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

Online display advertising ecosystem

The biggest divide in the online advertising world is search advertising v/s display advertising. Search sounds exactly like what it is: the ads next to search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and competitors. Search is bigger than display by revenues, and much more concentrated. 

The benefit of search to advertisers is it corresponds much better than display advertising to intent.  A searcher for “hotels in Palm Springs” is most likely in the market for a hotel in Palm Springs. The other thing search has going for it is its easy and quantifiable — you can sign into Google Adwords with nothing more than your credit card, type up some text ads, and be running campaigns with impression and click reporting within hours.

The display advertising world is structured differently. Display ads are obviously those pictures you see plastered all over the sites you visit. There’s less intent so individual impressions earn a lot less money. Typically the prices are measured as CPM, Cost Per Mille, i.e. cost per 1k impressions. It’s also important to understand the structure of the market a bit. 

In the beginning (90s), advertisers pretty naively bought ad impressions millions at a time on popular sites. Performance was often evaluated based on pure impressions or CTR, click through rates. Ads were often sold on the basis of quantifiability — you could, for the first time, measure how many ads were seen, who clicked, how often, where he or she went, etc. As search advertising evolved, I think a lot of the people chasing quantifiable advertising moved to that, while display became more about branding. This, btw, is the value of facebook — brand advertisers want to be able to precisely target age, gender, income, and other demographics; on facebook, users freely and generally accurately share this information.

The display ecosystem has a bunch of moving pieces. If you look at the display advertising tech landscape graphic from Luma Partners, you’ll see:

Agencies 

These are the big advertising agencies that run most large advertising accounts go through. Companies like Toyota, GM, General Mills, etc, will give these companies tend to hundreds of millions of dollars to run ad campaigns on their behalf.

Media Buying Desks 

The ad agencies weren’t really capable of managing digital campaigns. That is, when ad agencies came about, your media outlets were maybe 10 national TV networks, radio stations, local newspapers, and a couple national magazines. And the media buying process was pretty simple: the agencies would send out an RFP that said we want manly men in their 40s who buy outdoorsy cologne and the aforementioned publishers would respond and say how their audience matched that profile. Compared to the online world of today, where there are thousands of premier publishers such as the NYT, ESPN, online magazine versions, etc; this was much simpler. 

Today, trafficking ads is an order of magnitude more work and advertisers must decide what they want to buy, where, on which site, when, with what creative, etc. So the agencies built or bought companies that have the capability to build digital media, traffic campaigns, optimize the ads, and create the necessary reporting. Eg Vivaki is Publicis, b3 is WPP, etc.

Ad Exchanges 

These are, well, exchanges where publishers and advertisers come together to sell and buy remnant ad inventory. Basically, there is premier and remnant inventory. Premier inventory is something like display ads on high quality reporting on ESPN or ads on articles on ARS Technica. These are often sold by in house salespeople in a process remarkably similar to how everything used to work, though people mostly email PDFs instead of sending faxes. Every ad impression that isn’t sold as premier is referred to as remnant, and these remnant impressions are offered to ad exchanges such as Right Media — RMX, owned by Yahoo — in exchange for a cut.

So the way this works is I can buy, with some rules, 1MM impressions on RMX and RMX will put these impressions on their publishers such as ESPN in ad impressions that ESPN didn’t sell in house. These impressions go for an order of magnitude less money than premier. RMX is one of the more technically sophisticated. The benefit for publishers is they get some money for inventory they didn’t fill. Just to be clear, a good eCPM for premier might be $20-$40 and a good eCPM for remnant might be $3-$5.

Demand Site Platform

A DSP helps advertisers purchase remnant ads across multiple ad sources including exchanges, ad networks, and individual publishers. A good DSP will have sophisticated targeting and optimization algorithms that incorporate first and third party data on behalf of the advertisers. Typically, a DSP’s clients are advertisers that aren’t big enough to go to one of the big seven agencies. Often these advertisers spend $10 – $50k / month, for example a local Toyota dealership instead of the national dealer chain, etc.

Ad Servers 

These help publishers. See Exp: OpenX, DoubleClick Dart, etc. Particularly for larger publishers, coordinating all these ad purchases is complicated. Your advertisers want to give you rules, such as user bleaching rules (only so many impressions to a given user per some amount of time), time of day, what pages an ad can run on (few people want to run next to naked folks, etc). 

They also want to be able to update and optimize their creative or even change the creative or the landing page they go to. Advertisers, or their agencies, also demand reporting — how many times was an ad seen. On what pages did users click on the Ad etc., within publishers the ad sales or monetization folks don’t want to be releasing the site every time they tweak Ads. Ad servers are internal or external software that manages all this and can be quite complex.

Data optimization 

This requires some explanation. In the beginning, people basically bought broad swaths of display ads. The value to optimization is the more targeted you can make your ad, the more value it has. My favorite example is espn: assume 10% of their online audience is female. If you’re an advertiser that wants to sell female sports jerseys, your CTR amongst women is 5%, your conversion rate is 5%, and a conversion is worth $50, your value per 1k impressions is 1000 * .1 * .05 * .05 * 50 = $12.5, so your CPM has to be < $12.50. However, if espn could pick out the women and sell the publisher only that segment (with some error, obviously), but say espn can enrich the demos so that women are 50% of impressions in a segment. Suddenly advertising on espn is worth 5 times as much for the advertiser and hence espn can charge 5 times as much. This is the value of data optimization. It's performed many ways, from things as simple as geo targeting and day part to more sophisticated demographic estimation, retargeting, and varieties of behavioral retargeting.

Re-Targeters 

Re-targeting is a simple idea. Say that I see cookies going to a site like a bmw forum. I might reasonably intuit that these users are interested in bmws and choose to show bmw display ads to them as they browse the internet.

Behavioral retargeting is the next step of retargeting. Plain retargeting is nice, but it suffers from a couple flaws. First, it has limited reach, ie there are only so many cookies that go to a bmw forum. BMW probably wants to reach more purchasers than just those. Second, it doesn’t really help generate intent. If you’re going to a bmw forum, you’re probably already pretty interested in bmws, so that may not be the best person for bmw to advertise to. Behavioral retargeting means any of a variety of ways of trying to figure out cookies to advertise to to get broader reach or cheaper acquisitions than retargeting.

The other big movement going on in the display world is the evolution of how people buy ads. In the early days — 90s — people tended to buy online ads in a high touch process with salespeople. Ad networks started which brought more buyers and fewer salespeople. Companies like Right Media — which Yahoo bought — started and allowed you to create bidding rules that run on their servers so advertisers can buy ads. So I can say that I want to, across many websites, target cookies that have visited a site or set of sites (retargeting), or show them so many ads per day, etc, and based on a variety of characteristics of a cookie and the site which that cookie is visiting and the web page they are viewing, $X is my bid for that cookie. 

RTB or real time bidding 

This is the new - now, instead of giving limited rules to someone like RMX, you register with Google (the largest RTB platform) or Yahoo’s RTB, and their servers, for each impression, send you a bid request. Your computers located in a server farm near their servers are given typically 100ms to respond with a per impression bid for that cookie on that page and that impression. See. Also, this is obviously an enormous tech investment. DSPs also help with this; most companies aren’t capable nor is it worthwhile to build this out in house.
Source: blog.earlh.com

Email Marketing Apps for Small Business

Email marketing is one of the dominant ways that a small business reaches out to customers and prospects. Email marketing is about relationships — and successful relationship marketing involves a lot more thought than simply firing off a newsletter via email.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, email marketing is one of two marketing budget items that saw an increase in 2009.  The other is social media.

But where many have claimed that “email is dead,” MarketingSherpa has proven otherwise in its studies.  In fact, they show that email is quite social.  A recent survey asked users how they share information they find on the internet:  78% responded that email is how they do it.  22% use social media sites.

Here are 30 small business email marketing applications to grow customer relationships and your business:

Emma

Emma is a Web-based service that combines do-it-yourself with free personal assistance when you need it (custom email design comes at an additional charge).  They have strong tracking and analytics components that allow you to learn what works, or doesn’t, with your audience.

Constant Contact

They offer a free 60-day trial. They have been around a long time and have a strong arsenal of email marketing tools from HTML newsletter templates to personal coaching on how to get your email campaigns done right.  They have added event management so you can handle online registration, as well as online survey tools to gather info from customers and prospects.

AWeber

AWeber grew very popular because it focused on auto-response emails.  They made it very simple and elegant to create a form a prospect would fill out.  This service is auto-responded to that information with whatever message you had set up. They offer a robust set of tools including email newsletters, emails to RSS, and, of course, auto responders.  First month is $1, and then pay-as-you-go based on subscriber count.  You don’t pay per email with them.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the first email marketing providers to offer a “forever free” plan.  Small business users I know love this plan as it gives you up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails for free each month.  After that, it has pay-as-you-go pricing.  On top of the email newsletter and database list management, they offer integration with online event registrations and ticket sales via Eventbrite.

iContact

iContact offers all of the same features as the others, but they focus attention on their deliverability rates – often talked about as whitelist agreements. While it may not seem like a big deal at first glance, if your email provider isn’t doing things right, your email may not get through.  iContact partners with a third party, Pivotal Veracity, to score emails to help improve how many get through to recipients. They offer a free trial, no credit card to get started, and a good educational resource section.

Vertical Response

In addition to email, Vertical Response is probably one of the more integrated services out there, with integration to Intuit and Salesforce.  They offer postal mail options, too, so you can send a postcard to a prospect or customer to add another touch beyond email and it has great educational materials also.

EmailBrain

I liked that they had a “no credit card” free trial signup.  More importantly, I really appreciated that they offer an industry-focus approach with 20+ industry examples and case studies.  You could dig in and see what someone else like you was doing — a good way to get a jumpstart on your email marketing.

eConnect

eConnect Email’s claim to fame is their the first provider to offer a tagging system for email.  Look at it as a meta-organizing system where you can see what your customers and prospects find interesting and are clicking on.  You can tag items in a specific email, in a campaign, and across multiple campaigns.  That information is then available on a subscriber level, so you can see the top five tags your customer is interested in.

FuseMail

FuseMail offers email hosting as well as campaign management.  They have a 14-day free trial.  The big area that stood out for me was they have an SMTP Direct service (which is an email gateway) where you can use your existing email newsletter program and gain the advantages of their email servers.  The advantage of this is that you don’t have to get everyone on your existing mail list to “opt-in” to your newsletter again, which is almost always a requirement when signing on with a new service.  FuseMail doesn’t have this requirement with their SMTP Direct service.

SimplyCast

SimplyCast, owned by Mailworkz (offers 300 emails a month “free forever” account, similar to MailChimp).  Some of the key features that SimplyCast offers are worth considering:   Image hosting (so you can easily have your image render properly), easy to include attachments, forward-to-a-friend options from within the email (great for viral stuff), and dozens of template categories.

JangoMail

Many providers tag your emails with “Powered by ABC Email…” and you probably don’t particularly want to see this sort of branding on your email messages to customers.  JangoMail promises “your emails are your emails, not ours.”  Even though they are a web-based email provider, they allow for you to manage your messaging through Outlook or Thunderbird, and other web-based apps like Gmail and Yahoo, too.  Free trial allows for 50 test emails.

GetResponse

GetResponse appears to be very social media savvy.  They offer video email and social media tools.  Your email subscribers, for example, can easily receive your Twitter updates via the GetResponse service.   They also have a split-testing feature so that you can test one email against another to see which one pulls better results.

Contact29

Contact29 is an email marketing provider focused primarily on the real estate and mortgage industries. If you are in those industries, they are worth a look.

SendLabs

SendLabs has created a tool to help you see what your email will look like in the recipient’s inbox.  With a single click, this feature within the SendLabs Summer ’09 release will send a copy of your email to all of the major email programs (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.) and provide a screen shot report on how well your email will render for everybody.

Campaigner

Campaigner offers a nifty workflow tool that allows you to determine when and what actions trigger an email to be sent to your customer or prospect.  It is similar to an auto responder (which sends an email when a customer fills in a form on a website usually), but a bit more advanced.  With their workflow tool, you can trigger a specific response based on what a customer does within the email.  If they click a certain link, for example, they might receive an email 1 hour later.  Free trial, of course.

EasyContact

I liked the very simple 3-step plan that EasyContact presents to first time visitors.  You get a clear sense that they have thought about how to make it as easy as possible.   They also offer a free forever plan and low-cost pay-as-you-go options.

Big Response

The other services may have similar offers, but Big Response has a couple of things worth mentioning:  First, they highlight that you can collect an unlimited number of subscribers – meaning you don’t pay to store contacts and only pay for emails sent.   You get unlimited phone and email support from their experts. 

Benchmark Email

Their competitor comparison chart reveals a lot about what they offer that others don’t.  You can tie into your Google Analytics account.  You can view all of your subscriber opens within a map within the reporting feature.  You can segment out all of your email lists easily which is handy as you get to know your customers better.

StreamSend

The big differentiator for StreamSend is they offer every customer a private IP address, which helps you keep your reputation intact.  You are not judged by the email provider you use, but by your email quality.

myNewsletterBuilder

myNewsletterBuilder stands out in the crowd of email marketers by providing pre-written content that you can use in your newsletters and emails, by industry segment.  They also partnered with eVoiceSpot, which is a multimedia rich presentation service that you can embed into your email or newsletter.

YesMail

YesMail has one major awards and recognition for its platform and service.  They have a specific small business offering called YesMail Direct.  This link goes direct to that page. They are connected to InfoUSA, so if you need to build a mailing list you can do it all under one roof.

Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi is a simple email marketing system.  One of the nice features is it comes with free design assistance.  It also has a limited edition that is completely free and includes good sharing functions like Forward to a Friend, among many other standard features.

PoMMo

PoMMo is a free open-source program that bills itself as “mass mailing” software.  It is a no-frills program.  It’s is 100% free.  However, like many open source apps, remember there’s always a cost — it costs you time.  You are pretty much on your own when it comes to installing it and troubleshooting issues.  There is no customer support to call.

CRM EMAIL

Many companies don’t like their email efforts separated from their customer data. Keeping it all together is a lot of work.  Customer relationship management software companies have listened, but these five web-based offerings are aimed at the small business owner.  If you want to enable customized emails to your customers, with full tracking and opportunities to create new campaigns from your customer data, then you should look closely at these companies:

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is a popular CRM solution with automated email marketing as a central concept.  As you make contact with customers via email, or via interactions on your website or online shopping cart, Infusionsoft tracks those contact points.  You can then use those interactions to send targeted and relevant communications. Your salespeople can access this info and understand what communications the customer has seen, or where they’ve gone on your site, and have a more intelligent conversation.  (Note:  Infusionsoft is a sponsor of this site’s Internet radio show.)

Zoho CRM

Zoho is an online application suite like OpenOffice or Google Documents, but with a lot more applications and options for managing your business.  Their ZohoCRM tool recently introduced the email within CRM option. The email add-on is $5 a month additional.

Highrise HQ

Highrise HQ is a web-based CRM from 37 Signals (owner of Basecamp, a popular project management tool).  Like most CRM solutions, they allow you to track who you talk to and so forth, but the ability to see all of your email efforts and dialogue with a customer on one page is fairly useful.

Leopard CRM

Integrating your email into your CRM efforts always looks daunting, but Leopard CRM simply says — calls our support team and we’ll walk you through it.

SalesBoom

SalesBoom is an online CRM application that offers an email campaign management tool.  With it, a user can capture leads via a simple web form and then send individual emails, or manage entire drip marketing campaigns where you email customers or prospects a series of emails over a period of time.

SalesJunction

SalesJunction offers one of the lowest monthly costs for a web-based CRM that I’ve found.  The basic edition has a 15 day trial.

Lyris HQ

Lyris HQ used to be known as Email Labs.  It integrates with Salesforce.com, which is the industry-leading online CRM solution, so that’s a plus for the many business owners using Salesforce.  I could not find pricing on their website, which is a downside in my opinion. Small business owners are too busy to talk to sales reps or sit through web demos just to discover pricing.

SOCIAL EMAIL

There’s loads of proof that social networks have changed how we communicate. They increase transparency, build trust, and give people (customers and prospects) the choice to opt-in to our messages.

With social media you can communicate directly to your customers without the traditional email hurdles and miss the inbox altogether.  For example, your company can send messages to people in a Facebook or LinkedIn Group today.  Twitter does not offer a group feature where you can message a group of people privately, but a third party app called Tweetworks does.  You could accomplish something similar by addressing a group with a hashtag although it wouldn’t remain private.  The goal with a private message is to avoid bothering others that would not be interested in the offer or message.

Return on Subscriber offers a solid post on how to achieve more social email:  Making your email marketing social

Finally, remember that programs and offer details change.  But, to the best of my knowledge all information herein is accurate as of the time of publication.

We hope these 30 applications and ideas help you.  What email marketing software do you use now?  Leave a comment below with your favorite.

Source: smallbiztrends.com