ShopLocal & Pointroll Team Up And Fully Integrate Top Portals & Ad Network’s Behavorial Targeting (BT) Data Into PaperBoy Ads

Posted on 2 July 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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This is a really big deal.  To fully onboard and integrate around the (below) top portal publishers and ad networks that have demographic AND behavioral (collectively referred to as “BT data herein) data on their users in a way so that Pointroll PaperBoy ads can use these user-level BT insights to actually change WHAT content is actually shown within the ad units.  This is cutting edge, one-to-one data driven marketing.  Every single ad that gets served has the potential to be different and uniquely tailored (from a content perspective) for every unique user.

• Platform-a: There are two (2) parts that make collectively makeup Platform-a which are…
  • Advertising.com (the 3rd party ad network)
  • AOL (owned and operated sites that are BT powered by Tacoda)
• quadrantONE
• CollectiveMedia
• Yahoo!
  • SmartAds

These are the current publisher / ad network partners that ShopLocal and Pointroll have integrated the publisher provided BT data into the PaperBoy product. More publishers are in the works that will be launching soon.

At an unique user level (so for any given ad impression), these premier publishers and ad networks typically can provide the below insights:

• ZIP Code (and sometimes other higher level GeoLocation data is available)
• Gender
• Race
• Age / Year Of Birth (sometimes age ranges and sometimes exact birth year)
• Categor(ies) Of Interest (that the user has shown a past interest in – can be multiple)
• Publisher Property Type (helps determine the context of publisher page were the ad will be inserted – ex. finance.yahoo.com
• Publisher Page Position (helps determine the actual placement of the ad – ex. MPU above the fold)
• Publisher Page Context Keyword(s)

A couple of important notes however around these publishers provided BT targeting data:

• The amount (eg depth) of BT insights for any given ad impressions varies per publisher from some impressions having:
  • No BT data available
  • Only some BT data available
  • Very complete sets of BT data available
• Which BT data points are collected and maintained varies from publisher to publisher.  Not everyone for example has age data on it’s users
• The BT data collection methodology greatly varies from publisher to publisher. How extensive and wide any given publishers reaches into web logs, search histories, registration data, etc is all part of the secret special sauce that each publisher maintains
• The frequency of how often the BT data is updated is also a variable across publishers
• Storage, re-use and re-distribution of this publisher owned and controlled BT data is clearly prohibited and ShopLocal and Pointroll tightly adhere to this policy as it helps protects our publisher partner’s interests
• Privacy is one of the biggest concerns throughout the entire process. With all the recent self-imposed industry regulations around BT targeted online advertising, all parties have been very careful to be very respectful of the end users’ privacy throughout all of the design and integrations steps.  Our goal is to actual try to offer user a more personalized, more relevant overall site experience which includes the content within the display ads
  • From a publisher perspective: All information about any given user is 100% anonymous with no personally identifiable information (PII) being passed over to ShopLocal or Pointroll
  • From an ad server (Pointroll) perspective: All ads do not directly capture any PII which includes, but isn’t limited to, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and credit card numbers. No sensitive information is collected via the the ads. We even extend this by not allowing the cookies dropped to users machines to associate with any personally-identifiable information. (For purposes of this post, personally-identifiable information doesn’t include IP addresses or ZIP code)
  • From a localized content provider (ShopLocal) perspective: No PII is collected or stored or the user

Some of the next steps that the ShopLocal and Pointroll teams are gearing up to undertake:

• Onboarding and integrating more publishers and/or ad networks that have great user level BT data
• Integration of the publisher’s BT data into the very powerful Pointroll creative and content rules and optimization engine (called AdControl) to expand the reach and benefit of access of this powerful BT data across all of the other industry verticals that Pointroll supports (travel, auto, finance, etc)
• Improved reporting by the different publisher BT segments

Bye-Bye Mapquest. Hello Google Maps

Posted on 1 June 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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As of June 1st 2009, all of ShopLocal (on a global product basis) is 100% off of the internal (eg ShopLocal) hosted AOL MapQuest mapping and geocoding solutions and fully reliant upon Google Maps for mapping & driving direction capabilities and Pitney Bowes for geocoding. This has been one of the easiest ways to save on some needless IT expense AND at the same time offer my designers and developers a richer, more intuitive set of tools and mapping capabilities AND offer the site end users a more interactive, feature rich on-site mapping experience.  That is a win – win – win all the way around.  The team can’t be more happy with the new providers and how the integration has gone.

ShopLocal uses Google Maps in a few ways including:

• Store Finder / Store Locator (sort of a legacy product line for ShopLocal)
  • Example: Marsh
• Store Maps
  • Example: CircularCentral (uses the latest and greatest ActionScript 3 Flash API)
    
• Maps & Driving Directions (typically within a SmartCircular 2.0 site)
  • Example: ShopKo
  • Example: Kmart

Here is an example of a store finder that ShopLocal has hosted for years for the Indianapolis based Marsh Supermarkets.

This is the starting point of the store locator where a user must enter either their ZIP code or City, State pair to begin the store location search process

Once a user enters a ZIP code or City, State pair the store locator brings back a list of nearby store locations that are plotted on the Google map, along with a handy link to the right version of the weekly ad for that specific store location

If a user wants driving directions, it is very easy to generate the start - to - end point style directions

Here is one other example of what a Google Maps driven store maps implementation looks like within the SmartCircular 2.0 platform:

Typical SmartCircular 2.0 site with Google Maps integrated in a native manner. This interface provides the maps & driving direction "feature"

One final note. For retailer store location geo-coding, the ShopLocal team has opted NOT to use Google Maps but instead has created a new relationship with the Pitney Bowes owned MapInfo to use one of their geo-coding technologies. The reasons for doing so were pretty simple:

1. Google Maps API limits a user to pretty small number of geocoding requests per day
2. Google Maps terms of use prohibit the re-syndication / re-distribution of any geocode information that the Google Maps API returns

With Pitney Bowes, both of these are non-issues which is really key when your business is all about data syndication and distribution.