working with ad operations with a small to medium publisher has allowed me to see an opportunity in the way of providing ad statistics in a way that is easy for the operations person to gather and the advertiser to consume. We are receiving 3-4 requests for statistics a day for basic things such as the number of impressions and clickthroughs – but we also provide a detailed set of reports for amount of video viewed (in quarters), sections that the user clicked to go to the site, which video was playing when the click happened, etc…
all of these events are sent back to our servers to be aggregated and when an advertiser calls to check on them – we create the reports and send them on which can take a few hours and some custom made scripts to gather.
What if there was a third party to do this for us though – an independant company that would offer ping, clickthrough, and quartile creation, spitting out a short url tied to each event. The advertiser could enter the details: event title, location in the creative, and other metadata – and once the ping was saved the system would return a shorturl to record the event.
Once all of the events for a campaign were created and saved, the system should provide a comprehensive pdf or spreadsheet with the ad events that may be emailed to the publisher or the creative team to place into the creative.
to solve the need for up to date statistics on a particular campaign the system should, on an hourly or bi hourly interval, gather all of the pings that had been sent back to the system and generate an xml document based on the returned data that all parties can see.
the final leg of this is a desktop air application that would fetch the latest event info and present it in raw and graph format, allowing the advertiser the ability to keep up with how their ad is doing on any given network in almost real time. This application could be custom branded to prvide the publisher with additional marketing in the form of desktop real estate.
the business difficulty here is defining the end consumer: is that the publisher – a service that they would buy to provide their advertisers with greater insight into advertising performance on the publisher’s network and a little marketing? perhaps the advertiser: so they can keep up with the statistics across multiple platforms, or even the creative agency – so that they can provide their advertising customers with the data?
in the end, this seems like a relevant and necessary application, no matter who is charged for it…
is omniture an innovator in this space?
(http://www.omniture.com/en/)
