Behind the Scenes: Targeting in Real Life
In this second blog post about targeting we would like to present you some of the real life examples on how targeting works in case of AdOcean. Like in our first post, we aim to provide some basic, but still informative technical details. Thus sales as well as IT persons will hopefully find the information below useful and interesting.
Never underestimate the power of retargeting!
Retargeting is a relatively new targeting type in AdOcean, but it already delivered significant results for our clients. When we talk about retargeting, we refer to targeting such users with reminder advertisements, who showed some interest already towards the advertised product or service, but did not fulfil the advertiser’s goal (in most cases purchasing something). In the easiest to understand example, retargeting could be used to remind users about any interrupted purchase process, with messages such as ‘We think you forget about your Christmas present. Click here to buy it now’.
A standard retargeting campaign of WizzAir was running on the websites of CEMP in Hungary in December, 2009. As the date of the campaign suggests, it was one of the earlier retargeting campaigns. The aim of the campaign was to retarget users, who visited wizzair.com after being exposed to the running campaign, but did not buy a ticket at first. Of course the retargeting ad contained a unique message to call the attention of the users.
Some impressive results of this campaign are:
- 45% of all ticket orders during the campaign period came from users, who had contact with retargeted advertisements.
- The click-through rate (CTR) was 3.5 times higher for retargeted ads than for regular formats.
- Users, who were reached by the retargeted ads, purchased 31 times more tickets than in the previous non-retargeting campaign (both post-click and post-view actions were measured with the agency ad server (gemiusDirectEffect).
Retargeting may be done in a more granular way as well, when needed – monitoring not only certain events (did the user visit my website already without purchasing anything?) but also custom parameters, like the exact time of the given event or a relative, future point in time. One outstanding example was when users of a website with various insurance offers were targeted with AdOcean ads depending on when their car’s insurance will expire. It was possible to do so, because users had to enter some information on that website during the registration process, including the date of their car’s insurance period. First the website started to collect information about the expiry dates in AdOcean cookies, in the form of a timestamp. Then, when enough cookies became available to launch the retargeting campaign, a special ad was displayed to the users, whose insurance expiry date was due in a month – the date was already present in AdOcean cookies and a custom retargeting expression was making date comparison between the dates stored in cookies and the actual date.
This is one of the examples for AdOcean’s flexibility when it comes to advanced targeting solutions. It is important to note that such custom retargeting logic needs the assistance of our Technical Support as well, as the ad server interface provides only settings for standard retargeting campaigns. It is generally advised to start planning and setting up non-standard retargeting campaigns already weeks before the set campaign start, in order to make sure there is enough time to test and correct custom retargeting expressions on Technical Support side.
Targeting declarative data
In contrast to the somewhat scientific expression, targeting to declarative data is actually quite easy to explain. The majority of publishers have services, which require website visitors to register and provide (in other words: declare) some data about themselves. The most common examples of information in user databases are gender, date of birth or fields of interest. As computers understand numbers better than human language, in most cases the perfect solution for targeting users is by assigning numbers to any piece of declarative information. In case of gender ‘1’ might stand for male and ‘2’ for female. In case of fields of interest, ‘1’ might stand for movies, ‘2’ for music, ‘3’ for literature and so on... The possibilities are endless, you only have to think about ‘can I describe with, or constitute this piece of information by, a number? If the conclusion is ‘yes, you can’ then customized targeting is the perfect solution for you. AdOcean has made it easy to define the variables that may appear in Master/impression scripts while serving ads and the numeric values, which may appear next to the variables. You may define that the ‘ucar’ variable in an AdOcean Master/impression script declares if a user’s owned car (in case this information is provided by users during registration on your website). The numeric values accompanying this particular variable may also be given a short label to work with during the targeting setup of orders, e.g. ‘0’ may mean ‘none’, ‘1’ could stand for ‘small’ car while ‘2’ for ‘luxury’ car. Defining variables and their possible values once like this means a quick & easy job for the campaign traffickers later on, when they have to set up the targeting of an order for users, who own luxury cars and may be interested in very expensive trips around the world as well.
Example of an AdOcean Master script, where information about the user owning a luxury car was inserted (‘ucar’ variable is set to ‘2’, following our previous example):
<script type="text/javascript">
/* (c)AdOcean 2003-2011 */
ado.master({
id:'xR1RHY9SHHm.v1wTRu6x7kdBW5uKxid4n7Pw2Hx.97',
server:'myemitter.adocean.pl',
vars: '&ucar=2'
});
</script>
The ‘ucar’ variable for customised targeting needs to be set up in AdOcean before first use in campaigns:
Finally, this is how campaign traffickers set targeting to this user information in the AdOcean UI:
Sometimes it is not directly the user herself/himself that you need to target, but the content which she/he is looking at on your website. In such case, keyword targeting or in-text ads come handy. Keyword targeting is a classic example of targeting based on search queries of users – you only need to add the query that the user entered on your webpage to the AdOcean placement code on the result page. Then, if you have ongoing campaigns targeted to the used keyword, you are able to deliver ads, which are relevant for the information she/he was looking for. Of course some flexibility is needed in defining the possible keywords that should deliver a particular order. This is why keyword targeting was developed to understand regular expressions as well, letting you deliver an ad even if the language that your users speak and write distorts words with prefixes or suffixes. For example, using the ‘dent*’ regular expression means that the order is delivered if the keyword in an AdOcean placement code is either ‘dentist’ or ‘dental’.
Targeting webpage content based on keywords is a key feature in one of our creative templates as well which we introduced at the end of last year. In-text creatives do not only make use of an eye-candy advertising format, but they also rely on the power of keyword targeting. The ad bubbles appear only is a page if the given word appears somewhere.
In-text ads still require you to declare the keywords, meaning that they are not yet contextual ads according to common understanding (where the analysis of page content is done by such advanced algorithms that also assign topics/categories to it automatically), but they follow a similar direction.
We hope we could inspire you to evaluate again all the available targeting options in AdOcean. Who knows, you may discover that you can provide more for advertisers and agencies on your online portfolio by more efficiently reaching the target users of various campaigns. If you have any sales-related questions about targeting in AdOcean, please contact your local Gemius representative or write to our Sales Department. In case you have technical/practical questions, please contact your local Technical Support.
Authors: Tamas Rakoczi, Jan Walter
Posted: 21st December, 2011