CA6 Sessions 5-6

Agenda:
1. Display Advertising Basics
2. What metrics (diagnostic/KPIs) can be used for Display Advertising ?
3. What is the future for Display Advertising
Preamble
• Feb 2017, VisualIQ VP-Prod Mgmt writes on attribution methods
• The Conversion Pixel
• Can you design a method that measures conversions ?
• Focus on the conversion funnel
• Visit for information
• Including visits for newer pricing information
• Visit for comparison
• Visit for purchase
Display Advertising Basics
• The Display Advertising Food-Chain:
• Advertisers: An advertiser is the one who pays to get his ad shown on different websites. Usually, it’s a
company that has a product and connects with publishers to promote an ad through their websites
• Agencies
• Ad Networks: An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to
websites that want to host advertisements. The key function of an ad network is an aggregation of ad supply
from publishers and matching it with advertiser's demand.
• The fundamental difference between traditional media ad networks and online ad networks is that online
ad networks use a central ad server to deliver advertisements to consumers, which enables targeting,
tracking and reporting of impressions in ways not possible with analog media alternatives.
• Platforms
• Publishers: A publisher displays ads, text links, or product links on its Web site, in e-mail campaigns, or in
search listings and is paid a commission by the respective advertiser when a visitor takes a specific action such
as filling out a form, making a purchase or subscribing to a service.
• Viewers
• General Advertisements, Brand Messages, Direct-Response Ads
• Has eclipsed (Sponsored) Search Ads, will be eclipsed by Mobile Ads
• Often employed in conjunction with Real-Time-Bidding interfaces
• So, that means CPI or CPM ?
A demand-side platform is software used by advertisers to buy mobile, search, and video ads from a
marketplace on which publishers list advertising inventory. These platforms allow for the management of
advertising across many real-time bidding networks, as opposed to just one, like Google Ads. Together with
supply-side platforms, DSPs enable programmatic advertising.
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a system that allows buyers of digital advertisinginventory to manage multiple ad
exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface
• The short version is that DSPs allow advertisers to buy impressions
across a range of publisher sites, but targeted to specific users based
on information such as their location and their previous browsing
behavior. Publishers make their ad impressions available through
marketplaces called ad exchanges, and DSPs automatically decide
which of those impressions it makes the most sense for an advertiser
to buy. Often the price of those impressions is determined by a real-
time auction, through a process known as real-time bidding
 Screen Grab ex- YouTube video of Pete Kluge

Ads are delivered to a publisher’s site by an ad network’s ad server via code on the publisher’s site that
calls the ad. An ad network is a technology platform that serves as a broker between a group of publishers and a
group of advertisers.
Ad networks traditionally collect unsold ad inventory from multiple publishers and offer this pool of
impressions to advertisers at a much lower price than a publisher’s direct sales. This kind of inventory is
often referred to as non-premium, or remnant.
What kinds of Display Ads there are ?
• The creatives’ format:
• Clickable Image
• Video
• Rich-Media/Flash animation
• Overlays: Ad overlays can be a scroll, ticker, or watermark image. Viewers can click to close the ads, or they can click on them, at which point they stop the video in the
background and open up a "player within the player" (known as in-player messaging) that can include more advertising content. Overlay is an interactive element that
appears over a TrueView ad, and can help drive clicks to your website. An overlay appears when the video starts, and collapses into a thumbnail image after 15 seconds.
• Interstitials: Interstitials take over the whole screen of a user's mobile or tablet device. They usually appear in-app when playing games or before an article loads when
browsing online. Boasting a high viewability rate and many options to include rich elements as well, they are growing in popularity across the web.
• Sponsorship or Native Advertising

• Native advertising: An umbrella term for ads that mirror the environment they appear in. Google search ads are the granddaddy of digital native advertising, and
in-feed Facebook ads are the most lucrative type of native advertising today.
• Native advertising is a type of advertising, mostly online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. In many cases, it manifests as
either an article or video, produced by an advertiser with the specific intent to promote a product, while matching the form and style which would otherwise be
seen in the work of the platform's editorial staff. The word "native" refers to this coherence of the content with the other media that appear on the platform.
• Sponsored content: In the media industry, native advertising is often used synonymously with sponsored content. However, the two terms are not synonymous.
Sponsored content is just one type of native advertising—the brand-sponsored articles and videos that appear on the sites and social platforms of publishers and
influencers.
• Ad Sizes: Banner, Skyscraper, Bigbox, Square
• Creatives Vs Media-Planner

• Media planners produce action plans for advertising campaigns from pre-defined marketing objectives. They
select media platforms that best suit the brand or product that will be advertised

• Ad Server Vs Web Server

Ad server vs web Server
• An ad server is a web-based technology platform responsible for making decisions about what
ads to show on a website, serving them, and collecting and reporting the data (such as
impressions, clicks etc.).
• There are 2 types of ad servers - first-party and third-party ad servers.
• A first-party ad server (aka a publisher’s ad server) is an ad server controlled by a publisher that
is used to manage an advertiser’s campaigns on the publisher’s website by the publisher’s ad ops
team. You can think of first-party ad servers like a content management system (CMS)
• Third-party ad server (aka an advertiser’s ad server) is an independent ad server controlled by an
advertiser that is used for delivering (serving), tracking, and analysing the results of advertising
campaigns - the ones shown on publishers’ websites
• A demand-side platform (DSP) is used by advertisers to purchase available ad space from
publishers on an impression-by-impression basis in real time. The DSP stores display ads (aka
creatives) that the advertisers want to display on websites.
• It’s in the DSP where the real-time decisioning (e.g. how much to bid, which users to target, which
ads to display, etc.) takes place.
Some terms to remember vis-à-vis Disp Advt
• Display Network
• The publisher coterie associated with an Ad Network.
• The ‘inventory’ held by the Ad Network and sold to Agencies
• Content Network
• PPC, CPC, CPM, CPI, CPA, …
• PPC: Same as CPC
• CPC: CPC is a pricing model that charges the advertiser every time a user clicks on the ad.
• CPM: CPM is a pricing model where the publisher charges a flat rate for 1,000 displays or impressions of an advertisement to the
audience. That is why CPM is sometimes also called cost per thousand. The CPM model heavily relies on the number of times the
ad was shown;
• CPA CPA pricing model is most commonly used in affiliate marketing, it is a cost-per-action model where the payment only takes
place when the user performs the action such as installation, click, or converting to the lead.
• The complex case of Google AdWords
• FB Marketplace (now FB Groups)
• Web Analytics (view IIMK EPGP’s Page epgpadmission@iimk.edu.in)
• Conversion and Conversion Optimization
How does Online Advertising suit all ?
• And not just the Direct Response Marketers ?
• Building Brand Awareness
• Creating Demand – inform, persuade, remind - communicate USP
• Satisfying Demand
• A good source of measuring how effective the campaign has been
• Drive Sales - Short-Term, Medium-Term and Long-Term
• Varied forms of media and context certainly help.
• The method of measuring response varies too – Overlays, Interstitials
made clickable in order to disappear
‘Annoyances’
• Much before Ad-blockers, there were popup-blockers
• Not only are there pop-ups, there are pop-unders too.
• Floating Adverts
• A floating ad is a type of rich media Web advertisement that appears uninitiated,
superimposed over a user-requested page, and disappears or becomes
unobtrusive after a specific time period (typically 5-30 seconds). The most basic
floating ads simply appear over the Web page, either full screen or in a smaller
rectangular window.
• Built using DHTML or Flash, cover content for a few seconds
• Then disappear into a regular banner Ad.
• May (or may not) have a prominent close button
• Branding-only Wallpaper Adverts
• Map Advert placements against keyword search
• Advertisement file sizes (banners 50KB, but rich media is much more)
Peculiarities of the pricing models
• CPM higher for Rich Media than Text or Banners
• CPC
• Began from Sponsored Search
• Present in Display Advertising, esp. via Ad Networks
• Easy to measure traffic and ‘conversions’ with these
• In Affiliate Marketing, where traffic needs to be driven to a new site
• CPA (or its relative CPE)
• Disliked by publishers and Ad Networks
• Pursued, however, via Affiliate Marketing
• Sponsorship-based rates, or Guaranteed Demand (GD) contracts
Take your pick of the payment model
• Want to advertise on high-traffic, broad-audience websites:
• E.g. news sites
• Want to advertise as an affiliate of a niche, targeted-audience blog
• E.g. Economics bloggers
• Want to launch a new product in a big-bang manner
• E.g. ‘Maggi Returns’
• Want to capture the User’s response or ‘like’ to a video
• E.g. a new movie release’s song
• Want to drive a direct-sales response
Networks Vs Exchanges
• ‘An affiliation of sites that shares a single representative’, or
• A group of sites under the same corporate owner
• Eg. Google AdWords components
• The context pertains to the characteristics of the site
• Vs.
• Unsold Inventories are placed by publishers for possible bidding
• Audience profile, space available, are the ‘biddable’ items
• Generalized 2nd-price auction
• Well-suited to the (small) Advertisers’ concerns and vagaries
Social Media display advertising
• User profile fairly well known to aid targeted advertising
• Textbook example, Figure 7, pg. 305
• The SN Angle: Sponsored Stories, Promoted Posts
• Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates (plus many others), 2015
• Promoted Tweets, Accounts, Trends on Twitter
• All using geographic or hash-tag targeting methods
• Twitter and Facebook are likely to soak 1/3rd of Display Ad Spending
• LinkedIn targeted Ads.
• The constraints of Minimum Budget and Minimum Spend
Ad Server
• An ad server is a piece of advertising technology (AdTech) that is used by
publishers, advertisers, adagencies, and ad networks to manage and run
onlineadvertising campaigns. Ad servers are responsible for making
instantaneous decisions about what adsto show on a website, then serving them
• Brings the 3-tier architecture to Computational Advertising
• Allows in-place changes of creatives
• Is immune/transparent to venue of impression
• May be able to track post- click or post- view activities
• ‘Audited Ad Server’ is a method of detecting any click-fraud
• Plus offering targeting/optimizations to Clients:
• Frequency Capping
• Sequencing of Advertisements
• Exclusivity from competitors or Roadblock purchases of all inventories
An Ad Server’s targeting and tracking abilities
• https://clearcode.cc/blog/what-is-an-ad-server/
• Likely based on cookies
• Geo-Targeting:
• Geotargeting in geomarketing and internet marketing is the method of determining the geolocation of a
website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on their location. This includes country,
region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP or other criteria.
• Network, Browser, OS, Connection Type, ISP
• Behavioural Targeting:
• Website Visits’ History-based targeting (important to note, visited previously)
• Re-targeting or Re-Marketing
• Rule-based targeting: content is delivered according to predefined rules. Visitors are assigned a unique cookie ID that tracks
them throughout their web journey; the platform then makes a rules-based decision about what content to serve to the
visitor. The rules tend to be founded on generalities such as demographics, location and the past activity of visitors with
similar traits..
• Contextual Advertising: Contextual advertising is a form of targetedadvertising for advertisements appearing on websites or
other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by
automated systems based on the identity of the user and the content displayed.
• ‘Setting of Cookie’ aids not just post-click, but also post-view Analytics
What is the risk with Display Ads ?
• Bots !
• 60% of the Internet’s traffic consists of Bots (2013)
• Human beings or eyeballs may not have much to do with ‘Impression’
• Middleman agencies, volume discounts all ensure that:
• Only 8% of the display ads are actually seen by a human
• Ad Networks, Publishers (may) collude – but Advertisers lose
• IAB has a goal of 70% viewability
• Why You Shouldn’t Waste Your Money on Display Ads, Adweek, Jul
15, and The Alleged $7.5B Fraud in Online Advertising, Moz, Jun ‘15
Are there good proxies for Success-by-CTR ?
• Work by Dalessandro et. al., 2012, m6d research and NYU-Stern
• Conversion is often hard to measure:
• Conversion rates may be very low, slow
• ‘Cold Start’ – not many purchases to begin predictive analytics with
• Long cycles e.g. brand advertising
• “clicks are not good proxies for evaluation nor for optimization:
buyers do not resemble clickers”
• “predictive models built based on brand site visits do a remarkably
good job of predicting which browsers will purchase”
Notes on Display Advertising from authors:
• Display Advertising is seeing renewed interest due to:
• Browsers are consuming media, are on Net for leisure than search/shop
• Consolidation in the Ad Server, Ad Exchange, Targeting & Delivery ecosystem
• Yet, effectively tracking an online Ad campaign is mostly a myth
• ‘Conversions’ not expected in many campaigns – e.g. offline purchase
• Evasive behavior by viewers e.g. cookie deletion
• Low-frequency and cold-start problems in many campaigns – e.g. cars/cruises
• Targeting based on CTR is ‘wrong-headed’:
• “just the proverbial streetlight under which the drunk searches for his keys”
• A better proxy for ‘conversion’ and effectiveness is needed – rather than CTR
Proxies recommended by authors, and why
• Click, OR visit website, OR make a purchase
• “Targeting models built on clicks do a poor job of identifying browsers
who later will purchase”
• “..creatives are … designed to entice the click … at the expense of the
brand message”
• Site-visit based predictive models help in low-frequency or cold-start
• 58 campaigns were used, with the paper’s experiment as the control
• 1-in-1000 clicks, but 1-in-million purchases !
• Description of the experiment via regression
Final Comparisons
• Metrics of AUC and Lift
• Important to note ‘Post-View’: visit a site after viewing an Ad
• Note post- purchase: make a purchase after making an earlier one
• May not need to serve an Ad to such a user
• Future work for such display Ads:
• What are good proxy brand actions
• Actions where no purchase may be involved (though there may be site visits)
Future of Display Advertising ?
• From The Evolution of Display Advertising: Adapt or Die, AdWeek, ‘15
• No cookie-based attribution, either
• ID based attribution
• “autonomous marketing platforms” eg Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram
• “can insert brands into the conversation”
• Twitter will overtake Y! in terms of Display Advertising revenue (‘15)
• In case you have them, your Cookies will be synced !
• Mobile will overtake Desktop
• These platforms will help with their CRM, Cross-Device Attribution