Tags: Smart media buyers understand the inherent benefits of ad exchanges: Impression-level buying, granular audience targeting, killer ROI.
Thanks to OpenX Advertising Console, all media buyers can get into the game. To learn more, Paul Martechinni, Head of Marketing at OpenX spoke with Ian Davidson, Director of Business Development at OpenX.
Ian Davidson, Director of Business Development at OpenX
Paul: What is the OpenX Advertising Console?
Ian: OpenX Advertising Console is a web-based gateway into OpenX Market, OpenX’s global ad exchange where buyers bid on premium inventory via a real-time auction. And it provides all the tools buyers need to target their exact audience, manage campaigns, and view detailed campaign performance in real time.
Paul: Do buyers need a real-time bidding engine?
Ian: Absolutely not. We created the Advertising Console specifically for buyers who want premium inventory at scale and run their campaigns themselves, but don’t have access to a real-time bidding tool. We see the Advertising Console as a way to help all media buyers take advantage of the efficiencies and targeting capabilities of ad exchanges, regardless of their technical environment. All of our inventory is available via real-time bidding, but for those that do not have real-time bidding capabilities, Advertising Console allows them access to the Market.
Paul: Who uses OpenX Advertising Console today?
Ian: The Advertising Console is used by anyone who needs to reach a specific or broad audience. Advertisers can use it to run retargeting campaigns if they want to engage with people who’ve been to their website to target other specific audience segments, or even brand new audiences. Many types of companies buy from Market through the Advertising Console, including direct brands, agencies, ad networks, and DSPs.
Continue reading to learn more about the OpenX Ad Console and how to get started!
Paul: How do you purchase inventory with OpenX Advertising Console if you are not a real-time bidder?
Ian: Inventory is purchased via rules-based bidding, which let buyers carefully screen and select every single impression they want to buy. Buyers determine a set of rules that act as criteria for the impressions they bid on. Rules can be set for:
- Price, with a maximum CPM that they’re willing to pay
- Categories of sites or even specific domains
- Brand safe inventory, so your ads never appear on inappropriate sites
- Geography
- Frequency
- Retargeting
- User language
- Operating system, browser, net speed
OpenX will find all of the impressions that match the buyer’s rules and place a bid based on the price specified by the buyer. If they’re the highest bidder, they win the auction and OpenX will place their ad.
Paul: Can you expand on the kinds of targeting advertisers utilize with OpenX Advertising Console?
Ian: Many types of targeting criteria are available. For example, our geotargeting capabilities are very robust. Buyers can target by city, state, country, and province. We also have latitude and longitude targeting, making it easy to target the suburbs or exurbs of a particular city, for instance.
OpenX Advertising Console offers granular targeting, including geo-targeting by region, city, even by longitude and latitude, retargeting, and audience.
We also offer retargeting, which many buyers use to target audience segments. Advertisers simply drop an OpenX Marketing pixel on an audience, and that audience becomes available to buy. Buyers who work with a third-party data-provider such as BlueKai can provide them with an OpenX Market pixel to attach to their Blue Kai segment, and then target that audience against the OpenX Market.
We offer contextual targeting, which we support through categories of websites. For instance, buyers can target home and garden or wedding websites and reach publishers like GardenWeb.com. Or buyers can target by specific domains. And we have user-agent settings, which let buyers reach people who are on a certain operating system, net speed, or are willing to accept cookies.
Paul: Tell us about the inventory that’s available through OpenX Market?
Ian: Through our direct relationships with premium publishers across the globe, OpenX Market provides access to a massive pool of display, in-banner video, mobile and email inventory. Media buyers can reach 180 million unique users in the U.S. and 450 million unique users worldwide. We partner with publishers of every size, location, topic and niche—everyone from the LA Times, Earthlink, eHarmony, Merriam- Webster, and Realtor.com.
OpenX has an excellent feature called Market-Wide Volume Reports. These reports show volume over the past seven days, helping the buyers understand how much inventory is available for them to buy, by ad size, category of website, or country.
Marketwide Volume Report displaying the requests breakdown by country.
Paul: Take us through the steps of using OpenX Advertising Console.
Ian: It’s an amazingly quick process. Campaigns can even go live within the same day.
Step one is a review process. OpenX will analyze the campaigns the buyer wants to run to ensure there are no latency or malware issues, and that their ads meet our publishers’ standards. Once the review is complete OpenX extends a credit line so the buyer can begin purchasing inventory.
Once you have an Ad Console account, you will be assigned an OpenX account manager who will help you learn to use the system, optimize campaigns, and determine media buying strategies. Using the self serve interface you can launch a campaign and it will turn live within an hour. This can be done the same day you receive access to your account.
Prior to launching any campaigns we recommend all buyers spend a few minutes in the My Account tab to tell OpenX a bit about their preferences. For instance, we offer an easy Category Block List screen, where advertisers can block things like gambling or firearms. Buyers can also block specific URLs that they know from experience don’t convert well for them.
The My Account tab is also where buyers set-up retargeting pixels.
Paul: You mentioned using OpenX Advertising Console to test campaigns. How does that work?
Ian: The OpenX Advertising Console gives marketers what they need most: an easy way to test which websites, audiences and geographies deliver the best performance prior to committing the majority of their media budget. With simple campaign set-up, and no minimum spending requirements, they’re free to run tests as often as they like. For instance, they can test $200 on the LA Times.
Paul: How does OpenX ensure that only quality publishers are a part of OpenX Market? And that if you’re an advertiser, you don’t show up on bad sites?
Ian: OpenX has a team of human editors, trained in categorization, who review and categorize every website manually. This process yields better results than using contextual crawlers. We also have a feature called BrandSafe Inventory, whereby a site must meet 25 criteria in order to qualify for that designation.
Paul: How does buying inventory via OpenX Advertising Console compare to buying directly from publishers and buying from ad networks?
Ian: Over 10,000 sites participate in the OpenX Market. It’s virtually impossible to pick up the phone and negotiate with that many publishers. So from an efficiency standpoint, you get access to a far larger set of publishers than you could work with directly.
Certainly when you buy directly from a website you have access to great features, such as guaranteed placement. But you’ll face two types of minimums: spending and CPMs. Many websites aren’t going to talk to unless you’re willing to spend more than $10K – and many require over $200K. And their goal is to get the highest CPM possible. So the pricing efficiencies are greatly in your favor when buy inventory via the auction mechanics of an ad exchange.
The other advantage of ad exchanges is that you can quickly adjust the mix of inventory based on performance, which you can’t do when you buy direct. In that respect, ad exchanges greatly reduce your risk of under-performing inventory. OpenX Market makes this form of optimization easy by providing domain level reporting and the ability to optimize the sites you run on in order to improve key metrics like click-through-rate. Another example of dynamic trafficking capabilities that exist in an exchange environment is the ability to increase CPM bids to boost volume, or decrease the CPM bid to hit performance goals.
With ad networks, the big concern is transparency. Ad networks often can guarantee they’ll run a buyer’s ad across their site list, but that site list might be a thousand deep, and the buyer has no insight into where specifically they have run.
Paul: So how does a buyer get started?
Ian: Getting started is quick and simple. There are no commitments or minimum spending requirements to work with us. Send us a message via our contact form and we’ll be in touch with you. And check out the overview to the OpenX Advertising Console in the video tutorial below — we’re looking forward to working with you!
