How To Make Sense Of All The Date You Are Inundated With

Help! I’m floundering in a blizzard of data; how do I separate signal from noise?
The first thing to do is pin down your campaign objectives because that will decide your relevant analytics. The second is to look at the data you already have that adds value to the campaign. Most marketers have some of their own data and the second step is to find a partner that can help them integrate that with the publishers. This represents an evolution from the historical dependence on publisher data. Marketers know what segments they want to reach — if we can support using that data to help target, we are much more likely to meet their objectives. The third thing, after they’ve told us what they know, is ask, “What can you tell me? Surprise me with some insight.”

What’s the biggest misconception about data that marketers have today?
Marketers still believe you can’t establish ROI online. For direct response or search advertisers, that is not true. But a lot of the large brand advertisers are still very skeptical and in 2010, that’s a misconception. Some ask, “Can I get a better return online than my campaigns on radio and TV?” We tell them a couple of things. We (and others) provide solutions that can trace offline behavior and connect it to online advertising.

Read More: AdAge

January 2010 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report

For this month’s feature section, we ran an opt-in survey of consumers on iPhone, iPod touch, Android and webOS devices to learn more about how they are engaging and interacting with applications.  The behavioral and demographic insights taken from the self reported survey provide additional context to the traffic trends we report on each month.  The survey included 963 respondents across all of the platforms and revealed some interesting points on app purchasing habits:

• Android and iPhone users download a similar number of apps every month and spend a similar amount of time using the apps.
• iPod touch users download an average of 12 apps a month, 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users.
• webOS users downloaded fewer total apps per month, relative to iPhone OS users and Android users.  This may be related to the fewer number of apps in the webOS App Catalog.

As always, it’s important to take methodology into consideration when reviewing the results of any survey.  You can find more details on our methodology in page 3 of the report.  One thing to note is that many of the survey respondents were sourced through in-app ads, which could have resulted in a selection bias of active app users.  Also note that we did not include RIM users in the survey, because AdMob does not currently serve ads into Blackberry apps and we wanted to be able to compare similar methodologies across platforms.

Read More: AdMob

The Display Advertising Marketplace Is Going To Become More Like The Search Marketplace In The Next Year

That’s what two of the smartest guys in digital media said during this morning’s “steroid” panel. Both Varick Media Management’s Darren Herman, and Quantcast’s Adam Gerber, suggested that a rapid shift would occur in the way advertisers, agencies and publishers value display adverting, thanks to better metrics and faster exchanges, that would make it operate much more like search in the sense that real-time value would become based on real-time demand. “It’s why search is a $15 billion to $20 billion business,” Gerber said, “because the advertiser knows exactly what the keywords are that they want to buy. The medium works in real time. Everything is being decisioned in real time. The display marketplace doesn’t operate that way. But that’s going to change in the next year.” Herman agreed, and both executives said the reason why publishers are bemoaning that real-time ad networks and exchanges appear to be driving their value down, is that they still have an old-school media mentality of selling their inventory based on “scarcity,” and not the underlying value of the metrics and how valuable they are for a marketer at a given point in time.

Read More: MediaPost

Collective Adds Engagement Metrics to AMP

Aiming to expand reporting beyond the click, Collective Media has added the ability for customers of its AMP display ad platform to track interaction and exposure in addition to standard performance metrics. That means ad networks powered by the AMP system can now provide more detailed data on how users interacted with ads, mouse-over activity, how long ads were viewed and whether they were actually viewable in the browser. While these more in-depth measurements have long been available for rich media ads, Collective says it’s now bringing them to more common Flash-based ads as well. “These metrics apply to all ad impressions, not just rich media,” said Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective, whose AMP platform allows advertisers, publishers and agencies to target specific audiences and manage existing ad networks.

Read More: MediaPost

TARGUSinfo Breaks New Ground To Boost Lead Intelligence

In an October 2009 Forrester Research report titled The Intelligent Approach to Customer Intelligence, Andreas Weigend, Amazon.com’s former chief scientist, said “In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.” That’s why today, TARGUSinfo, the trusted leader in On-Demand Insight® about prospects and customers, announced that it has deepened its investment in innovation, offices and personnel to further help businesses capitalize on the massive amount of data available. “We closed 2009 with great success by helping our customers achieve improved audience targeting, better customer experiences, higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime values,” said George Moore, CEO and chairman, TARGUSinfo. “However, with the explosion of data continuing at a breakneck pace, our customers continue to choose TARGUSinfo because of our core ability to link predictive attributes to consumers and businesses in real time. We’ve committed considerable engineering man hours and financial resources to offer our clients even greater innovation through our verification, scoring and online targeting solutions.” Doing What Others Can’t—Taking a Giant Innovation Leap in Lead Scoring & Lead Verification By leveraging its real-time delivery network and robust repository of identities and attributes, TARGUSinfo delivers unparalleled intelligence at the moment of live interaction with prospects and customers.

Read More: Yahoo!

Tremor Moves in Real-Time

Video ad network Tremor Media on Thursday is expected to announce key improvements to its targeting products, including the use of real-time audience data. “Our Acudeo technology is the differentiator which gives us two key benefits — the ability to call multiple data providers simultaneously and the ability to get real-time updates,” said Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media. “Calling multiple data providers simultaneously increases the chances of finding up-to-date audience data, which improves user coverage and reach,” added Glickman. “Getting real-time updates from data sources ensures that we access the most current information, which improves targeting precision.”

Read More: MediaPost

Death Of The Impression/Rise Of The Data Economy

Recently there has been buzz around the rise of advertising exchanges, which bring media inventory into a liquid, dynamic environment driven by automation and technology. The exchanges come in many flavors, but they all move in the direction of allowing wide swaths of media impressions to be bought in a computerized manner. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all in the game, with ever-increasing amounts of inventory becoming available in this environment. In one sense this movement is a natural extension of the race to build the bigger and better network that can offer the one-stop shop to agencies and clients. Aggregate enough impressions, guarantee reach, sprinkle in some targeting solutions and you have a winner that can appeal to a wide range of clients. It is a simple enough model and an easy extension of the traditional media buy. But beneath the surface of this move is a far greater shift that will shake up and unsettle marketing as we know it.

Read More: MediaPost

David vs. Goliaths

While leviathans like Google and Apple battle for dominance of the mobile Web, Mobclix has adroitly maneuvered to build what is already a lucrative piece of the mobile-advertising landscape: a mobile-advertising exchange in which application developers can sell access to their audiences. The roughly 30-person company based in Palo Alto, California, which launched publicly about a year and a half ago, is on a $25 million to $30 million run rate and serving some 3.5 billion ad impressions per month, mostly to the iPhone and iPod Touch. “Every month, we’re essentially doubling,” said co-founder Krishna Subramanian. Mobclix is hiring eight people in engineering and business development, he said. It has 18 people in Palo Alto, five in San Francisco, and a fluctuating number in India.

Read More: Portfolio.com

Tap Into The Real Value Of The Consumer Data With Real-Time Bidding

Marketers understand that consumer data, both their own and that available from third-party vendors, is rich with potential to guide effective online advertising efforts. But the challenge is determining what type of data is right for your campaign or brand and whether it’s really delivering value. The good news is, with advanced capabilities of real-time bidding through a demand side platform, data can be better understood and put to work more effectively for display campaigns. Before getting into “how” to best test and learn about data tactics, let’s first review “what” types of data are available. While the industry is abuzz about so-called third-party data from specialized brokers, it’s worth emphasizing the primacy of a brand’s own data. Such first-party data is a by-product of online and offline marketing efforts, transactions, and CRM systems. Major sources of this data are ad servers, Web sites, and customer histories from back-end enterprise systems:

• Ad server: Site context, frequency, clicks, and view-throughs for ads served – the kind of data used to report on and optimize a campaign.
• Web site: Page visits, referral URL, offer type (e-mail, print ad, etc.), site engagement and conversions (downloads, purchases, registrations), etc. – the kind of data used for retargeting campaigns.
• Customer: Purchase habits and history, loyalty programs, and response to offers. Direct customer data is often used to define characteristics of desirable consumer segments to target.

Read More: ClickZ