Behind the Scenes: Targeting in Theory
Advertisers and publishers both benefit from targeted ad serving: advertisers are able to spend less of their budget to reach those people, who are potentially interested in their services or products; publishers are able to spare unnecessary ad impressions and deliver another campaign’s creative instead. Nobody likes to waste impressions and targeting possibilities aim to provide a solution for all parties in the ad serving process. A growing number of campaigns served on your websites does not always reflect better reach and bigger awareness of the campaigns. Compared to other media, the internet offers extremely sophisticated tools to target campaigns, helping publishers and advertisers to increase the effect without necessary increasing the number of impressions.
In our first blog post we are discussing certain aspects of AdOcean’s targeting solutions in general. In an upcoming blog post we will also present you some examples of how AdOcean targeting works in real life. But first things first...
Which are the most popular targeting types?
The CEE region’s countries have sometimes very different approaches to making business, but in other aspects they seem to be similar and following the same approaches. Let us examine how online publishers in different countries make use of an ad server’s available features, in our case the targeting types, and see how much similarity or difference there is.
Recently we were digging deep in our databases and we collected the most popular targeting types for each country. Our list shows the kind of targeting, which was mostly used in campaigns in the past 12 months.
Our research shows that the online advertisers in the CEE region have the highest demand for geographical targeting on publisher side. However, keyword targeting is also very popular, being the most widely used targeting option in 5 of all the researched countries. It is interesting to see that one of the small countries seems to be the most innovative in offering targeting solutions: Bulgaria finds customised targeting (which is based on numeric data) the most important.
Privacy matters
Apart from satisfying our clients by providing efficient targeting solutions, we also have to make sure we follow the self-regulation of the online advertising industry when it comes to cookie-based targeting. AdOcean has implemented its own opt-out cookie, which is accessible from the privacy page of our website, a long time ago. However, we went one step further recently and implemented support for the Do Not Track (DNT) header in AdOcean. The DNT header is a pretty new invention and its aim is to inform ad servers and analytics software about the fact that a user doesn’t want to be tracked. From the users’ point of view it’s just a simple setting in the browser and it is an easy way of denying tracking on any website. From the ad server point of view it requires changes on backend side in order to recognise and act upon receiving a DNT header, instead of relying on opt-out cookies (which may easily get deleted and result in the given user being tracked again).
News is already spreading about the W3C having started to work on standardising the DNT header and we felt it’s an excellent chance to do something really innovative. As the first ad provider in the CEE region, we have implemented support for the DNT header. We feel it is not only important because of the way targeting regulations are heading, but also because of the everyday Internet user, on whom we all rely on in the end.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, what does targeting future hold?
Of course AdOcean has already ongoing projects for researching possible solutions of contextual as well as behavioural targeting, several testing campaigns have been run, and AdOcean is also focusing on bringing even more options to you and your advertisers. Until the new major targeting options make a debut in AdOcean, we also have plans to upgrade existing targeting types. One example of this is geotargeting, which we believe deserves a more user-friendly UI than the current one. Details about changes in targeting functionality will emerge in our development newsletter prior to introduction.
We hope that this post was informative for not only new, but also long-time AdOcean users. We encourage you to check out the detailed descriptions of all available targeting and capping types in the AdOcean manual and think it over if there is any feature you might be using with great success, but which may have been out of sight until now. It is probably also the right time to target the kitchen in order to grab another coffee or cup of tea. ;)
Authors: Tamas Rakoczi & Jan Walter
Posted: 9th December, 2011