Categories

ad exchanges ad impressions ad inventory ad optimization ad optimization platform advertising advertising optimization algorithms audience buying audience targeting awards data data driven decisioning demand side platform digital advertising digital display ads digital media display advertising DSP dynamic bidding events funding Google IAB innovation MarketPulse media media buying media efficiency MIT MITX Mobile mobile advertising online advertising performance real-time bidding Right Media RTB sales search advertising transparency trends visibility Web publishers Yahoo!

DataView: The DataXu Blog

Category: trends

  • The Great CTR Debate: DataXu’s Perspective
    08/26/2010 | Categories: , ,

    Darren Herman of MediaKitchen posted a slideshare earlier this week about the death of Click Through Rates (CTR).  He gathered a number of his industry friends, including DataXu CEO Mike Baker and asked them – “Is the click through rate dead?”

    Mike’s reponse: “We have clear and compelling evidence that optimizing on CTR is a sure way to waste your money.  We help a leading packaged goods provider optimize on engagement and sales and we found that optimizing on CTR wastes 92% of their ad budget.”

    See that ‘clear and compelling evidence’ in the below chart which shows the click and conversion results for a DataXu packaged goods client.


  • Search and Display: Has Convergence Arrived?
    08/23/2010 | Categories: , , , , , , , ,

    By Mike Baker, President & CEO, Dataxu

    For years, many have viewed paid search advertising as the most simple and measurable form of online advertising. But with the growth of display ad exchanges and demand side platforms to manage the buying, display advertising has “gotten back in the efficiency game,” relying more squarely on data and bottom funnel metrics, and less on clicks and views.

    Building on the data-driven approach championed by search engine marketers, demand side platforms are now enabling display advertisers to replace much of the guess work of traditional media plans with bidding algorithms built on the learnings from a campaign as it runs. Borrowing even more literally from search, advertisers are now starting to use consumer search data to retarget display advertising.

    So, are search engine marketing and exchange traded display advertising ready for their convergence moment? Will search agencies successfully cross over into data-driven display practices? I recently spoke with Dax Hamman, VP display media at iCrossing, a Hearst-owned global digital marketing agency, to discuss these and other questions.

    Mike Baker: Search advertising, by its nature, is highly measurable. In your role as a display advertising evangelist in an agency with its roots in SEM, how do you educate clients about the value of display campaigns and their unique metrics?

    Dax Hamman: iCrossing has pioneered an approach to display that is particularly effective in ROI situations, focusing on talking to the individual expressing intent rather than simply shouting at the crowd. This approach is much more familiar to a search marketer and therefore is understood more by our client base than premium CPM buying and home page takeovers.

    Often, the hardest leap a search marketer must take is how to measure the campaign. SEM is very click based and an action is easily tied to a result. Display conversely relies more on post-impression data, a continuing hot topic amongst marketers in general. At iCrossing, we advise clients to run quantifiable studies to benchmark the post-impression results and determine what should be accounted for. This is often enough to alleviate any concerns.

    MB: Expertise in search engine marketing and display advertising has traditionally resided in separate domains – for both agencies and their clients. What will it take to successfully bridge that divide?

    DH: Agencies often structure themselves to suit the needs of a client, and while clients continue to typically manage SEM and display out of separate budgets with distinct goals, agencies will provide two teams of specialists. At iCrossing, we have merged SEM and display into one single media practice and have been cross-training individuals in order to find the synergies that may exist. This “new” world of exchange buying makes display planners think more quantifiably and bid-based like a search marketer and so the two camps are more aligned. Sometimes questions arise such as “who should manage a performance campaign that uses real time bidding” as you need both types of expertise working together. Quite simply, we can provide the framework for both parties to learn the other’s trade, and then the more experience each person gains, the quicker the synergies will come.

    MB: What can search advertisers learn from display advertising, and vice versa?

    DH: Like any form of marketing, display and search do not sit in silos, therefore the learnings from one channel should inform the other. There are some specific cases though where the learnings are more direct. iCrossing has been testing search retargeting, with Yahoo for instance. We also have been buying the data directly, of which there are now several including Magnetic, Chango and Simpli.fi. The success of these campaigns is in part based on selecting the right keywords, of which the SEM campaign is the richest source of learning.

    We also see cases where a SEM campaign can be improved by understanding why certain contextual buys in display are effective and what messaging works best. For instance, the iCrossing display team will often provide the creative units for a banner campaign on the Google Content Network for the SEM team to run.

    MB: Cross-channel, multi-format convergence is the “holy grail” of digital advertising. How close are we? What role will the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) search engines play in making this vision a reality? This may be controversial, but do you view them as partners, competitors, or both?

    DH: As an industry, we move closer and closer to convergence every day, and the benefits are being felt by brands already. The big 3 are certainly a factor in this, but we see them as more partner than competitor, educating search marketers about techniques such as display retargeting, and making it easy to buy it and place it. With the typical size and complexity of our clients, we do not see any of the engines being a sole provider to any of them. For smaller brands and smaller agencies I think the threat is greater – the reality is there are very few needs that a marketer at a small company cannot fulfill with Google.

    DSPs like DataXu will be at the center of the convergence as more and more media comes together. I do not see just display or even display and search together being bought through such a platform, but potentially all media, including offline.

    (This article also ran on ClickZ on 8/23: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1728864/search-display-has-convergence-arrived)


  • DataXu’s VP Sales to Speak on ‘Evolution of Display’ at FRWD Event in Minneapolis
    08/04/2010 | Categories: , , , , , ,

    DataXu’s VP of Sales and Go- to-Market strategy Steven Golus will speak at the FRWD event: “Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media”, on August 11 in Minneapolis.  The event will consist of an afternoon of discussions with industry leading Publishers, Demand Side Platforms, Data Aggregators, Verification and Survey tools providers.

    Steven will speak on the first panel of the day at 1:30 p.m. CT on the topic of “Leveraging Data in Display Targeting.” Joined by Brad King from BlueKai and Frost Prioleau of Simpli.fi, Steven will be discussing the integration of 3rd party and 1st party data into online display campaigns.

    Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media
    When: Wednesday Aug. 11, 2010

    Time: Registration- 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CT
    Program- 1:00 PM- 5:00 PM CT
    Happy Hour- 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM CT

    Where: Fine Line Music Cafe: http://www.finelinemusic.com/directions.html

    Cost: FREE

    To learn more and register for this free event, see: http://www.frwdco.com/events/


  • DataXu MarketPulse: “Last Click Attribution: A Simple Way to Misallocate Your Budget”
    07/28/2010 | Categories: , , , , ,

    Today, we released our third MarketPulse newsletter, a regular publication utilizing DataXu’s proprietary data to uncover and reveal interesting trends in digital advertising.  This month’s issue focuses on a highly contentious issue in the online advertising space – Last Click Attribution.

    The full pdf is available here: DataXu MarketPulse_Last Click Attribution_July 2010 and below is snapshot of the report.

    DataXu MarketPulse: July 2010

    “Last Click Attribution: A Simple Way to Misallocate Your Budget”

    Taking a look at data for six client campaigns, the DataXu team identified some interesting attribution trends.

    Data highlights

    • For all campaigns, last click attribution ignored 97% of spend driving conversions — which often results in over-spending in search and re-targeting, and under-spending in display that drives demand creation.
    • The recommended attribution period for short consideration products, such as CPG, is two weeks. In the campaign shown above, this window includes 90% of impressions  that converted.
    • The recommended attribution period for long consideration products, such as Insurance and Autos is five weeks.
    • The length of time it takes to attribute 90% of conversions varies by 250%; each product requires its own distinct attribution model
    Ultimately, no two campaigns are alike, and what drives their success is tough to predict at the outset, but incredibly valuable to understand.

    For the full MarketPulse report, you can download the pdf here: DataXu MarketPulse_Last Click Attribution_July 2010

    DataXu’s MarketPulse explores the data that defines today’s digital advertising marketplace. Sign up here to have future MarketPulse newsletters delivered directly to your inbox.


  • Mike Baker in 140 Characters
    07/23/2010 | Categories: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Per our recent blog post, DataXu CEO Mike Baker was a busy man this week. He was in L.A. Monday for an OMMA AdNets panel in the afternoon and Dapper panel in the evening. Then off to Chicago on Tuesday for a panel at the Right Media Open.

    With 3 panels in 2 days, Mike had plenty to say; in fact the Twittersphere did a great job of capturing some nuggets from each of Mike’s panels. But if you weren’t at the events, we thought these 140 character sound bites might be confusing, see the below for some additional context and detail from Mike Baker…

    • MB: This was part of a discussion regarding the increasing complexity of the media buying and ad technology space. Here I was making the point that instead of existing companies innovating to include new features, what seems to be happening is that entirely new companies are popping up with products that could have simply been rolled into existing technology platforms thus the space gets more complex and crowded.
    • MB: At the Right Media Open, I was on a panel about the evolution of agencies in the digital media world. I’ve always been of the mind that machine-learning technology, like that of DataXu, can handle the tactical execution of media buying and planning, allowing overburdened media buyers  to focus their energy and time on more strategic marketing initiatives.
    • MB: As I wrote about on Forbes.com a few months back, Google’s acquisition of Invite Media and expansion into the DSP (Demand Side Platform) space is exciting and validating for DSP technology, but there are still some concerns around Google’s neutrality.  Google is the largest digital media seller, yet they’re going to remain an impartial  buy- side advocate for OMG?  Seems unlikely.

    Stay tuned for more event news and updates and remember, you can always find us on Twitter at @dataxuinc!


  • Industry Leaders Collaborate to Make Digital Advertising More Efficient
    07/16/2010 | Categories: , , , , , , , ,

    Digital is the fastest growing and arguably most strategic sector of the advertising market, yet an agency executive recently told me that transaction costs are 300 percent greater than for television.

    As is often the case with rapidly innovating industries, marketers are struggling to master and manage the media planning and buying workflow.  With the recent launch of a coalition dedicated to developing industry standards, it seems that we may finally be able to make the business of digital advertising more efficient.

    The complicated display advertising ecosystem (see diagram here) exacerbates work flow issues for agencies and their clients.  Campaign data gets pushed through third party intermediaries, ad networks and exchanges, demand side platforms and more.  Reporting, tracking and reconciliation tends to be manual and thus very inefficient.

    Last week, Interpublic and Microsoft announced “MOMS” (Media Operations Management System), a program to overhaul the workflow involved in planning and buying digital media. The hope is that The American Association of Advertising Agencies will expand the initiative to a coalition of agencies, marketers, media and technology solution providers; developing standards for streamlining digital advertising with automated technology processes.

    Beyond removing needless cost, initiatives like this inevitably streamline the ecosystem, hopefully weeding out the low value middle men that populate the landscape today, and shining a light on what specific points of value each vendor is providing.  No doubt that these reform initiatives will become increasingly important to the industry’s survival much less growth over the next 5 years, with additional holding companies announcing similar efforts and embracing technology standards that will allow them to better leverage economies of scale in the age of digital data.

    In fact, we’ve seen similar reform efforts in other industries; from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems streamlining resource allocation in the enterprise, to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) making B2B transactions more standardized and efficient, and even recent efforts in the medical industry to address the security and privacy of health data with the Health Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

    Why is the advertising industry so late to the game?

    - Mike Baker, CEO, DataXu

    (**This piece was also posted on the MarketShare blog at Forbes.com: http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2010/07/16/digital-advertising-efficiency-agencies-ad-networks/)


  • DataXu MarketPulse: “Beyond Audience: What Drives Campaign Performance?”
    06/28/2010 | Categories: , , , , , , , ,

    Today we published the second issue of the DataXu MarketPulse, a research newsletter designed to highlight trends in digital advertising based on DataXu’s own proprietary data.

    In this month’s issue, we explored campaign performance and the impression attributes that are most highly correlated with conversions and the results were surprising!

    DataXu MarketPulse, June 2010

    Beyond Audience: What Drives Campaign Performance?

    Since the dawn of the Internet, advertisers have been on a quest for the holy grail of digital advertising: delivering the right ad to the right consumer at the right time.  This quest has yielded great insights about how to improve each of these ad dimensions. Consumer targeting is the current priority for some high-profile ad agency holding groups. But which factor is the most important driver of a campaign’s success?

    With real time bidding (RTB), advertisers can get closer to the answer than ever before. Impression level data essentially maps the path to the grail. At MarketPulse, we like to look past the hype and let the data do the talking.

    With 100s of millions of impressions served daily, we recently evaluated whether consumer, context, or creative attributes of ad impressions were most predictive of conversions.

    The result? Each category was well represented, but creative attributes were the winner — correlating most highly with conversions for 48% of the campaigns.

    “The data shows that a single campaign performance driver cannot be predicted with confidence in advance. This suggests that a more effective ‘media plan’ is one that instead responds to the nuanced, unique data each campaign generates. The implication is that brands and their agencies need systems that can glean the data and automatically adapt, rather than relying on a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach,” noted Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu.

    Our analysis included nineteen large-scale, online display campaigns that ran for at least four weeks, across the leading RTB ad exchanges. In each campaign, we evaluated multiple impression attributes in the categories of consumer (who saw the ad), context (where the ad appeared), and creative (what the ad looked like) to see which attributes appeared most consistently across ad impressions that preceded conversions.

    For additional results and takeaways from this month’s MarketPulse, you can download the pdf: DataXu MarketPulse_Campaign Performance Drivers_June 2010

    DataXu’s MarketPulse explores the data that defines today’s digital advertising marketplace. Sign up here to have future MarketPulse newsletters delivered directly to your inbox.


  • DataXu MarketPulse: Ad Price Volatility Is Opportunity for Advertisers
    05/21/2010 | Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Yesterday, we distributed what we hope will be the first of many “DataXu MarketPulse” newsletters. Designed to highlight compelling trends in the digital advertising space, the DataXu MarketPulse was created in response to our customers’ requests for visibility and insights into the rapidly evolving world of biddable digital media.

    DataXu MarketPulse, May 2010

    Extreme Price Volatility Across Ad Exchanges Presents Opportunities for Buyers

    DataXu analyzed the price paid for ad impressions across ad exchanges over the past 30 days, and discovered that the average daily price varied by over 100% during the period.

    This analysis is drawn from our leading cross-exchange advertising optimization platform, which evaluated over 175M unique user visits and hundreds of billions of ad impressions from all of the major suppliers of biddable display advertising during the measurement period.

    “With the tremendous growth of exchanges for bidding on digital display ads, we are seeing a persistent price volatility across all points of supply,” said Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu. “This presents innovative advertisers with a huge opportunity to boost media effectiveness and efficiency. But to do so, they have to move beyond static media buying to dynamic decision systems that keep pace with the volatility.”

    Advertisers know that exchange-traded inventory varies in value, but this significant volatility in prices for fungible placement opportunities may serve as a wake-up call. When it comes to display ads, are you confident that you are getting what you pay for?

    Over time, across large campaigns, such price variances can have a significant impact on ROI, if an advertiser is not employing the right analysis and tools to ensure that their higher cost impressions are also the highest value impressions for their specific goals.

    The Average Daily CPM Price for Display Ads Across Exchanges Varies by Over 100%

    The fluctuation of ad CPM prices outpaced other dynamic values — even during a period that included the stock market’s “flash crash” and the Goldman Sachs’ investigation.

    DataXu’s MarketPulse explores the data that defines today’s digital advertising marketplace. Stay tuned for future insights from DataXu.  For a pdf of this report see DataXu MarketPulse: Ad Price Volatility, May 2010 and to sign up for future MarketPulse newsletters, send an email to marketpulse@dataxu.com.