As with most things online, the things we see are made possible by complex processes that occur behind the scenes in the blink of an eye. Modern online display advertising (powered by real-time bidding) is no different. The whole bidding process happens in a fraction of a second.

(best viewed in full-screen mode)

We thought it would be helpful to slow down the process to show how each impression is evaluated and auctioned off in mere milliseconds (i.e., real time) before a page loads. Our goal was to do this in 30 seconds. The result is this video.

Please let us know what you think!^*

_{*Our designer needs praise to survive.}

SiteScout will be sponsoring and speaking at the first annual IAB Canada Real-Time Bidding (RTB) Event on Tuesday, May 22nd, at the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, Canada.

Our director of business development, Matt Sauls, will be speaking on the “Agencies + Advertisers” stream on the topic of “How Brands Can Leverage RTB for High Impact” at 1:00pm EST.

We will be posting the presentation for download later next week. If all goes as planned, there will also be video of the talk available online. Stay tuned!

For more details about the event, visit the official event page.

Come out and say hi if you have a chance!

Quite a few things have been happening here lately at SiteScout. There is a lot to share, so we’ll get right into it.

New Interface

At the same time as our new website launch a few weeks back, we also released an update to our RTB interface. We have received some great feedback from it already, so we hope you like it also. We are also working on some additional design updates to the interface, which will be launched in the near future.

Additional Interface Changes

We have a few new features and fixes that were soft launched last week:

Average CPM Column

Two columns have been removed from the interface – “Estimated Bid” and “Bid Range”. These proved to be confusing and missing for a good portion of our sites and placements. Instead, they have been replaced by the “Average CPM” column, which shows the average cost of traffic for the past 24 hours. This should give a ballpark idea of what price to bid. It should be noted that this is an average for impressions won on the SiteScout platform, and does not reflect the highest or lowest bid price on any given property. In order to win the 1st impression, it’s probably necessary to bid above the average price. Of course, it’s also possible to win traffic by bidding lower than the average price.

New Budgeting Controls

To begin with, we changed the name from “Spend Cap” to “Budgeting”. Many of our users were unfamiliar with the term, so we decided to forgo the industry speak, in favor of more straightforward language. In addition, we made it so that the default settings encourage the use of a daily budget, to help new users from overspending. The platform can deliver a very high volume of traffic, and if someone doesn’t realize that, they can unintentionally blow through their budgets very quickly. We also opted for radio buttons, instead of the drop-down menu we used before, to make the settings more visible.

New Device Targeting Controls

Device Targeting was previously an optional feature. However, it’s such a powerful and useful feature that we decided to make it more prominent and change the design to a more intuitive layout that encourages its use. Furthermore, we’ve changed the default settings so that mobile devices are not selected by default. This prevents web advertisers from paying for mobile traffic that they don’t want.

Upcoming Features

The following features and integrations will be launched shortly. Expect to hear more details about them very soon.

• Brand Protection
• Even Delivery
• Category Targeting
• PulsePoint Integration
• CasaleX Integration

Infrastructure Expansion

We have reached a point where we have outgrown our current infrastructure, which has resulted in the delay of many new features and integrations that we want to implement. The good news is that we are doubling our server capacity over the next 2 weeks, which means that you can expect many new features and integrations very shortly!

To explore the changes yourself, log in to your SiteScout RTB account. And, let us know what you think of the changes we have made.

Follow us on Twitter (@sitescout) to stay updated on the latest from our team.

One of the most powerful features on the SiteScout RTB platform is the AdBuilder geo-location macro. These macros allow you to dynamically display the viewer’s location (city, region, or country) within banners. The benefits to you are:

• Increased engagement (higher click-through rates)
• Increased conversion rates
• Increased recall (ads are more memorable)

Here is a short 2-minute video tutorial on getting started with this feature:

The following is a list of all the geo macros that you can insert into banner ads:

{CITY} – Displays the name of the visitor’s city
{REGION} – Displays the name of the visitor’s region (province/state)
{COUNTRY} – Displays the visitor’s country name
{REGIONABV} – Displays an abbreviated version of the visitor’s region (e.g., “CA” for California)
{COUNTRYABV} – Displays an abbreviated version of the visitor’s country (e.g., “AU” for Australia)

This is a just a simple – but powerful – example of what’s possible with SiteScout’s AdBuilder. There is much more that can be done, from adding social widgets (like a Twitter button) to fine-tuning your designs with custom CSS. We will cover those in future tutorials!

“I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.”
-David Ogilvy (1955)

Ogilvy understood the importance of good research. I think digital advertisers ought to take the same approach for online ad campaigns.

To do this manually is extremely tedious and inefficient. Larger trends and insights cannot be seen. But most importantly, it wastes far too much human time on something that can be done better by machines. With the right tools, research can be done in a fraction of the time.

Many of our advertisers ask us for information on what kinds of campaigns people are running, where they are running them, and what seems to be working (in terms of profitability) for direct response advertisers. Of course, we can only answer in generalities to avoid conflict of interest with our existing advertisers. However, we often recommend that they conduct some competitive intelligence in order to gather this data from public sources.

I’ve been following many research tools for over a year now, and have narrowed down the top two service providers — MixRank and WhatRunsWhere. Even though they operate in a similar space, they provide somewhat complimentary services, and are both actively developed. Each have a unique research philosophy and appeal to different levels of media buyers or planners.

I’ve included two videos below where I walk through each interface to conduct some hypothetical research for the auto insurance niche. These videos should also shed some light on the competitive intelligence process and how it fits into the larger media planning process.

It’s easy to actually create campaigns. The hard part is always the planning prior to creating your campaigns. But it can be made easier.

During the campaign planning phase, there are two fundamental things that need to be decided:

• What banners to use
• What websites to place them on

This is where intelligence tools enter the process. Good competitive intelligence tools are able to provide the following inspiration for media planners:

• Where other advertisers are placing their ads
• What banners other advertisers are using
• What landing pages other advertisers are using
• How long other advertisers have been running specific banners
• How long other advertisers have been running on specific placements
• and so on…

Given this data, an advertiser can figure out where other advertisers seem to be running the longest, and either mimic those placements, procure similar placements, or avoid placements adjacent to undesirable advertisers (e.g., I might not want my BMW ads to be on pages where Audi, for example, is placing their ads – or maybe I do.)

From a creative angle, seeing the duration of specific banners can provide you with an idea of how well it’s performing, along with an idea of what the audience has been exposed to – in order to avoid banner blindness. It can also serve as a “creative baseline” for designing more innovative creatives to challenge what’s currently out there.

Now let’s begin, alphabetically, with MixRank…

(best viewed in full-screen HD mode)

Summary

• Traffic Sources — Google/Doubleclick
• Country Support — United States
• Historical Data — 330+ days
• Data Points — Advertiser profiles (text ad count, banner ad count, first seen, last seen, days seen, top ads with publisher count and frequency, ad reach, etc.), Publisher profiles (top ads, Compete uniques, Quantcast rank), Creative profiles (text, image, flash, first seen, last seen, days seen, ad position, publisher list, destination URL list) and more.
• User Experience — Very intuitive and easy to use. Quick insights.
• Price — $67 /month (free trial account available) [Update: Coupon link for 1 month free.]
• Website — www.mixrank.com

Actionable data in very few clicks. Data is limited to the Google/Doubleclick display network within the United States. Due to focusing on a single network, they are able to deliver rich tailored data. It may actually be to their advantage that they focus, simply because they have less fragmentation to deal with and organize. The MixRank team employs machine learning to discover, for example, the best performing ads or placements for any given advertiser. The same applies to the top advertisers/ads for any given website placement. Another interesting feature worth mentioning is their Top 10000 Advertisers List, which is sorted by number of ads found in the wild.

Q & A

One of the founders of MixRank is Ilya Lichtenstein – an expert online marketer and technologist. I had a chance to ask Ilya a few questions about his platform:

Q: Who is the target audience for your product?

A: Our 4,500 users range from individual affiliates to larger lead gen companies to big national advertisers. In general, our product is most useful for performance advertisers who are actively optimizing for conversions or specific metrics rather than brand advertisers that might only be looking for impressions.

Q: How long has your platform been collecting data?

A: We’ve been collecting data since March 2011 from about 100,000 publishers.

Q: What makes your tool unique? What sets your product apart?

A: We’ve built technology for our enterprise clients that goes beyond simply displaying all of the data and uses machine learning algorithms to automatically identify the highest performing ads and traffic sources. Some of the data points we use in this process are available in our self-serve interface so that advertisers can make their own decisions about which ads and traffic sources are the best. For example, our users can look at average position of an AdSense text ad and monitor trends in its changes over time to find the most relevant and high CTR ad copy.

Q: Are there any future plans for 2012 that you want to share?

A: We’ll be focusing on making our data even more actionable and valuable, and making it easier for advertisers to turn our insights into campaigns and conversions.

Great.

Now let’s take a look at WhatRunsWhere…

(best viewed in full-screen HD mode)

Summary

• Traffic Sources — Google/Doubleclick, 247 Media, Pulsepoint, ValueClick, Tribal Fusion, Blue Lithium, BuySellAds, Rubicon, AdBrite, Technorati, Burst, Advertising.com, Interclick, Zedo, Xtend Media, Undertone Ads, Specific Media, Harren Media
• Country Support — United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Spain
• Historical Data — 760+ days
• Data Points — Domain profiles (traffic sources by %, top placements by %, top placements by duration, ad server occurrences, etc.), Placement profiles (top advertisers, top banner ads, top text/hybrid ads, etc.), Creatives (text, image, and flash), and more.
• User Experience — Advanced interface. Overwhelming amount of data available.
• Price — $229 /month (7-day trial available for $1) [Update: Coupon link for 2 weeks free.]
• Website — www.whatrunswhere.com

Tremendous amount of data with instant insights. Dozens of ad networks. Support for five countries. Almost three years worth of data collection. It’s clear that WhatRunsWhere was designed with the hardcore researcher in mind. Somewhat advanced interface for a novice. With the vast amount of data provided, there are no lack of insights, but the interface could use some improvement in terms of organization. Nonetheless, still extremely useful for almost any level of advertiser. There is also a handy “Track Domains” feature that allows you to track a number of specific landing page URLs, in case you have an interest in certain campaigns or advertisers.

Q & A

One of the founders of WhatRunsWhere is Max Teitelbaum – an entrepreneur and veteran online marketer. I had a chance to ask Max the same questions about his platform:

Q: Who is the target audience for your product?

A: Our target audience is any person that buys online media anywhere! Since we cover the web, anyone buying text or banner ads online should definitely check us out.

Q: How long has your platform been collecting data?

A: We’ve been around and collecting data for almost 2.5 years in the USA and every other country ranges from a year to a few months depending on when they were added.

Q: What makes your tool unique? What sets your product apart?

A: My favorite feature is our quick advertiser search, it allows you to find any domain and how they’re advertising (where and what ads) in literally seconds. Combine this with advertiser tracking to find when new ads are launched for an advertiser, and it makes looking at your competition a breeze. Keyword search is also useful as it allows you to do research into verticals when you may not know a ton about the players and need a place to start.

Q: Are there any future plans for 2012 that you want to share?

A: For 2012, we’re adding in some cool demographic-related features, more countries (a lot more) and more filtering and sorting options. In addition, we’ll be increasing the amount of data we collect daily and striving to help our users advertise better every day.

Final Thoughts

There is a new breed of competitive intelligence tools available for media buyers of online display advertising. If you want the maximum amount of data for your research, or you require more than just US data, and if budget is not an issue, I would recommend WhatRunsWhere. If you’re a startup, or focus solely on Google Adwords (US only), or if you’re newer to media buying, MixRank might be a better choice.

Competitive intelligence tools are excellent leverage for media buyers that are in the planning stages of their campaigns. With these new tools, media buyers can figure out where other companies are buying ad space, what creatives are being used, what landing pages are being used, the durations of their campaigns, and much more. This data can provide tremendous insight to the savvy media buyer.

Many people are surprised to hear that we also provide retargeting on our RTB platform. As a result of being connected to so many traffic exchanges, our network reach is large enough that our advertisers can run very effective retargeting campaigns in addition to their usual display campaigns. The following is a very simple guide to retargeting.

Use the following links to skip to the appropriate section:

The Basics
Frequently Asked Questions
How To Create a Retargeting Campaign
Advanced Retargeting Strategies

The Basics

Retargeting or “Audience Targeting” allows you to track all users that visit your webpage (or any online destination), and find those users across almost any site on the web. By building a retargeting list or “audience” of users who have visited a certain website, you can create powerful customized campaigns, tailored to those specific users, and which will only be seen by those users.

Primary Advantages of Retargeting:

1. Brand Recognition — Users who recognize your brand will now see your advertisements displayed across thousands of websites, creating the impression of a large-scale advertising campaign, but for a fraction of the budget.

2. Cost Effectiveness — The highly-targeted nature of retargeting allows you to pay higher-than-normal CPM prices compared to otherwise untargeted campaigns. However, due to the relatively limited size of audiences, overall costs are generally lower.

3. Behavioral Targeting — It’s possible to create campaigns which only target users that fall into certain behavioral groups. For example, users who are:

• known to click on banners
• known to enter their e-mail address into forms
• known to make online purchases with a credit card
• known to purchase specific types of products
• and so on…

Frequently Asked Questions

The following are the most common questions that we get from our advertisers.

Q: Is there an extra fee for retargeting?

A: No, there are no extra fees. You only pay for the impressions you win, just like any campaign.

Q: Can SiteScout find users who arrived at my site from other traffic sources/networks?

A: Yes! It doesn’t matter how people arrived at your page, our system can track them. Whether they came from search engines, links from other websites, or even media buys on other ad networks, they will all be captured in your audience.

Q: Who cannot be tracked with retargeting?

A: Users who have cookies disabled cannot be tracked using retargeting. In addition, users who were being tracked, but subsequently erased their cookies, will no longer be tracked, unless they revisit your website and receive a new cookie.

Q: Is it difficult to set up a retargeting campaign?

A: Setting up retargeting is very easy! You paste a small piece of code on the page (or footer of the site) on which you want to build your retargeting list, but otherwise it’s almost the same as creating a traditional campaign. The following are the most basic instructions on how to build a retargeting campaign…

How to Create a Retargeting Campaign

The following steps assume you have an account on the SiteScout platform. To create a free account, just click here and complete the sign-up form.

Step 1: Place a Retargeting Pixel on Your Website or Page.

a. Open the Retargeting tab by going to the “Tools” menu and selecting “Retargeting Lists“.

b. Create a new audience list and give it a name:

c. Grab the retargeting code. Select your new pixel from the list and click “Get Tags”. Highlight and copy the code in the box:

d. Once you have copied this code, paste it into the HTML of the webpage from where you want to retarget users. The code should (ideally) be placed after the content, right before the closing body tag, but anywhere will do.

Step 2: Create the Campaign.

a. Click on the “Tools” menu -> then “New Campaign“

b. Complete the Campaign Basics section.

c. Add Sites to your campaign. You should either add many sites, or select “Run of Network”. The idea is to get a large amount of network coverage so that your audience will see your ads no matter where they go. For the most reach and the simplest setup, choose “Run of Network”.

d. Add your Creatives (banners) to the campaign.

e. Add Geo Targeting to the campaign.

f. Go to the Retargeting section to add your retargeting list to the campaign. Once your audience has been added, the campaign will ONLY buy impressions for users on your audience list.

It’s generally a good idea to stay away from adding too much additional targeting if you plan on doing retargeting, since it will further reduce the traffic volume of the campaign. In other words, retargeting mixed with contextual targeting and/or day parting is generally not recommended.

g. Click the “Save” button, and your campaign will go into Pending mode for review.

Step 3: Monitor Your Audience Count.

Once you’ve added the pixel to your website, visitors will start being added to your retargeting list. You can monitor the progress of your list within the Audience tab.

Set the beginning of the date range on the toolbar to the day that you first added the pixel to your website. Leave the end of the date range as Today.

Every time a user is added to your list they will be counted in the “Created” column. Ever time a user re-visits your list, they will be counted in the “Updated” column. This allows you to track both the first and the most recent time that visitors accessed your page.

Once your list has at least one user in the “Created” column, your retargeting campaign will begin tracking them across the network.

Advanced Retargeting Techniques

The following are two ways to be creative with retargeting and really use it to it’s full potential…

1) Retarget Users for a Limited Time

It may be that you don’t want to target your users indefinitely. You would rather retarget them for a specific number of days after they visit your site, and then stop. You can set this window of time from the first time they visit your site, or from the most recent time they have visited your site.

The Process:

1. Tick the “Advanced” checkbox.

2. Add your audience as before, leaving the default setting of 0 days after first access.

3. Change the rule to “Untarget”, select the same retargeting list, and set the number of days after which you stop retargeting users. Add that rule. It should look like this:

4. This campaign will only target users for 7 days after the first time they access your site. Revisiting the site will not affect the status of the campaign pertaining to that user.

5. If you wish the campaign to react to the most recent time the user has accessed your site, then the rule should be changed to “last access”. It would look like this:

6. Each time the user re-visits the page, the 7 day window will be reset.

2) Untarget Converted Users

Your retargeting campaign might have a specific goal (signup, sale, form submission, etc.) Once that goal has been achieved (on a per-user basis) you no longer want to waste your budget advertising to those users. If you are selling a product, for example, you no longer want to advertise to users that have purchased it.

To accomplish this, you need to create a second retargeting pixel that will be placed on the Conversion Page, or Thank You page of your website. If that page is secure, you may need to redirect to a non-secure page to make this possible. Once the second pixel is in place, you’ll create a retargeting campaign which targets your main audience and untargets the converted audience:

That’s it.

If you have any questions, please let us know either in the comments or by contacting us directly.

We are excited to announce a few updates that we’ve rolled out to the RTB platform in the past couple of weeks.

1) Postback Conversion Tracking

After much demand, we’ve introduced Postback Conversions to the SiteScout RTB. Using this feature, you can report conversions without using browser cookies.

To do this, we created a new macro to be used in your destination URLs: {POSTBACKID}

Example: http://www.mylandingpage.com/index.php?myparam={POSTBACKID}

The postback macro will translate into a value that refers to a specific user. You are responsible for storing and using this value once a user has clicked on your ad. Append the value to your Postback Conversion URL, which can be found in your Offers tab by selecting an offer, and clicking the “Get Tags” button.

Example: http://clickserv2.sitescout.com/conv/a227ad4326795?pb=f5cdf90e6130d%2Fd097ce3e760e%2F2-575%2F2%2F%2C100.100.250.133 (example value)

A conversion will be counted when this URL is called.

2) New Frequency Capping Controls

We’ve improved the way frequency capping is controlled. You now have the ability to control the level at which your frequency cap operates: per campaign, per site, or per placement (zone).

Per Campaign – Frequency is counted per user, across the entire campaign.
Per Site – Frequency is counted separately for each site in the campaign.
Per Placement – Frequency is counted separately for each zone/placement (e.g., 300×250, above the fold) within each site in the campaign.

Prior to this update, frequency capping operated on a campaign-wide level by default. This limited potential traffic volume for campaigns (with multiple sites selected) by preventing certain sites from getting a fair amount of traffic.

3) Faster Interface

As we mentioned last month, we’ve been working on a new way of storing and fetching statistics which should vastly improve the speed of the user interface. We are happy to announce that the improvements are finally complete and that the interface is now significantly faster!

If you have any questions, please let us know!

Please Help Nominate SiteScout for Best Bootstrapped + Best International Startup

TechCrunch is taking nominations for the 5th annual Crunchies Awards, a celebration of startups and technology in 2011.

As you may or may not know, SiteScout is a bootstrapped startup with no outside funding whatsoever. In only one year, we have grown to become a leading Demand Side Platform (DSP) in the ad tech industry, despite the fact that all other DSPs have millions in venture capital investment. Not to mention that we are Canadian!

We think that’s pretty cool and we are very proud of it.

Please help nominate us for the following categories:

• “Best Bootstrapped Startup“
• “Best International Startup“

All you need to do is visit: http://crunchies2011.techcrunch.com/nominate

Just enter “sitescout.com” in the boxes for those two categories.

It only takes a few seconds, but would be very appreciated :)

You can vote once per category per day, until December 13th at midnight.

Happy holidays!

Crunching Intensely

It’s been almost 2 months since our last update, so we thought it would be a good idea to fill everyone in on what we’ve been working on.

We still have plans to share some contextual targeting case studies, but we’re developing some improved statistics which will provide more granularity and insight into category performance, so the results will take some time to compile.

Other than that, we’ve been working on various things over the last month or so, mostly backend improvements, but important stuff nonetheless…

1. Bidding Algorithm Optimization

Roughly 2 weeks ago, we implemented an update to our bidding algorithm which allowed everyone on our platform to win more bids across all exchanges.

Preliminary results have shown almost double the win rate (%) across the board. So, if you’ve noticed in the past few weeks that your campaigns are winning more traffic, this would be the reason.

2. Retargeting Fix

As a result of the bidding algorithm update, the retargeting functionality was affected. We have recently managed to resolve this issue and it’s working wonderfully again.

If you’ve had issues with getting enough volume on your retargeting campaigns, despite having a large audience, this fix should help remedy the issue.

If you aren’t familiar with retargeting (also known as the “Audience Targeting” section in our campaign editor), there is a comprehensive article which is both a great primer and guide to what’s possible with retargeting.

3. Increased EU Capacity

We’ve beefed up our presence in our European datacenter, which has made the system far more stable and given us a much higher capacity to win European traffic.

In addition, we have also integrated with a European traffic exchange, Improve Digital, so we have even more traffic available. If you’d like access to Improve Digital traffic, please talk to your account manager.

If you have any campaigns that target European traffic, you should definitely notice some increased traffic levels and win rates.

4. Google/DoubleClick Integration

A few weeks ago we finalized our integration with our biggest exchange partner yet, Google/DoubleClick. The volume is extremely promising. We can basically open up traffic to any site on the DoubleClick exchange, however the ad quality guidelines are definitely the strictest compared to our other partners. We are still ironing out some final details, but expect us to officially announce it soon.

5. Database Optimization

We have scaled out our database infrastructure and essentially changed the way we store and retrieve statistics. As a result, you should notice improved speeds in the interface, including more stability in the system, which means less forced logouts and buggy interface behavior.

What’s In The Pipeline?

Here are some of the things we’ll be working on and releasing over the next few months.

1. Site List Restructuring

The way the system works right now is that you target specific Site IDs, from the Site List, when creating a campaign. A Site ID may actually represent traffic from multiple domains. By the same token, traffic from a domain can be served by multiple Site IDs, so there is some fragmentation and lack of transparency at the moment.

In about 2-3 weeks, we’ll be releasing an update which will change the way sites are represented. You will be able to target domains, with a breakdown of which Site IDs and exchanges are providing the traffic. This way you’ll be able to get the maximum amount of traffic for a desired domain, along with the ability to optimize based on the performance of each Site ID that’s providing traffic for that domain, which is a huge increase in transparency for media buyers.

This essentially allows us to be “network agnostic” by focusing on the actual domains serving the ads, and not on Site IDs, which can include multiple domains and sometimes run-of-network (RON) traffic.

2. Next Generation of SiteScout Ad Server

Some big news. We are happy to announce that we have begun the development of the next generation of our Ad Server product. This is very exciting for us, since it will enable everyone to do some extremely innovative stuff with direct (premium/guaranteed) media buying. Our goal is to have it fully launched by the end of Q1 2012.

3. Additional RTB Integrations

We have plans to integrate a demographic targeting partner in the near future. It will most likely be powered by TargusInfo. We also have plans to integrate with some additional traffic partners such as AppNexus and mobile sources such as Nexage or Mobclix. Expect these to be announced in December/January.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know!

In our last post we announced the integration of the first data provider on our RTB Platform — Proximic. They power our contextual targeting capabilities, which allows you to run your campaigns exclusively on pages that match your chosen contextual categories.

At the moment, when you target sites, they are essentially “run of site” aside from the global targeting rules you set for the campaign (geo, device, page position, dimension, etc.) With contextual targeting, you can now target the specific pages (based on categories) within sites. However, this depends on having a certain amount of content on pages with which to classify them.

Best Sites for Contextual Targeting

Some sites lend themselves to contextual targeting more than others. Sites with a variety of content are ideal. Some examples would be news sites (foxnews.com, latimes.com, etc.), which have a variety of subjects and topics of discussion. The same applies to large article directories (about.com, answers.com, etc.) and forums.

Some sites that you may want to avoid when using contextual targeting are image-heavy or media sharing sites. Others include sites with very little text content, or very erratic content like social networking sites.

Alternatively, if you don’t feel like hand-picking the sites for your contextually-targeted campaign, you can simply choose to do Run Of Network (RON).

Inferred Demographic Targeting

Another benefit to contextual targeting is that you can now basically do inferred demographic targeting based on category.

An obvious example would be “Lifestyle::Senior Living”, where we could reasonably assume that we would be targeting more senior demographics. Your imagination is the limit when it comes to matching up categories with demographics.

• Style & Fashion::Jewelry
• Sports::Bodybuilding
• Sports::Rodeo
• Sports::NASCAR Racing
• Sports::Figure Skating
• Home & Garden::Interior Decorating
• Hobbies & Interests::Needlework

With a little brainstorming you can take some reasonable guesses at the genders, age ranges, income levels, and possibly marital statuses of the categories listed above. This should give some insight into one approach towards implementing contextual targeting for your campaigns.

Expect to see proper demographic (and most likely behavioral) targeting data on the system in the near future.

Coming Soon: Brand Protection!

According to a recent Econsultancy survey, nearly 70% of advertisers say their top concern with ad networks is having their ads show up next to inappropriate content.

If you or your agency represent a brand, there is a good chance they have concerns with their reputation. Proper context is very important to brand reputation, and Brand Protection functionality will help make this possible.

Brand Protection will allow you to only target sites/pages that match your brand safety criteria. For example, you will be able to block specific types of “non-standard content” such as:

• Adult
• Weapons
• Drugs
• Terrorism
• User-generated Content
• File Sharing
• and more…

You will also be able to specify the rating level of the pages your campaign wishes to target: “G”, “PG”, and “R”.

With 3rd party data partners, like Proximic, we now have the power to give you more control over where your ads show up on sites.

Stay tuned for the final part of our contextual targeting series where we’ll share the results of some case studies.