Ad Networks
Article | September 1, 2023
When print publishers transitioned to online publishing, they were keen to find a way to generate revenue. Their revenue model in the print world was advertising, so they needed to monetize their content online. Display ads were a great start for them. They sold their advertising space to interested advertisers directly. Even then, there would always be some ad inventory that remained unsold. The need of the hour was a platform that could help them sell this inventory. That is when ad networks for publishers and advertisers came into the picture. Let us take a deeper look into how ad networks are helping both publishers and advertisers optimize their selling and buying processes.
Ad Networks: Simplifying Ad Buying and Selling
An ad network is a technology-backed platform that acts as an intermediary between a group of publishers who want to sell their ads and advertisers interested in buying them.
Ad networks for publishers and advertisers first appeared in the mid-nineties as the earliest advertising technology to support online advertising. They helped advertisers buy ad space across multiple publishing platforms.
The primary purpose of an ad network was to collect unsold ads from different publishers and put them up for offer to advertisers at a lower price than what a direct sale would cost. This kind of ad inventory was mostly referred to as remnant, non-premium ads that publishers struggled to sell directly.
Today, ad networks for publishers focus on offering advertisers exclusive ad deals at premium prices. They pre-buy inventory from different publishers and then resell it to advertisers at premium prices to help advertisers get the impressions they expect.
Types of Ad Networks
Based on your audience, industry, topics, and formats, you have four main types of ad networks to choose from:
Inventory-specific networks: Such networks have ads of a specific type, such as mobile or video.
Vertical advertising networks: These are ad networks that focus on a specific topic, such as fashion, automobiles, or business.
Premium networks: These are the networks that offer premium inventory, mostly from popular publishers.
Targeted networks: These networks offer specific targeting capabilities through a built-in ad server.
How do Ad Networks Work?
Ad networks for publishers and advertisers keep on evolving with technological advancements. To understand how the best ads network works, here are the dynamic steps they follow to benefit publishers and advertisers:
Ad networks compile multiple publishers with available ad inventory.
Advertisers create campaigns using the ad network’s campaign panel, keeping in mind their budget, target audience, and any other special attributes.
The publishers install relevant ad network tags on their websites.
When there is a match between an ad campaign set by an advertiser and the publisher’s ad inventory, ad information is sent to the publisher. The ad network provider gets a share of the ad revenue generated from the campaign or by selling the inventory at a higher price than the publisher.
Using the ad network’s campaign panel, the advertiser tracks and manages the ad’s performance.
Ad Networks in Programmatic Advertising
Ad networks for publishers and advertisers are a part of programmatic advertising, which is the process of automatically buying and selling digital advertising space. In this space, demand-side platforms (which help advertisers) and supply-side platforms (which help publishers) streamline the buying and selling process through real-time bidding (RTB).
Businesses and enterprises rely on programmatic advertising for their digital advertising needs because publishers are adopting native ads on their websites. Thanks to native ads, ad blockers don’t affect advertising, and marketers can optimize and improve their ads with programmatic techniques for campaign success. It's no surprise that programmatic digital display ad spending is expected to increase by 25.8% this year (Source: Brand Equity).
In conjugation with ad networks, an ad exchange connects DSPs and SSPs autonomously. An ad exchange came into the picture in 2005 when ad networks were not enough to solve the cumbersome problem publishers were facing ─ selling unsold ad space. Automation in the open marketplace for buying and selling digital ads was the solution. An ad exchange offers a streamlined platform for advertisers, publishers, ad networks, and other parties to connect their ad serving technologies for efficiency.
Ad Network and Ad Exchange: What is the Difference?
In the programmatic advertising ecosystem, the ad network and the ad exchange are two important components that are often mistaken to be the same because of their role in media buying. Let us take a look at the factors that separate the two.
Attribute
Ad Network
Ad Exchange
Function
Intermediary between publishers and advertisers
Open marketplace for everyone
Identity
Company
Technology
Key Users
Publishers, advertisers and agencies
Publishers, advertisers, agencies, ad networks, DSPs, SSPs and ATDs
Important Characteristic
Pre-segmented ads for particular audience. Promotes bulk buying and selling.
Pool of various types of ad inventory. Based on an impression-per-impression trade
Ad Quality
Top-tier ad inventory, often sold for the first time
All available inventory on sale including remnant ad slots
Optimization
Time consuming
Optimization possible on-the-go
Cost
Stable and determined by the ad network
Dynamic pricing based on real-time bidding by advertisers
Impact on Advertiser
Ad prices are higher
Advertisers can define the pricing
Impact on Publisher
Low control over inventory pricing and optimization
More control over value per impression
Buyer/Seller Information
Advertisers are unaware of the placement of their ads
Publishers don’t know who the advertisers are
Both advertisers and publishers have each other’s information
Why Advertisers and Publishers Rely on Ad Networks?
A Wider Range of Options
With the help of top ad networks, advertisers and publishers can buy or sell more ad space. As a part of monetization strategies for publishers, they can rapidly increase their revenue through premium or remnant inventory because ad networks bring them the highest paying bids. Advertisers, on the other hand, can easily find any type of ad inventory that matches their budget for ad publishing.
Higher Return on Investment
Top ad networks bring in more revenue from advertising. The better the quality of ads, the higher the revenue for advertisers because they get precisely matched with their targeting needs and they can choose the most profitable deals.
Increased Efficiency
Automation in matching publishers and advertisers is the biggest advantage of advertising networks. It saves the time of manually looking for suitable deals or favorable pricing. The best publishers that bring the best impressions on ads can easily be approached. Publishers can get their inventory sold for the best price thanks to digital advertising networks.
Features of an Ideal Ad Network for Publishers & Advertisers
Here is a list of features you can refer to while choosing an ad network that caters to your needs:
Size: The size of the advertising network matters because it facilitates a steady traffic. The more traffic it can deliver, the higher your ROI will be.
Quality: Identify the quality of the inventory that an ad network offers. It should match the kind of inventory you need.
Audience Targeting: Your ad network should support different audience targeting options so that ad campaigns work perfectly well.
Format Support: Your ad network should support different formats like responsive, call-only, animated GIF or simple banners so you can diversify into different formats without any hassles.
Reliability: Depending on your requirements, ensure that the network doesn’t go down and provides consistent service so your business remains unaffected. The interface should also be easy to use, clean, and rich with data to help your marketing team optimize their personalization efforts.
CTV Streaming Platform Used PubMatic to Bump its Revenue by 400%
Future Today, a premium CTV streaming platform, used PubMatic’s platform to drive its ad revenue. PubMatic helped Future Today partner with a leading CTV DSP and achieve a lucrative private marketplace (PMP) agreement to create incremental demand through direct integration and optimized engagement.
“PubMatic has been one of Future Today's fastest growing demand partners in the last 6 months. The entire team has been a pleasure to work with and they genuinely understand the value of CTV in the market.” – Katya Shkolnik, Head of Partnerships, Future Today Inc.
Key Takeaways
Display, native, and banner advertising campaigns are critical for marketers like you to scale your business, so understanding how and what an ad network for publishers and advertisers does is important to creating the best, most effective advertising campaigns that bear results.
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Advertiser Campaign Management
Article | August 12, 2022
While brands have dabbled in augmented reality (AR) for years, 2020 marks the tipping point where it’s becoming an integral part of marketing strategy, helping create meaningful and emotional consumer connections.
AR has finally grown up; once infamous for gimmicks such as face filters on social media, it’s now a cross-platform tool to build truly interactive environments, compared to VR which requires a headset to create computer-aided stimuli. The figures tell us that the global market is expected to grow substantially from $13 billion this year to more than $67 billion by 2024. The technology is graduating from being used solely for entertainment to providing real-world value and utility for marketers through immersive and experiential opportunities. So – in the midst of a global pandemic – what makes this the perfect time for AR to come of age, and how can marketers make use of its unique attributes?
Extensive investment in the ecosystem is laying the foundations for AR’s long-awaited, mainstream emergence. Google and Apple’s mobile tech stacks, ARCore and ARKit, mean more than four billion smartphones across the world are already AR compatible, and Google now includes AR in mobile search. In addition, the imminent arrival of 5G will dramatically boost mobile connectivity, enabling developers and content creators to use approximately 100 times the bandwidth of 4G to build a new type of experiential, 3D environment where users can intuitively interact with the people, objects and information around them.
Alongside these tech developments, the global COVID-19 context is inevitably changing consumer needs and behaviors, increasing demand for the virtual, contactless experiences that can be achieved through AR. And in the near future, wearable tech such as AR spectacles will also join the party to propel evolution in the space even faster.
Here are four ways AR can be a game-changer for marketing in 2020:
Enabling product visualization
In a world where consumers order everything from clothes to cars online, marketers can harness AR to help shoppers visualize products in an interactive and immersive way that goes far beyond a static image or video. This could mean experiencing what it’s like to sit inside a dream car, watching AR panoramas unfold through the virtual windscreen, or seeing what a jacket looks like on the actual shopper, without them having to leave the house.
Augmented Reality enables consumers to explore customization options and the unique elements that a product can offer. Brands that utilize the technology witness up to 8x longer dwell times, as giving consumers control over their digital experiences boosts engagement levels. For instance, participants at an AR smartphone launch can virtually see and interact with detailed specifications and features of the device. AR is certainly not restricted to just online browsing – it has a real benefit in the physical world too, for instance helping shoppers in stores discover how and where the product was made, just by scanning a code –subsequently helping move them along their purchase journey.
Future-proofing education and development
AR enables a more sophisticated, discovery-based form of learning. For example, students in a classroom can engage with virtual, 3D objects to help grow their understanding of certain topics. Teaching concepts such as orbits in the solar system can be optimized using AR-powered, interactive models. Additionally, AR allows for the gamification of learning experiences, helping to boost knowledge retention through educational puzzles and treasure hunts.
The learning benefits of AR also extend beyond the classroom. In mechanical fields especially, the technology can train people how to complete tasks by superimposing the end result on the version the trainee is practicing with. Implementing AR in professional development cases has shown significant improvements to learning curves, creativity, and spatial awareness. In fact, according to a study by the National Training Laboratories, “learning by doing” has shown to increase learning retention rates by up to 75% compared to simply listening to a seminar or lecture. By progressing education onto understanding and experiencing, as opposed to reading and writing, AR offers huge benefits across the industry.
Invigorating interactive advertising
Product visualization, along with other attributes of AR, can be used to deliver interactive advertising experiences that truly connect with consumers and boost conversions by 40%. AR ad units drive far more engagement and dwell time than conventional media and can give digital display advertising a new lease of life. What’s more, the real-time interaction between user and ad enables advertisers to effectively measure the impact of their campaigns and optimize accordingly.
Advertisers have cautiously experimented with AR for years but they have largely added minor elements to traditional campaigns simply to ‘tick a box’. To make the most of AR’s capabilities and deliver real engagement, marketers need to take a different strategic approach and put this disruptive technology at the heart of their ad campaigns.
Superseding live events
At a time when social distancing makes live events and product launches problematic, AR can be used to digitally create immersive and emotionally-charged experiences that generate buzz around a brand. In fact, AR improves upon the in-person experience by allowing marketers to scale events beyond the natural boundaries of any physical location and enable hundreds of thousands of participants from all over the world to share the experience simultaneously. This will revolutionize how audiences engage with live music and sports events in particular, enabling unique forms of interaction.
By augmenting the user’s immediate environment with a digital presentation layer, AR allows users to interact with players and performers in a way that is not possible with a traditional passive offline event, and to be true participants rather than simply viewers. AR reduces the need for traditional physical events and paves the way for a new era of participative, immersive and scalable online experiences, with visceral and emotional engagement.
The perfect combination of tech evolution, advanced connectivity and contextual circumstance means this is the year AR really comes into its own. By taking advantage of product visualization, interactive advertising and immersive digital events, brands can leverage AR as a game-changer for marketing in 2020.
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Social Media Advertising
Article | July 14, 2022
Nate Burke, CEO of Diginius, a London-based technology company, who specialise in digital marketing and ecommerce solutions, discusses the growth and exciting future prospects for video advertising, particularly for those seeking unique ways to promote products in a saturated online marketplace.
Over recent years, there has been increasing focus on the use of video in just about every marketing context. And as it would seem, all the events and shifts in the market that have occurred ever since have only played into the success of the audio visual format.
Take the coronavirus pandemic as a prime example. Lockdown restrictions and stay at home orders across the globe have catalysed our consumption of video content. For anyone sceptical of this statement, just take the sweeping influx of TikTok users, and consequently, development of Reels, Livestream services IGTV and Stories features across social media platforms.
These video-based formats often provide a more entertaining and engaging way to consume content. And at a time when we have been looking for just about any way to fill gaps while stuck at home, videos have offered moments of escapism and connectivity, despite people never being so physically far apart.
The video content we have consumed has varied from DIY tutorials for making face masks or home renovation projects, through to product reviews and demonstrations for items we would typically like to see in person and in store.
And although restrictions are beginning to ease and these in store experiences can resume, many consumers will have adjusted to the new way of doing things, particularly with regards to online shopping and decision making.
Therefore, no longer is it enough to simply enable the purchasing of your products through an online channel. Rather, brands need to be supporting every step of the customer journey through their digital offerings, including the awareness, research and post-purchase service stages.
And thanks to the continued development of online advertising tools, this is now more viable than ever. For example, the social media features mentioned previously can all be used for advertising purposes too. Whether it’s enticing brand videos posted to your own feed, or promoted via each platform’s advertising network, or even an influencer partnership, whereby a famous face shows your product in action, there are countless ways to get word of your product out there with video.
Similarly, YouTube ads have long been praised for being a cost-effective way to earn greater digital reach through better engagement and creativity. As the second largest search engine in the world in terms of number of searches, it’s easy to understand why video advertising on the platform is so beneficial.
But while it might be one of the largest, YouTube certainly isn’t the only worthwhile search engine to be advertising on. In more recent times, the sophistication of other search engines, including Google and Bing, have created a strong case for businesses to include video consideration in their SEM strategies too. For example, we’re probably all familiar with the increasing favourability and better integration of YouTube videos displaying on results pages. And although this is separate to PPC advertising, it does require considerable effort in terms of SEO in order for videos to rank.
However, more recently, and we suspect moving forward, there is room for the use of video in these traditional PPC search advertising platforms too. In fact, Bing is currently rolling out a video extension feature to its ad accounts, allowing advertisers to include a 6 - 120 second clip in their search ads. On desktop, a thumbnail for the video will be shown to the right of the copy, which when clicked, the video plays in an overlaying window. On mobile, the video simply plays in the frame with ad copy still visible below.
As well as helping to secure greater real estate space on the results page, these videos make ads more engaging and can even enable businesses to provide more information about the brand, product or service beyond what is permitted in the copy.
Therefore, for businesses looking to implement a strong video strategy, Bing can help you maximise the return on investment required to produce such pieces of content. As well as making use of video to improve PPC efforts, the search engine definitely appears to prioritise the format more than other platforms do. Just a quick search for big name brands, such as ASOS and Sainsbury’s, will show you just how easily the search engine integrates branded and user generated video content, when compared to the likes of Google.
Again, with videos that are appropriately optimised, there is great potential to increase the space taken up on the all important first page of results. As well as this, you can provide searchers in the awareness and research stages with greater information and a better brand experience through content in a more engaging format to increase the chances of a conversion.
In terms of PPC advertising, the use of video is at no greater expense to the business. Video clicks are charged at the same rate as call to actions or website click throughs, and like in the traditional form, only the initial click incurs a cost. Therefore, users can click to watch the video, and then press the button to call, enquire or visit your website, and despite having spent more time immersing themselves in your brand, there will be no additional price to pay.
Undeniably, video advertising is becoming increasingly intelligent, providing businesses with much more opportunity to showcase their products in an engaging way, which can help break through the white noise of the saturated online marketplace. But interestingly, I believe this is only the beginning of what is possible with the format, particularly when it comes to PPC in search.
As the retail world recovers from the disruption of the pandemic, and businesses really begin to home in their strategies to accommodate users’ new found preferences in the age of post-lockdown, the creative use of video will become an ever-growing key tactic in advertising.
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Advertiser Campaign Management
Article | August 12, 2022
Advertising metrics provide clear information on the success and failures of an ad campaign. They are a practical tool to track all aspects of your marketing activities as well as how your campaign compares to designated metrics. Take a look at your campaign health metrics to understand your campaign’s performance. These metrics aren’t exactly KPIs (key performance indicators) because they are not tightly connected to your marketing goals. However, they do support the important ad metrics. They can give you insights into how to improve an ad campaign on your level.
Check out this list of valuable metrics to add to your armory if you really want to find the value of your content, the value of your audience, and the success of the advertising you're hosting.
Cost Efficiency Metrics (CPCs, CPMs, CPVs)
Understand what your initial interaction with your audience is costing you. Metrics like cost per click, cost per mille and cost per view are foundational to determining where you need to focus to optimize your campaign while ensuring you have an eye on the changing trends.
Click-Through Rate
To understand how relevant your ads are to your audience, you need to look at your click-through rate. A low click-through rate means your ads have a huge scope of improvement and that you might not be targeting the right audience to meet your marketing goals. To avoid losing your ad spend, quickly identify drops in performance and alter your ads to make them relevant to your target audience.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of your ad indicates the relevance of your landing pages and how well they are optimized for conversion. If the conversion rate is low, it means that your site’s content is not resonating with your audience or that the audience you are targeting isn’t right for your product or service. It could also mean that your audience isn’t at the right stage of the funnel to take an action. You can make changes based on how this metric looks.
Impression Share
This metric helps you understand how much you can scale your campaign through aggressive bidding. It can also highlight underperforming keywords and how you can enhance your campaign by adjusting the budget. Adjusting geo-targeting settings and improving ad quality are some of the ways to increase the impression share.
On-Site Engagement
To gauge the interest of the audience in your ad campaign, keep an eye on on-site engagement metrics like bounce rate, average number of pages visited, and average session duration. These are the real measures of the interest your prospects show in your ads.
Quality Score
A quality score helps you identify ways to improve your campaign. This score gives you a comprehensive look at all the individual scores that affect your campaign. The historical data that evaluates the changes in your campaign over time is visible here. You can pinpoint which changes led to a positive impact and which didn’t.
Bottomline
Campaign health metrics are your answer to improving your ad campaigns. Taking note of what is working and what isn’t is the right way to constantly enhance the performanc
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