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Third Party Ad Serving Provides Enhanced Stewardship for Online Campaigns

August 10, 2009

Posted by: Keith Betz in Stewardship

As an advertiser, effectively reaching your prospects should be your primary goal. Providing a process for achieving this goal in the complex online advertising world has become the focus of third party ad servers, companies who push ads out to sites and allow advertisers to track their performance.

The key features and benefits that third party ad servers can provide are discussed below. Keep in mind that while your campaign will have its own unique set of goals and objectives, these points should apply to anyone looking for the most effective online campaign possible.

Ad Deployment
• Third party ad servers simplify the process by which your ads are trafficked out to publishers. They provide you with the ability to weight the delivery of your multiple creative messages based on your unique set of goals and objectives for each message.

Tracking / Conversion
• Third party ad servers can track every time a user either sees or clicks on your ad. This provides critical independent reporting to ensure that your campaign is running as scheduled. This also allows you the advertiser to learn how effective your messaging is in terms of click-through rate and ultimately conversion. Having the knowledge of which ads are actually converting provides the ability to look beyond exposure and examine action…the ultimate information for any advertising effort.

Reporting/Optimization/Consistency
• The post-purchase stewardship of the campaign relies on this reporting so you can optimize the campaign based on real-time performance data. If one creative message is driving 25% of your sales on that site but you are devoting 75% of your budget to it, you may want to consider creative changes. By aggregating the data from all of your ads and ad placements on a media buy, third party ad servers also provide consistency. So instead of receiving a bi-weekly report from one site and a monthly report from another, each potentially reporting on different metrics, you receive one full report that you can use to compare apples to apples for your entire online campaign.