Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdWords View-Throughs
Good news for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange – If you’re advertising on AdWords through the Google Content Network, a new attribution feature has been enabled showing view-through conversions. This will undoubtedly encourage more display buyers to buy through AdWords – and, therefore, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange – as they get a better understanding in their analytics of how their display campaigns affect their campaign’s conversion in comparison to search. The “look-back window” is 30 days according to the Inside AdWords post. Read more. Or you can visit the AdWords “Help” section on view-throughs.
The Marriage Of Display And Search
There appears to be an increasing effort to marry search and display tactics by members of the advertising ecosystem – and why not? If it improves ROI, it’s time to get busy as long as you have the attribution models in place to understand how much display budget brings how much performance at the bottom of the funnel in search. ComScore and Starcom have a new display/search study out and its covered by Kunur Patel of Ad Age. Read more.
M&A Right This Way
Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal commented in a recent research note that M&A activity for web companies will likely pick-up over the next year. Among private online advertising companies he lists, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder and JumpTap make the list. AdExchanger.com would add all the buy-side optimization platforms, at the very least, as agencies and other companies look for foothold in the ad trading world which is about to explode. Read Aggarwal’s note (PDF). Or, Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org’s coverage.
Publisher Ad Trader
Farney Media visits the publisher side of the exchange and considers the trading opportunities in new trader role which sits between ad operations and the publisher’s direct sales team. An interesting take that’s worth a look. AdExchanger.com sees it slightly differently down the road where the direct sales and trading teams are in distinct sales channel roles. Read more from Farney Media.
M&A Dollars Up
In a release, investment bank Petsky Prunier says that third quarter 2009 M&A activity is up in dollar volume over the second quarter for the marketing, information and digital media group it tracks. Petsky Prunier noted 153 transactions totaling $7.3 Billion in Q3. Transaction levels were down 1% in comparison to Q2. And, there’s more info on M&A and IPO results over at Dow Jones Venture Source here.
Conversion Rates Be Damned?
Brandt Dainow, a web analytics and marketing consultant, says on iMedia Connection that the conversion rates that marketers are tracking do not matter as much as unless they are looking at conversion rates “for retained visits — people who actually engage with your site.” Read more.
The Frequency Of Ads
Ariel Geifman, a Research Analyst at Eyeblaster, has posted the first of a series of observations about ad frequency for campaigns. In the current post, Geifman references Eyeblaster research which says, “advertisers with ads that were served for less than 4 million impressions would find it hard to achieve an average frequency that is higher than 2.5 exposures per user.” Read more.
More Google Display: Creative Units
The Inside AdSense blog offered a couple of nuggets on what display ad sizes work best. Not surprisingly, larger ads (such as the large rectangle – 336×280) get a higher clickthrough rate and the “box” or “small rectangle” (300×250) tends to get more placement targeting opportunities through AdWords given the wide-spread use of the ad size. Read more from Arlene Lee of Inside AdSense.
Twitter Sentiment As Targeting Data
How about using Twitter to target through demand-side buying platforms? “sderose” makes an interesting argument – which I barely understand – in the Open Amplify commumity blogs. Still, it’s clear that Twitter as a real-time sentiment meter could be used to target in real-time across multiple supply sources – now that’s interesting! Read more.
First Round Capital Opens In NYC
First Round Capital – investors in many ad tech companies such as AppNexus, Aggregate Knowledge, DoubleVerify, Invite Media, VideoEgg and Yieldex – is opening an office in NYC to get closer to the city’s growing technology community. On his blog, RedEye VC, osh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital, said, “We’ve found that the New York City ecosystem has been particularly strong for Internet and media-based startups.” Read more.
