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

Social Media Marketing Trends

Social media marketing disappears

Social media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.

Integrating social media to corporate websites

Brands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.

More support through social media

The integration of social media will lead to people reporting their problems in their channel of choice. Social media integration lets some of those problems be handled by the peers. However, companies should find ways to avoid their social media channels becoming a glorified helpdesk.

Social CRM will make inroads in larger organizations

Social data will be added to the CRM systems to find trends in sentiment and individual preferences of customers. The goal is to engage the customer in a conversation and give value that binds them tighter to the brand. As brands lose control of online interaction social CRM will help them react and predict how conversations are taking place. Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Social media will influence more sales

Social media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.

Social commerce on mobile devices

We will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.

Social media budgets will grow

Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services and part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook.

Social media advertising will grow

Social media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Social media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising.

Social media ROI is a must

More result oriented. Still less than half of the marketer’s measure results from social media. Social media ROI is a hot topic but less than half of the marketers report seeing it. We see that the budgets will grow and social gets more important in the brand’s marketing mix. This means that C-level will demand results. Dollars in sales - It can be as easy as direct sales from Facebook or a bit more vague as in conversion rate of people from social channels is higher than average.

In the course of our conversations with CMOs worldwide, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers; create lasting relationships with those customers; and measure marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

Rise of the branded content

Next to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curetted and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, and has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.

Content Curation and Discovery

Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what’s important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers. Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.

Tabletizing and mobilizing websites

Not exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did; now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried).

Social gaming will grow and spill over to real world

Social Media Games have more players than prime time TV shows have viewers. In-game ads and branded game items will become important promotional tools. As social media will become more mobile so will social gaming. This means that games that are hosted on social networks, such as Zynga and EA on Facebook, will be playable on mobile devices. 

These kinds of games will be played on-the-go – when you’re traveling by bus, sitting in a boring lecture, waiting for your lunch. Social gaming will be integrated with real life to physically perform tasks offline that have effect in the virtual world. Engage real friends; go to locations, flash mobs, etc. The potential growth of mobile social gaming will be huge.

Location! Location! Location!

Location based services will be everywhere. The Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more all tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.

Most social media usage will be on mobile devices

Social media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smart phone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smart phones give us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!

Group buying sites will add location based services

Let’s face it, it is a brain dead model. Grow a huge list by offering really cheap deals and then sell that list to businesses to get really cheap deals. Group buying will not go away but businesses will understand better what it is and use it accordingly. To spell it out: businesses buy an opportunity to let potential customers sample their offering at a hugely discounted rate in hopes of repeat business. New layer of value can be added by integrating with location based services that will alert users to deals when they are in the neighborhood.

Interacting with live TV in social media

Live TV shows will react to user interactions such as votes, suggestions, etc. We have the ability to change what’s happening by providing real-time feedback on social networks. TV is going to be everywhere through mobile apps.

News will be social

News websites will gradually be replaced by applications integrated with social media technology such as Facebook’s Open Graph. While this won’t happen instantly, we’re going down that road as we speak. People will be reading news from their dedicated applications such as iPad’s Flipboard or Washington Post Social Reader.

Mobile apps will become more social

All of the successful new mobile apps will be deeply integrated with social networks allowing you to share and engage more than ever before. We will be taking in a lot of suggestions and recommendations from our friends, colleagues and other trustworthy peers.

Your social media footprint will grow

Frictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don’t share, your friends will. Some may raise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.

Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark

Where do those more than 1 billion Facebook users come from? The countries with more than 20 million people and Facebook penetration below 20% will add most of this growth in 2012. Add the potential growth of other countries and you get to a cool billion or 1.1 billion even. And that does not include China.

Source: www.dreamgrow.com