Retargeting means showing a user advertising for a product that they’ve looked at in the recent past. Retargeting, from a users perspective, is broken down into two stages: In the first stage they’re looking at a product or service at the product’s web site. In the second stage they see ads on (possibly unrelated) web properties for the product or service they were looking at previously.
This is the third part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks – or maybe I’ll just keep goin’!
Day parting a campaign restricts the campaign to serving only during certain times of the day. Day parting typically takes the form of a serving window between particular hours; a setting may have a starting hour and a stopping hour. The campaign serves normally between the hours, but doesn’t serve at all outside of them. Day parting is not the same as a start and stop time for a campaign. When a campaign is day-parted it will serve during the “on” hours every day the campaign is scheduled to run.
This is the second part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks.
The Daily Cap is the limit of the number times an ad is shown throughout the day. With branded campaigns these are usually in the 10s or 100s of thousands. When used on a performance campaign it can vary based on the confidence in performance for the given targeting parameters. When the cap is achieved the ad stops serving. The next day the ad starts serving again until it reaches the daily cap once more.
The Global Cap is a bit of a misnomer. It behaves as the limiter for the entire campaigns impressions from beginning to end. Once the global the ad stops serving, period. It doesn’t start up again the next day. In ideal circumstances the global and daily cap are harmonious so that the daily cap was restrictive enough, but not overly restrictive such that the global cap was reached or nearly reached on the end date of the campaign. Mathematically speaking – an ideal daily cap is equal to the global cap divided by the number of days in the campaign.
My post was originally published on the Rubicon Project blog. It was written with contributions from Dr. Neal Richter and Jonathan Zhuang.
Pacing algorithms come in a few basic forms at the Rubicon Project. The most basic is one called “as fast as possible” which can hardly be shown to do anything that resembles pacing. The Pacing controller is supposed to spread out impressions served for a campaign throughout the day. In general it takes the goal of impressions to serve in a given day as input and calculates a serving schedule for the campaign.
A naive pacing algorithm will break the day up into 24 segments, let’s call them hours. It will allocate equal amounts of campaign impression for each hour and then recommend the campaign get impressions until the hour’s allocation is exhausted. This algorithm has a couple of pretty big flaws. Primarily it tends to serve the campaigns at the beginning of each hour and then once the allocated impressions are used up it stops serving until the next hour. The second flaw is that it has no understanding of the traffic distribution throughout the day. The 1AM hour doesn’t have the same amount of traffic coming in as the 10AM hour. If the inventory is relatively scarce the campaign will under-serve during the early hours, catch up during the peak hours, and then under-serve again in the later hours. Ultimately campaigns using this algorithm may not achieve their goals at the end of the day and it won’t serve evenly in a given hour. Read more
This is the first part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks.
Frequency capping is the act of placing a restriction on an advertising campaign that mandates that are particular user only see an ad a fixed number of times over a given period. This usually takes the form of impressions/day/user (or impressions/hour/user). In an ad serving system this will show up in two ways:
The X and Y in these settings are usually variables. The Y tends to have predefined drop downs in the interface like 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours or 1 day, 2 days, 3 days.
It is common to refer to frequency caps at one per day as the “tightest” cap. Increasing the frequency is referred to as “loosening” the frequency cap. These phrases are common in the industry.
