Social Advertising Blog   …building a social advertising network.

Just a quick post today about a couple of great articles on social media in a recession. I 100% agree with them, I think that the core of any marketers campaigns will be very measurable spends and social advertising is very measure and very much a direct response media.

Recession to Boost Social Media Spending

Social Media Could Thrive In a Recession…

That’s all for now.

As for upcoming posts, I’ll probably be focusing on how to organize the reporting: separate reports or in-dashboard numbers - it’ll all take some though.

Was doing some more research on social advertising metrics and came across a great video from the Social Ad Summit.

http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/09/21/social-advertising-metrics/

They talk about influence and engagement, but I struggle to see how we can come up with a standard definitition and quantify it.

Enjoy!

With social advertising, there are two sides to the story: publishers and advertisers. Personally, I don’t think publishers require advanced reporting, they need simple summarized data with the occasional graph to help illustrate trending. On the other hand, advertisers require everything. Hmm, maybe this is because my background is in advertising and not publishing..?

Advertisers

Advertisers need to know the 5 W’s, like we learned in school.

• Who?
  • We need to separate demographics: age, gender, location.
• What?
  • Impressions, clicks, conversions - which ads got what actions?
• Where?
  • Which publishers are profitable, which publishers are not.
• When?
  • Day parting: which times of the day are most profitable.
• Why?
  • Multivariate testing - need flexibility to understand why something works or doesn’t work.

What does this all mean? It means we need to track loads of data and have a smart way of displaying it. My hope is to be able to accurately answer any question asked by an advertiser in a reasonable amount of time (< 1second). Because of the shear amount of data, I can’t allow advertisers to have free reign over the data and run on-the-fly queries. This would result in huge CPU time restricting other users from viewing their publisher and advertiser reports. Instead, I need to predict their questions and summarize the data periodically - this will allow for uber fast reporting as there isn’t any work for the db or application to do, just a simple select (read).

To answer the above questions I need the following metrics:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• CPC (cost-per-click)
• CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions)
• CTR (click-through-rate)
• Cost / Conversion
• Cost
• Publisher
• Demographics: Age, Gender, and Location

This should be plenty of information for the average advertiser and is already more than most social advertising networks offer.

Publishers

Publishers are easy, they need really basic data: impressions, clicks, earnings, and eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand impressions). eCPM is the holy grail of publisher metrics in social advertising. Most publishers will determine which network to run with based on their eCPM.

Obviously most of my time will be spent on the advertiser side.

A quick post about social advertising happens in the last year (which is about how long the industry has existed - in my opinion).

• Appssavvyy
  • http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/07/appssavvy-raises-31-million-to-connect-social-media-developers-advertisers/
• SocialMedia
  • http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/socialmedia-hires-saviaan-to-secure-its-series-b-round/
• Lookery
  • http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/reed-hundt-invests-in-facebook-ad-platform-lookery/
• Cubics
  • http://www.centernetworks.com/adknowledge-acquires-facebook-ad-company-cubics

I feel that as a small start up with young and motivated people we’ll do fine. We don’t have $20MM in funding, because we don’t need it - and ultimately it will help us make a better offering.

I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel.

Therefore I’ll be modeling my interface after Google AdWords. Most online advertisers are familiar with AdWords and almost everybody will agree that it is the simplest and most powerful interface for search engine marketing.

What I like about AdWords’ Interface:

• Simple and intuitive.
• Overview - get account health fast.
• Reporting - powerful and flexible.
• Account structure - logical.
• Relatively fast - ability to create & launch campaigns quickly.

That said, I’m not building a search network, I’m building a social advertising network - so I’ll have to make some changes to accomodate.

What I need to Improve / Change:

• Reporting speed - I’d like realtime, but I’m going to get <5mins delayed.
• Account structure - no need for adgroups as there are no keywords here, just want campaigns & ads.
• Ad creation - need to change to accommodate demographics.
• Conversion tracking - not going to allow multiple actions per ad, only one type of conversion allowed and value is set at ad level.
• Clear some other junk out - AdWords provides lots of tools / options that are designed for PPC.

Why am I designing the interface before I have a back end? Well, I’m not sure if this is “by the book” but it makes sense to me. I feel that over time my interface won’t change much.. maybe cosmetic changes, but overall functionality should stay constant. Once I have the interface done, I can start on the actual serving of ads. I can get this working and running fast, but it will take me time to hammer out the exact architecture which will maximize performance and minimize latency. I don’t want to stray from what I’m working on right now, which is the interface - so that’s all I’ll say about back end / architecture stuff for now. It’s hard because I’m a one man show, a one hit wonder, just me - usually we’d split this up into teams and designers would design and architects would architect - but alas I am a man of many hats and I love it.

Next post I’ll go into the meat and potatoes of the interface: reporting - what do we need to track?

I’ve decided to start a blog to document my journey as I architect, design, and implement a social advertising network.

A big shout-out to my wordpress theme artist Lucian E. Marin - thanks!