Dynamic Ad Targeting & Optimization Using Omniture Test&Target

Personalization · By On · 2 Comments

This morn­ing, Omni­ture announced new solu­tions in Dis­play Adver­tis­ing to help adver­tis­ers increase their return on ad spend. The press release may be found here: Omni­ture Announces Dis­play Adver­tis­ing Solu­tions for Increased Return on Ad Spend

Today, I’d like to add color to a par­tic­u­larly excit­ing part of the release titled “Dynamic Ad Tar­get­ing & Opti­miza­tion Using Omni­ture Test&Target”. This capa­bil­ity marks sig­nif­i­cant progress towards our abil­ity to increase ad rel­e­vancy by pro­vid­ing a capa­bil­ity that matches a vis­i­tor that belongs to an adver­tiser seg­ment (iden­ti­fied using Site Cat­a­lyst, Dis­cover or Test&Target) with a dynamic ad (via Test&Target). The ad is dynam­i­cally assem­bled and may con­tain mes­sag­ing rel­e­vant to the segment.

Dur­ing the lim­ited release phase for the solu­tion, we have seen a sig­nif­i­cant increase in ad click through rates (CTR). Given that ad impres­sions may only be shown to vis­i­tors that fall in seg­ments that have proven ROI for return con­ver­sions, adver­tis­ers reduce impres­sion waste and increase con­ver­sion rates, increas­ing their return on ad spend. This is extremely exciting.

As the Prod­uct Man­ager for the solu­tion, I wanted to out­line two major capa­bil­i­ties as we push to bring this solu­tion into the hands of some of the largest adver­tis­ers in the world.

Dis­play Test­ing for Acqu­si­tion Cam­paigns: For Adver­tis­ers that are inter­ested in opti­miz­ing their acqui­si­tion cam­paigns, Test&Target pro­vides AB and Mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing for ele­ments within the ad. Agen­cies can pur­chase media through their cur­rent processes. Ad cre­ative would be pro­duced using a Test&Target ad tem­plate and would be traf­ficked across the media plan. Typ­i­cally, the ad would be served by the agency ad server.

Dis­play Tar­get­ing for Remar­ket­ing Cam­paigns: For Adver­tis­ers that are inter­ested in opti­miz­ing their remar­ket­ing cam­paigns, Test&Target pro­vides the capa­bil­ity to tar­get vis­i­tor seg­ments to ads. The cre­ative may be gen­er­ated dynam­i­cally for the rel­e­vant seg­ment. For exam­ple if you had a vis­i­tor seg­ment that was in mar­ket for travel between any ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion city, they could be shown a dynamic ad con­tain­ing the ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion city. As prior, the ad cre­ative would be pro­duced using a Test&Target ad tem­plate and would be traf­ficked across the media plan and the ad would be served by the agency ad server.

Last but cer­tainly not least, the vision is not lim­ited to increas­ing the CTR on the ad. The solu­tion includes con­nect­ing the mes­sag­ing in the ad to the mes­sag­ing on the land­ing page (via a uni­fied Test&Target Expe­ri­ence) and through the fun­nel, i.e. the “long ad” to enable our adver­tis­ers to increase their con­ver­sion rates through rein­forced mes­sag­ing. Adver­tis­ers can view reports from “click to close” that allows adver­tis­ers to eval­u­ate their ad spend against the met­ric they really care about, i.e. against con­ver­sions or revenue.

For those attend­ing Omni­ture Sum­mit 2010 , you can learn more at the keynote this morn­ing. I would also sug­gest you attend a cou­ple of break­out ses­sions. The first is Opti­miz­ing Dis­play Adver­tis­ing Cam­paigns The sec­ond ses­sion is How Data and Ana­lyt­ics Are Shift­ing the Dis­play Adver­tis­ing Land­scape. Hope to see you there!

I’ll be using this blog to keep you posted on our devel­op­ments in this space. I’d also love to hear about your thoughts so feel free to com­ment here or email me directly at schaudha at adobe​.com.

  • Rel­e­vance Police

    In order to make ads per­son­al­ized, you need a dis­play side ad server which this is not. This solu­tion assumes that some­one builds a cre­ative in Flash or in HTML and injects it into the adver­tiser side ad server. Deci­sions are made by the “ad cre­ative” call­ing the Test & Tar­get server? This will kill the ad in terms of poor latency and per­for­mance. The Flash/HTML cre­ative — not being an ad server can­not get any data passed into it with­out jump­ing through hoops. Sorry, this is not a real solu­tion. As an agency pro­fes­sional on these issues — let me tell you, you have a lot of work to do. I was excited ini­tially that you might have some­thing here, but this appears to be noth­ing at all that mat­ters in the dis­play world.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/schaudhary Sid­dharth Chaudhary

      Hi there,

      Yes, deci­sions are made by the ad server call­ing the Test&Target server, in real time. Latency and per­for­mance are not an issue. Keep in mind that Test&Target has a very effi­cient world­wide con­tent deliv­ery net­work that serves bil­lions of impres­sions a month on the home pages of some of the most traf­ficked sites in the world. Inter­est­ing to hear your per­spec­tive on data flow. With Test&Trget, data cap­ture is a mar­keter friendly activ­ity. I’d love to show you a demo some­time that specif­i­cally shows you that piece. Addi­tion­ally, given that the Test&Target plat­form can sync the ad cre­ative with the site side cre­ative, while allow­ing the mar­keter com­plete con­trol, we believe we have a strong dif­fer­en­tia­tor when com­pared with solu­tions such as Ter­a­cent or Tumri where opti­miza­tion is lim­ited to ad clicks. But don’t take my word for it. Come to the Omni­ture Sum­mit 2011. I’ll be doing a ses­sion with an direct response Adver­tiser that drove 600% ROAS from the solu­tion. If you can­not make it to Sum­mit, do send me an email (schaudha@​adobe.​com) and I’ll be happy to show you a live demo and case stud­ies that will serve as ample proof. Thanks!