Tracking Of Online Advertising.

The trackability of online advertising is what makes it so superior to conventional

advertising in a bid to boost brand awareness. Not only can an advertiser tell

how many times an advert was seen (impressions), but also how many times

the advert was successful in sending visitors to the advertised website (clicks).

As discussed in the chapter on conversion optimisation, the tracking needs to

continue on the website to determine how successful the advert has been in

creating more revenue for the website (conversions).

As well as tracking adverts being served and clicked on, advertising networks

can also provide information about the people who saw the advert, as well as

those who acted on it. Here is some of the information that can be provided:

• Connection type

• Browser

• Operating System

• Time of day

• ISP

Many third-party ad servers will set a cookie on impression of an advert, not

only on clickthrough, so it is possible to track latent conversions (within the

cookie period). Simply put, not only can third-party ad servers track the post

click data, but also post view data: when a user sees an advert, does not click

on it, but goes to the website after viewing the advert (either by typing in the

URL, or searching for the site).

And the best thing? Using this information, the ad server can target the display

of advertising, helping advertisers to optimise campaigns and get the most

from the advertising spend.

Targeting and optimising

Ad servers serve adverts across a number of websites, and can track a user

visiting websites using cookies or IP addresses.

This means that ad servers can offer advertisers:

• Frequency capping: the ad server will limit the number of times a user

sees the same advert in a session or time period.

• Sequencing: the network can ensure that a user sees adverts in a

particular order.

• Exclusivity: ensure that adverts from direct competitors are not shown

on the same page.

• Roadblocks: allowing an advertiser to own 100% of the advertising

inventory on a page.

The ad server can also target adverts based on the business rules of the

advertiser or based on the profiles of the users.

• Geo-Targeting: online advertising has the ability to target markets by

country, province or city, and can even drill them down to something as

specific as their IP address.

• Network / Browser Type: markets can further be targeted via networks

or browser types such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google

Chrome and Apple Safari.

• Connection Type: users can be segmented and targeted according to

their Internet connection type, e.g. whether they use broadband or dial

up connections.

• Day and Time: advertisers can choose the time of day or day of the

week when their adverts are shown. Advertisers can specify when their

campaign should air, down to the minute. This usually depends on the

client’s objective for the campaign or the product itself.

• Social Serving: websites gather demographic data about users and then

serve each user with targeted and relevant advertising. For example,

Facebook will allow advertisers to select specific characteristics of users

who will be shown an advert.

• Behavioural Targeting: the ad server uses the profile of a user (built up

over previous websites visited) to determine which adverts to show during

a given visit. Ad servers can base this profile on cookies or on IP addresses.

For example, the ad server may choose to show adverts for pet insurance

on a news page to a user who has visited the pets and animals section

of a general media site previously. Another way of behavioural targeting

is to set up parameters to determine when a certain advert needs to be

shown. For example: if the user has clicked on a banner advertising a test

drive, and the user actually booked the test drive, the next time they see

an advert from the advertiser, a different advert will be shown because

the user already responded to the previous advert.

• Contextual Advertising: the ad server infers the optimum adverts to

serve based on the content of page. For example, on an article about

mountain bike holidays in Europe, the ad server would serve adverts for

new mountain bikes, or adverts from travel companies offering flights to

Europe, or perhaps adverts for adventure travel insurance.