FAQ

Targeting

How does the advertiser know what he is buying?

AdECN has over a dozen ways to target ads to visitors.  The advertiser knows that his ad is going to be shown on a page or a site with certain content, or at a certain time, or to a person with a certain profile, and so on.  Advertisers place their bids based on these factors.

What sort of targeting is available in the AdECN Exchange?

We built the targeting engine to be an open platform. We offer more than a dozen ways to match ads to viewers now, and can plug in new ones as they pop up.

Aside from the basic run of exchange with geo-targeting, day parting, and the other staples, we offer three levels of live contextual, in which we read the web pages on the fly for relevant content. This works extremely well with blogs and news sites, whose content is changing constantly. We also offer behavioral, including a viewer's recent search queries, and profile-based targeting: age, gender, income, and that sort of thing.

Where do you get your profile data?

We cull it through relationships with our partners. Here's how it works: when a viewer lands on a webpage in the exchange, we can tell if that viewer is known by one of our partners. If so, we query the partner, who tells us about that person, but obviously never their name or other data, which identifies the visitor. We have a strict privacy policy and adhere to those already adopted throughout the industry. Our partners, in turn, get paid for each profile. What this means is that the AdECN Exchange is not only a market for advertisers and publishers, it is also a market for data providers.

Can an ad network that already has its own targeting apply it to traffic from the exchange?

Yes.  A member may have excellent targeting from its private publisher relationships and want to use it to identify those viewers on other sites.  The member can keep this targeting wholly to itself, or elect to make it available to other members — for a price.  In any event, the targeting data remains with the member.

The actual integration process will require a conversation with our engineering team, but we have several such projects underway.

Even if the targeting is dead on, and the bid is what the advertiser wants to pay, aren't some sites or pages a lot better than others?

Yes, and different ad spots on the same page can be better than others, quite significantly.

We protect the advertiser from overpaying for underperforming ad spots with something we call SpotBot. It works like this: we track the performance history of every single ad spot on every page on every site in the exchange. A moment before the auction, we look at that history. If the spot performs about as well as its peers, other spots of the same format in the same subject category, we let the advertiser's bid go through unaltered. But if the spot underperforms its peers, say by 35%, we decrease the advertiser's bid by the same percentage.

We don't calculate the theoretical value of an impression for an advertiser, but we do adjust his bid to the relative value, based on the history performance of that spot. It's not enough for an exchange to be an open market: it also has to be a fair market.

What do you mean by "performance history?" Is that just the spot's click-through ratio?

The CTR is important, but we also take into account conversion history and other factors that I am not at liberty to disclose.