Why Publisher Need Own Ad Server

As an advertiser, there is no better way to purchase massive amounts of online display ad inventory than directly from publishers or ad networks. Granted, there is more legwork involved when compared to programmatic buying, and the CPM rates can be quite high — but this is offset by the ability to reserve large amounts of inventory.

When you’re buying media in bulk, the need for a proper ad server is very important in terms of controlling your ad operations. You could say that it’s a best practice to use your own ad server, especially if you run a consistent volume of ad campaigns.

How Ad Servers Work Together

To illustrate why you need your own ad server, it is important to first understand how ad servers work. In the below example, the advertiser’s ad server is managing its campaigns across four different publishers. This is accomplished by providing each publisher with their own unique “ad tag” script (generated by the advertiser’s ad server), which the publisher then inserts into its ad server associated with the corresponding website.

You might be asking yourself: “If the publisher has an ad server, why would I need my own?” Here are seven reasons.

1. Accountability

Tracking your own campaign statistics is probably the most important reason you should have your own ad server. When you’ve been around the online advertising space long enough, you come to realize that some degree of discrepancy is inevitable. Mid single-digits percentages are pretty normal, though it can vary wildly in different cases. With so many different ad tags being served by so many different ad servers in various locations around the world, it really shouldn’t be surprising that reporting will differ to some degree.

Without your own ad server, you have no independent stats against which to audit the results being reported by the publisher. The old adage “trust, but verify” holds true when it comes to buying online media. Having your own ad server allows you to keep publishers and ad networks accountable.

2. Creative Control

Giving a publisher or ad network your ad tags to run in their ad server gives you control over what ads are served to which users, and how. From a creative perspective (depending on the ad server you use), you can have more control over the format of your ads, such as running text ads, video ads or expandable ads.

Beyond control of the ad formats being run, using your own ad server affords you the ability to optimize delivery of your ads as well. Your ad server can give you the ability to split-test different ads and weight which will be shown accordingly.

3. Insights

Not using your own ad server means that you are at the mercy of the publisher’s when it comes to mining campaign insights. The fact that reporting transparency differs from publisher to publisher means that you will likely be left with an incomplete picture.

Using your own ad server provides you with the greatest possible transparency into the performance of your campaigns, giving you insights that otherwise would not be visible. Using your own ad server, you can look at placement stats, geographic stats, creative stats, and hourly stats, all on multiple levels, to determine what is and what isn’t working.

4. Centralized Management

Without your own ad server powering your direct buys, you will oftentimes have to rely on the publisher’s ad operations team to create and manage your campaigns. Multiply this by the number of publishers you work with, and you can imagine how the logistical complexity increases dramatically.

With your own ad server, you centralize management of your campaigns across all the publishers that you work with. You also aggregate all of your campaign statistics in a single database. The benefit of this approach is invaluable, which leads to the next reason to have your own ad server.

5. Data Ownership

One of the strongest arguments for using your own ad server, in my opinion, is that you own and control all of your campaign data. If you don’t have your own ad server and simply rely on publishers, you forfeit ownership and control over your own reporting. Trust me on this one: you don’t want to be beholden to a publisher or ad network for your historical campaign data.

6. Data Freshness

Publisher reporting practices vary. Some will report campaign results daily, weekly, even monthly. Oftentimes, this will come in the form of an email attachment. For some advertisers, this delay is acceptable; for performance-driven marketers optimizing toward an effective goal, such delays can mean costly, wasted ad spend.

In most cases, 3rd-party ad server reporting is close to real time. Having your own ad server allows you to see exactly how your campaigns are performing – up to the minute. This real-time reporting is essential to making timely and actionable decisions.

7. Data Privacy

If the goal of your campaigns is return on ad spend (ROAS), you will obviously want to be tracking revenue. However, you probably don’t want publishers knowing how much you profit on their ad inventory (for obvious reasons). Your own ad server gives you a discrete platform to confidentially track your campaign performance metrics.

The Caveat: Cost

Having the luxury of your own ad server typically isn’t free. There are some ad servers that offer free ad serving up to a certain number of impressions, but any serious media buyer will blow those limits away fairly quickly. The general cost of ad serving is anywhere from $0.01 to $0.10 CPM. You will also need to factor in content delivery network (CDN) costs, which are passed along to advertisers and range from $0.02 to $0.06 per gigabyte of transfer.

Checks & Balances

By not using your own ad server, you are pretty much flying blind and giving publishers all the power in the relationship. From a business perspective, it’s simply not prudent. This fact becomes especially important if you are doing any degree of high-volume media buying across multiple publishers.

Using your own ad server adds checks and balances to the process of media buying. It also adds a level of consistency for the media buyer, allowing all campaigns to be managed from a single point of control. While the publisher ultimately controls the flow of traffic, you can keep things on an even keel by leveraging a platform of your own to control and monitor the ad campaigns that get served — and ensure you are getting what you paid for.

Source: marketingland.com

Real-Time Bidding: New era of Digital Advertising

New technologies have introduced a variety of challenges to advertising companies. RTB, or real-time bidding, addresses many of these challenges by providing a direct and flexible method of matching consumers to appropriate advertising content. It offers several key benefits to the buy and sell sides.

Real-time bidding (RTB) will be a significant factor in fulfilling the promise of online digital advertising, which has been on the limit of dramatic changes for many years.

RTB, as defined by Parks Associates, describes the automated process of buying and selling online display advertising in real time, and it incorporates enhanced solutions in targeting algorithms and data analytics in order to deliver better targeting, greater control and more granular campaigns.

Given these strong benefits to ad buyers and sellers, RTB is starting to claim more revenues in the online advertising industry, and by 2017, it will account for 34 percent of all online display ad revenues.

Challenges in Online Advertising

Several industry factors will drive this shift to RTB. New technologies have introduced a variety of challenges to advertising companies. Consumers can skip commercials or go completely "over-the-top" in their video viewing, and they are now using multiple screens to consume content. Parks Associates consumer research reports over one-half of U.S. broadband households have a smartphone and nearly one-third have a tablet. All these extra screens make it more difficult to follow consumers and necessitate detailed tracking solutions.

These types of tracking solutions raise privacy concerns, often cited by advocacy groups, which could lead to customer rejection of the online advertising industry as a whole. However, Parks Associates' report Advertising Strategies on Connected TVs finds 45 percent of U.S. consumers are comfortable with targeted ads based on their TV-viewing habits. Over one-third are comfortable with targeted ads based on their online browsing habits, according to the report Monetization of Multiscreen Video: Content Owner Strategies.

While there are and always will be some consumer segments unwilling to share any details of their buying and browsing habits, many consumers are willing to provide personal details in exchange for something of value.

The more significant challenge has been in matching consumers with the appropriate content and, in some cases, matching consumers with any content. For the past 10 years, companies looking to buy and place online ads on a large scale typically have purchased blocks of ads, usually in groups of 1,000, through ad networks. Agencies pay these ad networks a CPM-based rate to reach audience segments with the understanding that a portion of the online ads will not reach intended consumer targets. The industry considers ad networks as "blind-buys": Buyers do not have full control over ad placement; so as a result, ads can appear on any website located in the network.

RTB addresses many of these challenges by providing a direct and flexible method of matching consumers to appropriate advertising content.

How Does RTB Work?

RTB is a data-driven buying model through which ad agencies place auction-based bids for individual ad impressions. This process takes place in milliseconds, allowing agencies to adjust their strategies almost immediately based on the performance of individual sites and ad impressions.

When a user visits a website, in addition to serving up HTML code, the Web server delivers an ad tag to an ad server, which ultimately sends the user's cookie ID to an SSP (supply-side platform) or ad exchange to be auctioned using RTB APIs. Buyers use that ID data to value the ad impression and set their bids. In an RTB environment, ad buyers analyze multiple variables of an ad impression, such as demographics, geography, and publisher attributes. The ad exchange determines the winner, and then the information flow goes back to the ad server to deliver the ad to the user's browser. This entire process is done automatically, in real time.

Below are a few examples to illustrate the meaning of RTB and its benefits beyond the standard targeting parameters (Geo Target, Gender, Age, Category, Demographic, etc.). Let’s say we want to set a maximum bid price for display ads in a campaign (bid = $1 DCPM). We can set the system to change the bids according to a set of rules, and all in real time (50 milliseconds before the ad loads)!

For example:

• If your ad appears below the fold - bid 0.25c
• If the user is seeing the ad for the first time – bid $1
• If the user saw the ad 3 times this week – bid $0.5
• If the user saw the ad 5 times this week – bid $0.1
• If the user saw the ad 7 times this week – don’t bid
• If the user visited your site in the past (retargeted user) – bid $3
• If the user visited your site and left at the checkout – bid $5 (and show him an ad with a discount!)
• If the user usually visits sites similar to yours – bid $2

RTB offers several key benefits to the buy and sell sides.

Core Benefits of RTB

Ad Buyers - Ad Agencies	Ad Sellers - Online Publishers
Accurate audience targeting Campaign control and transparency Improved return-on-advertising spend (ROAS)	Greater yield optimization Higher value of inventory Incremental revenues for display ads sold outside of direct relationships with buyers

While there are several paths for agencies to take when employing RTB, most use a media buying desk (MBD) that relies on demand-side platform (DSP) technology to access and bid on RTB ad impressions. An MBD is a buy-side platform that consolidates the process of planning, buying, serving and reporting online media campaigns, typically leveraging the technology offered by DSPs. Agencies also compile proprietary audience intelligence profiles through their MBDs, which integrate with third-party DSPs. DSPs connect ad inventory to agencies and measure a campaign's efficacy against its goals.

Agencies know who they want to contact due to data management platforms (DMPs). DMPs provide audience intelligence across the entire digital ad ecosystem, not just the RTB ad market, containing info on variables such as purchase intentions, household demographics and behavioral patterns. DMPs collect, manage, and evaluate online user information obtained from multiple media sources to identify and create audience segments. They enable the delivery of the right ad unit to the right consumer on the most effective media channel.

The confluence of these elements boosts the overall value of the RTB process for all players, so much that on the supply side, publishers are beginning to release premium inventory to SSPs to capture larger shares of ad budgets processed in RTB markets.

Facebook and Ad Exchanges

In mid-2012, Facebook announced the expansion of its growing display ad business into the RTB marketplace, with several DSPs already testing the Facebook Exchange, or FBX. RTB-enabled ad exchanges aggregate ad impressions across many online channels and connect ad sellers to buyers. Primarily a sell-side service, ad exchanges provide ad inventory details, such as website type, ad unit size, and user geography to ad bidders (e.g., MBDs, DSPs, ad networks). They also manage the entire ad-auction process - receiving the bid, determining the winner and facilitating ad placement.

Within the FBX system, brand advertisers can target Facebook users based on their Web-browsing history, with ads displayed on a Facebook page based on third-party Web browsing habits. It matches users more closely with not just relevant content but with products where they have displayed purchase intention. For example, Facebook Exchange can serve up ads about cheap flights or local auto dealers to a user who has visited a travel site or the Ford home page.

FBX indicates Facebook is getting more aggressive in its advertising methods -- and is forging new ways to build revenues. According to comScore, the social network serves approximately one-third of U.S. display ad impressions, so the FBX could open up a large source of ad inventory to the RTB market.

Facebook is competing with other companies in the RTB market, notably Yahoo and Google, which have established their presence in the RTB market through a variety of acquisitions. Yahoo acquired Right Media in 2007, Rubicon Project purchased Fox Audience Network in 2010, and Google followed suit in 2011 with the acquisition of Admeld.

Growth of the RTB Market

Agency demand for cross-platform ad synergies will drive the development and adoption of RTB sell-side platforms for emerging media, particularly mobile, online video, and social media, but these markets will remain small, with growth contingent on the maturation of the online display RTB ad market. Even so, Parks Associates asserts this market will grow quickly. RTB is a complicated process, with unfamiliarity and a lack of industry knowledge as potential inhibitors, but even if they have any significant impact, they will serve only to slow growth, not stop it.

The advantages of the RTB process to ad buyers and sellers are simply too great to ignore. Ad spend will shift away from traditional online display advertising to the RTB ad market as buyers become more comfortable with the concept and realize benefits such as cost efficiencies, reduced ad waste, rapid scalability, and improved control and transparency. RTB revenues generated by online display ads in North America will reach US$1.6 billion in 2012 and $7 billion by 2017.

Source: ecommercetimes.com and adgorithms.com 

How to Read Doubleclick Ad Tags and Ad Tag Variables

The term ad tag is thrown around quite a bit, and can usually refer to any link involved in the ad serving process, on the publisher, or marketer side. Strictly speaking, Ad Tags are the HTML code a browser uses to fetch an advertisement from an Ad Server – it is a redirect to content rather than content itself. 

There are also click tags, action tags, view tags, and other more specific variants to the general ad tag category.  For this particular example, we’ll look at publisher side tag; because our purpose is to show how ad tags help publishers organize their content into targetable products.

Ad Tag Components

So, without further ado, feast your eyes on this example a DoubleClick ad tag:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ADJ/publisher/zone;topic=abc;sbtpc=def;cat=ghi;kw=xyz;tile=1;slot=728x90.1;sz=728x90;ord=7268140825331981?

An ad tag can tell you quite a bit about how which ad ends up on a page – if you want, navigate to any major publisher and look at the source code; you can probably find a real-life example of a working ad tag. So how can you tell what the ad tag says about the publisher hierarchy and ad targeting? Let’s break it down piece by piece:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ – this is the host address for the Ad Server – you can see that it is not a publisher’s website, but an independent technology company that has nothing to do with publishing content.  In this example, we’re talking about DoubleClick, the Ad Serving powerhouse that was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion dollars in 2007.

/ADJ – this code defines a specific type of ad call, and what the response can be, i.e., images vs. XML vs. scripts.  For this example, the code ‘ADJ’ is the most common and only returns images, which will serve via JavaScript.  Other responses can include ADF (only image creative in a frame), ADX (only image creative served through streaming technologies), as well as others. 

/publisher - this is the site code that DoubleClick uses to distinguish one publisher property from another.  For example, the New York Times owns NYTimes.com, About.com, and Boston.com among other properties.  If they are a client of DoubleClick, the corporation likely pays the bill, but each site would have its own site code so ads could be targeted to a specific paper and not the entire network.

/zone - the zone is akin to a channel level, so the Homepage vs. the Arts page, vs. the Sports page.  These content verticals are likely to attract different advertisers, so it’s important for publishers to be able to target to this kind of granularity.

Zone-Based Hierarchy vs. Topic Based Hierarchy

Here is where tagging logic starts to diverge in DoubleClick.  Some publishers prefer to deeply categorize at the zone level, while others keep moving down the hierarchy to the topic level.  The benefit of using zones over the topic, subtopic, category, or keyword levels that we’ll talk about in just a minute is that the zone is the last level in which you can pull historical reporting.  So you might have sports/baseball or even sports/baseball/nymets so you can pull traffic statistics going back months or years.

The downside with this method is that zones are vertical structures, so if you had multiple verticals on your site that all had a games section, you would have to select each games zone every time you wanted to target all games when traffic the ads, rather than just targeting a single “games” key value.  This sounds easy on paper, but ads up to lots of extra time for your trafficking staff if you have lots of subcategories in each zone.  It would not be difficult to imagine needing 50 zones or more per content vertical to tag to the lowest level of granularity.

That is why most Publishers tag at a higher level, and leave the granularity to the topic variable and below.  A great benefit of granular topic tagging opposed to granular zone tagging aside from being able to use the same topic tag across multiple zones is the ability for topic tags to handle wild cards when trafficking. 

This means if you had topic=newyorkmarathon and topic=bostonmarathon, you could simply target topic=*marathon* and ads would automatically fall into both areas.  This makes trafficking much easier, but has the downside of no historical reporting, which can be a challenge for your Yield or Inventory teams.

topic=abc – next in the hierarchy is the topic level. As mentioned above you can use the topic level to tag similar content across zones.  For example, games in multiple content verticals or within them.

sbtpc=def – next in the hierarchy is the subtopic level.  You might use this to target sports games vs. adventure games for example.  Again, you can use this to target across content verticals or within them.

kw=xyz – the keyword segment isn’t really another level in the hierarchy but a way to describe the page for contextual targeting.  The benefit here is multiple keywords are allowed.  These are typically used in guides and directories like a recipe, where you would want to be able to target chicken recipes vs. vegetarian recipes vs. winter recipes, and etc., allowing some overlapping targeting.

tile=1 – the tile variable sets a unique value for each ad call on a specific page.  If there were two or more of the same size ads on a page, separate tile values would prevent the browser from trying to serve the same ad to multiple ad slots at the same time.

slot=728x90.1 – typically defines the location of the ad tag, but is really just another type of key-value.  While this may seem duplicative with the tile value, it isn’t.  For example, tile values are often set dynamically, in the order they appear on the page.  So the first call is tile=1, the second is tile=2, and so on.  But websites use different templates all the time so the homepage may not have as many ad calls as a category page which may have a different number of calls than an article page, so the tile value isn’t designed to be a consistent variable for use in targeting.  The slot however, is.  For example, if a publisher had two of the same ad units on a given page, say a 728×90 unit at the top of the page and a 728×90 at the bottom of the page, the slot value allows them to target specifically to one or the other. That said, the publisher could just as easily set the value of this to anything they want, and it’s common to see sites re-purpose this key value for another purpose, use a text value such as “leaderboard”, or not use it at all.  See Jared’s post in the comment thread below for more detail.

sz=728x90 – defines the ad size of the unit for the ad server logic.  To be clear, this doesn’t restrict the size of the ad in the unit, it just provides a targeting attribute for the ad server.  If a trafficker were to mistakenly target a 300×250 ad to a market segment with a sz=728×90 attribute however, the 300×250 creative would still serve to the 728×90 call, it would just be cut off.  It isn’t uncommon to catch one of these mistakes from time to time as you surf around the web. Additionally, you can actually include multiple values into this attribute, separated by commas.  (Thanks to Jared for correcting!)

ord=7268140825331981 – this number is a random value better known as a cache-buster.  As users move back and forth between pages of content, they often return to pages they’ve seen before, especially navigational pages like the homepage.  Browsers today try to save as much content as possible to speed up load times.  

To prevent browsers from reloading the same ad multiple times (so publishers can maximize revenue and advertisers can get accurate reporting), a random number is tacked on to the end of each ad call so it looks unique to a browser and forces a new series of calls through the ad server. 

Source: www.adopsinsider.com

Why Do Publishers and Advertisers Have Separate Ad Servers?

At first glance it might seem confusing why Publishers and Advertisers both maintain their own Ad Servers. After all, what’s the point of forcing a browser to make so many trips across the internet, bouncing from Ad Server to Ad Server when technically all you need is a single Ad Server to deliver an ad?

The answer is mostly convenience, but also so Advertisers and Publishers can audit each other when it comes time to bill.

Ad Servers are convenient because they allow Publishers and Advertisers to centralize the nuts and bolts of getting an ad on a web page. If an Advertiser bought media across ten different sites for example, without an ad server every time they wanted to change their creative assets they would have to talk to ten different publishers. Not only that, but when it came time to report on how well their campaigns did, they would have to compile ten different data sources into a single report. For a sophisticated advertiser advertising multiple products to multiple audiences with multiple messages, this quickly becomes unmanageable and is distasteful from the start.

However, with an Ad Server, an Advertiser can update their creative in a single place, whenever they want, and do so without needing to contact a publisher. Moreover, they can pull reporting on-demand from one place that uses the same tracking methodology.

Publishers maintain an Ad Server for the same reasons – they have multiple clients running multiple creatives for varying amounts and with different targeting requirements. Publishers also want a single source for reporting, and where they can efficiently track that they are delivering on schedule so they can bill clients in full.

Lastly, separate Ad Servers allow both parties to maintain their own independent set of reports. This forces both parties to rely on the technology when it comes time to bill rather than each other’s honesty. Of course, using two Ad Servers that count at different times, even milliseconds apart creates the possibility for Ad Serving Discrepancies, the bane of Publishers and Advertisers alike.

Source: www.adopsinsider.com

Ad server – An Overview 

Computer system which stores, maintains and serves (uploads) advertising banners for one or more websites. Ad servers program, track, and report several statistics about website visitors which are used by advertisers to custom tailor ads and offers to suit different categories of visitors.

How Does Ad Serving Work?

Interactive ads are everywhere these days, but when it comes to the technical process of getting an ad on the page and how publishers and marketers verify it delivered, not many people can explain what actually happens in detail.  Read this article though and you’ll be one of them!  Below I’ve detailed step-by-step how a browser gets from the initial call to a publisher’s website to the final ad creative, and when and how each party counts an impression.  You can view a diagram of the ad serving process at the bottom of this post – the numbers in the text refer to the steps labeled in the diagram.

So, without further argument -

When a browser navigates to a publisher website (1), the publisher’s web server sends back a bunch of HTML code (2) that tells the browser where to get the content (3) and how to format it.  Part of the HTML code returned to the browser (4) will include a coded link known as an ad tag.

Here’s an example of what an ad tag from Doubleclick, one of the major ad serving companies, looks like:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ABC/publisher/zone;topic=abc;sbtpc=def;cat=ghi;kw=xyz;tile=1;slot=728x90.1;sz=728x90;ord=7268140825331981?

The ad tag points the browser to the Publisher’s Ad Server (5), a system designed exclusively for delivering and tracking advertising.  In most cases, the Publisher’s Ad Server is actually a network of cloud servers owned and maintained by a separate company.  In this case, the content server tells the browser to fetch the ad from Doubleclick, a company owned by Google that then makes the very complex decision on which ad to serve using a program called an Ad Selector.

In many cases the ad server is deciding among thousands upon thousands of potential options in mere milliseconds.  The computational power behind the Ad Selector is mind blowing – Atlas, the major rival to Doubleclick calls the supercomputer running its Ad Selector “WARP” and it is among the most powerful in the world, making billions of decisions a day and trillions in its lifetime. 

The Ad Server makes a decision, and in most cases sends back another ad tag (6), or redirects the browser by pointing it to the Marketer’s Ad Server.  These redirects are technically speaking 302 redirects, which tell the browser the page has been “temporarily moved”. 

This allows Ad Servers to count the 302 call as an impression and host the actual ad content on a different server.  Once the publisher’s ad server sends the browser a redirect to the marketer, it counts a delivered impression in its own database (star).  The only exception here is if the publisher decides to deliver a house ad or the marketer has asked the publisher to “site-serve” the ads, both of which requires the publisher load the actual creative files into their ad server, meaning the publisher is the final destination, and the browser can skip the loop through the marketer side (steps 7,8,11,12).

The browser now calls the Marketer’s Ad Server (7) and is redirected yet again to a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, (8) a global network of cloud servers that actually house the raw creative graphics to fetch the actual Ad. 

Why, you ask?  Well, as powerful as ad servers are, they just aren’t equipped to handle the volume and bandwidth required to deliver content as heavy as image files.  Redirects are often nothing more than a 1×1 pixel requiring just a few bytes of memory.  Image files on the other hand are kilobytes or even megabytes in size, could be called millions of times a day, and require a much faster and robust infrastructure. 

Ad Servers might maintain three to six data centers across the world, but a CDN can process the heavy bandwidth and deliver the content faster because they operate hundreds of data centers and can route requests to the one nearest to the user, no matter where they are on earth.  You can think of the ad server as the brain and the CDN as the brawn.  Ad Servers aren’t the only companies that use CDNs; in fact many websites host their bandwidth intensive files in these cloud networks.  A CDN is almost always another independent company, such as Akamai, that hosts the heavy creative assets so the Ad Server doesn’t have to. There used to be a handful of these companies out there, but Akamai has acquired almost all of them and is the largest player by far in the space.

Here’s what a CDN redirect to an Akamai server hosting a flash file looks like:

http://spe.atdmt.com/ds/ABCDEF12334/filename123_300x250.swf

In addition to sending back the redirect to the CDN, the Marketer’s Ad Server also appends a second redirect (10) back to itself with a query string to fetch a 1×1 pixel (11) after the ad content has been called.  When the browser fires this last redirect calling a 1×1 pixel from the Marketer’s Ad Server (11), the Ad Server knows the ad was successfully downloaded and it finally counts an impression in its own database (star).

In many cases, your browser has to make at least four calls for site served ads and six in the case of third-party served ads for this whole process to work, if not even more, but shouldn’t take more than a second regardless of the number of parties involved. To visualize the process explained above, please see the diagram below – 302 redirects are highlighted in blue, and the ad creative is highlighted in red.

Source: www.businessdictionary.com and www.adopsinsider.com 

Advertising network – An Overview

An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements.

The key function of an ad network is aggregation of ad space supply from publishers and matching it with advertiser demand. The phrase "ad network" by itself is media-neutral in the sense that there can be a "Television Ad Network" or a "Print Ad Network", but is increasingly used to mean "online ad network" as the effect of aggregation of publisher ad space and sale to advertisers is most commonly seen in the online space.

The fundamental difference between traditional media ad networks and online ad networks is that online ad networks use a central Ad server to deliver advertisements to consumers, which enables targeting, tracking and reporting of impressions in ways not possible with analog media alternatives.

Overview

The advertising network market is a large and growing market, with the top 20 companies earning about $2 billion in revenues during 2007. This represents around 13% of the total display advertising market, forecasted to grow to 18% by 2010. This growth has resulted in many new players in the market, and has encouraged acquisitions of ad networks by large companies entering the market.

Ad networks are primarily involved in selling space for online ads to appear. This online advertising inventory comes in many different forms, including space on websites, in RSS feeds, on blogs, in instant messaging applications, in adware, in e-mails, and on other sources. The dominant form of inventory continues to be third-party websites, who work with advertising networks for either a fee or a share of the ad revenues.

An advertiser can buy a run of network package, or a run of category package within the network. The advertising network serves advertisements from its central ad server, which responds to a site once a page is called. A snippet of code is called from the ad server that represents the advertising banner.

Large publishers often sell only their remnant inventory through ad networks. Typical numbers range from 10% to 60% of total inventory being remnant and sold through advertising networks.

Smaller publishers often sell their entire inventory through ad networks. One type of ad network, known as a blind network, is such that advertisers place ads, but do not know the exact places where their ads are being placed.

Large ad networks include a mixture of search engines, media companies, and technology vendors.

Types of ad networks

There are 3 main types of online advertising networks:

Vertical Networks: They represent the publications in their portfolio, with full transparency for the advertiser about where their ads will run. They typically promote high quality traffic at market prices and are heavily used by brand marketers. The economic model is generally revenue share. Vertical Networks offer ROS (Run-Of-Site) advertising across specific Channels (example: Auto or Travel) or they offer site-wide advertising options, in which case they operate in a similar fashion to Publisher Representation firms.

Blind Networks: These companies offer good pricing to direct marketers in exchange for those marketers relinquishing control over where their ads will run, though some networks offer a "site opt out" method. The network usually runs campaigns as RON or Run-Of-Network. Blind networks achieve their low pricing through large bulk buys of typically remnant inventory combined with conversion optimization and ad targeting technology.

Targeted Networks: Sometimes called “next generation” or “2.0” ad networks, these focus on specific targeting technologies such as behavioral or contextual, that have been built into an Ad server. Targeted networks specialize in using consumer click stream data to enhance the value of the inventory they purchase. Further specialized targeted networks include social graph technologies which attempt to enhance the value of inventory using connections in social networks.

There are two types of advertising networks: first-tier and second-tier networks. First-tier advertising networks have a large number of their own advertisers and publishers, they have high quality traffic, and they serve ads and traffic to second-tier networks. Examples of first-tier networks include the major search engines. Second-tier advertising networks may have some of their own advertisers and publishers, but their main source of revenue comes from syndicating ads from other advertising networks.

While it is common for websites to be categorized into tier, these can be misleading. 

While Google is in the clear majority of advertisement impression served, other networks that could be labeled as tier 2 actually dominate over this tier 1 Ad networks as far as the number of customers reached.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr might be considered spam on Facebook. A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter but fail on FriendFeed. Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding many sites can be difficult.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps, using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

Source: mashable.com