3rd Party Ad Servers

If you’re planning a full-blown web advertising campaign, you will likely want to purchase ad space on multiple sites. By doing so, you will be extending your target audience reach, but you will also be creating a whole new set of tracking complications. To track each ad campaign, you can either try your own ad-hock method of relying on the sites you’ve purchased space on to provide you with ad tracking reports and then monitoring them all individually for response rates, OR, you can pay a little money and be provided with a lot more information and retain your sanity. That alternative is to run your campaign through a third party ad server.

Third party ad servers are independent companies whose technology and equipment do the “dirty work” of managing, maintaining, serving, tracking and even analyzing the results of online ad campaigns. Since everything is managed through one central place, it’s much more easy to view and compare multiple campaigns. You can view this information all online with easy-to-use programs.

Ad servers also give you the ability to change ad campaigns on the fly — instead of running an entire campaign, getting back the results, and then optimizing the media buy, with an ad server you can better analyze results on an ongoing basis and make alterations instantaneously. This means pulling out an ineffective ad banner and replacing it with a new one or a high-performance banner. You can even control the sequence of ad impressions on those sites.

Moreover, some ad servers can control your banner delivery to the extent that if a user is previously exposed to a banner on one site, he or she will not have to view it again on another. The ad server accomplishes this by placing a cookie on the computer of the surfer. The server can then recognize the ad cookie in the future and from this, can decide, based on the instructions its been given, whether or not to show this ad again. For more information on cookies,visit our marketing tip What is a Cookie from 2/10/00.

Besides optimizing delivering and analyzing click-thru performance, one of the other most useful benefits of using a third party ad server is its “post-click tracking” capabilities. This refers to the tracking of pages on your site that a user visits as a result of clicking on your ad. The way it works is this: Most third party servers allow for at least three “tracers” which are typically placed on “event pages” (landing page, sign-up/order page, thank you page). Real time tracking can then show you which campaigns are producing the most sales and sign ups, and what are the customer acquisition cost of each campaign.

Using third party ad servers is not inexpensive, but if you’re planing on spending a considerable amount of your advertising/marketing budget on online advertising across many sites, you’ll find it’s well worth the price and the information.

Third Party Servers:

DoubleClick Dart (owned by the ad network DoubleClick)

Matchlogic (owned by Excite)

AdKnowlege (part of the CMGI Engage program)

Sabela (recently acquired by 24/7 Media)

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