There are various pros and cons of Iframes (see here for a good overview some of which I summarize here), some pros include: Iframes don’t delay the serving of the page, typically loading in parallel with the other page content, there is no chance of name clashes with Javascript variable names if they are inside an iframe.

Some pretty big cons of iframes would include losing the referrer information of the page, which in turn means you can’t do contextual analysis of the page and more importantly you don’t really know where your ad has been running. Ads can’t communicate between each other if they are on the same page, so the coordination for wrap arounds or other things can be lost. You can’t run expandable ads (though some rich media creative companies like OggiFinoggi have come up with ways to “fake” expansion ads with iframes that is kind of interesting), which some users would say is a great benefit of these, but it complicates further the adserving ecosystem adding more heterogeneity to inventory which is now a mix of iframes and javascript tags and it is then unclear what can serve where.

As a demand-side platform helping advertisers buy optimized media, CPM Advisors (CPMa) runs billions of ad impressions per month across various advertising exchanges and we look at a LOT of impression logs. A lot of lower-cost inventory on some of these sources we have seen is hidden behind iframes, meaning most often the referring URL is that of the ad network serving the ads. As a whole, inventory that is served in iframes has a substantially lower price and underlying value than inventory that appears in javascript tags. The extent of the problem on any particular platform including Right Media is unclear, though I would guess that, excluding Yahoo! on the exchange, iframes might be 70 percent by volume if a fair bit less by number of publishers. There are obvious reasons for this, including that companies who would do nefarious things and generate large volumes of traffic often would hide their referring URLs behind iframes (and often, many nested layers of iframes running in parallel), but I do not believe the fairly young ad market yet correctly takes into account this trade-off.

Now there are exceptions. Some publishers like Amazon.com that work with ad networks grudgingly, purposefully put their ads in two layers of iframes to hide their origin AND to stop unscrupulous partners from “stealing” shopper-related data from their pages presumably – but as my other writings would attest I believe that the “sell the same stuff for different prices” world of online publishing will come to an end in the next several years and then this kind of good-quality-site-hiding-behind-frames behavior should be reduced – with the caveat that data use practices in a non-iframe world will also have to be more closely looked at, which I think will happen regardless. Are impressions a commodity? No, not yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a real market to buy and sell impressions or “audience”. Let me put it this way – platinum and lead are both commodities but one sells for $1400 an ounce and the other for $1 a pound.

In tomorrow’s market-driven ad world, transparency will be more the norm and anonymous inventory will have its place, but on average will be discounted in price. Thus we may see what one might call the “iframe tax” – less measurability and accountability means more trust is needed which means more risk which means less money for networks and publishers that use them.

Google/Doubleclick has this week enabled pixel-based targeting across their exchange, including the Google Content Network, and we are now able to offer brands and partners the ability to instantly do retargeting (also known as remarketing or remessaging) campaigns across a variety of ad platforms including the entire Google Content Network which numbers about 159.7 monthly unique visitors monthly: CPMatic.com offers self-service retargeting which you can setup and be live on within 10 minutes with a credit card.

Audience-targeted retargeting campaigns have a typical 3x to 20x better ROI than regular site-targeted display ads: we think it’s a great way especially for search marketers to get started with display ad buying.

Ad-Juster, Adacado, adap.tv, AdBrite, AdBuyer, adfinity, adfunky digital media, Aditall, AdJuggler, adknowledge, AdManage, adMarketplace.com, Adoori, AdOptim, adperio, AdSide, Adsmarket , AdsMe, ADTECH, Adventive, Advertise.com, Advertising Database.

It’s an ad-world!

For ad networks that work in the RMX system, there are a few problems and things you cannot do currently some of which that were possible in earlier iterations of the system. 1) if firms are connected via the exchange, they cannot directly buy/sell behaviorally-targeted campaigns, 2) controls for directing campaigns to specific publishers are sometimes cumbersome and are very general, 3) there is a limit on the ‘depth’ of serving connections allowed, meaning that you cannot buy on another site or network via a partner even if it would make economic sense, due to limitations in the RMX adserving capabilities, and 4) we can of course apply our proprietary optimization techniques to make campaigns work.

We have had several networks buying media from us, and we certainly encourage them to set up an account and initiate it. While our system allows for the upload of ad tags for campaigns, please do note that we very closely scrutinize ad tags to prevent any issues from being introduced into the ecosystem. If you have any questions please contact us.

About.com has a lot of inventory and to monetize, and has been an aggressive user of various ad exchanges including the Doubleclick Ad Exchange where it is disclosed as one of the participating publishers. That is not to say that is the reason for their good performance of course, just an interesting data point. Online revenues dropped for the other parts of the company but not as much as the problems on the offline side of the business:

The company posted a loss of $35.6 million for the quarter. On an operating basis, the company reported a profit of $80.6 million ($0.16 cents a share). Total revenues were down 16.9 percent. Revenues at the About Group unit were up 7.2 percent, but on the digital front in total, it was a different story. Website dollars dropped 7.2 percent. The main point of the NYTCo’s digital struggles in Q3 were centered at the News Media Group, which posted an 18.5 percent decline in online ad revenue. On the print side, the digital declines don’t seem nearly as bad.  Advertising revenues fell almost 30 percent for the News Media Group, as print ads declined 31.2 percent.

Publishers need to start thinking about how they can extend the reach of their inventory into various online exchanges, including those that will be enabled for real-time bidding. As our CEO Rob Leathern mentions in this piece on AdExchanger, publishers will only be able to have a voice and shape the online advertising environment and hence their revenue picture by having a seat at the advertising exchange / real-time bidding table. Part of this will relate to participating as providers of data into these ecosystems, about attaching that data to their inventory but there will also be innovations that none of us can yet predict that need strong publisher participation to help make happen.

As someone selling media, CPM seems great but for the buyer it’s not the best experience. The seller need do nothing, really, for any particular deal. They collect money regardless of performance. Obviously in the overall sense, as word gets around that their CPMs are too high relative to performance, people will not buy from them, but in the micro case the onus is on the buyer to know the underlying characteristics of the media and make an assessment about whether to buy it or not. On the other hand, CPA gives the power to the buyer. They determine an activity or metric and the price they can pay for it, it’s performance-based, and absent any issues with fake leads or anything like that (not to be addressed here) they are happy. The incentive for the seller now is to collaborate and cooperate with the buyer and try to get the ads to work better to improve the likelihood of conversion. Some things are in their control – they can choose where to place the ad, when, what sub-segment of audience to target and so on, and if they are smart or have a very targeted audience they can sometimes make a lot more money than they could in the CPM case. But it takes work, and all-too often the incentives for the advertiser to care and make things work better are not there.

Run display ads with one of the big CPA networks. What do you see? Awesome Flash-based ads with great production values? No. More often it is crappy JPG and GIF-based ads with little interactivity or pizzazz to them. Part of this is a legacy issue related to making it simple for CPA pubs to pull these creatives down onto their site but REALLY in the age of pretty-much free adserving, sub-10c/Gig CDNs and the like you’re telling me you can’t get ad tags or flash onto a publisher’s page? It’s not that these ads don’t exist – the same advertisers are running the flash-based good stuff in their own often-CPM-based ad campaigns while their poor affiliates are sitting with the second rate JPG ads. The incentives are not properly aligned.

We need a new hybrid performance-model that gives incentives for the sellers and the buyers of media to come together to make campaigns work. We’ll be sharing some of our ideas on this with the industry soon, but we encourage idea sharing from others. This also means we need to empower publishers and media sellers with tools to better match their inventory with likely performing ad campaigns in a non-black-box way (some of their insights ARE useful, but with so many CPA options out there it’s a bit overwhelming for the average site owner). BUT the first thing I’d say is if you’re an advertiser using CPA or affiliate channels, bring your best creative game AND demand and actually use data and feedback they can give you about what’s working and what’ s not. Every impression is an opportunity to gather data, and make a sale. Put the crappy JPGs to bed and build a better marketing ecosystem for yourself.

CRS is for small to mid-sized publishers looking for insider tips on how to maximize AdSense revenue, increase revenue opportunities via contextual optimization technologies, advertising network exchanges and the latest affiliate/lead generation alternatives.

Display Advertising for Search Marketers: Banners Aren’t Just for Branding Anymore
MODERATOR:
- Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, iCrossing

PANELISTS:
- Roy de Souza, CEO, Zedo
- Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO, CPM Advisors
- Div Bhansali, Director, Self-Service Products, AOL Advertising

First, when I reloaded the page from the link above, I found that the Westin 160×600 no longer was inside the top 728 banner, but it now was floating (see above) partially obscured by their SearchChicago classifieds widget. Eek. But more interesting were some of the other ads. The first is a content-looking box from ARALifestyle.com, discussed here by Jay Weintraub in a post. Very clever, “are you snoring yourself to death” of course is an “article” of sponsored content that reveals its sponsor very subtly at the end.

In addition, in the meantime there has been a popunder launched which has several similar-sounding ads to help with cellulite, flat stomachs, colon cleansers and the like. This is the company Adblade.com of course, although there is no longer any disclosure that we can see on the pop except for a very light “Advertisement” – there is no Adblade branding thereupon and I thought it was interesting that they chose to show the address bar with a Zedo.com adserving URL. No doubt intentional, much the way some networks hide they are doing pops.

It is interesting that premium publishers like Yahoo! have banned all advertisers like these from their network and yet they are still seeing a lot of action on newspaper sites. Further down the page there are a couple of other banners in rotation, at one point it looks like Pulse360’s text ads are there with more negative-option weight-loss ads showing up.

These offers appear to be where a lot of the online ad money is currently, and whether it works out for them or not, all kudos to Yahoo! for saying they don’t want to have these ads on their network (Microsoft has not yet done the same, by the way). It certainly doesn’t seem to perturb the newspaper sites. But moving along to the bottom of the page  we round out our quick analysis with one more shot showing a few more ads….

Another set of text ads at the bottom with a display unit way on the bottom – to bring the total for this page to:

1 x pop with 6 text+image ads

1 x top 728×90 display banner

1 x 300×250 “content-like” banner

1 x dynamic classified ad banner/link unit

1 x Left 120×600 with text ads

1 x Right 160×600

1 x bottom 300×250 with more ARAlifestyle ads

2 x bottom 728 x90’s with text and display ads

So at least 7 in-page units with a big popunder. Is this really that different from offline newspapers? Maybe not. But the main point here is that we encourage advertisers to think about the context in which their ads are being placed when they assess whether it is better being on a legitimate site they may not have heard of with two other ads versus being on a brand-name site like this with 6 or 7 other units stuck way below the fold at the same price. Or perhaps they shouldn’t care – both options are useful – at some price. It just seems unlikely that the so-called “premium” publisher today is getting the benefit of understanding the true value and the true tradeoffs they are making when selling their ad space this way, and we as an industry on the advertiser side need to do more to build tools to help bridge the information gap so we can get more of what we need and the publisher can be more fairly compensated for the audience they are able to deliver.