Advertising and Ad Campaigns

Advertising products

Advertising products are generally based on one of the following models:

• Performance based or cost per click (CPC)

• Impression based or cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

• Tenancy or banner ads, billed at a set fee for a period of time, often on a particular site.

Advertising products have three essential characteristics:

• The product type (CPC, CPM, Tenancy)

• Immutable product attributes (including available creative types, costs, ranking models, end dates)

• Configurable features that may be set by an advertiser (including keywords, content, devices, demographics)

Campaigns are created using advertising products. Advertisers pay the fees associated with the selected products. Brokers may create house campaigns to promote their own products. House campaigns do not normally attract fees and have a lower priority with respect to paid advertising.
Creative content for advertisements may be in the form of a text string, an image (including gif, jpg and png) or Flash for rich media advertising. The space required for an advertisement is known as an AdSpace and is usually a multiple of a standard IAB unit.

Contextual advertising

Using Advertising, a publisher may display advertisements that are relevant to the context in which the ad will be shown, and should therefore be more relevant to the end user's interests.

Advertising uses a contextual engine to build indexes of contextual data which are then used to select advertisements relevant to the end user's interests for display.

Ensuring that advertisements appear in a context that is related to the item being advertised can increase the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Cxense Advertising may be configured to analyse web pages and user intentions to ensure that the contextual indices are used to retrieve ads that are relevant to the person viewing the page. Keywords specified by the advertiser may be used to match search terms or contextual entities from the user's searches or online activity.

Publishing overview

Advertisements may be published across various networked delivery channels including mobile phones, SMS and web sites. Advertisements are retrieved for display to the end user by means of a JavaScript hook or via the Impression Request API. The selection of advertisements may be controlled by filter criteria, although these may be overridden by search request parameters.

The characteristics of an AdSpace will be used to determine what advertisements are eligible for display on the site, including mime type, size, codec, base ad unit dimension and the space multiplier.

Product validation

When advertisers purchase a product, they must provide values or content for feature placeholders that are customisable by the advertiser.

When this has been done, the product will be validated according to the rules for that product, the status of the contract is updated and the user is able to proceed with the purchase.

If a broker has created a product specifically designed to be sold in the period before a major festival, the flight dates may be constrained to limit the period in which the product can be used. If the purchaser sets dates in accordance with those rules, the product will be validated and hence available for purchase with the appropriate contract.

The contract for a product will be appropriate to the product type (CPC, CPM or Tenancy).

Tenancy product contracts

Contracts for Tenancy products commence on a fixed start date. Purchasing the product after the start date will result in the full fee being charged for the period, unless a manual adjustment is made by the broker. The contract is for the remainder of the available period, (day/week/month).

Tenancy products are charged at a set price for a specific slot or set of slots. The fee is payable on purchase, and the broker is committed to showing the relevant advertisements on the specified AdSpaces at the specified times.

There may be setup and/or periodic fees.

CPC product contracts

CPC products are not based on a contracted number of impressions. They must be 'published' by the advertiser, and may be paused and re-started at any time without penalty.

The advertiser is charged for the clicks the ad receives. The display of the ad is determined by the results of auction processing which takes place when a request for an ad is received.
There may be setup and/or periodic fees.

CPM product contracts

CPM campaigns are bounded by start and end dates. The advertiser may choose a required number of impressions up to an estimated maximum limit. The broker is bound to display the selected number of impressions.

The costs for a CPM campaign are based on the numbers of impressions the advertiser chooses.
There may be setup and/or periodic fees.

Changing a campaign or ad make impact the number of impressions that may be delivered. Pausing a campaign or modifying targeting criteria will affect the number of impressions that can be delivered.

Pausing campaigns and ads

Campaigns and ads may be paused or deactivated at any time. The product type and configuration determines what the effect of pausing the ad or campaign will be.

Pausing and charges

For CPC products there is generally no charge. Products such as CPC and Tenancy are billed on purchase and there is no refund made when the product is paused. On-going product fees will be applied in accordance with the purchase contract.

Deactivation will similarly not result in fees being refunded. Ads will be removed from tenancy spaces and the contracted impressions for CPM products will not be delivered.

Modifying advertisements

Ads may be modified, depending on the product type and configuration.

In general, ads can be modified or added to an existing product

• If it is a CPC or tenancy product, or

• If the product is CPM and has no additional matching criteria

Keywords and bids

Keywords are used to match advertisements with an intended audience. The audience matching is done on the basis of web page content (contextual material) or search terms.

Advertising keywords have various attributes, including

• Bid value

• State (active or inactive)

• Match type

• Language

• URL

The bid value is the maximum amount the advertiser is willing to pay for the advertisement.

Keyword match types

There are 4 keyword match types available:

Exact match

Only matches purchased keywords.

Broad match

Matches all purchased keywords, including additional unmatched keywords. All of the purchased keywords must be present, in any order.

Phrase match

Matches all purchased keywords, including additional keywords. The order of the keywords is respected.

Negative match

Excludes the purchased keyword from a match when performing a broad, partial or phrase match.

Keyword suggestion

Advertisers may request information about keywords and their performance. The keyword information is obtained from the following sources:

• Spelling - corrections for known mis-spelled words

• Common keywords - related keywords that are frequently used in searches

• Synonyms - synonyms and conceptual matches, as defined in the system

The information about each keyword will include the expected number of impressions per day.

Advertiser budgets

Advertisers may use budgets to manage their expenditure over a period of time. Budgets may be set on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Budgets may be applied to

• CPC campaigns

• CPC advertisements

• An advertising account

Only one budget may be applied to each item.

Advertisements are displayed until a budget is overrun. A slight overrun is normal. The amount of the overrun over the budgeted amount is applied to the advertiser's account.

Advertiser accounts and statements

Advertising account balances are maintained in the account currency.

The following transactions may be applied to an advertising account:

• Advertising fees and charges, including set-up fees, click charges, periodic fees etc

• Broker adjustments

• Fees and transactions from third party systems

Account statements are normally prepared on a monthly basis and show

• Opening balance of the account

• Payments

• Adjustments

• Charges

• Closing balance

Advertising account balances

A pre-paid account whose balance is zero or negative will not normally allow ads to be shown, unless the broker changes the threshold value.

Post-pay advertisers may also not display ads if their account balance is below a threshold, set by the broker. This threshold is normally set high, and represents a credit to the advertiser on behalf of the broker.

Brokers may have advertising accounts that require no payments to be made. These accounts should be created as post-pay accounts with large minimum account balance settings.

Importing and exporting ads

Advertisers may use a CSV file to up- and down-load keywords and bids for an ad.

Note that

• Importing a CSV file will create a new campaign

• Only standard CPC products with a text creative, keywords and two lines of descriptive text can be exported

• Monetary values are assumed to be in the user's default currency

Advertiser reports

The advertiser performance report can be used to monitor the performance of an advertising campaign and its related budget.

The report includes:

• Impressions

• Clicks

• Average click-through rate (CTR)

• Average position

• Average CPC

• Cost

Reports may be displayed with grouping options and graph views.

Last updated: December 20, 2021