RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Google Expands 'Display Benchmarks' As It Reaches For More Branding Business

Neal Mohan, Google, vp displayGoogle is giving advertisers and agencies up-to-the-month access to its industry performance benchmarks for display advertising. Called Display Benchmarks, the tool presents aggregated ad performance data that can be filtered according to variables such as click-through rates, ad interaction times,  video completion rates, and other metrics.  And it works across ad formats/sizes (including mobile), verticals, and regions.

Google has produced such benchmarking before, but only on an annual basis, Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display, told AdExchanger. The idea here is that advertisers will be able to take their own metrics – from any and all other data sources they use – and match it against the rest of the industry to provide a greater context for their performance right now.

"I don't think there's an agency or advertiser out there that wouldn't welcome more access to benchmarks," Mohan said. "In the past, this has been something that we produced as a yearly report, but we wanted to offer a real-time tool for today's real-time world. Our hope is that our partners find this broadly useful across all their campaigns."

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MRC Blesses Google's Viewability Metric. Does That Matter To Agencies?

Neal Mohan, Google, vp displayGoogle's offering in the ad viewability space has scored third-party accreditation from the Media Ratings Council.

Google joins others who have wended through the MRC's approval process – the respective viewability products from comScore, Double Verify and RealVu have been approved – so Google does not stand alone. But given its expansive relationship with marketers, agencies and publishers, the MRC's nod at Google's viewable offering is likely to spur more usage of this tool.

"Viewability is the first critical building block; no other metric matters, from a brand's perspective, if the ad wasn't seen by an actual human being," said Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display, in an interview with AdExchanger. "Anything that we build on top of that, such as brand lift, as we announced with our Google Consumer Surveys product, follows from that first step of knowing if an ad has been viewed."

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ShareThis Tightens Social Data Relationship With Starcom MediaVest

kurt-abrahamsonSocial data analytics provider ShareThis is allowing Publicis-owned Starcom MediaVest Group to embed the company's Social Quality Index rankings in its advertiser dashboard.

In essence, the SQI is an indicator of the volume of social sharing and clicks across all of ShareThis's 2.4 million publishers, who are mostly smaller, long-tail players but also include major outlets like Vogue, The Food Network, New York magazine, AllThingsD and others. In addition to showing what content is being shared across Facebook, Twitter and other social channels, the index's numbers can then be sliced and diced along 27 separate vertical categories, according to the specific needs of Starcom clients.

The move aims to create a hard number around the value of "sharing" and to offer social metrics alongside demographics or reach, said ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson in an interview with AdExchanger.

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WeatherAlpha Sees Weather Data Opportunity For Ads

weatheralphaWeather is getting more news attention these days. In financial market terms, you could say weather has had a “high beta” lately – extremely volatile.

According to Jason Chen, co-founder of four-person WeatherAlpha, marketers and media companies alike have taken note and are starting to use information about weather, building it into their operations and campaign strategies. Chen and his co-founder Dan Alexander, who is the company’s Chief Meteorologist, hope that they can bring new insights to advertising via their self-funded company, which began in 2009.

AdExchanger spoke to Chen and Alexander recently.

AdExchanger:  First, a typical venture capital question for you – what problem is WeatherAlpha solving?

JASON CHEN:   Three years ago when we started WeatherAlpha, we believed that the market lacked what we considered to be actionable insights as they related to weather. For example, we perform a weather impact assessment for clients, where we inform them which weather conditions impact their strategies as well as the threshold and variances from one location to another.

But it wasn’t enough giving them that information.

We wanted to provide a specific mechanism to apply these insights in their strategies and operations. So we developed WeatherEdge, our data platform, which provides real-time weather data tailored to specific advertisers. For example, it automatically accounts for the views per location, the time of year, the time of day – and the actual weather conditions including the threshold and magnitude. And in that sense, we basically are more about the application of the science. It’s not just about tying a product to the weather. It’s about understanding the weather’s impact on the consumer psyche, and then correlating different products to that weather condition to help consumers make their experiences easier, better, more comfortable, more fun or – in a case of apparel – even more fashionable in some way.

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Video Is Next For Chartbeat's Real-Time Engagement Analytics

chartbeatChartbeat recently announced that it has brought its "engaged time" metric to its growing web ad analytics offering.

Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile and Product Manager Alex Carusillo discussed their company's objectives in advertising and industry trends with AdExchanger...

AdExchanger: Overall, where does the analysis of advertising fit in Chartbeat’s strategy?

TONY HAILE: Our core has always been helping people align their teams with their metrics to get the most out of them and adapt in real-time parameters. With advertising, we’ve found a recurring misalignment between the value of an ad and how much we’re paying for it. We’re bringing those things into alignment now because it touches on whatever we do around content and engagement. It’s certainly important to Chartbeat.

Given your unique position in analytics, in your opinion, is it possible to achieve cohesive insights about content and ads – and commerce?

TONY HAILE: We're seeing people move from having only one way of generating revenue – as in “I’m just going to have some ads on my site” – to having multiple ways of generating revenue, whether that’s commerce, through subscription services, or a range of other things. It’s not just about indiscriminately chasing traffic anymore; it’s about building a loyal, returning audience and understanding which audience members are great candidates for which path such as subscription, commerce and who is an attractive audience for advertisers. And then the challenge is making sure that the right messages and paths are set in front of these people. We believe the best indicator is the amount of, what we call, “engaged time” that you're able to capture - in other words, the amount of audience attention you're able to hold.

Unsurprisingly, the more engaged time you capture, the more likely someone’s able to return, and you can monetize them with more than just the classic eyeball flash.

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Quantcast Stretches Into App Analytics Amid European Expansion

Konrad-Feldman-QuantcastAs often happens with emerging channels, advertising dollars are still way behind when it comes to matching the time spent on smartphones and tablets. One barrier to greater spending is the lack of measurement of both the mobile web and app activity, but online analytics provider Quantcast is trying to tie usage across devices together by adding app measurement to its coverage.

The move comes a little more than a year after Quantcast introduced its mobile web metrics product. The company is also broadening its physical presence with the opening of its European, Middle East and Africa office in Dublin late last month.

“Apps have become an everyday habit for billions of consumers, and publishers and advertisers need better tools to uncover this hidden audience in order to gain a unified view,” said Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman in a statement. “By directly measuring mobile app consumption, publishers and advertisers can drill down beyond app installations to learn key insights including audience loyalty and usage."

A key difference in measuring mobile is the lack of cookies, at least on iOS devices. Quantcast's approach is to supply publishers with mobile app and web audience reach, which they can use to show engagement levels to advertisers and third parties. Quantcast for Apps also provides breakdowns by unique visitors as well as visits, app installs and details on trends in return visits.

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Quote: Don't Think Of It As Social Analytics

Gareth_Herschel“There’s no such thing as social analytics. Just like there’s no such thing as big data—it’s an artificial amalgamation of related topics. When you lump these things together you lose the distinction between them. Don’t talk about social analytics -- instead, talk about the analysis of the topic. What is the sentiment? What are the hot topics? What is the buzz? How many people are using this channel? How often? Who are the influencers? These questions are all related to social analytics... You need to look at them individually and then bring them together.”

-Gareth Herschel, research director at Gartner, on the ways companies can differentiate themselves through their use of data at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit on March 20.

Content Recommenders Combine, As Outbrain Buys Visual Revenue

Outbrain Visual RevenueWhile much of the focus on data has been on the way marketers and ad agencies employ it, there are a few companies who work primarily with the editorial side on how best to target their content (and the advertising that supports it) to readers. That space is shrinking a bit today, as content discovery engine Outbrain acquires Visual Revenue, a predictive analytics company for online publishing. Read the release.

The merger comes at a moment when concepts such as "holistic yield management, native advertising, and content marketing are being heavily discussed as methods to broaden publishers' revenue options beyond the typical confines of their own sites and the usual balance between editorial and advertising.

"We both serve publishers, but we found that our two systems are very complementary," said Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai, in an interview with AdExchanger.

"We've known each other for about two years or more and are good friends through many of our mutual clients," added Dennis Mortensen, CEO/founder of Visual Revenue. "It was probably December when we really saw how well our two pieces fit together. It was about bringing together article views and front page views -- like peanut butter and chocolate.  It's a great match!"

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Videology Looks To Partners, Not Purchases, For Deeper Mobile Moves

Aleck Schleider VideologyMobile and video are the fastest growing segments of display – eMarketer has video's growth rates rising 46.5% for 2012, while it says smartphone based ad spending will jump 180% this year to top $4 billion. And yet, aside from Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu, there are very few sites that can truly make the claim that either mobile or video is a significant revenue driver.

Part of the problem is the lack of a standard ad serving technology. Most agencies, marketers and publishers have to work with several system providers to handle video ad delivery and metrics.

Ad network Videology has been looking to expand its buy and sell side services over the past several months by positioning itself as a one-stop shop. After starting off as a video ad server and distribution point for marketers and agencies,  it has begun to serve publishers in the capacity of a video supply side platform, in part through acquisitions like DSP LucidMedia last fall and then mobile data management and publisher platform Collider in August.

These moves erase silos between devices where consumers access video, says Aleck Schleider, Videology's VP for Product Vertical and Data Solutions. Two recent partnerships with mobile analytics provider Korrelate and offline market researcher Kantar Shopcom serve a similar purpose. The ultimate goal for Videology is to for marketers and content companies to consider it the single connection for online in-stream video advertising with a seamless mobile and rich media display advertising line between consumers and their offline purchases.

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Hoping To Unlock Bigger Budgets, Adap.tv Begins Selling Viewable Impressions For Video Ads

Amir AshkenaziAs competition for brand campaign dollars heats up in the video space, Adap.tv has introduced its version of the "viewable impression" for streaming media with the introduction of its Certified Viewability feature, which promises to verify whether a video placement has been seen in real-time and blocks impressions that do not appear to the user.

The hope for Adap.tv and its CEO/founder Amir Ashkenazi is that its Certified Viewability will not only buttress the reach and frequency metric known as the Gross Rating Point for online, but that its viewability tool will become the industry standard, as its rivals in the video space develop and market their own similar tools.

"It doesn't make sense for buyers to pay for impressions that haven't been viewed," Ashkenazi said in an interview with AdExchanger, echoing sentiments of his agency partners. "The idea around viewability is so basic. We believe that any brand advertiser that is paying on an impression basis should pay for only what's viewable. You wouldn't pay Amazon for an empty box. Why should media buyers?"

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