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

Online Display Advertising – An Overview

Display advertising is graphical advertising on the World Wide Web that appears next to content on web pages, IM applications, email, etc.

These ads, often referred to as banners, come in standardized ad sizes, and can include text, logos, pictures, or more recently, rich media.

Rich media, synonymous for interactive multimedia, is enhanced media that utilizes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for active participation from the recipient of the ad.

The internet has become an ongoing emerging source that tends to expand more and more. The growth of this particular medium attracts the attention of advertisers as a more productive source to bring in consumers.

A clear advantage consumers have with online advertisement is the control they have over the product, choosing whether to check it out or not.

Online advertisements may also offer various forms of animation. In its most common use, the term "online advertising" comprises all sorts of banner, e-mail, in-game, and keyword advertising, on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace has received increased relevance. Web-related advertising has a variety of sites to publicize and reach a niche audience to focus its attention to a specific group. Research has proven that online advertising has given results and is growing business revenue. For the year 2012, Jupiter research predicted $34.5 billion in US online advertising spending.

You may picture display advertising like magazine or newspaper ads, just online and - like TV commercials - with the possibility of moving from static to interactive, flash and video. However, display advertising has a significant advantage over advertising in magazines, newspapers and TVs:

1. Targeting options such as demographic and behavioral targeting are available to laser in on your audience and,
2. You can track the performance of your campaign daily to measure metrics such as impressions, clicks and conversions to calculate your ROI.

Online advertisement as Digital Promotions for Television

Online advertisement can also be classified as Digital Promotions. Digital promotion in connection to the television industry is when networks use authentic digital resources to promote their new shows in a growing vast range of venues.  Television networks development of digital off air promotional strategies allowed digital promotion to remain significant to the advertisement advancement in the television.

Examples of television online digital promotions:

The Sci Fi network for loaded a special recap episode of Battlestar Galactica onto Microsoft’s Xbox online gaming service; this gave the audience additional opportunities to sample content if they may or may not be familiar with the show.

Another example of digital promotion in television is when network CBS incorporated new digital technologies of Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices that were able to download a thirty seconds clip of the new advertised show on their devices; consumers standing in range of billboard don’t need an internet link to down load the show’s content. These non-linear viewing opportunities provided as a valuable tool for gaining audiences; and to encourage them to intersection with the linear audience.

Revenue models

The three most common ways in which online advertising is purchased are CPM, CPC, and CPA.

CPM (Cost Per Mille) or CPT (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) is when advertisers pay for exposure of their message to a specific audience. "Per mille" means per thousand impressions, or loads of an advertisement. However, some impressions may not be counted, such as a reload or internal user action.

CPV (Cost Per Visitor) is when advertisers pay for the delivery of a Targeted Visitor to the advertisers website.

CPV (Cost Per View) is when advertisers pay for each unique user view of an advertisement or website (usually used with pop-ups, pop-under and interstitial ads).

CPC (Cost Per Click) or PPC (Pay per click) is when advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. They do not actually pay for the listing, but only when the listing is clicked on. This system allows advertising specialists to refine searches and gain information about their market. Under the Pay per click pricing system, advertisers pay for the right to be listed under a series of target rich words that direct relevant traffic to their website, and pay only when someone clicks on their listing which links directly to their website. CPC differs from CPV in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site.

CPA (Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition) or PPF (Pay Per Performance) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. This model ignores any inefficiency in the seller's web site conversion funnel.

The following are common variants of CPA:

CPL (Cost Per Lead) advertising is identical to CPA advertising and is based on the user completing a form, registering for a newsletter or some other action that the merchant feels will lead to a sale.

CPS (Cost Per Sale), PPS (Pay Per Sale), or CPO (Cost Per Order) advertising is based on each time a sale is made.

eCPM: Effective CPM or eCPM calculated through other conversion events such as Cost per Clicks, Cost per Downloads, Cost per Leads etc. for example when an advertiser getting $2 per download and for 100,000 impressions you received 10 downloads worth $20, in this case your effective CPM or eCPM will be 2*20*1000/100,000= $0.4

Fixed Cost: Advertiser paying fixed cost for delivery frame by campaign flight dates without any relevance to performance

Cost per conversion describes the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an ad campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "Conversion" varies depending on the situation: it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

Source: help.yahoo.com and www.wikipedia.com