This document relates to advertisement placement management.
The Internet allows access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc. Such access to these content items has enabled opportunities for targeted advertising. In an online environment, advertisement targeting can be facilitated by presenting the advertisements in placements that reach a target audience. A placement can be any web property, e.g., a search engine results page, a website, a domain, or subset of web pages, etc., where an advertiser can place content items (e.g., advertisements). Placements can also be other forms of media property (e.g., print media, broadcast media, etc.) that can be used to publish a content item, such as an advertisement.
Advertisement syndication is a form of online advertising that allows advertisers to extend their marketing reach by distributing advertisements to additional partners for presentation in available placements. Through syndication, third party online publishers can place an advertiser's text or image advertisements in placements that have content related to the advertisement. As the users are likely interested in the particular content on the publisher webpage, they are also more likely to be interested in the product or service featured in the advertisement. Accordingly, such targeted placements can help drive online customers to the advertiser's website.
Placements on which to advertise can be selected by an advertiser based, in part, on placement traffic. For example, an advertiser may have traffic data for placements, provided by either the placement publishers or a third party, that specify traffic demographics, such as the location and age groups of users that view the placements. Thus, if an advertiser is interested primarily in advertising in a geographic region, such as California, the advertiser may select placements that receiving a significant portion of traffic from California. However, some of the publishers may enable targeting rules, i.e., rules that limit the types of advertisements presented depending on the demographic of a user visiting the placement. The use of these targeting rules can result in a much higher percentage of the advertiser's advertisements being provided to a target audience. For example, a first placement may receive 60% of its traffic from California, while a second placement may receive only 10% of its traffic from California. However, the second placement may have a targeting rule that enables the serving of an advertisement only if the placement is being viewed by a user in California. Thus, assuming the advertiser purchases 10,000 impressions, the first placement will, on average, result in 60% of the 10,000 impressions being shown in California. However, the second placement, which can target specifically to California, would result in all 10,000 impressions being shown in California. Thus, the better placement for the advertisement is the second placement, even though only 10% of its traffic is from the advertiser's target market.
Unfortunately, however, there is no easy way for the advertiser to collect such traffic data and target rule data from multiple publishers. Advertisers must contact publishers directly and request such information, which the publishers may or may not readily disclose. And even if the publishers do disclose this information, the process of finding placements and determining which placements are likely to result in the highest return on investment is time consuming, and often impossible to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time, if at all. Finally, the reservation of the placements can also be difficult process and subject to risk, as availability of the placements and pricing can vary, and publisher and advertising software and hardware may experience serving errors that cause discrepancies in the number of advertisements served for a placement.