Marketers (and the Interactive Marketing Agencies) have been trying and testing all the options available and have learnt a lot in last few years. Among the various types available today, Online Ad Network industry can be broadly divided into three types:

Right Ad Network

Vertical Ad Networks: As Advertiser/Marketer you get to target audience matching your product/service by selecting vertical specific publishers/websites e.g., Sports / Technology / Lifestyle / Education / Music / News / …

Regional Ad Network: Geo specific Ad Networks tend to have better knowledge and network of websites for targeting mass audience in that location e.g., Hispanic (Hispanoclick) / India (Komli, Pubmatic) / China (Allyes)/ …

Global Ad Network: These have been in the online advertising space from quite sometime. The obvious logic is that the technology with Global Ad networks is better. They get down to manage huge inventory and deliver campaign on publishers/websites from various time zones and handle the discrepancy issue within the best and set industry standards. These bigger Networks give more options in terms of volume and no less in providing extensive targeting options. Some Networks ValueClick / Tribal Fusion / ThePublisherNetwork / …

There is no one good choice though! It all depends on the campaign’s objective and media plan. There are products/service of a local business which obviously chose to go with the local ad network for the fact that local ad network provides better insights and connect better with the local audience. Today’s Global eBusiness on the other hand would need exposure from various geographies and hence would look for traffic from across the globe. In that case the best choice for media planners would be to go with a Global Ad Networks. Similarly the choice of Vertical Ad Networks – provide all the volume (geo-specific/global) from a specific industry websites.

Do Let us know your experiences and what has worked for you!

Each of these big players also acquired various Behavioral, Video and Mobile ad networks… Apart form these big players there are other media firms who have been on acquiring spree of various smaller players in the ad networks industry, like Ybrant Digital (acquired Addynamix and Oridian), WPP (acquired 24×7 Real Media) etc… Research on Ad Network model from various sources IAB, Comscore and the like gives us enough data to look into the scope of Ad Network’s reach into the targeted audience and how potential is the business. AOL’s experience – beginning with the acquisition of Advertising.com for $435 million in 2004 – provides a useful point of reference about the recent growth of ad networks. From less than $100 million in revenues in 2002 to approximately $650 million in 2007 (a CAGR of 55%), AOL’s third-party ad networks (primarily Advertising.com) now account for approximately 27% of the unit’s advertising and content revenues. Based upon the value recently placed on Yahoo! by Microsoft, AOL’s advertising and content business could be worth as much as $20 billion, and Advertising.com represents a significant portion of that value.

Though all those acquisitions and the revenue now coming from those units is an exciting story, currently a lot is happening in the Ad Network industry turf. Dynamic nature of our industry makes us face challenges every now and then. Current challenge is that many big media companies like IAC, News Corp, and Time Inc. are in the process of aggregating all of its web properties into an ad network of their own, which means, limited direct access for a general Ad Network to the media available with few of the biggest portals. On the contrary there are enough legitimate arguments that there will be any scarecity of media with the existing Ad Networks like ThePublisherNetwork.com:

1) This transition will take a lot of time and experts doubt that its not worth an effort for the bigger media owners to form there own ad networks. Though they will be more organized in handling the huge audience they have on their properties but Advertisers now-a-days need variety and this need is the result of shift in trend at the macro level. Online marketing is facing unprecedented change, brought on by a volatile economy.

2) There are thousands of 2 – 3 Tier independent publishers who have no choice but to be part of an Ad Network

3) Improved targeting technologies (beyond contextual, demographic, social, behavioral) 4) New methodologies like free content v/s community (user generated content – users share videos, blog posts, and widgets with each other across sites) targeting. We need to be there where users are.

4) New methodologies like free content v/s community (user generated content – users share videos, blog posts, and widgets with each other across sites) targeting. We need to be there where users are.

Publishers need to be more innovative in terms of not only maintain the traffic flow onto their web property but also should always look for technological advancement to attract more traffic. There have been arguments, especially after the recent economic slowdown, about how display media should be bought and what direct value does it add to the ROI goals. In my opinion, Publisher need to look beyond CPM advertising and work on Revenue Share to attract more Advertiser Sign-Ups… Basically how Google works and maintains number 1 positions, as a traffic source … Only when a USER clicks… they get paid (PPC)

A) Offer your clients various Ad-options to chose from:

- Online Display Advertising (Banner/Popunders)

- Lead Generation

- AdSense

- Rich media

- Direct Sales

- Subscriptions

- Sponsorships

B) Offer clients various Cost Models to fit into their media plan:

- CPM (Cost Per Thousand) / CPV (Cost Per View)

- CPC (Cost Per Click)

- CPL (Cost Per Lead)

- CPA (Cost per Acquisition)

- Rev Share

C) Be part of Online Ad Networks/Traffic Exchanges as these are the places where you get most of the advertisers…

D) Have Flexible/Customised rate cards

What could advertisers do to make their online advertising more effective?

Advertisers and/or the Agencies they hire, need to do a lot –

- Need to always look for fresh ideas of how to be at right place and at the right time.

- Strong Media Planning – Media Mix (Display/PPC/Email/Social Media Marketing/Contextual etc.)

- Look for genuine traffic sources under each of the above category, where they not only get volume assurance but also the experience and technological capabilities to target audience and optimize better. Rate each traffic source on five important aspects (in Order): Audience/Reach/Technology/Pricing.

- Based on the objective of the campaign and offer type, select vertical specific traffic or run campaign on relatively cost effective traffic from Online Ad Networks under RON category.

- Try different traffic sources to reach deep and vast as much as possible.

- Use of innovative ideas in the creative used to attract audience actions

- Create Landing pages with Relevant and to-the-point information

- Measurability of Delivery against goals… Post Impression/Post click tracking

- Plan better for future campaign… Its better to have a balance of the same traffic source already worked with (if you have seen performance or scope of performance) along with trying new ones in every media plan rolled out for a campaign.

- No traffic is bad, based on what the offer is… The Best approach is to try various Display Ad Options (Banner/Popunders/Contextual/Email etc.) under Different Cost Models. (Know more about how Various Cost Models Work…)

Basic logic behind how Google’s AdSense works — automatically analyze the content of web pages to dynamically determine which ads are the most relevant ones to be served there. If you are on a site gathering information about Next generation Notebooks, they show you ads for retailers who sell them — without the publisher or the advertiser (or even the Online Ad Network) having to explicitly specify anything. This is simply contextual advertising, and if this is done using Semantic Technology, its nothing but Semantic Advertising.

Semantic Technology: encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code. Semantic technologies are “meaning-centered.” They include tools for: auto-recognition of topics and concepts, information and meaning extraction, and Categorization.

Given a question, semantic technologies can directly search topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources. From the portal perspective, semantic technologies can be thought of as a new level of depth that provides far more intelligent, capable, relevant, and responsive interaction than with information technologies alone.

With HTML and a tool to render it, one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’. But there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number XYZ is an Electronic Gadget with a retail price of $199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “XYZ” is something that should be positioned near “Electronic Gadget” and “$199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Electronic Gadget” is a kind of title or that “$199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them where as RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies (RDF, OWL, and XML)_are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within documents. The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e. to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and facilitating automated information gathering and research by computers.

Semantic targeting makes a step ahead of Contextual Marketing by going deeper than keywords and understanding the page’s actual content, which results in intelligently placed ads and higher conversion rates and revenue. Various Publisher Ad Networks have integrated Semantic technology in their system which discovers, classifies and interprets text information automatically, builds detailed taxonomies in any language, and classifies content on publisher web pages into these taxonomies, a method of organizing content on a website.

**The content in above article is information gathered for you from differnt sources available on Internet**

Online Advertising demands you to be smart, flexible, and quick to meet the challenges. Experts empower you with solutions that go further, work harder, and deliver improved accountability and on the way Learn the market stats.

Other than the very popular challenges some of the hard tests that an expert in online marketing professional face:

Targeted audience – Maximum results with Minimum waste.

RON Ad placement – on complete network,

Channel Targeting – ROC campaigns,

Contextual Marketing – Focused Keyword/URL Targeting,

IP based Geographical and Area targeting,

Duration (Month/Week/Day/Hours of the day) Targeting…

Choices are endless. Let expert give you options

Transparency - Number of vendors for the same audience. There are various Traffic Sources:

-          Online campaigns across Premium Publishers like Yahoo, AOL, Rediff, MSN allows you to reach global audience.

-          Online Ad Networks in this context have been proven effective as Advertisers and Agencies get choices and better rates at single point.

Branded publishers don’t want the inventory they release to an ad network be identifiable by the buyer because they feel their direct-sales staff will be affected adversely, especially if the buyer is allowed to hand-pick the site. Ideally the media experts backed by targeting technology at an Online Ad Network, should be given authority to decide for offers/products to be on a site that is contextually relevant to the offers. Again it’s just not possible all the time. And so all the parties involved have to be aware and give the consumer some credit, and only the media-mix to reach most relevant consumer in the most cost effective manner is what works.

Pricing – Aiming the marketing goals various pricing models are involved in the Internet Marketing arena:

CPM – COST PER THOUSAND under RON and ROC – Cost effectiveness of CPM model not only works wonders for ROI targeted but adds value to consumers’ Search behavior.

CPC – COST PER CLICK with Text or Graphical Banner on targeted content rich sites with highly experienced optimization team in place.

CPA – COST PER ACTION – Performance campaign with ROI targets with range of online advertising options available.

CPL – COST PER LEAD – Pay only for Lead Generation, Sign-ups.

CPV – COST PER VIEW – Keyword/URL Targeting to provide relevant online advertising to the internet user while they are browsing the web, based on the relevant terms they use to look for information.

It all boils down to extensive experience focused approach and technological advancement to deliver results. Got queries, please write to

Email: sales@thepublishernetwork.com