receipt of a campaign brief, a network quickly matches it up with the kind of inventory it has on board. If the requisite inventory is not available ( or if requisite number of impressions are unavailable), the network quickly ‘recruits’ more publishers to ensure that it has the right number of impressions.

Once the number of impressions are on board, the network usually rolls out a proposal which covers the following areas

Campaign Name and Objectives

What kind of targeting the network proposes to meet campaign goals and number of websites / impressions it can make available

CPM/CPC rates for the campaign

USPs of network – What the USPs of the network vis-a-vis the campaign in question and any similar campaigns it has run in the past

Reporting mechanisms i.e. how the network will keep the client informed of the campaign progress

Expectations of client – What feedback the network expects of the client to ensure that the campaign is on track

What does the client do with the proposal

On receipt of the proposal, the client understands it in context of the brief and examines percentage fit. If necessary, the client would call the network in for a meeting to seek clarifications on the proposal. Rates would be discussed and negotiated keeping in view campaign ROI goals and what the client perceives as ‘value for money’ on the campaign.

Once the campaign nitty-gritties are agreed upon, the client gives the network the go-ahead for the campaign.

What next?

On receipt of the go ahead from the client, the network prepares an Insertion Order (IO). The IO is the equivalent of a contract. An insertion order is an online or printed document that specifies the terms and conditions surrounding an online advertising campaign. The IO mentions

Name address and contact people in the client and network organizations

Campaign Details

Targeting Details

Commercials – Budget, CPM/CPC rates, Number of impressions/clicks to be delivered, payment terms, campaign stoppage clauses etc

Reporting – What the report modalities between network and client will be for the campaign.

The network usually emails the IO to the client. Once the client signs the IO , the network can legally start the campaign.

Campaigns are started by the client within 24 – 48 hours of receipt of IO.

Post ‘go live’

Once the campaign goes live, for the first few days, both client and network keep very close tabs on campaign performance. The network sends daily reports on number of impressions/clicks etc. And the client would send statistics on Cost per action statistics data to the network. If the campaign is under performing, the network would optimize the campaign to ensure that client CPA goals are met.

This, then is the workflow of a campaign from the time the campaign is conceived until it goes live.

Features of a typical Ad-server

Online campaigns revolved around ad-servers. As explained earlier, there can be 2 – 3 ad-servers in a given campaign. The ad-server market is quite a big market in itself. Google with its acquisition of Doubleclick in 2008, now has over 50 % of the ad-server market. Following google, is yahoo with a ridiculously low share of around 10%!

To the uninitiated, the ad-server is a kind of a black box. Beyond the general ‘An ad-server is used to serve ads in online campaigns’, there is little which the layman knows.

Let me, in simple terms. Try to unravel the ad-server mystery.

When one speaks of ad-servers one speaks of the following features –

General Features

Administration Features

Advertiser Features

Publisher Features

Reporting Features

Application Program Interface (API) Features

Let me briefly discuss each of these features

General Features

General features usually covers features and functionalities that are usually available in the average ad-server. It covers –

Installation rules , whether it allows white label licensing etc

Whether things like content based ad-matching are available or not

Indexing engine and how it works and its capacity – how many pages can be processed in a day per server

How easily customizable is the ad-server

Kind of customer login features available

How scalable the platform is and how many impressions it can handle in a single server and multi-server installation

Architectural Scalability

Administration Features

Administration features have to do how an ad-server can help run and manage a campaign from an administration perspective. Areas covered here are –

Kind of interface = web based , or does it require a special software to manage the system

Configuration options

How easy is maintenance of campaigns

Monitoring and monitoring reports

Advertiser search features – can we search advertiser by name, email id, company name?

Advertiser account management – kind of tools available

How easily can ads be suspended?

Management of Account Information

How can payments be accepted – credit card, payments

Posting accountwise credits and debits

Publisher search features – can we search advertiser by name, email id, company name?

Approve / Decline / Suspend accounts
Post credits for bonuses
Payment options

Server Status Report - summary of the health of the ad server.
Daily Performance Reports
Advertiser Performance Reports

Advertiser Features

These are features that the advertiser can use to suit his needs. Covered in this are –

Does the ad-server permit account pre-funding to start a campaign

Does it have a web-based interface allowing for self-management

Does it support quick ad self-creation?

Types of targeting it supports – via content channels, geographical targeting, regional targeting, keyword/phrase targeting

Is a budget capping tool available?

Support for start and stop dates for campaign

Does it support on demand campaign pauses?

Does it email notify low account /exhausted funding on a campaign?

Support for Automatic funding

Does it support pay-pal as a means of payment?

Does it allow CSV downloads of reports?

Publisher Features

These features cater to a publisher and his view of a campaign. Covered in this are –

Availability of web interface

Does it support ad matching to page content ? i.e does it have a contextual engine?

Does it generate a revenue summary report by date?

Does it generate CTR and earnings generated in a date range?

Ability to change account profile and password information.

Reporting Features

This is quite self-explanatory. It deals with the kind of reports the systems generates.

Security Features

What kind of security features does the ad-server support?

Does it help defend against click fraud?

Does it have an inbuilt invalid click detection logic?

Does it provide for automatic account locking after ‘x’ number of tries?

What kind of password functionalities does it support?

Application Programming Interface (API) Features

APIs are ‘pipes’ that an ad-server has to permit users to extract data from the ad-sever. Such extraction is usually done to generate reports, have a customized view of a campaign etc.

Different users of an ad-server will look for APIs to achieve differing purposes, primarily in the area of report generation.

I have tried to keep this article as simple as possible so that the average reader can understand in broad and general terms what features and functionalities one expects from an ad-server. For further reading, I would suggest visiting websites of ad-servers like Double click, Adsense etc and see how they stack up against these feature requirements.

Real-time bidding

There is a great deal of excitement in the market about Real-time bidding (RTB). News has also filtered thru’ that Microsoft has added RTB functionality to their AdECN platform. Views on RTB are divided – for and against. There is a school of thought which says that adding a real-time elemtn will improve performance of online campaigns. And there is a school of thought which says that a proper business case needs to preceed a full-fledged adoption of RTB.

Let’s dwell a bit on what RTB is all about?

What if an advertiser can reach a specific consumer? RTB aims at achieving this end objective.

RTB is a contrivance that allows all participants in the online advertising game to buy impressions in real-time. The prospective buyer can quickly analyze an impression and bid accordingly. When I say quickly, I mean in seconds.

RTB allows the publisher to define an audience and segment their inventory to introduce advertisers to valuable users. An advertiser can bid for an impression in real-time to reach a specific consumer. This is done impression by impression, meaning it is highly targeted – an value can be assigned to each ad impression. In other words, RTB enables the advertiser to use the right consumer at the correct time.

This is done on an impression-by-impression basis, which makes it highly targeted and means that an individual value can be assigned to each specific ad impression

Benefits of RTB

RTB enables the media-buyer to improve and optimize campaigns. RTB allows pre-programming to set a maximum bid per impression.

It helps the publisher better monetize his inventory. RTB allows the market to decide what the value of an impression is. Remnant inventory always goes abegging – RTB might enable the publisher get better value for remnant inventory. Remnant inventory will at last find its place under the sun.

Results from RTB

Results from RTB have been extremely encouraging. Whether it is CTRs, conversion rates or Cost per action. In each of these areas an improvement upwards of 100% has been recorded.

Availability of the requisite sophisticated technology and expertise to further the uptake of RTB is a lacuna. But, with passage of time, I am sure this gap will be quickly plugged.

Advertising Exchange

The online advertising marketing place is multi-tiered. On the one hand you have the publisher who directly solicits clients for advertising inventory. At the next level you have the network. The network ‘recruits’ publishers and sells their advertising inventory to their (network’s ) clients. At the next level you have the advertising exchange.

An ad exchange is like a stock market. It is a mechanism that allows buying/selling of ad impressions openly, transparently. The ideal ad exchange would manage risk and maximize return on every impression purchased. Research conducted by different agencies indicate that a fairly large number of advertising professionals – over 50% - who have not yet ‘adopted’ the ad exchange plan to do so soon.

Benefits of the ad exchange

A buyer’s target has always been to find an efficient way to be able to buy advertising inventory. Upwards of 20% of ad inventory remains unsold. In this context, an ad exchange benefits different players in different ways –

The seller can reduce unsold inventory thereby increasing overall yield. Given the amount of unsold inventory, the ad exchange is a very good mechanism for the publishers to monetize unsold, remnant inventory.

The buyer can ensure better ROIs and achieve better reach for their campaigns – the ad exchange’s dynamic bidding rules enables the buyer get inventory at the best possible price

Disadvantages of the ad exchange

An ad exchange is not the panacea for all ills – it has its own flaws.

Firstly, different ad agencies offering different models like Real time auction and prepay. Neither model has an established superiority over the other. In fact, it is not very clear which model works best for the publisher.

In-game advertising

In-game advertising is about the use of computer and video games to deliver an advertising message. Statistics has it that in 2005, spending on in-game advertising was US $ 56million and this figure is estimated to grow to a staggering US$ 1 Billion by 2014!

In-game advertising is seen as an idea way of targeting the younger demographic – age 20 to 35. This group is viewed as showing a preference for computer and video games over TV. There have been complaints of in-game advertising being invasive, sometimes calling in-game advertising software as spyware. The potential of this form of advertising has been recognized with Neilsen Media Research having a new video games rating service.

There are primarily two types of in-game advertising –

Static, and,

Dynamic

Static in-game advertising

In this form of in-game advertising, the advertisement was placed into the game by programmers. Once it was place, it couldn’t be moved. The first such ad was seen in the 1978 computer game Adventureland by Scott Adams, who inserted an ad for his forthcoming game Pirate Adventure .

Dyanmic in-game advertising

With the growth of the internet and availability of increased bandwidth, it has been possible for dynamic in-game advertising to find a place in the in-game advertising arena. In this method, the ad can be dynamically altered by the advertising agency. Ads can be modified according to Geographic Location, time of the day etc. A most recent example of dynamic in-game advertising was an ad featuring the then Presidential hopeful Barack Obama in the game Burnout Paradise.

The advertising industry’s reaction to in-game advertising has been, not surprisingly, positive. In-game advertising is seen as a very effective way of reaching the 20 -35 demographic. This is especially relevant in context of the falling TV viewer numbers.

The games industry has no gripes either, as it represents a new revenue stream. Industry figures suggest that in-game advertisements contribute extra 20% – 33 % profit per game sold. Game publishers see this as a key contribution to cover their game development costs.

The next time we play a video or computer game watch out for that in-game advertisement!

Measurement of Ad-performance

One of the reasons for the popularity of online advertising is the ease and detail of performance measurement. Unlike print advertising, where performance measurement is quite a challenge, display advertising effectiveness can be measured down to the last detail.

Accountability is very high in the online medium. There are a number of parameters for performance measurement. Some parameters provide a more generalized idea of performance while others provide a much sharper analysis.

Campaigns like Run-of-Site (ROS), Run –of-Channel (ROC) provide even better analytics simply because they run over a smaller number of websites. In such campaigns an extremely detailed analysis is possible – performance by website, whether the campaign performs better on certain types of websites within a channel etc…

Some of the commonly used barometers for campaign performance are –

Number of Impressions – Analysis starts with number of impressions served.

Type of Ad impression – Certain types of creatives are found to perform better on certain campaigns. In some campaigns, therefore, the 300 x 250 might perform better than the 468 x 60… In another the Skyscraper might perform better than the 728 x 90….

Position of the Ad impression on the page – Many a client has requested a 1^st scroll banner position i.e the ad should appear on a webpage at 1^st view..Such requests are made based on metrics from earlier campaigns which have pointed to the effectiveness of 1^st scroll banners over others

CTR – Click thru’ rate (CTR) is an important measure. CTR, I believe, is a measure of how compelling the creative has been… A good creative motivates the user to click thru’ and see what the product / service is all about

Registration – Does the landing page provide for registration? If so how many have registered?

Email Acknowledgement - Post registration, a confirmatory email is often sent to the user. This email needs to be acknowledged for the registration to be active. How many users have acknowledged the email, is an another important measure.

Cost per Action – Any type of campaign – CPM. CPC or CPL always has a back-ended CPA goal. A client would therefore, put down a CPM budget of £ 5,000 with a CPA goal of £ 50 i.e. for every £ 50 spent, they’d like a customer action. Customer action would vary from campaign to campaign.

With more advanced targeting methodologies like Semantic targeting becoming available to the advertiser, better performance measurement tools are also evolving as a natural consequence.

Lead Generation

A good lead is the life blood of a business. Any business in any market is always looking for a ‘good’ lead. Good as a word is as clichéd as can be… but ‘good lead’ as a phrase will have value till eternity.

Why?

Because each and every business wants a good lead.

What is a lead?

Lead is a bit of information about a potential customer who has stated his interest in buying a product/service. The emphasis on a good lead is because there a number of ‘purported’ prospects who say they are interested but their interest is not qualified i.e. he/she turns out to be a non-serious prospect.

What information do we need to capture for to be termed as a lead? This depends completely on the product/service being marketed. If one is looking to create a list to email information on a regular basis, Name and email id would constitute a lead. A debt management company would , on the other hand, require more information –

Name

Email id

Mobile number

Landline number

At least 3 qualifying debts

Minimum unsecured debt to be US $ 5k

Must have regular income

Must be paying at least $ 200 per month toward qualifying debt

Quite a list isn’t it?

Clearly, generating a name and email id is fairly straightforward – in terms of ability of generate ‘quantity’ of leads as well as the sources these leads come from. Unless the product/service is very ‘niche’, the wider the spread of leads the better.

Generating a lead for a debt management company is more involved. Publishers with whom the campaign is to run need to be carefully selected. Publisher demographic needs to be carefully studied before being included in the campaign.

Co-registration ( discussed in one of my earlier articles) lends itself to the former type of lead generation campaign. But the latter type of lead generation would call for a Run of site campaign that is carefully optimized and monitored on a day-to-day basis.

Pitfalls of online lead generation

Incentivized v/s non-incentivized leads – Any lead generation exercise which has a lolly of a free gift is fraught with risk, especially if it is a matter of providing minimal information like name and email id. People will freely register to get the free gift. There is something irresistible about getting something free. An up-front incentive is a recipe for a bagful of infructuous leads. An incentive payable after a user has contracted to a service could , on the other hand, work wonders.

Fake Leads – If a network is running a CPL campaign, it could very well get a host of people to enter their details and submit a lead. Such leads only shore up the statistics on the campaign, with poor end results.

Bottom line is that if a lead generation campaign has a stated and clear goals, good processes to monitor the campaign there is no reason why it should be able to generate fairly high quality leads.

Email marketing

Email marketing is very much on the rise. Statistics have it that volume of emails has overtaken direct mail marketing by a long shot.

In this article I’ll talk about email marketing and how it make it a meaningful exercise.

Firstly, it is important to be clear about where the email campaign fits in an overall context. Is it an email shot to an opt-in list? Or is it a part of an overall strategy. In other words, is it a cog in the wheel or is it the wheel itself?

Some of the questions one need to ask are similar to those you ask in context of any other campaign –

What CTRs would you expect? Do you have any precedents to go by?

What kind of ROI would be reasonable on the campaign?

If it is a part of a wider strategy, what is the expectation of the email campaign?

Once these objectives are clear, we need to get the nitty-gritty of the email campaign out of the way –

Cleaning databases and emailing lists

Ensure you have requisite permissions to email

If the campaign is outsourced, ensure that a bonafide company has been selected for the purpose

Decide the number of emails that need to go out and how often they need to be emailed

Benefits of email marketing

Better value for money

Cost of delivery is relatively lower as there are no costs involved in creating the message ( printing) and delivering the message ( postage).

Usage

Email is clearly the most used application on the internet

Speed

Emails are very quickly created and sent. And delivered in a jiffy. To add to this, you can also ask for ‘delivery receipts’ for emails using many of the popular email editors like MS Outlook etc

Response

Email advertising elicits a response of upto 15 % which is much higher than display advertising

Quickness of response

Response are usually received within 3 days of the email shot.

Targeting

With reference to opt-in databases especially, very focused targeting is possible using email marketing.

Scope of optimization

A similarity with online advertising is that one can measure results quickly. If the results are not upto expectations, one can quickly change/refine the message and re-launch the campaign.

Having iterated the benefits, let’s look at some pitfalls as well.

A campaign has to be well thought thru’ in terms of its ‘technicals’ so that it can bypass filters set up by the user

It may not work very well with everyone… For example, time and time again it has been proved that the over 55s rarely respond to email marketing messages

In conclusion, let me say that we need to ensure that email is a good way to get across to the prospective customer, the right kind of database is ready and available and ensure that we have a compelling message to get across. If these important factors are considered, we should have a potentially effective email campaign on our hands.

Ad-servers - Part II

In this article we’ll take a close look at how ad-servers actually serve the ads that the user sees.

The first step, our imaginary company Weightloss (WL) has to place its ads into its ad-server. The ad-sever then creates tags. The tags give the following details –

Ad size

Where the ad can be located on the web page

The tags are sent to the publisher alongwith information on WL’s campaign like –

Number of times a day it has to appear also called frequency cap. An ad can be 1/24 frequency capped, meaning it appears once in 24 hours on a particular PC, or 2/24 meaning it appears twice in 24 hours etc

Demographics of the targeting i.e. should the ad be targeted to men/women of a certain age group, who have specific interests ( interested in golf, gardening..)

Geography to which it is targeted – Campaigns could be targeted to the UK, US, Germany….

Specific time during the day when the ad should appear

All of WL’s campaign instructions are now loaded onto our imaginary newspaper the England Journal ‘s(EJ) ad-server. The ads themselves reside on WL’s ad-servers. The EJ similarly receives tags from other advertisers as well.

What happens next?

Suppose a user enters the website URL of The England Journal onto their PC, the EJ website is displayed on his/her PC. What is loaded on the user’s PC is content… A logical question that arises is – How does an ad get loaded onto a user’s browser? The user’s browser follows instructions it receives from The EJ, which in turn directs to get an ad from the EJ ad-server.

The EJ server in turn instructs the WL ad-server to serve an ad. The WL ad-server then has to figure out which ad to show. A cookie helps the WL ad-server in this process. When the EJ ad-server sent the user’s PC content, it also sent it a cookie. A cookie is a small piece of software that travels between the EJ ad-server and the WL ad-server. A cookie identifies a browser. A cookie controls the number of times the user sees an ad, has user information like age, sex , preferences etc.

The EJ ad-server selects the ad and serves it on the user’s PC. The ad selected is based on user information provided by the cookie. When WL’s ad-server sends an ad to the User’s PC, it also sends it a cookie which allows it to identify the user’s browser. This allows WL’s ad-server to track number of times an ad is shown on the user’s PC.

The process of serving an ad, though happens in a few seconds, is a fairly involved process. This process is completely managed by the different ad-servers in the network without any human intervention whatsoever. Amazing isn’t it?

Ad-serving Part 2

As a continuation of my earlier article on basics of ad-serving, I will be dwelling a bit in depth on ad-serving and how it works.

As a first step let’s look at how ad-servers target ads that the user sees on his PC. In a typical online ad display, there necessarily are two ad-servers ( if not more)- the publisher ad-server and the advertiser ad-server.

The publisher ad-sever decides which advertiser’s ad to show. The advertiser ad-server decide which ad to show from among it’s stock of ads.

Going back to our imaginary newspaper of yesterday, the England Journal (EJ). How does the EJ’s ad-server decide which ads a user Roger is going to see? The ads Roger’s browser has show and the ads he has clicked on play a role in which ads Roger sees. Roger’s demographic information – age, sex etc – will also play a role in what he sees. To understand how this can happen, let’s assume that Roger has registered himself on another website with him name, age, sex, kind of work he does etc… Many a publisher shares this demographic information with other ad-servers so that they can demographically target ads.

For example, therefore, a website (publisher) might tell an ad-server that Roger is a male between 35 and 40. And that fact that Roger often visits home and decor websites identifies him as a person who is interested in garden, furnishing etc. Roger might therefore, find that a number of home decor ads start to appear on his website. Roger’s computer IP ( Internet Protocol ) is used by ad-servers as well. An IP address helps identify around what area a PC is located.

Is ad-serving an intrusion into one’s privacy? Do they have your personal details like name sex, email id etc? Not quite. Ad-severs target primarily to an IP address – they do not have any personal details like name, phone number emai lid etc. They primarily target people’s interests, demographics and where people are located.