The web is the only medium where the decision about which ad to serve is made at the moment the page is displayed to the user. This is a tremendous opportunity – to display the right ad to the right user at the right time means advertisers get better ROI and users see ads that are less of a come on and more of a service to them.
But it’s also online advertising’s biggest challenge. Once ads are booked they are expressed against whatever inventory users happen to create when they view a page. One of our partners gets 150,000,000 page views per month and there are 3 or 4 spots on the page so that’s 600,000,000 decisions per month about which ads to place. There are millions of ad campaigns expressed against those page views when you count the ad networks. There are about 4 million total pages on this partner's site. 4 million x 1 million = 4 trillion potential combinations of ads and articles.
It’s amazing that we can program the machine to match ads with content correctly -- at least most of the time!
But even given our best effort, sometimes it goes horribly wrong.
At Perfect Market we're developing technology that can identify questionable ad placements and correct them. It's not perfect, but we think it's a step in the right direction.
Have you seen some unfortunate ad placements online? Send them in, we'd love to see them!
-j .
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