PPC Land

Quora yesterday launched CPM bidding on Quora Ads platform. With CPM bidding, advertisers can now pay for impressions. Nikki Dahan, Product Designer at Quora says that CPM bid represents how much you are willing to pay to get 1000 ad impressions on Quora.

Besides CPM (bid per 1000 impressions, charge by 1000 impressions), Quora also offers CPC (bid per click, charge by click) and conversion optimized ad delivery to a target CPA bid (bid per conversion, charge by impression).

Quora says CPM bidding can be useful to advertisers who want to build brand awareness. Advertisers might consider using CPM bidding for broad branding campaigns, such as trying to drive awareness of a new product or service, upcoming webinars, or conferences

For performance-based advertisers, Quora recommends testing CPM bidding in addition to cost per click (CPC) and Conversion Optimized Campaigns that were already available Quora.

Quora Ads are available with no minimum spend but for advertisers with a daily spend of $100/day, Quora provides hands-on help from the account management team.

Google today announced that AdSense users will have to submit each website to a verification process which checks that the Adsense user owns the domain or have the ability to modify its content.

Only after the domain is verified, ads can be shown on the new website. The process also reviews your site for compliance with the AdSense Program policies. After the checks are completed, the site will be marked as “Ready” and ads can be shown.

Existing sites already being monetized should automatically appear in the sites list, accessed by clicking the new Sites tab.

Google is also renaming the My Sites tab to Sites and moving it further up the menu to make it easier to find.

LinkedIn today announced the integration with Google Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager), now part of Google Marketing Platform.

The integration between LinkedIn and Campaign Manager (Google CM) will enable to see LinkedIn ad performance alongside the rest of the advertiser paid spend, and also get attribution for the LinkedIn ads across all impressions and interactions, measured in a cross-device and cross-platform manner. Earlier this year, LinkedIn launched this integration for some ad formats, but today – LinkedIn made it available also for Sponsored Content.

When advertisers activate the integration, they will be able to see the LinkedIn ad performance in Campaign Manager, and use their conversion attribution capabilities for Sponsored Content campaigns, including Video, Carousel and Lead-Gen Forms, as well as Text and “Spotlight” Dynamic Ads.

Taylor Greason, product manager at LinkedIn, said that this integration highlights LinkedIn commitment to make LinkedIn’s ad platform easier to use by providing the flexibility marketers need to access all their campaigns in one place.

“Our customers use Campaign Manager to track and report on their ad performance in a single place, and we are really excited to offer this capability for their LinkedIn campaigns as well. This new integration makes it easy for customers to see metrics and attribution for LinkedIn campaigns alongside the rest of their campaign data.”
Payam Shodjai, Director of Product for Google Marketing Platform

How to enable Google Campaign Manager measurement on LinkedIn?

After creating the Sponsored Content campaign as a “Draft’, click the “Manage tracking” bullseye icon to add your Google tracking tags.

Add impression and clicks tags, and hit “Save”. The tags for carousel and video campaign go here as well.

Google today introduced a new filter in Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool, enabling advertisers to preview their ad with a specific audience. Advertisers could use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to preview ads by search term and filter by location, language, and device. Now the tool also has the audience filter.

Targeting (Target and bid) or Observation (Bid only) audiences

Sylvanus Bent, Product Manager, Google Ads said advertisers “using the Targeting setting (previously called “Target and bid”) in your campaigns, advertisers will be able to see which ads are showing for the specified audience.”

For advertisers using “Observation setting (previously called “Bid only”), they can see how the ad may appear higher or lower on the page, based on the bids for the specified audience.”

The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool supports search audiences.

Listen Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, when he yesterday announced the launch of dating features on Facebook. Zuckerberg said there are 200 million people listed as single on Facebook, “so clearly there is something to do here.”

Zuckerberg, at F8 Conference, clarified that the features were designed to build “long and real term relationships” and “not just for hookups.”

 

Here a preview of Facebook Dating:

Match Group, leader on online dating websites and apps, owner of OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, and Match.com, saw their stock fall over 20% since Facebook’s announcement.

Match Group Stock Volume 1 Year

Match Group Stock Price 1 Year

Yesterday, in the Earnings Call of Google, Heather Bellini, from Goldman Sachs, asked Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the impact of the implementation of the GDPR.

 Listen here his answer:

 

Sundai Pichai said that Google is working on GDPR over 18 months ago and that is important to get it right.

Mark Mahaney, from RBC Capital Markets, followed up Heather´s question about the GDPR: if it will impact the targeting capabilities of Google, making Google less attractive to advertisers. Here the answer from Sundar Pichai:

 

Pichai said that the impact of GDPR will be limited as most of the ad business of Google is on search, and the information used by Google there is very limited, mainly the keyword that the user is searching.

According to CNBC, Google’s properties (Search, Youtube, Maps, etc) revenue makes up around 80 percent of its total advertising revenues. Around 20 percent of its advertising revenue comes from AdMob, AdSense or DoubleClick, mainly partners, and that’s where the GDPR implementation will be more difficult as it involves personalized targetings.

The Problem behind Ads.txt

or perhaps we need to talk about 2 problems behind Ads.txt: the first is the domain arbitrage and the second problem is domain spoofing. When domain arbitrage happens, the publisher still gets some money. When Domain Spoofing happens the money never arrives at the publisher. But let’s try to understand how these ad frauds work.

Starting with the first. Domain Arbitrage. In the advertising industry, there are resellers that are not authorized by the publishers to arbitrage their inventory. The resellers sell the inventory on programmatic, buying it cheaper from the publishers and taking then a percentage. Resellers are considered middleman’s, reselling the inventory on the exchanges, with URL transparency or in a semi-transparent way. This makes the inventory expensive to buy, and at the end, the money is not going to the publishers. This is called Inventory Arbitrage.

Domain Spoofing is another issue on Programmatic. Since is the publisher that is passing the url on the bid request, it is easy to show a premium domain on the bid requests. Advertisers think they are buying premium inventory, when in fact they are buying advertising on another website. Will give you an example. The advertiser is buying on Spiegel Online when in fact is buying ads on fakenews.com. Domain Spoofing should be detected and avoided by the SSP’s or DSP’s, but with more and more players in the RTB ecosystem, this is difficult to detect. IAS (Integral Ad Science) says that up to 12% of the display impressions were fraudulent in 2017, and on Video this number of fraud increases to 16%.

Let’s talk about one example: Methbot. Methbot is the most famous case of ad fraud, detected by White Ops. Russian hackers did almost 5 Millions per day using bots and masking 6000 premium domains and more than 250000 URLs. The domains were from premium publishers like Vogue, and the ad type was video, due to the higher CPM’s. The hackers also register IP addresses in US, so they look American homes.

Here are 2 examples of ad fraud, domain spoofing, and unauthorized inventory arbitrage, that the implementation of Ads.txt can help to solve.

What is Ads.txt?

If you know robots.txt, from SEO, this explanation will be easier, as Ads.txt is inspired on the robots.txt from SEO / Google. Ads.txt is a txt file named ads.txt that is inserted on the main domain of a website. This file will inform the RTB players about the Authorised Digital Sellers of the domain. According to IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, this makes hard for bad actors to profit from selling counterfeit inventory across the ecosystem.

Ads.txt works in advertising as Robots.txt works in Search. On Robots.txt the domain says which folders authorises to the search engines to be index publicly. On Ads.txt the domain informs which RTB sellers can sell ads there.

 

So how does Ads.txt works?

The content owner creates a Ads.txt file and uploads on the main directory of the domain. Example: ppc.land/ads.txt. On the file Ads.txt the content owner informs the supply chain authorised to sell advertising, for example google.com. The DSP’s crawl the domains and looks for the Ads.txt. When Advertisers are buy ads targeting domain, through a DSP that supports Ads.txt, Advertisers have the guarantee that this DSP is only buying on ads of a domain through the authorised sellers.

Not only the DSP’s and the Publishers can benefit with Ads.txt. The Exchanges can also have filters to avoid Domain Spoofing and Inventory Arbitrage, as now they will be able to know the authorised ...