Understanding ad placements key concepts is crucial to understanding the blogs that will be posted here. This blog will be dedicated to explaining player, concepts and obstacles to overcome for successful presentation of ad on a rich media client.
Key players,
Publishers – organizations that hold assets on which and ad can be displayed, such as web sites, toolbars, game providers or video content providers.
Advertisers – company’s who advertise their products on the web, or represents such clients.
AdNetworks – provide a market place were an advertiser can place his ad and reach multiple publishers and the other way around. Multiple advertiser results in the better coverage and a bidding war on the publisher assets, many publishers allow better targeting higher effectiveness of the ad campaign. So the bigger the market place is the higher the benefit is for all the players.
Concepts :
Assets – a place on which an ad can be presented.
Coverage – the percentage the AdNetwork will successfully return an ad to the certain publisher per geo location of the client and demographic consideration of the asset. There are several ad networks that hold inventory just for certain regions like the USA or Europe. If you are a publisher and have users from all over the world you might be forced to work with several AdNetworks to improve your coverage and better monetize your asset.
Impression –the presentation of an ad on the client side.
Click – click on the ad presented, result in redirecting to the advertiser site.
CTR – Click-through rate is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Representing the ratio between the number of ad presented (impressions) and number of clicks.
Acquisition – an impression that resulted in a user actually registering or buying the advertised service.
CPA – Cost Per Action\ Acquisition a contract in which the advertiser pays for each specified action(perches, registration…)
CPC – Cost per click is the amount of money an advertiser pay per click on the ad.
eCPM – the value paid to the publisher per 1000 impressions. Actually all ad networks present earnings in their reports as eCPM values, even if payment resulted from CPA or CPC deals.
Obstacles to overcome:
• Flash and SilverLight clients used to display rich madia (movies and games) do not integrate with the format an ad is returned by the AdNetworks (iFram or JavaScript).
• When the game is developed or a movie filmed it is not designed for ad int0egration. To present the ad you have to find a location and a time on which to place an ad, and of course some code is required for the actual presentation. Last I heard there is no code integrated in avi or divx files and the requested add must fit the location found on the asset without interfering with the actual content presented on the client.
• Hopping – to retrieve an ad the client navigates to an AdNetwork server if there is no coverage he must navigate to the next AdNetwork. Navigation loss stands at about 5%-10%, and you have to develop a complicated to execute all of these hops.
There are two great blog posts that I urge you to read, they perfectly explain the process of placing an ad on an asset.
http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/05/01/the-ad-exchange-model-part-i/
http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/05/02/the-ad-exchange-model-part-ii/