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 

Social Media Marketing – An Overview

Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc., These are all examples of social media, and I bet as soon as you hear these words, you can add at least another three sites to the list off the top of your head. But what is social media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It's more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.

According to Ron Jones' - "Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online."

There is a wide variety of social media, ranging from social sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr through social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

In my opinion, social media has shot to the forefront of people's attention because it's fun. Thanks to social media, it's easy to share your ideas, photos, videos, likes and dislikes, with the world at large - and find out what they think of them. You can find friends, business contacts and become part of a community or a bunch of different communities. 

Social media gives you what TV never could - a chance to be engaged and engage others.

Because of this, social media is of particular interest to businesses. Currently, businesses of all sizes are experimenting with social media marketing, grappling with the question of how to get in on what appears to be an especially viral way to get their message (and their products) out there.

Insight of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix; advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion. Increasingly also viral marketing campaigns are grouped to integrated marketing communications.

In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms. However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and better customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. With emergence of services like Twitter, the barrier to entry in social media is greatly reduced.

Social media marketing is also known as SMO - Social Media Optimization, benefits organizations and individuals by providing an additional channel for customer support, a means to gain customer and competitive insight, recruitment and retention of new customers/business partners, and a method of managing their reputation online. Key factors that ensure its success are its relevance to the customer, the value it provides them with and the strength of the foundation on which it is built.

Finally it is a strong foundation to serves as a stand or platform in which the organization can centralize its information and direct customers on its recent developments via other social media channels, such as article and press release publications, etc.

Kinds and benefits of Social Media

Many social media sites come in the form of a blog, micro blog, podcast, video cast, forum, wiki, or some kind of content community. To help you understand social media better, let's break them down into basic forms or groups.

Social news: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position.

Social sharing: Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share videos or photos with others.

Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person's contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It's bringing the world together like nothing else has.

Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others.

This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added daily. Breaking them down into these categories or groups will help you understand their focus and to consider which avenue is right for your approach to social media marketing.

Key Benefits:

Let's look at the general scope of social media universe.

• Five of the top 10 fastest-growing Web brands are user-generated content sites?
• Sixty-seven percent of businesses say that the best source for advice on products and services are their consumers?
• Forty-five percent of adult Internet users have created content online?
• There are about 1.2 million blog posts per day?

So do you think it would benefit you to tap into this ever-growing universe of social media? Absolutely! Many companies are trying to figure out how to get involved. They're shifting money from traditional marketing budgets to social media marketing because it:

• Helps manage company's or brand's reputation.
• Builds brand awareness and helps improve how people view your brand.
• Gets you closer to your customers. Learn about their needs then respond. Discuss converse, debate.
• Offers creative and effective ways to learn insights not previously available.
• Features new and inexpensive ways to support your clients.
• Is typically less expensive than traditional advertising.
• Offers various ways to measure and track performance.

Listed above are some of the key benefits to use the social media is the best channel to promoting the products or services through internet.

Source: scribd.com and searchenginewatch.com

Polite Ads

Working with non-streaming ads can be challenging. They often take a long time to download, which in turn can negatively impact the visitor's experience on that page. 

Polite ad formats were developed to address this challenge by enabling advertisers to serve larger file formats without disturbing the load time for the rest of the images on the page.

A polite ad format is loaded in two phases:

Phase One: The initial load is a compact image or SWF file that is smaller in size, so there is no delay in loading other contents on the page. This could be the first few frames of the ad, or a teaser.

Phase Two: The main load is the full version of the Ad. The full ad can have a larger file size. It is loaded only after the whole web page has finished loading into the visitor's browser.

Benefits of Polite Ads

• Serve larger file formats without disrupting web page content for a more positive user experience
• Provides advertisers with greater creative flexibility without compromising the experience of the user.

Source: www.mojorichmedia.com

Expandable Ads - An Overview 

Advertisers use expandable rich media formats to expand an ad creative into a larger creative upon a user mouse-over or click interaction. The most common implementations expand leader board creatives vertically into larger rectangles (i.e. expand from a 90 pixel height to a 500 pixel height) or expand 250x300 rectangle creatives horizontally into larger rectangles (i.e. expand from a 300 pixel width to a 600 pixel width). Many other implementations are also possible with the expandable ad format.

Benefits of Expandable Ads

1. Provide more ad space to share interactive experiences and information with the advertiser's audience.
2. Support the inclusion of any number of rich media features, including video within a single ad unit.
3. Allow advertisers to measure the number of ad expansions and the amount of time the ad is expanded, in addition to common measurements included in all Mediaplex rich media ad formats.

Troubleshooting Tips

1. "wmode" setting must be either "opaque" or "transparent" since the Flash ad needs to be displayed within a window mode (opaque or transparent). The default setting (leave wmode as empty) will lay-over the main content and it's not the expected outcome.
2. If multiple expandable ads are on a single page, you need to use distinctive DIV containers so they are not in conflict with each other
3. The default value for "allowScriptAccess" has changed since Flash 8. You need "allowScriptAccess" to be "always" so that the JavaScript method is called properly.
4. Since we set wmode to "transparent", if your Flash file has a transparent background, the CSS for the container can set a specific background color. You can use "opaque" wmode to maintain the Flash background.
5. If you need technical assistance with the HTML/JavaScript code for an expandable ad, please open a new ticket with the ad name/ID in your account.

Google Display Network expandable ad specs

Maximum Expansion size:

• For 728x90 - can expand up to 728x180
• For 160x600 - Can expand up to 320x600
• For 300x250 - Can expand up to 600x260

Expansion Direction: Multi-directional expansion (MDE) to expand up or down

Expansion Method:        Expand – On click             Close – On click

Maximum initial load: 50K

Max size per panel: 200K

Max Polite load: 2.2MB

Required control: Panels must contain a prominent Close X in 16pt font or larger on the corner of the unit

Audio Requirement: User-Initiated

Animation Restriction: User-initiated action must be 30 seconds or less (2 mins if video)

Other specifications:

Availability - Expandable ads are currently available to select advertisers with North American account managers.

Expansion Direction - Depending on its placement on a given page, the ad must be built as a multi-directional ad unit, designed to expand either left/right or up/down on-click. The ad may not expand in two directions at the same time.

Approved Expandable Vendors - DoubleClick Rich Media, EyeBlaster Rich Media, EyeWonder Rich Media, Pointroll Rich Media

Tags - Use JavaScript tags, not iframe tags.

Other Spec Notes - No restrictions on hot spots.

Source: www.adspeed.com, support.google.com and www.mojorichmedia.com

Floating Ads – An Overview

A floating ad is a type of rich media Web advertisement that appears uninitiated, superimposed over a user-requested page, and disappears or becomes unobtrusive after a specific time period (typically 5-30 seconds). The most basic floating ads simply appear over the Web page, either full screen or in a smaller rectangular window.

They may or may not provide a means of escape, such as a close button. More sophisticated versions can come in any shape or size and include sound, animation, and interactive components. Floating ads use a variety of technologies, such as a combination of Flash and dynamic HTML (DHTML), and may have the ability to display differently according to the user's browser capabilities. United Virtualities and Eyeblaster (Mediamind) are two advertising media companies that offer floating ads.

Floating ads grab the viewer's attention and tend to be more interesting to view than other formats. The Boston.com Web site recently featured a highly successful campaign using United Virtualities' Shoshkele ad, in which a Boston Globe delivery truck drives on from the left and crosses the screen, with newspapers flying out of the truck to houses in the background. When the truck drives off the right side of the screen, a small rectangular ad floats up to the right top corner, offering 50% off home delivery.

According to a How Stuff Works article about Web advertising, a floating ad generates a click through rate of about 30 clicks per thousand impressions, similar to the rates for pop-up ads and much higher than the cited 2-5 clicks per thousand impressions for a banner Ad. Although the floating ads don't necessarily generate more clicks than pop-ups, they are thought to be more memorable and have a greater branding effect as a result. They often include tracking capabilities that report not only the numbers of clicks to the ads, but the number of times users reload a page to see the ad again.

Benefits of Floating Ads

1. Floating ads have proven to increase brand exposure through the delivery of visually engaging, high impact content that 'floats' above your publishers' web pages. The prevalence of the floating ad in recent years is attributed largely to the high impact it delivers.
2. Publisher is given full control over positioning and layering attributes. By specifying screen coordinates and z-index as parameter values passed to the Mediaplex ad tag, the publisher can effectively optimize the delivery of the ad so it refrains from obscuring or interfering with their site’s core content and other layer elements.
3. Publisher may control the timeout of the floating ad to comply with their own specifications. 

Source: searchcrm.techtarget.com and www.mojorichmedia.com

Benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Companies of all sizes in all industries are taking advantage of pay per click advertising’s immediate and quantifiable results.  Pay-Per-Click (PPC) delivers highly targeted pre-qualified traffic and your company’s message is delivered the very customers already searching for your product or service.  

Another PPC benefit is that it also offers the unique ability to test messaging, enhance both on- and off-line branding, and quickly adjust to shifting market conditions. 

Immediate Search Visibility – 

If your company does not have strong search engine visibility, pay per click marketing is the fastest and easiest way to show up on the search engines. SEO Inc’s Paid Search managers can launch a new campaign in a matter of days and optimize your campaigns to drive pre-qualified visitors to your site.

Reduce Costs – 

From proven keyword expansion and bid management techniques to ad testing and landing page optimization, through the effective keywords advertiser will get his own targeted customer to his brand.  Whenever the user use the keyword to search any on internet the Ad will display on the page.  Also advertiser will only pay for clicks not for any impressions; this will help to advertiser for reducing cost.

Maximize ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – 

Working closely with ad campaigns we will get to know the performance of the Ads and collected leads will maximize the Return on Ad spends to the advertiser.  This enables us to get more clicks for the advertising dollar and to deliver the highest quality traffic.

Increase Depth of Keyword Targeting – 

If you have a smaller website but want to target a large amount of keywords, you will need to use PPC advertising. Organic search will only support keywords that show up on your website while with PPC you can target as many keywords as you want.

Reinforce Branding – 

Supplement already strong search engine rankings with PPC and you control more of the search engine results pages (SERP’s) for searches on your branded keyword phrases. Branded keywords are often inexpensive and provide excellent opportunities for testing and also remarketing.

Re-marketing – 

Every marketer knows that the more a potential customer is exposed to your brand and messaging over time, the more likely they will become a customer. Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who've previously visited your website as they browse the Web. Find out more about Re-marketing.

Testing Capabilities – 

Pay per click marketing offers a tremendous opportunity for marketers to test new ideas whether it is testing a marketing message prior to a new product launch, experimenting with offers or price points, or just improving an existing PPC campaign. 

Increase Organic Click Through Rates – 

Once the adopted keywords are search organic we will get a highest rate of valid click through rates from search engines,  but the only one thing is it will take more time and depends on our update of the websites or landing pages.

Local to Global Exposure – 

One of the best PPC benefits is the ability to choose where your ads are served by geography. If you are large or small and want to grow, PPC allows you to target new geographic or demographic markets. . It doesn’t matter if you have a small local business or if you are major global brand, PPC has benefits for all types of companies of all sizes.

Source: www.seoinc.com

The benefits of e-Marketing over traditional marketing

Reach

The nature of the internet means businesses now have a truly global reach. While traditional media costs limit this kind of reach to huge multinationals, e-Marketing opens up new avenues for smaller businesses, on a much smaller budget, to access potential consumers from all over the world.

Scope

Internet marketing allows the marketer to reach consumers in a wide range of ways and enables them to offer a wide range of products and services. E-Marketing includes, among other things, information management, public relations, customer service and sales. With the range of new technologies becoming available all the time, this scope can only grow.

Interactivity

Whereas traditional marketing is largely about getting a brand's message out there, e-Marketing facilitates conversations between companies and consumers. With a two-way communication channel, companies can feed off of the responses of their consumers, making them more dynamic and adaptive.

Immediacy

Internet marketing is able to, in ways never before imagined, provide an immediate impact.

Imagine you're reading your favorite magazine. You see a double-page advert for some new product or service, maybe BMW's latest luxury sedan or Apple's latest iPod offering. With this kind of traditional media, it's not that easy for you, the consumer, to take the step from hearing about a product to actual acquisition.

With e-Marketing, it’s easy to make that step as simple as possible, meaning that within a few short clicks you could have booked a test drive or ordered the iPod. And all of this can happen regardless of normal office hours. Effectively, Internet marketing makes business hours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for every week of the year.

By closing the gap between providing information and eliciting a consumer reaction, the consumer's buying cycle is speeded up and advertising spend can go much further in creating immediate leads.

Demographics and targeting

Generally speaking, the demographics of the Internet are a marketer's dream. Internet users, considered as a group, have greater buying power and could perhaps be considered as a population group skewed towards the middle-classes.

Buying power is not all though. The nature of the Internet is such that its users will tend to organize themselves into far more focused groupings. Savvy marketers who know where to look can quite easily find access to the niche markets they wish to target.

Marketing messages are most effective when they are presented directly to the audience most likely to be interested. The Internet creates the perfect environment for niche marketing to targeted groups.

Adaptivity and closed loop marketing

Closed Loop Marketing requires the constant measurement and analysis of the results of marketing initiatives. By continuously tracking the response and effectiveness of a campaign, the marketer can be far more dynamic in adapting to consumers' wants and needs.

With e-Marketing, responses can be analyzed in real-time and campaigns can be tweaked continuously. Combined with the immediacy of the Internet as a medium, this means that there's minimal advertising spend wasted on less than effective campaigns.

Maximum marketing efficiency from e-Marketing creates new opportunities to seize strategic competitive advantages.

The combination of all these factors results in an improved ROI and ultimately, more customers, happier customers and an improved bottom line.

Source: www.quirk.biz