'Net Features : advertisement

Twitter Ups Relevancy of Targeted Ads

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:20:00 GMT

After a significant amount of time spent testing and tweaking, Twitter has finally rolled out a new feature to all of its advertisers that may dramatically improve the relevance of targeted ads on the microblogging social network.

See, before, Promoted Tweets or Trending Topics were displayed without taking into account how relevant or useful the ads were to a given individual user. This was largely because the site, by its nature, isn’t able to cull the kind of personal information about its users as Facebook can, since they don’t specify their interests on their profiles.

Twitter is now developing a way to glean this information from what users are actually saying on the site, as well as who they follow and some of their other activities. Unfortunately, that’s about all of the information the company has given up so far.

These changes will also allow advertisers to specify the specific @handles of users, but rather than only target those individuals, Twitter will show ads to all of their followers who share interests with them. So, for instance, if you wanted to target people who like a certain type of food, a marketer can use this feature to target people who follow a restaurant that serves a similar menu.

Social Metrics to Watch: Exposure and Frequency

Allison Howen — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:27:00 GMT

Advertising on Facebook is currently a hot topic due to GM’s public pulling of its ads from the social network, which led many marketers to wonder if advertising on the social site is a smart move.

After a year-long study, Resolution Media and Kenshoo are providing marketers with insights on the effectiveness of Facebook ads. The companies analyzed global data spanning 65 billion Facebook ad impressions and 20 million Facebook ad clicks over a wide range of brands and categories – including entertainment, finance, retail and insurance.

“Social media has quickly become one of the preferred channels for brands, and when done right, can foster meaningful relationships between brands and consumers in ways that were never before possible,” says Alan Osetek, president of Resolution Media. “The purpose of this study was to define what ‘doing it right’ means in terms of measureable actions and outcomes, and giving marketers a model for demonstrating effectiveness.”

The study reveals that Sponsored Stories and Post Ads receive about double the click-through rate (CTR) of Social and Web Ads, which means that ads with social context resonate better with audience members likely due to a personal connection. Additionally, Post Ads are prone to draw more attention because they often feature special offers and are larger than normal ads.

The data also shows that higher CTR leads to lower average cost-per-click (CPC) rates, with Post Ads averaging a CPC of $0.24, Sponsored Stories averaging $0.46, Web Ads averaging $0.59 and Social Ads averaging the highest CPC at $0.78. But for advertisers that choose the cost-per-thousand (CPM) model, Sponsored Stories are the most expensive ad type – averaging a CPM of $0.31 compared to Web Ads that averaged the lowest CPM of $0.18.

However, some of the most interesting insights of the study regarded a new metric called “Exposure Rate,” which measures targeted engagement on Facebook. This metric determines the percentage of the target audience that a brand is reaching and exposing its message to. The study reveals that high exposure rates correlate to high CTR and conversion rates, with the ads that reached 76-100 percent of their intended audience also receiving an average CTR of .038 percent and conversion rate of 31.92 percent. In comparison, ads that only reached 0-25 percent of the intended audience resulted in an average CTR of 0.028 percent and a conversion rate of 11.81 percent.

But the study also notes that high exposure rates don’t guarantee success, because brands should balance this metric with frequency, which is the amount of times the average Facebook user has been exposed to a specific advertisement. The data from the study shows that there is a conversion rate drop-off of 32 percent when ads are shown to consumers more than six times. This means that the ad is being exposed to the user too frequently, which results in consumers ignoring it. Additionally, the CTR averaged 39 percent lower after the sixth impression.

According to the study, one way that marketers can optimize exposure rate and frequency is by maintaining a CPC above the maximum recommended bid. This is because the study’s data showed that the exposure rate was higher for ads with CPCs that were greater than the maximum recommended bid, driving the average exposure rate up by 11.5 percent. Additionally, the data showed that frequency dropped when the CPC was above the maximum recommended bid, by an average of 1.7 exposures.

“With new channels and ad formats come new tracking capabilities," says Sivan Metzger, general manager of Kenshoo Social. "And with new tracking capabilities come new data points. With new data points come new insights. And with new insights come new key performance indicators. This study is the first in a series from Kenshoo and Resolution Media to surface KPIs and help brands define a new measurement paradigm for improved social media investments.”

Test Online Ads with Project Adthenticate

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Get the most out of your online ads by testing them before you launch them with a new service from Adobe.

Project Adthenticate enables publishers, rich media vendors and creative agencies to test, validate and optimize ads based on the IAB’s 2011 Rich Media Creative Guidelines – which can all be done directly within the browser. For example, after signing into the service, users are able to select a file, enter an ad’s URL or an AdTag and then choose the IAB specification they want to test against.

The tool then displays results in a chart that reveals allowed and actual value for specs – including file height and width, filesize, framerate, animation time, sound and more for SWF. Plus, a performance monitor maps out the CPU usage.

Additionally, more advanced features such as custom specifications per publisher, network tracking and audio/video rules will ship in the commercial release.

Ads Come to WordPress Blogs

Allison Howen — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Attention, WordPress bloggers: Your ship may have just come in.

According to Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, there are more than 63 million WordPress sites in the world, and about half of those are actually hosted by WordPress itself. But for such a large number of bloggers (15 percent of all websites on the Internet, says Automattic), the actual returns have amounted to little more than compliments and publicity.

However, WordPress has just taken a big step toward changing that by partnering with Federated Media Publishing to offer ads to millions of WordPress blog users. The deal was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit and will allow all WordPress blog users – no matter the size of their audience – to participate in Federated Media’s advertising network.

Although bloggers will not have the ability to choose which individual ads will be displayed on their site, they will have the choice of ad themes.

"FM is the perfect partner for us to offer opt-in, premium advertising to WordPress users for the first time ever," says Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic. "FM has years of experience in bringing together leading brands and top bloggers and will now bring that experience to our network of tens of millions of bloggers and hundreds of millions of readers."

The ad options will be available to WordPress bloggers in the first quarter of 2012.