Banner Ad: Please Fix Your Pacing Algorithm
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Tag Archive for online advertising

| March 20, 2012
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Day Parting Primer

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’!

What is day parting?

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.

Why use day parting? Read more

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , ,
| March 13, 2012
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Daily and Global Cap Primer

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.

What are the Daily and Global Caps?

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.

What happens if a campaign falls behind as a result of the daily cap? Read more

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , , ,
| March 12, 2012
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Using Proportional Control for Better Campaign Pacing

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.

Estimated Curve of Available Impressions

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

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , ,
| March 7, 2012
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Frequency Cap Primer

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.

What is Frequency Capping?

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:

  • Frequency Cap: X Impressions / Y Hours
  • Frequency Cap: X Impressions / Y Days

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.

Why choose to apply Frequency Capping? Read more

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , ,
| February 29, 2012
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In a world without cookies

I’m hoping your mental audio kicked in with an interpretation of a movie trailer with a Don LaFontaine voiceover when you read the title. I wrote this post in response to a lot of articles written from a position of fear from the advertising industry at the prospect of web browsers shipping with 3rd party cookies disabled. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and should not be construed as the opinions of my employer, associations or other groups I happen to belong to.

There’s a lot of highly visible worry in the news lately about online advertising losing the ability to set 3rd party cookies in a web browser. This technology is used to perform a variety of seemingly critical tasks: retargeting, audience targeting, frequency capping, user identification for RTB and probably a hundred other things – most of which I try not to know in detail.

The biggest concern seems to be that this growing part of the industry gets turned upside down if more browser companies decide to ship their products with 3rd party cookie disabled by default. Apple did this with their Safari browser which has been one component responsible for slowing down advertiser adoption of iOS devices. But advertisers have alternatives (like: display ads in other browsers, keywords, and online video ads) that they’re more comfortable with anyway, so there’s no telling how much of an impact the lack of 3rd party cookies on iPhones and iPads really has on the growth of the mobile ad revenue stream. Read more

Category: Free Ideas, Working On It | Tags: , , ,
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