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Intuitive Display Advertising Intelligence for Publishers, Advertisers and Ad Networks

September 10, 2013 by Peter Kirwan Leave a Comment

Adclarity asked us to if we’d like to review their new tool which helps advertisers, publishers and ad networks research and analyse Ad buying activity across a vast range of website properties.

We are quite particular about what we review but, in this case, the tool caught my interest because I am acutely aware of how difficult market research on display advertising can be. These are the two things I like most about AdClarity: the usability is very intuitive while the insights are actionable and, if used well, seriously revenue generating.

The tool is designed with three client types in mind (publisher, advertiser, ad network) so let’s address these in turn. At the end I list some extra features I like, some forthcoming features and a short feature wishlist.

Advertisers

Let’s imagine I work for Toyota and want to know more about Honda’s campaigns. I want to know where they are putting their ads, which of these places they are concentrating on as well as what the ad copy and landing pages look like. Let’s look at how we’d extract all this from the tool. After running a search for Honda I am taken to this page

Focusing on the last three months of US results, we have details of the 76 campaigns Honda have run in this period. The “last time detected” allows me to spot ongoing ad campaigns that I may want to respond to. Filtering by statistical share, how often these ads are detected as a percentage of total ads detected for Honda, allows me to see where they are concentrating their money. As with most things on AdClarity, this is all exportable to excel. Under URL we can click-through to see the landing page used in any particular campaign.

I can then dig down to get more detail on a particular campaign. I can get a list of publishers for this campaign along with statistical share and a daily trend graph that shows campaign impressions over the last three months on that publisher. This allows me to see where Honda are concentrating the campaign. Drilling down and filtering by statistical share on the Honda Access campaign, for example, I can see that they are concentrating heavily on Huffington Post which is taking well over 10% of their ads for this campaign. There is also the option here to see mediators (such as DoubleClick) and the reports also show the display and text ad copy that is being used on the campaign.

Going back up a level, I can see all publishers, creatives (ad copy) and mediators for the last 3 months across all Honda’s campaigns if I wish. To save me digging through these results every month, I can “follow” Honda and receive email updates whenever AdClarity spots a new Honda campaign in a particular territory such as the USA.

Now suppose my alerts told me about the Honda Access campaign on Huffington Post and I decided to counter on that publisher with Toyota’s own campaign. Who should I email at Huffington Post about this? Conveniently, AdClarity have included contacts for the websites they cover. So, for Huffington Post, I navigate to the main report and then click contacts to be presented with a small address book of 86 contacts at this website. I can filter by department and level to narrow it down to people with the authority to sell me ad space. Contacts credits are then used to reveal full names, email addresses and phone numbers of particular individuals.

For bigger sites the contacts feature can be a little overwhelming and the two dimensions for filtering may feel slightly sub-optimal.

American Express, for example, returns 5924 people and limiting this to directors and managers in marketing only narrows it down to 815. It may take a little time to find the right person but the real question is how this compares to other options. LinkedIn does have many more filters, including a location filter which AdClarity might benefit from, but many filters are not free and Linkedin is unlikely to supply phone numbers or email addresses! In short, there’s some room for improvement here but it beats the alternatives.

AdClarity for Publishers

As mentioned, AdClarity is also aimed at publishers and ad networks so let’s take a look at what a publisher could get out of the tool. Just as advertisers will mainly use it to check out other advertisers, publishers are going to spend most of their time looking at the performance of other publishers.

Imagine I work for a new competitor to ESPN. Opening up the ESPN report, I see a similar report to the one we saw for Honda but here we have (in place of publishers) the advertisers that are placing copy on ESPN and the proportion their ad copy makes of the total ad copy AdClarity found on the site. We also get an estimate of unique visitors and page views.

Now let’s say I spot an advertiser, like Ticketmaster, that I’m not currently running and whose ads would be useful to many of my readers. Drilling down to a particular campaign like this one, I can see not only the creative ad copy but also the deployment chain illustrating all the ad networks and mediators that assisted in getting the ad from Ticketmaster to ESPN. This campaign has had quite a few intermediaries so there is a good chance that if I go direct to Ticketmaster I may be able to offer them a better deal. I can then contact Ticketmaster using the same functionality we reviewed in the advertiser section.

If Ticketmaster were to decide to advertise on my site, I could revisit the data a few months later to compare what share of their ads ESPN and my own site have. Similar email alerts could be set up for ESPN as we set up for Honda in the above section.

Mediators\Ad Networks

The fact that AdClarity reveals the deployment chain of ads is one of several features that make it an interesting proposition for Ad Networks interested in either scoping out the competition or investigating new sales leads. An AdClarity report on DoubleClick reveals Campaigns, Advertisers, Publishers, Landing Pages and, if we drill down, deployment chains and the different ad sizes used in a campaign. As with publishers, a competitor could use this information to either benchmark or search for new leads.

That covers the most important things advertisers, publishers and ad networks can get out of AdClarity. Let’s finish up with some other features I like, some forthcoming features and my feature wishlist.

Other useful features I like

Clients influence coverage: don’t see the publisher you are looking for? You can submit them to AdClarity for inclusion and have results within about a week.
Share reports: you can share reports with co-workers if they are also AdClarity users.
Sub-domain focus: focus on a specific site subdomain like soccernet.espn.go.com.
Publisher categories: make it easier to find relevant placements for a niche e.g. in health and fitness.

Exciting future features: Coming soon to a report near you!

More countries: AdClarity planning to double from 15 to 30 countries in the coming months.
Mobile: Coverage of mobile ads planned.
Social: Coverage of social ads planned.
Retargeting: Coverage of retargeting ads planned.
Benchmarking: Currently you have to do this yourself in excel but an insights benchmarking report is in the works.

My feature wishlist

Campaign daily trend: Would be great if this could be maximised to show more detail.
Specific page level data: Would allow one to research highly relevant articles on a site (e.g. Forbes.com) which is too general to target otherwise.
A location filter: to narrow down contacts in large companies.

Do you use AdClarity and, if so, what do you think about it? Let me know in the comments.

SEM Rush New Features

April 3, 2012 by Brian Kane 1 Comment

Back in November I reviewed one of our favourite tools SEM RUSH – SEM Rush Review

The guys recently gave us a heads up on some features they have added to the mix and asked if we would do a quick post with our thoughts on the new additions. If you don’t know about SEMRush then our previous post will give you an overview of some of the key features but essentially it’s a very smart keyword research tool. Focusing primarily on Google data, it pulls all sorts of information on keywords, search volumes, trends, commercial values, advertiser competition etc. When it comes to building more effective, relevant and commercial keword lists; its keyword reports, phrase and exact match reports and competitor analysis are some of the ways that the tool can help.

So what is new in SEM RUSH?

The 2 new features recently added are Adsense Reports and Back links Reports.

The back link report lets you analyze your website(or anyone else’s) producing a full list of sites which link to your site. It provides the exact URL of the site/page which links to you and shows you the target URL (the page on your site that the link points to). It also gives you the anchor text of the link. This is very useful data for checking your own links, analysing competitor back links etc. however as it stands we already source this type data from a few other tools but I’m keen to see how the SEM Rush guys develop this report over time as I am sure they will be build in more features.

The Adsense Report
I found the Adsense report very interesting. For anyone who doesn’t know about Adsense it is effectively a Google run program which allows website owners (once signed up and accepted) to make space available on their sites (ad blocks) for Google to populate with Adverts. Revenue generated is shared between Google and the website owner. The flip side of Adsense is the Google Adwords program where Advertisers can use something called the Google Display Network to get their adverts placed in other websites. Essentially the Google Display Network is comprised of website publishers participating in the Adsense program.

Advertising effectively through the Display Network involves investigating and identifying a range of web properties that are relevant and complimentary to your own products or services and then targeting these sites through the network. There are broader, more general ways to use the Display Network however typically the more targeted, the better. Analysis of click through, rates and conversions can then tell you what sites are working for you and what ads are generating interest.

Using the Report
After entering a website address and selecting the Adsense option this report will give you all kinds of information and data on how that particular company is using the Google display network to publish adverts around the web in various web properties. It contains top level data on the total number of ads running, split between text ads and banners etc. it then lists all of the websites where these ads are appearing and actually displays each of the ads being run with key metrics such as number of publishers displaying the ad, first seen, last seen dates, frequency and average ad position on the page.

So how might this data be used ?
Aside from the immediate insights into exactly how your competitors are spending money through this channel, there are ways to use this report to inform your own Google Display network strategy. By analysing larger direct competitors you can find out all of the sites they are targeting through the Google display network. You can then check the ads they are actually displaying and get data on how long the ads have been running. The ads that have been running for a while are likely to be converting well so this is useful information to take note of.

If you have a way to compete with some of these competitors on price, quality or service you can then tailor an ad to reflect this and target the same sites. By conducting this research on a number of competitors and possibly even on related and complimentary websites you are likely to find a very targeted range of websites which you can target with your ads through the Google display network. Further tailoring of ads based on the nature of these sites and based on what you have learned from competitors can give you a real leg up when it comes to smart online spending and Return on Investment

How to Make Money from your Website

August 8, 2011 by Brian Kane 2 Comments

One of the questions that I get asked just about every day is ‘How do I make money from my website?‘ and it’s the sort of question I could spend about a week trying to answer. Just like some of my other favorites like ‘how do I get to the top of Google?’ or ‘how do I use social media to market my business’. So sticking with ‘the make money from website’ question for now, this post attempts to explore this subject in some detail.

Obviously the route for commercialization of a site depends on a hundred different things from what you are actually doing online, the market you’re in, what you are selling (if anything), who your customer or audience is and so on. However brushing over all that trivial stuff for now 🙂 this post sets out to generally explore some of the ways you can make money from your content online. Please note this is not about straight ecommerce (plenty of that elsewhere on this site) but instead an exploration of how you can make money online without directly selling anything (or website monetization as it’s often called).

So by online content I could be referring to blogs to forums, information websites, video sites and so on but for the purposes of this post I will simply refer to it as a ‘website’. The information below should hopefully be relevant if you are trying to assess the value in your website or help you determine the best way to generate income if you are planning on developing an informational site, blog or forum.

Let’s discuss the principles of what gives any web property commercial value

1) Your Market – Subject Matter, Audience Demographic & motivation of your visitors
Some markets are more valuable than others & some audiences are more valuable than others. Consider the motivation of your online visitors. If someone is browsing the web looking for celebrity gossip and you have a celebrity news blog then chances are this visitor is not particularly valuable as they are just passing time, surfing the web, looking for gossip etc. However if someone is looking for answers to problem like ‘how to lose weight quickly’ or ‘ how to use Google Adwords’ then this visitor is far more commercial and answering their questions with your content also gives you an opportunity to place a relevant advert, an affiliate product sale and so on. These commercial placements are far more likely to convert to a click-through or sale because they are relevant to your content and relevant to the motivation of the visitor. There is a reason why health & beauty are such competitive spaces on the internet. Solving people’s problems can have real commercial value even if you are not directly selling any products.

2) Size & site Authority
The tactic of building focused mini sites (or micro sites) was popular a few years ago when search engines often favored these targeted focused little sites. This is no longer the case with Google now absolutely favoring large sites with lots of quality content, regular updates, lots of user interaction etc. These sites will have better search engine rankings, more traffic and in addition these authority sites have an incredible ability to rank very quickly for any new content that is published on them. A breaking story on CNN will rank on Google within the space of minutes because that site carries such authority with Google that it is constantly trawling the site and re-indexing content.

So commercially speaking more traffic means more commercial value but more targeted traffic means more value still. Greater user engagement also contributes to site value as this suggests visitors are there for a reason and not just finding the site by mistake (advertisers pay more to get their message in front of engaged visitors because it proves they are genuinely interested in a specific subject/market). The ability for new content to rank quickly on search engines is also very commercially valuable (consider being able to rank for the next Apple product on Google on its launch day), this type of power can be used for many commercial benefits.

One of the keys to becoming an authority site is to deliver great quality content that is engaging, presented in the right way, has the ability to generate interest and discussion and provides a vehicle to capture this (e.g blog comments, Facebook integration, forums etc.)

3) Relationships, list & interactions
Site visitors are one thing but the ability to strike up a relationship and communication channel with your site visitors can give you long term commercial value (relationship return on Investment). Building an email list of subscribers for example is a great way to continue to deliver more targeted content to a number of people. Continuing to find out more about your subscribers via surveys and list segmentation etc. will allow you to target segments of your mailing list with tailored content and incorporate some very relevant commercial ads, links etc. within your communications which should convert well if you get this right.

Social media has introduced the opportunity to take this communication and interaction a stage further with Twitter and Facebook creating more dynamic and interactive ways to deliver your content, and actually begin to interact with your subscribers/followers/fans etc.

How to Build Commercial value Online
So if these all things make a site commercial then to increase the commercial value of your site you should be thinking about identifying who your target audience is and making sure you reach this target audience through the web. This comes back to creating the right sort of quality content on your site, providing expert commentary on other things going in your subject area, employing good SEO tactics to give your content the best chance of ranking on Google (for what you know your audience is searching for) and starting to engage in off-site discussions in your subject area. In other words become an authority on your subject by taking about it a lot on your own site and on other relevant sites, forums, blogs and so on (and always linking back to your site from these places).

Continuing to build and grow your site & encouraging user interaction (e.g. blog comments) and interaction with your social media presences (Facebook, Twitter etc.) can all contribute to your online growth & commercial value of your site.

How to find and access your market – content, keywords, seo, linking building referrals
See our video guide section on Digital Marketing Strategy Development to find out more about how to research your market online & target this market through best practice seo etc.

I get all this so What Next?
So assuming you have a site, a strategy and are working on all of the elements above. How do you actually plug in in the stuff that makes the money? What are the options for website monetization?

Some different ways to monetize your website

Sell Ad space on your site
You can look for companies who are willing to spend money to advertise on your site through banner ads, video ads etc. This approach can often get you better rates than the more automated routes of onsite advertising (discussed below) however it takes time, effort, management and a bit of a sales pitch.

To sell ad space you need to find advertisers who may be interested in the sort of traffic/audience your site is attracting. A few tips you can use to find these potential advertisers are as follows

Use Google: Simply search Google for some of the words, & phrases associated with your website content/ subject area and start to look at the Google ads (ads on right hand side of the Google search results). These companies are already paying Google for adverts on a pay per click basis so they recognize the value of online advertising. These companies may be worth targeting with a sales call or email offering them an opportunity to advertise through your website.

Another method is to use sites such as www.semrush.com and run a report on your site. It will give you back all sorts of information including a list of advertisers relevant to your site who may be prepared to buy advertising from you. www.alexa.com also has a mechanism to check for sites related to yours that you could target with your sales pitch.

You will want to create a compelling overview of the key metrics of your site in order to give potential advertisers more information on which to base a decision on. This is typically known as a rate card and it would include information such as monthly site visitors, unique site visitors, monthly page impressions and demographic information about your site visitors (you can use sites such as www.quantcast.com to get some of this data)

Monetize your site with Ad Networks
This is a massive topic I am not going to cover in any detail here. There are different tiers of ad networks but getting accepted to the more exclusive, higher paying networks requires your site to be of a certain size and authority. For this reason it’s often easier to start with some of the larger ad networks like Adbrite or Adsense.

One of the most popular ad networks is the Google ad network – Google Adsense. You can sign up as a publisher through https://www.google.com/adsense and effectively set up ad blocks within your website. By simply embedding these ad blocks within your site you can let Google do the hard work for you. Its algorithm establishes an understanding of your content and it dynamically populates these ad blocks with relevant ads from its advertisers (companies advertising through Google Adwords content network). Every time someone clicks through on these ads, Google earns revenue and shares this revenue with you.

Monetize your site with Affiliate marketing
What is Affiliate marketing? It’s basically a mechanism that allows web publishers to place links to merchants’ websites/products and get rewarded when their visitors click through these links and buy a product on the merchant’s site. Many merchants run their own affiliate program, possibly the best example of this being the massively flexible and sophisticated Amazon Affiliate Program . However the easiest way to find and manage affiliate marketing is typically to go through an Affiliate Network which is acts like a “middle man” making the links between publishers and merchants and providing a management system which handles, reporting, tracking, payments etc.

There are lots of Affiliate Networks but two of the most popular networks are
www.cj.com
www.clickbank.com

There are also new smart tools/Networks which can be used for website Monetization through Affiliate Marketing. The www.skimlinks.com network has the capability to trawl the content of your site and automatically convert relevant links to affiliate links with merchants it is associated with (and there are thousands). This can be a very smart route to quickly commercialize your content without having to find individual affiliate offers, joining different networks, placing links and so on.

CPA Networks
CPA stand for Cost Per Action. So while an action in theory could be the sale of a product (just like affiliate marketing) CPA offers are usually about lead generation. So the ‘action’ would be something like signing up for a free trial or entering a competition. I have heard it referred to as ‘Affiliate marketing on steroids’ which isn’t a bad description. CPA offers change regularly as merchants promote new offers & deals so if you are a web publisher wishing to market CPA programmes you typically need lots of traffic, huge mailing lists or be exceptionally good at buying targeted traffic and converting the traffic to offer sign ups. It’s not for the faint hearted and very much a specialized form of online monetization.

There are lots of CPA networks around. The easiest way to get an overview of all the top networks and find CPA networks & offers relevant to your subject matter is to use the site http://www.offervault.com which allows you to search for CPA offers across multiple networks then apply directly to specific programmes.

What does Google offer in mobile?