The demographic and behavioral targeting (BT) enhanced PaperBoy ads that run under the Yahoo! white labeled product name of “Smart Ads” are finally certified. This means that there has been a detailed inspection of all the ad metrics, ad performance, ad serving, etc by the Yahoo! Smart Ads team and that Pointroll passed with flying colors. Nice work everyone at Pointroll and ShopLocal in passing this important external validation step.
Here is one interesting tidbit that helps validate why there is a need for dynamic generated and machine optimized rich media ads.
So if there are 300 weekly ad items live at any given point in time, and you needed to pick four specific products to include in a ad, there would be 300 + 299 + 298 + 297 possibilities (which is 1,195 options as each of the four outputs are calculated independently). This is why it is only possible to do this type of optimization via machine optimization and learning.
Here is a nice flashy demo that Yahoo! put together that overviews the SmartAds program
Hooray! ShopLocal and Pointroll are now official partners
The press pickup has been amazing with over 200+ sites running the story, so thank you to all. Here are some soundbites from a few more notable sources:
- ADOTAS: “As a member of Yahoo’s Smart Ads program, PointRoll will leverage Yahoo’s reach and targeting capabilities to provide even more customized, relevant, and scalable rich media campaigns. PointRoll will also leverage its ShopLocal retail advertising program in order to offer enhanced Smart Ads for retail advertisers.”
- ClickZ: “Rich media firm PointRoll will tap Yahoo’s ad-targeting technology to deliver those ads to the right audiences, according to PointRoll CEO Jason Tafler. PointRoll’s ShopLocal retail ads will also be part of the Smart Ads program.” – ClickZ
- WebProNews: “Smart Ads can be used in any vertical industry, but Yahoo says it has seen success within the retail industry, where many advertisers are looking for new ways to reach consumers. Testing Smart Ads with ShopLocal retail ad content has shown improved campaign performance for retail advertisers such as CVS and Kohl’s. These advertisers saw gains in click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.” -
And finally, here is a link to the official release and some generic info on the Yahoo! Smart Ad program overall.
Mobile display ads have come a long way in a short period of time. It wasn’t that long ago when all mobile ads were essentially really small .gif or .jpg images that had no functionality other than a click thru URL. With the iPhone continuing to increase its massive platform footprint, this is really accelerating and opening up some exciting new possibilities within the mobile display space. So the PaperBoy team has been hard at work building out a mobile version that will be deployed within native iPhone applications.
Here is a link to the mobile PaperBoy prototype ad that the Pointroll team helped create (screen shot below) using CVS weekly ad content pulled in from ShopLocal. Note that this demo sort-of works in a regular web browser, but it only fully works within Safari for iPhone which unlocks many of the features.
PaperBoy has gone mobile! By only using javascript & HTML (and NO flash), the team was able to create a version of a PaperBoy ad that is specifically designed to operate and make use of a number of iPhone specific features.
Here is what the offline in-store shopping list looks like populated with a few items of interest. This can be stored within the session storage that the mobile version of Safari provides for iPhone users.
So if you have an iPhone, try this ad out. Open it up as it has been designed specifically to use the following iPhone features:
- Latitude / longitude based user location service that comes from either the iPhone’s GPS or cell tower proximity
- Slide finger controls that allows a user to scroll though products left and right via touching the screen
- Integration with the iPhone’s one click to call feature for the user’s current/closest store location
- Integration with the iPhone’s one click to bring up a Google map feature for the user’s current/closest store location
- Direct support by the underlying ShopLocal provided data backbone (eg SDAPI) to provide look up capabilities on both radians and decimal lat/long (geocode) values. So no more in-between step of hitting the Google maps API to convert lat/long pairs to ZIP codes
- Offline in-store shopping list where the user’s list of items of interest is accessible regardless the presence of an Internet connection. This only works via using some new functionality that is included within the latest web browsers as it evokes the data URI scheme (e.g., data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64). Click this link to actually check out for yourselves how this type of offline web page works. This is a powerful new feature that will allow an entire web page essentially to be stored offline
- Support for some of the more traditional ways of navigating ShopLocal weekly ad content which include browse by categories, brands and keyword search
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!
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:
The team actually did it. After months of internal R&D, the first SmartSearch campaign is finally live on Google for JCPenney (only for the Kansas City DMA currently) and on Yahoo!. This marks a historic day here at ShopLocal as the SmartSearch product allows for fully automated, localized search engine marketing (SEM) on both Google & Yahoo!. Below is an actual screen shot from a Google search result page for the keyword “womens apparel” that comes back with a SmartSearch paid in the top paid position:
The SmartSearch ad on this LIVE Google search result page is the very first paid ad in the top ranked spot. Note that within this particular screenshot the organic search results are from Chicago, but all of the paid ads are from the Kansas City DMA area due to fact that ShopLocal is located in Chicago
And here is what a user would see if they actual clicked on the Google ad:
Notice how the SmartCircular landing page is loaded with localized, relevant content to the search term "womens apparel".
And just to be fair to our good friends over at Y!, here is how the same live SmartSearch campaign shows up within a Yahoo! search results page (SRP) for the keyword “bedding” within the Kansas City geo-location:
The SmartSearch ad for JCP is showing up in the fourth (4th) position in the paid search portion within Yahoo! currently
A few of the most notable differences between this specific search effort and all the rest of the pack of typical paid search campaigns is:
- Hyper-Local Focus so that a retailer’s store foot print drives where the ads will be shown and what content will be within any given ad. So if there are no “shoes” on sale within some store locations, then those underlying geographies of the country would not get targeted with a search keyword of “shoes”
- In-Store Focused Conversion instead of the typical online or eCommerce sale based conversion. This type of paid search campaign is not intended to drive online orders, but rather shoppers into local stores that make purchases offline
- In-Store Sale Based Content as the circular or weekly ad is the underlying source of this promotional store focused set of keyword ads. This helps leverage this core existing offline assets
- Full Automation of the creation of all the localized keywords, ad copy and landing page URLs. Once a set of ad copy templates are setup and agreed to by the client and/or agency, this entire process of determining what keywords should be active for what markets and what the associated ad copy and landing page URLs should be is all system driven. The sheer volume of keywords and associated ad copy and landing page URLs would never be possible to be done by humans on a week in and week out basis
Some of the key features that SmartSearch has built in version 1.0 are:
- Fully dynamic and localized search ad copy that can pull in the correct, localized information in regards to:
- # of Items On Sale within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Example: 35 Deals (on womens apparel items on sale)
- Relevant & Exact Keyword
- Price Range, from lowest priced item and/or to highest price item of the all the items within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Retailer Location, as expressed via a mixture of City Name, State Abbreviation, or ZIP Code
- Example: Shop Your Local K. C. (Kansas City, MO)
- Retailer Name
- Sale End Date of the in-store promotion that this content is being drawn from
- Example: Sale Ends Jun 30
- Auto ad copy template selection so that when some of the above dynamic ad copy variables get too long (total # of characters), the systems gracefully falls back through a series of alternate ad copy templates selecting the one that best fits the dynamic data being thrown at it and at the same time attempting to maximize all available allowable characters within both the headline/title and the description line(s)
- Client specific business rules can be created and applied so that each unique advertiser can tune the ad copy templates and associated landing pages (very powerful)
- Fully dynamic and localized landing page (via a precisely relevant click thru URL) that takes the user deep within the ShopLocal hosted SmartCircular site
- Support for third party bidding and management tools so that search agencies can still use their same tool sets to manage these localized paid search campaigns in a native manner
- Support for both Google and Yahoo! paid search campaigns. The other search engines are not supported currently, but that doesn’t mean too much as they all collectively only represent less than 15% of the overall US search volume as of May 2009 (comScore data)
Here is a practical break down of how the two JSP example (live) ads from both Google and Yahoo! actually breakdown according to the ad copy specifications imposed by each search engine:
- Google AdWords
- Keyword: Womens Apparel
- Headline (25 characters max): Apparel At JCPenney
- Line 1 (35 characters max): 35 Deals Starting At $4 Visit
- Line 2 (35 characters max): Your Local JCPenney By Jun 30
- Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Keyword: Bedding
- Title (40 characters max): Bedding From $5
- Description (70 characters max): Shop Your Local K.C. JCPenney Store. Sale Ends Jun 30.
For another look at what the SmartSearch product looks like in action, you can personally check it out by using the Google Preview Ad Tool. Just click the image above and make sure to enter a keyword of "womens apparel" and select a State location of "Missouri ---Kansas City MO" and you'll get to see localized search in action.
Finally, a special thanks to the JCP and 360i (JCP’s search agency) teams for all working really hard on this launch and making hyper-local paid search a reality.
So “selling futures” is a common PR trick in the technology world. I’m not a huge fan, but I am a fan of showing real customers and partners glimpses of what is about to happen so that real market feedback and guidance can help shape the product.
Reading crystal balls and tea leaves is difficult, but one such soon-to-come strategic enhancement for PaperBoy will be the addition (or really deep integration) of Pointroll’s new AdControl system. The goal is to allow this dynamic ad generation tool to control (update & optimize) on a micro-targeted basis the following types of ad variables:
- Web site / publisher
- Ad placement
- Geography
- Publisher generated behavioral, demographic, or contextual data
AdControl also measures all the typical rich media metrics including:
- Interaction rate
- Brand time
- Click through
But aggregates the results of these and other metrics by individual creative and delivery variables. This capability enables more robust testing and optimization, as the technology will identify each ad version created and evaluate its performance as a single unit and against other versions, or as part of an entire campaign.
AdControl allows retailers and their agencies can produce, target and deliver PaperBoy ads dynamically, customizing creative elements including video, content, images, offers and more – all in real time and by non-technical personnel via an online interface
Where this powerful combination of the in-store, on sale offer data that ShopLocal offers + robust localized rich media functionality that PaperBoy offers + the dynamic creative and targeting controls that AdControl offers is…
- Creative Control: Imagine an ad unit where the background image is dynamically changed in run time based upon the user’s location. So if this was for a retailer like Walgreen’s, this would allow a user in Florida to have a sunny beach background while for the same retailer a user in Minnesota may have a snow lake background. This is an over-simplified example for sure, but it make the point. Any creative element (button, copy, images, text, etc) can now all be driven by extensive, easy-to-create and mange business rules
- Content Control: Image an ad unit where the offers (eg the products) that are displayed change based upon multiple factors such as the age of a user, the context of the placement and the categorical interest(s) of the user. So the women that is age 25 and has a strong category affinity to “fashion” gets women’s junior apparel content served into the PaperBoy ad unit vs. the man age 50 that likes “sports” would get golf clubs content inserted into his PaperBoy ad unit
Here are a few background resources to aide in getting a deeper understanding of AdControl:
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