Comments on: Targeting Online Ads to a User Session

By: Matthew Roche

Matthew Roche — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:47:10 +0000

Yes. And it does work. But you are just scratching the surface of a much bigger opportunity. Why limit the experience to repeating the ad? In fact, just repeating might be counterproductive, as it is extremely unlikely that the display ad would be highly relevant in 3-5 different contexts. Instead, why not conceive of multipage ad units. It is what we do and it does work. Multipage targeting that goes beyond simple frequency works extremely well. You might be interested in: 10 Second Clip in a Thirty Second Slot 95% of Your Ad Sucks

By: eric yoon

eric yoon — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:58:34 +0000

The New York Times began offering user targeting via their in-house ad server a few years back (around 2003). They called it “Surround Sessions” and gives an advertiser the ability to create ads that would follow a user for up to five pages (if I remember right). Also, there was the ability to create story-like, multi-page ads that would follow the user for consecutive pages.

It’s described here on their media kit here:
http://www.nytimes.whsites.net/mediakit/pages/d_adprograms.html

By: eric hebert

eric hebert — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:39:06 +0000

I think this makes total sense, especially if the ad progressed into a message based on clicks. For example, landing page has ad #1 and that ad says “hi”. The reader clicks on the next page and the ad says “here’s my product” and then another click and ad # 3 says “heres a testimonial”.

The ads could build on the previous ads to get a message across. Sites with good multiple page view stats could sell these ads at a higher premium than sites that only get 1 or two page visits.

By: paul lomax

paul lomax — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:17:11 +0000

I think some ad servers may do this a bit already as part of their optimisation.The effect isn’t that noticable if there are lots of campaigns running on a site though.

On one of our sites we had two campaigns running of equal weight, but the ad manager was complaining she could only see one of them. We investigated and discovered that the ad server (DART) did appear to follow you session. If you kept refreshing then you got the same ad, but when you cleared your cookie it was 50-50 you’d see the other one.

Ad servers optimise to give maximum click rates – but since campaigns are booked for an impression delivery target it has to worry about that first…

Plus there is a balance – when paying by the impression you also want to maximise your reach. The question is, what is better – 10 people for 10 mins or 1000 people for 10 seconds.

By: Igor M.

Igor M. — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:20:45 +0000

I think this is a good idea. I’d definitely want to do a test on it.

By: Dale

Dale — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:33:23 +0000

Sounds like a good idea. However, I can see how it could also be an annoyance.