Learn Ad Operations – New Blog to Learn from Basics

 

It’s been a long time we are posting a piece of content on this blog! We are working with Learn Ad Operations blog to post the new content on Online advertising from basics. This blog will help you learn the online advertising concepts with various articles.

Learn Ad Operations blog started by a few digital marketing professionals with 10+ years of experience in the industry. The team will help answering your questions via comments under each post and try clarifying all sought of questions within a day.

This blog is also going to publish articles on Programmatic Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and other digital marketing channels. You will also find a few lifetime free digital marketing courses from various well-known online learning platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, CourseEra, Google Digital Garage and other platforms.

This blog will publish at least 3 - 5 articles on a weekly basis and active most of the time in a day to answer in case of any questions from the readers.

You can also follow social media handles of Learn Ad Operations on Facebook via Facebook page and private Facebook Group to meet likeminded hundreds of digital marketing professionals. Also, the team has started posting Ad Ops jobs in their Facebook Group where you can follow them to get curated job alerts every day.  

Learn Ad Operations team is active on LinkedIn where they share new articles on their LinkedIn profile which has 700+ connections from the online advertising industry. You can also follow LinkedIn Page to get daily alerts on the industry updates.  

You can also follow their Instagram page to get industry updates periodically. However, they are not always active on Instagram platform to answer any questions via DMs or Comments.

Last but not the least, you can directly contact them via Contact Us page on Learn Ad Operations blog or you can directly send an email to their email ID info@learnadoperations.com in case of any questions.

We hope you learn Online advertising basics by visiting this blog and please share this blog with your friends who are looking to learn online advertising from basics.

How Digital Marketing Is Affecting the Growth of Small Business (SMB)

Digital marketing is an essential and cost effective strategy to promote small/medium business.  An online marketing strategy is an important part of the overall marketing strategy of a business. This is true whether or not a company is doing business online. It is also true for a small, medium or large size company but especially true for a small company.

Small business marketing for a local company can include many offline local advertising methods but needs to include a healthy portion of internet marketing strategies to be successful and maximize sales in today's economy. A small business that is doing most or all of its business online, needs to embrace an internet marketing strategy that helps it be seen by online users.

Five Key Areas of Online Marketing for Small Business  

There are five areas of online marketing to improve the growth of small business. Some of them are more important to local, offline businesses, while others are more effective with online businesses. Many businesses engage in all five areas of small business marketing on the Internet.

Search Engine Marketing
This portion of digital marketing is critical for a small business. It provides a chance to compete with larger companies by being visible in search engines. Since people use search engines to find products both online and locally, it is important that your company place top in search results for words that relate to what you are selling. Professional Internet marketing firms offer this service under the name of search engine optimization. They can make sure your site is visible to those looking for your product when using a search engine.

Local Search Marketing
This includes website optimization for search results, but in addition, integrates a search engine's function of maps. This is especially true with Google, where your business can be listed with mapping and address information, giving a prospective customer what they need to visit your establishment. Your phone number and website address can also be listed. Customer services will often be available to help someone decide if they are interested in your product or service.

Content Marketing
This strategy revolves around providing a prospective customer information about your product or service, as well as information in general. People will attribute a certain level of expertise to a company, and this instills confidence in the consumer. Content marketing in the past was often done with printed brochures and guide books, but today, this can be done with articles and other forms of information on a business's website.

Social Media Marketing

This type of marketing can be tricky. Everyone talks about social media, but the truth is, it can be difficult for companies to integrate social media with their business. The type of media used, as well how it is used, is dependent upon the type of business you have. For some companies being in touch with their customers and giving them breaking news can be an important element of success. Other business such as a local restaurant, have seen success using social media by letting customers know of the latest specials and new additions to their menu. The most important aspect of social media is to use it to strengthen your customer base to achieve repeat sales.

Email Marketing
This form marketing is crucial to a small business online or offline. Essentially email marketing is about building a list of customers and prospective customers. This list of names and emails are people who are interested in your business, and you know this to be true because they have opted into this list themselves. Perhaps they were offered future updates on products as well as coupons to sign up. As this list grows, it becomes more valuable. In fact, many marketing professionals consider this to be, in the long run, the most important small business marketing strategy in the long run.

Steps To Promote Your SMB through Effective Digital Marketing Channel

Importance of Google – with approximately 80% of all searches being conducted via Google, it is critical to primarily focus SEO effort on this search engine. Yahoo and Bing are less important but still an important part of search engine marketing.

Keyword Selection – Pick keywords that are relevant to your business but also fairly easy to rank for. Look for multi-word phrases or ‘long-tail keywords’ as they are usually less competitive

Content is King - Prospects are more likely to buy from you if you are a thought leader, so establish yourself as one by creating extraordinarily helpful content. Take decisive action to ensure prospective customers are attracted to your site as a place to find answers.

Generosity is Also King – Another key part to attracting customers is your generosity in giving away information, access to tools, etc.,

Social Media – Focus on the top three social media venues: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remember, ‘be real’ and ‘be there’ to help the community rather than to push products.

Calls-to-Action – It is an important to provide something of value that solves a problem for visitors in exchange for their contact information. Often traffic will not be ready to buy right away, but a tempting call to action will lead them down the sales funnel.

Landing Pages - Everything that has been done to draw qualified traffic to a site, from improving SEO, to generating great content comes to a head in the landing page. Leads should be confronted with an inescapable case for them to leave their carefully guarded personal information on the form. Having one offer, recapping benefits, and a short form are all key.

Lead Nurturing – follow up calls to action with a ‘thank you’ email and a lead nurturing campaign that further entices leads down the sales funnel with additional free offerings– this is a free opportunity to keep touch with a lead.

Tracking Progress – Effective Inbound Marketing is all about experimentation. Select a strategy based on experience with customers and industry to get people to both visit and convert on the website. But anticipate that initial assumptions about keywords, or what it takes to get traffic to convert will not be right (or not right enough) and changes will need to be made. For this reason, it is essential to have a complete internet analysis tool-suite to help figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Patience & Tenacity – It’s easy to become discouraged and frustrated if Inbound Marketing is approached as a point solution. In reality, it’s a long term strategy only rewarding those who approach it with patience and tenacity.

Click here to download the high resolution info graphic

 

Click here to download the high resolution infographic

Conclusion:
Online marketing is the effective channel to promote small business in wide range of geographical area with minimal cost.  Also it will purely depend upon area of business and the industry which you are promoting to your targeted audience.

Above described areas and steps to improve small business through internet marketing are helpful to promote the business in desired geography. Formulating the plan and combining it with other marketing efforts are also very much important to grow in tremendous way.
Online marketing strategies that are often outsourced include social media, search engine and local search marketing, because unless you have time to dedicate it's difficult to stay on the multiple changes that transpire when it comes to strategy. With content and email marketing, you can do much of it yourself, but it never hurts to ask experts for strategy advice to help get you started.
Source: http://www.siliconindia.com/blogs/blogs_new.php?30Sfk6297ltsXB39TX3KE01fg68xhnCy

Why Publisher Need Own Ad Server

As an advertiser, there is no better way to purchase massive amounts of online display ad inventory than directly from publishers or ad networks. Granted, there is more legwork involved when compared to programmatic buying, and the CPM rates can be quite high — but this is offset by the ability to reserve large amounts of inventory.

When you’re buying media in bulk, the need for a proper ad server is very important in terms of controlling your ad operations. You could say that it’s a best practice to use your own ad server, especially if you run a consistent volume of ad campaigns.

How Ad Servers Work Together

To illustrate why you need your own ad server, it is important to first understand how ad servers work. In the below example, the advertiser’s ad server is managing its campaigns across four different publishers. This is accomplished by providing each publisher with their own unique “ad tag” script (generated by the advertiser’s ad server), which the publisher then inserts into its ad server associated with the corresponding website.

You might be asking yourself: “If the publisher has an ad server, why would I need my own?” Here are seven reasons.

1. Accountability

Tracking your own campaign statistics is probably the most important reason you should have your own ad server. When you’ve been around the online advertising space long enough, you come to realize that some degree of discrepancy is inevitable. Mid single-digits percentages are pretty normal, though it can vary wildly in different cases. With so many different ad tags being served by so many different ad servers in various locations around the world, it really shouldn’t be surprising that reporting will differ to some degree.

Without your own ad server, you have no independent stats against which to audit the results being reported by the publisher. The old adage “trust, but verify” holds true when it comes to buying online media. Having your own ad server allows you to keep publishers and ad networks accountable.

2. Creative Control

Giving a publisher or ad network your ad tags to run in their ad server gives you control over what ads are served to which users, and how. From a creative perspective (depending on the ad server you use), you can have more control over the format of your ads, such as running text ads, video ads or expandable ads.

Beyond control of the ad formats being run, using your own ad server affords you the ability to optimize delivery of your ads as well. Your ad server can give you the ability to split-test different ads and weight which will be shown accordingly.

3. Insights

Not using your own ad server means that you are at the mercy of the publisher’s when it comes to mining campaign insights. The fact that reporting transparency differs from publisher to publisher means that you will likely be left with an incomplete picture.

Using your own ad server provides you with the greatest possible transparency into the performance of your campaigns, giving you insights that otherwise would not be visible. Using your own ad server, you can look at placement stats, geographic stats, creative stats, and hourly stats, all on multiple levels, to determine what is and what isn’t working.

4. Centralized Management

Without your own ad server powering your direct buys, you will oftentimes have to rely on the publisher’s ad operations team to create and manage your campaigns. Multiply this by the number of publishers you work with, and you can imagine how the logistical complexity increases dramatically.

With your own ad server, you centralize management of your campaigns across all the publishers that you work with. You also aggregate all of your campaign statistics in a single database. The benefit of this approach is invaluable, which leads to the next reason to have your own ad server.

5. Data Ownership

One of the strongest arguments for using your own ad server, in my opinion, is that you own and control all of your campaign data. If you don’t have your own ad server and simply rely on publishers, you forfeit ownership and control over your own reporting. Trust me on this one: you don’t want to be beholden to a publisher or ad network for your historical campaign data.

6. Data Freshness

Publisher reporting practices vary. Some will report campaign results daily, weekly, even monthly. Oftentimes, this will come in the form of an email attachment. For some advertisers, this delay is acceptable; for performance-driven marketers optimizing toward an effective goal, such delays can mean costly, wasted ad spend.

In most cases, 3rd-party ad server reporting is close to real time. Having your own ad server allows you to see exactly how your campaigns are performing – up to the minute. This real-time reporting is essential to making timely and actionable decisions.

7. Data Privacy

If the goal of your campaigns is return on ad spend (ROAS), you will obviously want to be tracking revenue. However, you probably don’t want publishers knowing how much you profit on their ad inventory (for obvious reasons). Your own ad server gives you a discrete platform to confidentially track your campaign performance metrics.

The Caveat: Cost

Having the luxury of your own ad server typically isn’t free. There are some ad servers that offer free ad serving up to a certain number of impressions, but any serious media buyer will blow those limits away fairly quickly. The general cost of ad serving is anywhere from $0.01 to $0.10 CPM. You will also need to factor in content delivery network (CDN) costs, which are passed along to advertisers and range from $0.02 to $0.06 per gigabyte of transfer.

Checks & Balances

By not using your own ad server, you are pretty much flying blind and giving publishers all the power in the relationship. From a business perspective, it’s simply not prudent. This fact becomes especially important if you are doing any degree of high-volume media buying across multiple publishers.

Using your own ad server adds checks and balances to the process of media buying. It also adds a level of consistency for the media buyer, allowing all campaigns to be managed from a single point of control. While the publisher ultimately controls the flow of traffic, you can keep things on an even keel by leveraging a platform of your own to control and monitor the ad campaigns that get served — and ensure you are getting what you paid for.

Source: marketingland.com

Online Marketing - The Smart Way of Promoting

Online marketing is one of the rising types of marketing segment to promote products and services in stunning way.  There are many smart ways online media is catching up the audience using different kind of technology to promote the commodities also it has enormous accessibility and reach it is easy to reach millions of users at one go.

Being the modern and hottest field online media advertising has become focus of attention in all the trading and service firms. According to the media experts online marketing mode carries a lot of prospected audience to make business. Also experts think that online media advertising is in game change period and soon it will beat other traditional media of advertising with its reach and sustainability.

The Smart ways of promoting

The sharpen technology discovering many more new systems to make strengthen of online marketing segment. Below are recent trends which are talk of the town in this industry.

1. Real Time Bidding
2. Behavioral Targeting
3. Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives
4. Mobile App marketing
5. Games on social media channel

Real Time Bidding: This is one of the booming technologies which enable high return of investment to the advertiser. Real time bidding will be a significant factor that can fulfill the promise of online marketing.

As defined by Parks Associates, the automated process of buying and selling online display advertising in real time, and it incorporates enhanced solutions in targeting algorithms and data analytics in order to deliver better targeting, greater control and more granular campaigns.

In general words we can easily compare real time bidding with stocks market and its operations, but whatever transactions happed in RTB is approximately o.6 seconds.  Once advertisement wins the bid for desired inventory it will start serving to the right audience at the right time. Even still lot more improvements are going on to develop this system and track the accurate data at real time. As predicted in 2012, by this yearend real time bidding is most game changing segment in online marketing.

Using Real Time Bidding, Facebook advertising exchange is assuring the conversions within 2 days to its advertisers and it is working in that advertising exchange with abundance of audience, targeting based on geographical, demographical and behavioral factors.

Behavioral Targeting: This is one of the major parameter that online media used to target the right advertisement to the right customer to get business done within estimated time.  These technologies assess user behavior through user’s activity on World Wide Web.  This technology tracking through user’s IP address and personal information which user has submitted while transacting something else on the web.  Through this user data, various types of the advertisement will target to the respective customers based on their behavior and demographical factors.

Through behavior targeting most of the online media networks retargeting the interested customers through a variety of offers and discounts. Also many data management companies will analyze this data and segmenting the data as per the behavior of a particular customer.

Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives:  As technology develops, online media is also implementing new techniques to attract the customers towards its products or services. Now most of the displayed creatives which have eye catchy look, color, articles on ads, videos, offers, discounts and many more to attract the customer’s attention from its first impression.

These interactive creatives have all the features in single creatives and this leads customer busy with one of their pages or its services. Also through this kind of the creative we can track user’s activity in each and every second and over again using this data, advertiser can target those audiences for their new products or services.

Mobile App Marketing: Now a day’s most of all are using smart phones and through mobiles we are engaged on many social networks, e commerce services, personal email conversations and chats applications.  These applications will capture potential data of the respective customer and track their activities on web.  Through these kinds of the interactive applications, marketers will target their desired audience to promote the services to its desired pool of customers.

Advertisers are following their own strategies to stay at the top of the game using these mobile apps.  Few are listed as these are recent trends in 2013.

• Retargeting and Real time bidding using mobile apps - Every successful mobile marketing campaign starts with successfully targeting those who will prove most beneficial towards the product or services.  The recent introduction of Apple's Advertising Identifier is helping to develop more complicated real-time bidding and retargeting technology, including the ability to exclusively target the inactive users in an effort to reengage through mobile apps and making other marketers jealous in the process.

Real-time bidding is truly a win-win for the mobile advertising industry, giving buyers more access and transparency while concurrently giving sellers a market-driven fair price.

Frequency of tracking -   This is one of the high debated topics across the industry and still it is going on in this year with lot of facts and figures. Using Unique Device Identifier (UDID) advertiser can track the activities of user. It is one or the other way helpful to understand the user behavior and expectations to optimize the app for stand on the top of the market. AdTruth is also announced a partnership with OpenX Softwares on their new venture to develop Unique Device Identifier technology in Jan 2013.

Advanced data capture about users – From past few years, many industries have squeezed the power of data and now the mobile marketing industry is taking notice and recognizing its value. The possibilities of discoveries using data are endless. Thousands, millions, and billions of data points provide mobile app marketers with a wealth of knowledge on user behavior that was not previously available.

New mobile user behavior: As we discussed above mobile marketing is also booming with other form of online marketing and we can also easily track the behavior of the particular user and potential of customer to promote feasible product.

In TradeMob, we are predicting a change in user structure and behavior in 2013. Due to competition in the tablet and smart phone market increases, service providers inevitably become more accessible and affordable to a larger cross-section of demographics, including less affluent and increasingly younger users.

According to eMarketer, introduction of new tablets like iPad Mini, the number of tablet users is expected to see explosive growth and it is reaching nearly 34 million (in 2011) to 70 million in this year.

Games on Social media channel: Social gaming started in middle of 2007 and officially introduced on Facebook platform.  Since then, Facebook grown from 27 million to 500 million unique visitors and over 70% visitors are engaging with social gaming on various social media networks.

Through these gaming apps advertisers can attract the premium customer especially they will target youth segment of customers to promote their lifestyle, entertainment, sports related merchandise and accessories to the targeted audience. Social media has implemented three methods for driving social games, such as premium placements, ongoing promotions, and viral notification channels from these three methods social media networks attracts daily active users to make revenue out of these games.

Conclusion: Online marketing segment is one of the terrifically growing domains for many uses. As fast as technology develops this domain is also developing in its own sizzling way.  This is the major reason that we all can see online advertising inventories on each and every piece of the web page and it’s just like a popular marketing place put any product or services in front of the right audience at right time also there is no geographical barriers to promote any of the services at any time without any hassles.

Source: http://goo.gl/hXA4s 

Are Ad Exchanges and Real Time Bidding The Next Big Thing?

There is a great deal of buzz in the industry around Ad Exchanges and the technology associated with them. However, it is not well understood how they operate and what the benefits to publishers and advertisers are. In researching this topic, we found that while Real Time Bidding (RTB) receives a great deal of attention, there are other attributes of Ad Exchanges that are not widely discussed, yet have the potential to make a major impact on the digital marketing ecosystem. We’ll attempt to clarify some of the concepts used in the Ad Exchange technology stack in this article. First let’s examine traditional Ad Networks.

How Ad Networks Operate

In the Ad Network model, the building blocks are the traditional components of web advertising: Web Content Servers, Publisher Ad Servers, Advertiser (third party) Ad Servers, Database Providers, Cookies, Tracking Pixels and Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

The process generally works as follows (simplified for clarity):

• User begins to load a web page.
• Web page issues a request for an advertisement from the Publisher’s Ad Server which logs the request and returns a “NET TAG”.
• Web page issues request to the Ad Network Server, which processes its pixel, reads and/or drops its cookie, queries its database and applies targeting (demographic, geographic, contextual, behavioral or all of the above) algorithms. It then applies the rules set in the contract with the advertiser. If it finds a profitable match it issues an ADV TAG and logs the transaction. If it does not find a match, the Ad Network may pass the request on to a partner Network, which repeats the process to determine if it has a profitable ad to display and so on until a network claims the impression. This processes typically involves multiple http requests and redirects, which impact load time negatively.
• Web page processes the ADV TAG resulting in the Advertiser Ad Server either serving the ad or handing off the request to a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• The browser loads the ad, if the user hasn’t already moved on to another page.

This architecture has evolved as the online advertising industry has matured. At this point, it has become what tech types refer to as a “kluge”- a process which is inefficient, slow to serve creative, problematic to traffic, difficult to report upon and expensive relative to the real cost of the media. Add in secondary networks, yield management techniques and third party data sources and you have a cumbersome architecture that does not scale well.

What Ad Exchanges Do

If you have read this far, you now understand one of the most important (if not often publicized) rationales for Ad Exchanges: Efficiency. Suppose instead of the “Round Robin” approach described above, there was a centralized mechanism for aggregating the impressions offered across multiple Ad Networks and matching them (based on the advertiser’s target, budget and placement requirements) with the most appropriate ads?  What if this mechanism existed in the cloud with a well understood API (application programming interface) for audience targeting data and there was dynamic auction functionality around pricing which allowed the publisher to supply his impression to the highest bidder at any given instant? Add self-serve applications for ad creation, traffic, campaign management and reporting and you have the basic components an Ad Exchange or Demand Side Platform (DSP)

Real Time Bidding (RTB)

Real Time Bidding is a dynamic auction process where each impression is bid for in (near) real time versus a static auction where the impressions are typically bundled in groups of 1,000. The potential advantages are cost efficiency, higher performance and greater granularity with targeting and measurement.

Demand Side Platforms (DSP)

Demand side platforms (DSPs) give buyers direct RTB access to multiple sources of inventory. They typically streamline ad operations with applications that simplify workflow and reporting. These products are directed at agencies, agency holding companies and large advertisers (the buyers). The technology stack that powers an Ad Exchange can also provide the foundation for a DSP, thus there is a synergy for plays in both spaces.

Supply Side Platforms (SSP)

Large publishers incorporate yield management techniques to increase ad revenue. This typically involves managing multiple networks. The SSP play uses the data generated from impression level bidding to help the publisher increase the value of his inventory by being on target. Applications to manage ad operations are also bundled into these solutions. Again, the technology is adapted from the Ad Exchange tech stack.

Obstacles to Adoption

While this technology sounds promising, there are arguments against Ad Exchanges:

• Questionable ability to appropriately value premium inventory.
• Devaluation of direct sales efforts.
• Fear of the commoditization of inventory (allegedly suppressing price).
• Suitability of addressing Branding as well as Direct Response objectives and goals.

While the jury is certainly still out, sentiments on these issues are leaning in a positive direction based upon these assumptions:

• Homepage takeovers, guarantees and deep integration on major properties will continue to command premium pricing and require the efforts of direct sales teams to package, promote and manage.
• Because Ad Exchanges increase reach and provide hooks for multiple third party data sources to plug in to the ecosystem, the ability of the architecture to leverage RTB functionality with accurate targeting potentially raises the value of inventory. Perhaps advertisers will pay more to reach consumers that have been qualified by current, actionable data and are therefore more likely to have immediate brand interest or purchase intent.
• The tactical advantages of Ad Exchanges potentially make branding campaigns across premium inventory more effective by broadening reach. Additionally the tools for targeting, traffic, frequency capping, rotation and reporting are ROI enhancing to brand as well as direct response efforts.

The Players

The technology supporting Ad Exchanges is complex and expensive. In order to scale up to handle the level of traffic enterprise clients demand, software engineers often have to code tools from scratch. Open source and/or off the shelf databases just can’t handle the load.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that the big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) are taking the lead in building out Ad Exchange infrastructure. Their deep benches and pockets allow them to invest the resources necessary to make technology like RTB actually work.

Yahoo’s Right Media was arguably the first out of the gate with an exchange. With broad reach across the Yahoo network it is well positioned and has recently committed to offering more premium inventory.

Google AdEx leverages the DoubleClick Ad Serving platform with RTB. As is typical with Google, the technology stack is the most sophisticated of the top tier exchanges.

Microsoft AdECN is Microsoft’s Ad Exchange for the Microsoft Media Network.

AdMeld helps premium publishers maximize revenue from their ad inventory, reduce operating costs and eliminate unwanted ads by giving publishers access to demand from ad networks, exchanges and DSPs.

PubMatic is an ad monetization and management solution which combines impression-level ad auction technology, brand protection tools and ad operations support.

The Rubicon Project offers Supply and Demand platforms with integrated API’s for data providers.

ContextWeb provides real-time contextual targeting.

AdBrite is an advertising exchange focused targeting and optimization, has real-time bidding, API functionality and a self-service account management interface.

OpenX combines ad serving and yield management with RTB.

Media Math is a demand side buying and analytics  platform that aggregates the AdEx, Right Media and AdECN exchanges.

DataXu offers a real-time ad optimization platform which manages buys on an impression-by-impression basis across AdEX and Right Media.

AppNexus is single-point integration to exchanges and inventory aggregators, including Google’s DoubleClick, Microsoft’s AdECN, and others.

Turn is a demand side platform with targeting, exchange integration and analytics.

Audience Science specializes in segmentation and targeting data.

x+1 is a targeting platform for advertisers and publishers. They also build dynamically assembled landing pages and micro-sites based on demographic and behavioral data.

Triggit integrates with Ad Exchanges via its RTB Platform.

Invite Media’s Bid Manager is a RTB buying application.

Content Monetized by RTB Technology

The evolution of the technical infrastructure supporting display advertising is all the more interesting because this tech stack conceivably is applicable to other media types as well. Imagine video on whatever screen supported by ads delivered with this technology…

Source: advertisingperspectives.com