As a relatively new technology, Site Retargeting–the practice of serving targeted display ads to people who have previously visited your site—is often misunderstood and misused.
At first, the misconceptions are usually positive. Unlike content or social media marketing, where initial results can be underwhelming, the early results from Site Retargeting often look quite incredible and far outpace other display techniques on the media plan. This makes sense: you have all these users who have visited your site and indicated intent to buy things, and you’re finally serving them display ads that compel them to return.
But beware. If you don’t have a complete understanding of Site Retargeting, the early results can paint a false picture of what’s happening and mislead you into making errors that waste time and money. Remembering these 5 things will help you get retargeting right:
1) You’ve got to know which ads to credit for conversion results
Imagine a scenario. A user gets served a display ad for your site, which compels him to visit your site. He browses around, but leaves without buying anything. Later, he gets retargeted and converts.
This is a productive conversion cycle, but if you use an ad server [like DoubleClick or Atlas], you won’t understand what happened correctly.
DoubleClick or Atlas will misguidedly give the Site Retargeting ad all the credit for the customer acquisition, ignoring the display ad that generated the customer’s interest in the first place. (Site Retargeting, by definition, isn’t a customer acquisition tool, since the users have already visited the given site.)
As a result, you’ll think that your Site Retargeting ads are killing it while your other ads are failing, and you’ll invest your marketing budget in the wrong places.
2) Using Multiple Site Retargeting Vendors Wastes Money
There are many different vendors that offer Site Retargeting solutions, and it can be tempting to use multiple vendors to achieve scale, as you would with more traditional display techniques.
That’s not a good idea, however. If you hire multiple vendors, they’ll end up competing with each other to serve retargeted ads to the same users who visited your site. This competition will drive up the cost of serving the ad impression and waste media dollars. Stick with one vendor.
3) Stalking your customers is suicidal
Consumers are savvy, and they notice when brands are relentlessly stalking them with display ads across the Web for weeks. Not only can this damage their perception of the brand, but it’s also a waste of money.
Start by examining the buying cycle of your product or service—the amount of time it takes them to make a purchase after first being engaged with an ad—and then set a maximum length of time for retargeting. When in doubt, remember that retargeting a user for more than 7 days is rarely justified.
In addition, set a cap for the number of ads that can be served to a user each day. These measures will ensure that your brand doesn’t go from “cool” to “creepy.”
4) Only retarget visitors to relevant sections of your site
It’s only worth tagging sections of a site for retargeting that demonstrate a user’s intent to convert: shopping cart, product pages, download pages, and so on. If you retarget visitors of every page on your site, you’re going to end up wasting media dollars targeting users who are unlikely to convert, such as those who only visited the careers page or those who have already converted.
5) The biggest name doesn’t mean the biggest reach
Brands, understandably, want a big media reach, but that doesn’t necessarily mean going with a big name. For instance, Google Display Network (GDN) is extensive, but a Search Retargeting company will have access to all the GDN inventory, plus additional inventory equal to or greater than the size of GDN.
Why is a bigger reach important? The more opportunities you have to retarget a user with an impression, the less you have to bid in ad exchanges to ensure that you serve that impression. A bigger media reach means bigger returns.
Bryan Bartlett is the Online Marketing Manager for Chango Inc. Advertising for the real-time world.
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As a publisher, maximizing your revenue yield should be a constant theme. Every day I hear from publishers and members of my team, “how do I get higher CPMs?” High CPMs(revenue per 1000 impressions) is a concern for all online publishers large and small. I think it is the common denominator for conversations among all publishers and advertisers.
There is an ever present theme in our daily lives when we are ready to engage in exchange, “How much to I have to give in order to get.” In the case of online advertising, how much are advertisers(brands) willing to pay you(the publisher) to smack a banner ad across your content. As a publisher you want maximum dollars flowing to you for each impression you allow on your content. Advertisers want to spend only the minimum amount to see a return(product purchase, brand lift, etc). With a nearly unlimited market of supply(impressions requests by publishers) and a finite dollar amount(brand advertising budgets), the brands(demand) will follow the economic law of diminishing returns and spend less and less for each additional ad impression across your content. As a publisher you have a choice to continue to sell at a lower rate thus maintaing market efficiency or closing the market, ie making your content no longer available to advertisers.
Below is a sample of a publisher’s revenue yield curve. On the right side are highdollar CPMs(y-axis) but a low quantity of impressions served(x-axis). As you move along the curve, the CPMs fall and the quantity of ads served increases. This is not atypical for any publisher that maximizes the revenue across their content.
As a publisher there are several questions that remain in order to maximize revenue and push the belly of the curve up and to the right:
- How do I slow the rate of diminishing returns?
- When do I stop selling my advertising on my content?
I analyze these questions every day for the publishers in the Federated Mediaexchange. There are several techniques but the most significant driver to decreasing your revenue delta is a robust ad partner(demand) structure. The demand market is limited but there are solutions available to you. As an exampleI,your site receives 1,000,000 ad requests per month and one advertiser(scenario one) has offered to buy all of your impressions for the month. They agree to pay you $5CPM for the first 100,000 impression then $2.50 for the next 150,000, $1.00 for the next 250,000 and finally $0.50 for the remaining 500,000. Now imagine your savvy sales development skills landed a second advertiser for you the next month. They agree to pay you the same amount as advertiser one keeping in mind that your number of available impressions is constant at 1,000,000 for the month. Can you see what is happening here? You have have to advertisers buying your content for the same rates and the same quantities. Good stuff for sure. Now let’s look at the impact of your additional sale.
- Revenue is up by 63%
- Your lowest value ad inventory is now priced at $1.00, not $0.50
This brings me to the topic at hand, by using two partners you improved your revenue yield. Did you reach the maximum? Impossible to tell. You would need to add additional advertisers until you found a diminishing rate of return.
The above scenario is a bit simplified but my point is that as a publisher you should focus on increasing your revenue yield by maximizing the return from each ad partner. High CPMs, like winning streaks are great but eventually all begins to normalize. This leads to the second question of when do you stop selling your content. There is no easy answer for this as each publisher is different. The rule I like to follow is if you don’t receive an incremental or noticeable bump in your revenue then you have likely reached the point on your yield curve where selling more content space is not going to lead deliver noticeable returns.
I hope this helps provide you with a better understanding of the market dynamics that are at play. I will continue to write about this topic as it resonates daily with me. Post comments and I will do what I can to answer.
This article was originally published on www.drivingdelta.com. Matthew Barrowclough is the Director of our Publisher Management Group and currently oversees publisher revenue growth for our network. You will usually find him grinding away with spreadsheets and surfacing additional revenue yield for each publisher.
Tags: employee guest post, industry, Lijit publishers | View Comments
When determining the right advertising strategy for your site, implementing an ad chain can be a great solution to optimize earning potential and achieve 100% fill. In the following how-to video, Lijit Publisher Development member Grayson Braswell walks you through all the components of an ad chain.
Tags: how-to, industry, Lijit publishers | View Comments
Calling all food bloggers! The time has come for the 4th annual Foodbuzz Blogger Festival in San Francisco. On behalf of our friends at Dailybuzz Food, we would like to invite you to a weekend of eating, classes, tastings, demos, and more eating. The weekend will be filled with the best of the best in food and drinks, our favorite bloggers, and good times to be had by all.
The festivities will be taking place October 19-20. You can go ahead and check out the full agenda here. As a Lijit publisher, you’re eligible to attend the festival for just $30. Get your tickets here or email festival@dailybuzz.com for more information.
This is sure to be a great event. Come hungry, and we look forward to seeing you all there!
Tags: events, Foodbuzz, Lijit publishers | View Comments
Timing is everything and knowledge is power. Content is not king if there’s no one there to read it. Understanding your audience and the importance of timing are fundamental to blogging success.
As a blogger, you need to know exactly who your audience is and their habits online. Use what you know about your readership to fit into their day-to-day schedule. Think about what they are doing at certain times of the day and how it reflects on their time spent online. Leverage this knowledge to grow your readership and drive more traffic to your site.
Let’s imagine you’re a food blogger and your target audience comprises of moms like Alice, a 38-year-old mom of 3. On a week day morning, Alice sips on coffee and surfs the web for quick and easy dinner recipes in-between dropping her kids off at school and yoga. Too bad you didn’t do your research and submit your blog post “delish din in 10 min” until 2pm in the afternoon. On the fly, Alice took the kids for fast food after their soccer game and you missed out on catching the eye of a huge influencer. Had you known that your blog caters heavily to busy moms with me-time in the morning, you could have timed your post appropriately to reach Alice on time. Instead, you missed out on Alice seeing your blog post, taking action from it, and sharing it with family and friends both off and online.
Proof is in the pudding. Just check out these general stats from our friends over at KISSmetrics in their blogging series: Timing and Blogging.
* Note: the data below is presented in Eastern Time (EST)
While general stats, such as these, are certainly enlightening, it’s also important to do some digging of your own to really zero in on your unique audience. To do this, use your customized analytics to see when readers are most often on your site and use that information to schedule publishing, tweeting, Facebook updates and more. Be sure to consider time zones as well – four hours can be a huge difference in someone’s day.
Bottom line, timing is key. Harness the power of your research and your instinct so that you know when and where your audience is online. Build a strategy with this knowledge in mind and adapt it in a way that aligns with their schedule and routine. Organically, you will ramp up page views, saturate more of the social sphere, and ultimately, become a more successful blogger.
Tags: blogging, Lijit publishers | View Comments
At Lijit Networks, we like to live by the phrase work hard, play hard. This has been a year of milestones for our company, and no efforts have gone unnoticed.
Our most recent accomplishment as a company was demolishing our goal of 750M daily ad calls by clocking in a current average at 900M. Everyone was amped and the adrenaline was running. As a reward for everyone’s awesome work, we took a company field trip to Unser Racing, the local go-kart race track.
Who new we had so many professional racecar drivers! The competition was fierce, we had a blast, and needless to say all who competed were pretty legit!
Tags: events, fun, good times, lijit | View Comments
David Pennington, a member of our Publisher Development team provides some great insight on maintaining your blog during those moments when you may not have the time to do so. Read on to hear some of his suggestions!
The holidays are coming. Your kids are on vacation. Your in-laws are in town. You’re tired, busy, uninspired. It is beautiful out. There is too much good TV on.
For as many reasons people start their own blogs, there are just as many reasons why they fall off and are never updated again. Starting is easy – you’re full of ideas and fresh content and every comment left on your blog is reason to celebrate. Burnout is inevitable – there are so many demands and not enough time to fill them. From developing your content to arranging your ad zones to developing a bigger audience and even taking the time to optimize for SEO – there is always something you need to be doing with your blog to stay on top.
We all need a break. Not taking one can result in forced-sounding blogs, bland content, and uninspiring entries. Your audience loses confidence in you and your blog falls apart anyway. How can you take a break without losing audience, traffic or ad revenue?
Consult your audience: Whether your loyal readership is just “blogluvr281″ from Illinois or a thousand of the finest mommy bloggers from around the world – the reason you have kept a blog to this point is for those who take the time to read it. Through your blog you’ve likely created a community and made friends. Why not ask them flat out what it is that keeps them coming back to your blog? Create a blog post with a survey in it (a simple, and free, survey can be created through Google Docs). There is little purpose in creating the kind of content that your audience isn’t exactly fond of.
Juices still not flowing? Do you actually need a break? Try these:
Guest Editors: Three things, which are true for every blogger: They write blogs, they read blogs, and they LOVE attention. Just imagine what one of them would say if you handed over the keys to your blog for a week or two? Your audience and readership, in the palm of their hands. Go outside and think “what would my blog look like if blogluvr281 ran it for a few weeks?” You might come back to a wealth of new readers!
Go on Auto-pilot: While there is some stigma towards blogs that auto-post with no one at the wheel, many popular bloggers do it when they aren’t able to dedicate time to their craft for a while. Plan ahead and create a backlog. Come up with your own content, contributions from guest blogs, do a “top 5 posts from the archive” week, or curate content from other quality sources. Your goal is to have your audience not even realize you’ve left.
There are dozens of tools out there that allow you to schedule content, and automatically post to social media, and manage your blogs remotely. For content ideas I use the blogging tools from Zemanta. Most blogging platforms already have scheduling tools built in and most social mediums have API services that are easy to use.
The only thing left to do is ask: What are you going to do with your blogging break?
At Lijit, we’re always looking for the best ways for you to monetize your website. We’ve recently gotten to know an exciting company called MediaPass that gives publishers like you the ability to supplement your advertising revenue by converting some of your free users into paid subscribers. Created by experts in online subscriptions, MediaPass allows you to sell subscriptions to your content without the complexity or resource demands associated with building and managing the process yourself. Thousands of blogs, newspapers, magazines and other content sites use MediaPass as their digital subscription and paywall solution.
MediaPass makes it easy and delivers results:
- Live in minutes: It’s so easy that MediaPass has been called “AdSense for online subscriptions” by the Nieman Lab at Harvard.
- Huge ad revenue supplement: MediaPass’ average publisher is enjoying an effective RPM of $130 on their premium subscription pages.
- No upfront costs: MediaPass doesn’t make any money unless you do, and will quickly send you payments for your subscription revenue.
- No strings: Try MediaPass for free with no commitments or exclusivity requirements. There’s no reason to not try MediaPass – that’s why we like them!
Find out why MediaPass is also the only subscription solution officially certified by WordPress.com and the only one they offer to their VIP publishers – just sign up for an account and you can be live testing in minutes.
Tags: Lijit publishers | View Comments
Monta Fleming is a Lijit Publisher that utilizes our analytics tools. Read on to learn about the importance of analytics for the success of your site!
When running a blog, there are a number of different tools and strategies that you can use to make it run more effectively. One of the tools that you should probably implement on your blog is analytics. With analytics, you can realize a number of benefits that you won’t be able to get otherwise. Here are a few of the reasons that you need to put analytics on your blog.
1. Finding out Who Your Readers Are
One reason that you may want to put analytics on your blog is so that you can figure out who is actually reading it. When you set up analytics, you’ll be able to tell where your traffic is coming from and see who is checking out your blog the most. For example, you could find out if the majority of your readers are male or female. You could find out how old your readership is, and whether they are educated. This information can be extremely valuable when it comes to tailoring the future content for your site.
2. Finding Out Hot Topics
When running a blog, it is essential to make sure that the content you create is interesting to your readers. With analytics, you’ll be able to find which topics are the hottest, so that you can delve into them deeper. If you don’t ever take the time to figure out which topics your visitors like, you may end up driving some of them away by the future content that you make. You can see which pages on your site are visited the most, which ones get the most repeat visitors, and how long people are staying on the pages.
3. Uncovering Trends
When you use analytics, you can also uncover trends that may be emerging. If you want to be successful at blogging, you have to be able to correctly identify trends, and then get in on the front end of them. If you can position yourself in front of a trend, you stand to generate a large amount of traffic and followers in the future. For example, if you notice that some section of your site is becoming more popular than all of the others, you can build more content and feature that section more prominently. This can go a long way toward helping you boost the profile of your blog in the long-term.
4. Measure SEO Efforts
Many people who are involved in creating blogs also engage in search engine optimization. With search engine optimization, you can boost your profile in the eyes of the search engines and generate more traffic for free. There are a lot of different things that you can do for SEO like link building and writing content based around keywords. If you are interested to see how your search engine optimization efforts are paying off, you need to implement analytics. This will show you how much of your traffic is coming from the search engines, and what keywords are bringing them there.
5. Improve Site Performance
With the information that you can get from analytics, you can make changes to your site that will directly improve its performance. For example, Google uses over 200 different variables to determine how your site ranks in the search engines. One of them is the bounce rate of your pages. If your pages have a high bounce rate, this indicates that the quality may not be very good. Use this information to help your site rank better.
By implementing analytics, you can get all kinds of information that you can use to your benefit. Play around with the analytics solution that you choose to make sure that you understand how it works.
Monta the mother of three children serves as an Expert Advisor on multiple household help issues to many Organizations and groups, and is a mentor for other “Mom-preneurs” seeking guidance. She is a regular contributor of “gonannies.com”. You can get in touch with her at montafleming6Atgmail dotcom.
Tags: analytics, blogging, guest post, Lijit publishers | View Comments
Lijit Networks is always staying up to date with industry trends, and we like to make sure that our publishers remain informed as well. Recently, Google altered their AdSense Program Policy stating that as of August 15th AdSense publishers are no longer allowed to install tags using iFrames.
As a Lijit publisher, there is no need to worry about these changes; we’ve got you covered. We are aware of Google’s updated policy and have made the necessary technical changes to comply with their ad serving guidelines. If you currently utilize Lijit in conjunction with AdSense, rest assured that Lijit will continue providing you with high quality ad campaigns.
Why does Lijit provide the option of iFrames? As an online publisher, page load time is an extremely important factor. Choosing the right ad network is critical to ensure that your pages load quickly. A great solution for Lijit publishers with regard to installing ad tags on their site is utilizing iFrames. With iFrames, advertisements load separately from the actual web page and therefore do not affect site load time.
Lijit will continue to offer the option of iFrames to our publishers. If you do not currently utilize Lijit advertising services and will be affected by Google’s changes, or if you would just like to learn more about what we provide, check out our site or contact us directly. We would love to work with you and can get you up and running super fast!
Tags: advertising, industry, Lijit publishers | View Comments
