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.
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.” -
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
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