We all know that Online Social Networks are the current trend of internet traffic. If you are not there –your square!

Who have not been through the high of racking our brain over every individual we knew in our past- trying to reestablish long lost ties with our high school sweethearts through Facebook or Myspace or at least spent time spying up on them.

And while the title of this paragraph might be understood as a discussion on how to maintain a good imprint on our peers in the social cyber world, I'd like to take it its meaning to the Performance based advertising arena.

According to various surveys, we are spending the most amount of our monthly Internet time online in top social networks; each individual racking up over 45 page views a time -  from flipping through photo albums to joining a "good cause". 

New social networks are popping up daily covering all walks of life from music to travel to business interests.

Publishers are now having a challenging time keeping up the performance for their banner advertisers with these mass amounts of page views, as  banners swiftly become a blurred backdrop to users after a few pages.

Publishers can keep up their value for their advertisers if they:

Segment their user's interests and profiles

Serve ads contextually to the content on page.

Keep banner advertisement placements to a reasonable amount for each unique user   - Sometime less is more.

All these tactics will increase the CTR and CNV considerably giving higher value to each impression –and that’s the impression that lasts!

 As Affilicon Israel draws near, we approached Peles to discuss the interaction between the two marketing channels - Results-based online advertising & Affiliate marketing:

§         Q: How do affiliate marketing and results- based marketing co exist with the more traditional ways?
Peles:  Affiliate marketing is one segment within the broader scope of result based advertising. They in many cases compete for budget, although, in our opinion they shouldn't. More traditional ways should deal with what is called branding, and result base should deal with direct acquisitions. More sophisticated advertisers, transforming both their budgets to results - they just define the goals differently, but measure both and optimize both budgets.

§         Q: What is more effective affiliate or SEM?
Peles: It is like asking what is more important, eating or drinking, for successful online advertising programs both should be effective, it is a matter of volume, competition and market.

• Website marketability
• Offer
• post click conversion

 On the side of the Service provider or, in our case, the "network" - we complete the picture with our expertise in providing the playing field and the optimization tactics. As a representative of the media side of the business, my responsibility is with the playing field or accurately; the rich Blend of traffic that provides the opportunity for the conversions to happen. This is fundamentally made up by a 2 level media pool: 
1. The base – the mass amounts of various traffic that provide multiple types of traffic from channels and placements that have some  slight relevance to the advertising offer.
 2.  Highly targeted, highly convertible traffic. Together these traffics create a blend that provides the advertiser with enough momentum to take its first baby steps in making the beginning conversions happen.

Once those occur it has to be provided with enough fuel to be able to learn and grow and be optimized using our technology, expertise and tactics into a significant volume campaign. One may ask why a campaign isn’t run on the second level traffic only where the highest likeliness of a conversion would occur.

The answer lies partially in the fact that this traffic is limited in its quantity and furthermore we have seen that to grow an advertiser to limitless expansion it is important to provide it with both types giving it the necessary bulk it needs to be a strong long lasting campaign. 

If the issue of the perfect blend of traffic isn’t enough; in order to keep going a long lasting successful campaign the traffic pool must remain forever fed by a continuous flux of new traffic in both of the levels. This compliments the continuous changes and optimization tactics made on the back end side of the campaign that creates each moment with a rich starting point for the new seed conversions. 

By Gilad Hellerman - CTO   

One of the major characteristics of the online-result-based-advertising industry is the huge numbers involved (no, I am not talking about the money, even though that is quite impressive as well, I am talking about impressions, clicks and conversions).  

 These numbers require special attention both in terms of technology (which I will address in my next post), and in terms of information gathering and analysis, which I will address in this post.What is our goal in all of this information gathering and analysis?Our ultimate goal is decision making, mainly towards campaign optimization, even though there are other decisions we need to make in order to maximize our profits. 

 In order to empower the user to make better decisions, we need to provide the user with knowledge on which the user can make his decisions. The emphasis is on knowledge as opposed to information since knowledge is actually the result of the procedure of processing the information we are presented with, during its storage in our brain. We make our decisions based on the knowledge rather then based on the information. Our goal therefore should be to process the information for our user so that it will save him some of the processing he will need to do by himself, and add bits of processing he might not have thought about, thus enlarging his knowledge.

 How do we turn information into knowledge?
We do that in four major stages:
1.       Data gathering
2.       Data analysis
3.       Deciding what, of the vast number of analyzed data to present.
4.       Presenting the data in a way that will make it easiest to use and consume by the user.  

Establishing the decisions on knowledge rather then information is the only way to effectively manage this vast amount of data in the online advertising world.

Gilad

An article in the wsj from the 5th of february.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123379182761749823.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

The ‘performance-driven advertising’ is yet another, a bit nicer (maybe), name for what internet advertising is and should be all about:

Measurability and accountability – which are the core merits.

Eventually, sometimes you need to go through tough times in order to inherit concepts that should have been inherited already -  like this one.

Treating internet advertising, as TV or news paper advertising is just missing on one of the net's biggest advantages measurability and accountability.

I am sure we will all get out of these times stronger and smarter about our businesses - especially if these businesses are online.