Questions to answers when choosing an adserver

Hello, there!

This is a joint post of Susanne Flug and yours truly. We’ve compiling a list of criteria for choosing an adserver and we hope it can be useful.

AdServer differ quite a lot in terms of features and service. To select the suitable partner we have to be first clear on our needs and objectives. The best way to address those needs are a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) asking the questions pointed out in the defined criteria.  So, why are those criteria important?

Publisher Database: There is no need in teaming up with a partner that is not able to provide the market and target group defined in the companies’ needs and objectives. The publisher database going along with a certain amount of service is the starting point for a successful campaign.

• For the purpose of the campaign one should be able to find the necessary inventory in the presented ad servings spaces.
• Large and niche availability is a must.
• What about a list of references?
• Time is money. How many points of contact do we have?
• How flexible is our partner? Can we change cost models easily?

Trafficking: An important part of trafficking is the combination of automatic and manual tasks organized in-house or outsourced. Those processes have an immediate impact on costs as well as operations.

• What are the requirements?
• How easy it is to use?
• Does the AdServing company offer staff platform education?
• Is there automatic publisher tagging?
• Is there opportunity for ad rotation?
• Is there an outsourced trafficking model?

Serving: After solving infrastructural and organizational issues a company has to think about serving criteria, which are part of the operations. Important aspects are, if the partner’s technology can meet the questions of: Who is targeted (segmentation)? How (ad formats, ad delivery)? At what price (costs)?

• What is the pricing model (CPM, CPC etc.)?
• What is the variety of ad formats spaces?
• Can we segment ad serving to different users and tailor make the ad feed accordingly?
• Can we manage ad serving sequencing?

Tracking: Served ads have to be tracked in order to be measurable and of benefit for the overall companies success. For this reason the partner has to meet certain metrics defined in advance covering the methodology, the format and the timing.

• What’s the tracking methodology?
• What type of data can be tracked?
• Is it compatible with our marketing database?
• Does tracking rely on cookies?

Reporting & Analysis: After running a campaign the way of reporting is essential to measure success or to improve future actions. An important part is that the defined metrics are included and presented in an appropriate way.

• Can we review standard reporting sample?
• How fast is the report extraction time?
• Which types of analytical tools available?
• Is it secure? – i.e. no access to it by competition and scalable access by employees.

Planning Tools: Key parts of the service provided are the planning tools and the way they interactive with each other. There is a need to run certain actions mentioned above in a most convenience and effective way.

• Is there a reach/frequency predictive tool in place?
• Is there RFP automation available?
• Is there recommendations option available based on opportunities noticed?
• Is there interoperability of the tools within the platform?

Analyzing Website Performance

Summarizing the key aspects of each type of analysis (purchasing process, lead process, on-site search, home page, brand metrics & landing pages)

It is important to understand the difference between website performance reporting and analysis. Think of reporting as stating the facts and analysis as taking things to the next level and understanding why does facts are such and what can be done taking them into account. The following types of analysis are:

How to segment traffic?

• Identify Segments
  • Based on type of visits – where they come from, how often and what prompted them.
  • Is the user proactively segmenting himself?
  • Do you need to use cookies and different land-pages to segment the user?
• Define Desired Behavior
  • Users behave differently and go differently about satisfying their needs
• Identify typical agendas
  • Customize per-segment and for-all
  • Create a Hot Box on each page – content is determined by segment identity

Offline conversion and delayed conversion: how does it work:

• Offline Conversion
  • It is important to analyze the whole transaction process on-site and off-site
  • Measure metrics on-site and off-site
  • A good example is the Mini Cooper website that drives traffic to its offline reseller sites
• Delayed Conversion
  • Occurring when transaction process requires approvals
  • It is important to somehow tag the customer initially and the follow the process  (RMB, Promo Codes etc.)
  • It is also important to benchmark on regular time basis to get a clear picture of trends

Case study on collecting Primary and Secondary Data types

Here is an example of something concerning one of my websites I have been thinking and somehow working on in the past 6 months.

Site: www.borislavkiprin.com
Site objectives: Exhibit my photography to the online community.
Site goal: Reach 1000 visits per month and receive feedback on regular basis on photos I publish.

Collecting Primary & Secondary Data:

• Behavioral – I use primary Google Analytics that is allowing me to gain insights on
  • Where my visits come from (China, Spain, USA, Bulgaria)
  • Visits (0.48/day)
  • Average page view (21)
  • Average time spent on site (00:01:07)
  • Bounce rate (66.67%)

As you can see the website is well ill-performing behind the set goal.

• Attitudinal – why is this happening?
  • I run focus group on different occasions watching friends browsing through the website and I established that the architecture is too complicated and lacks intuitiveness. This was identified as the main reason for the low page view, bounce and average time spent on the sight.

• Competitive – what are other photographers doing to gain more exposure on their work?
  • Since there is an abundance of photographic portfolio display websites on the Internet, I have focused on players within the 1000 visits per month (mainly friends or photographers I know).
  • I discovered that most of them use a PHP, HTML and CSS coding. Where as my website has tons of iFrames that did not allow SE robots to read the data published in them. In other words, I am skipping on SE inbound delivered traffic.
  • I also noticed that most of them were adding value through giving background info, as well as tips on how they got the photograph. I am not doing that due to coding and space limitations.
  • WordPress seems to be the most popular web base complying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) features as well as SMO(Social Media Optimization) ones.

• Segmentation analysis – who are my site visitors? I have identified mainly two types of visitors.
  • Photographers – Fellow photo makers that are seeking for new ideas, post production editing techniques and photo composition. These users need more technical and background information about how the photo was made and what was the rationale/vision behind photo edits.
  • Friends/Family/Spectators – this type of users is simply driven by the curiosity of where I have been and what I saw through my lens or simply love to see a good photo every now and then.

Conclusions & Next Steps:

1. Redesign of the site structure, coding and platform.
2. Offer more information and view on each photo published.
3. Offer new photos on regular basis – 1 each week for example.
4. Work on SEO and SMO .
5. Decided to go for a WordPress blogging platform with an already identified template.
6. Timeline: – start working on it as soon as I graduate from IE and get it up and running by the end of April 2010.
7. Budget – 200 USD for template purchase and upgrade of hosting services and space.
8. Collecting reports on weekly basis and change ill-performing features and issues.

I know it is not very extensive, but it should give a starting point for those of you that are not very knowledgeable in digital marketing auditing and need some info on it.

Primary Data Types vs. Secondary Ones

Primary and secondary data represents collection of information that can help one to improve the website in order to optimize the reach of business goals. The segmentation of primary and secondary data types is as follows:

• Primary Data Types
  • Behavioral Data – showing what the user is doing on the site
  • Attitudinal Data – focuses on why people show such behavior
  • Competitive Data – benchmark against what competitors are doing
• Secondary Data Types
  • Call-center Data - focusing on what customers are looking for and can be implemented on the site.
  • Customer Data - helps getting insights on customer profiling in relation to their behavior.
  • Transaction data - amassing knowledge on transaction behavior that can help optimize the process
  • Third-Party Research - not tailored to your specific needs and rather general, but time and cash saving option
  • Usability Benchmarking - Studying how users interact with the website and how easy it is to perform a task on the site
  • Heuristic Evaluation & Expert Reviews - done by experienced professionals & cheaper option to usability benchmarking.
  • Community Sourced Data - useful source of true perception of your product/brand

Work Methodology:

Case study: Leveraging different data types to improve site performance:

Conversion Funnel & KPIs

Defining the Business Goals. How to establish the conversion funnel?

Business existence is based on the ability to create an economic value for its stakeholders. In that sense, before building a website or make changes on one, we should define our business goals and the purpose of that site on the road to achieve them.  The critical cycle or the so-called marketing funnel is as follows:

Defining KPI’s. How to construct KPI? Different KPI’s for different site types?

Key Performance Factors help defining and measuring progress while trying to achieve set business goals. It is important to have the agreement among the leadership in the company when identifying and setting the KPIs. These indicators are quantifying results of taken actions towards achieving the goal(s) or identification of fields that need optimization or improvement. They represent metrics and ratios that differ depending on the purpose of the website at hand with the following examples:

KPIs should be monitored on regular basis and in different intervals of time in order to obtain clearer picture on the trends of the website consumption and evaluate the impact of changes made to it.