Others Online Blog

Affinity Analytics Beta Launch

We're pleased to announce the beta launch of our Affinity Analytics service for publishers and networks. This is not like any other Web site analytics you've seen.

Traditional web site analytics tell you about visits, page views, sources, etc. but nothing about your visitors. Our free Affinity Analytics service tell you about your audience and the topics/interests they care most about, based on how they browse not only your site but our whole network.

It takes seconds to sign up. Once you're approved, we'll provide you with simple HTML (Javascript) to copy and paste within your Web pages. That's it -- we then provide you with web-based reports (we also offer a data feed and API service) which show you the topics that your audience cares most about, and for each topic your audience's level of interest (average affinity strength score of 0-100), the commercial value of that topic in the advertising world, and how much of your audience cares about that topic. Here's a screen shot ...

You can also click on any of the topics to see trending data/graphs over the past 7 or 30 days. This helps you understand total unique visitors and page views for any given audience segment, allowing you to target them by their interests and affinity strength.

Increasing Social Network Ad Revenues

Ever since I heard about the MySpace HyperTargeting program last December, I've been looking for information about how it's been performing.

The theory, which we're proving to Others Online partners and which HyperTargeting is testing, is that ads in social network situations are better targeted not by the context of the page you're on, but on the content you write within your own profile/pages.

Looks like they're reporting 300% increase in clicks in initial tests.

UPDATE: Found a little more information on how MySpace HyperTargeting works and how they're charging. Looks like they are segmenting users into proprietary categories based on the information in their profiles, then selling those categories on a CPM basis at a 50% premium.

Affinity vs. Engagement in Advertising

Others Online has been working on some interesting reports for our partners to summarize in aggregate form what their users care about. As a matter of labeling, we've discussed the term "affinity" vs "engagement". The latter has been thrown around the online advertising space quite a bit recently, so I did some poking around the Web to get a better feel for how it's being used. Usually, going with some convention in labeling in more advantageous, rather than creating your own definitions (which markets get annoyed with IMO).

Stumbled upon an interesting and intelligent blog post on How the New Engagement Metrics Can Impact Advertising Decisions. In it, "engagement" was defined as the nature of visitors’ relationship with a site and how that is expressed in the full range of user interaction, involvement and connection. Kevin then went on to describe categories of engagement that effectively describe the kinds of engagement illuminating and differentiating Web sites for advertisers: loyalty, recency, click depth, interactivity, duration, and subscription. I should also point out that Kevin's work leveraged the work of Eric Peterson. Kevin then wrote:

How  can publishers collaborate with advertisers to yield actionable intelligence?

“We’ve developed Web technology to the point where we have an astounding wealth of data about audiences. Publishers can tell us what content audiences are consuming and the share of content downloads among competing advertisers. All this has been great. But what does it all mean? How can we turn that information into something we can act on?”

Brandon Starkoff, Vice President/Global Director at Starcom Worldwide

Starkoff’s point is critical to the whole point of seeking to establish a definition and a set of metrics for engagement. What does it matter if, as far as media companies are concerned, it doesn’t produce better insights into what will make advertisers successful with even the most “engaged” audiences? The kind of audience knowledge Starkoff says he is seeking is “predictive intelligence-advice on what kinds of advertising will work with a particular audience or audience segment.”

Advertisers right now think about engagement as a way to distinguish sites from each other.

It was in the last sentence that I realized what I felt was wrong with their line of thinking. It's not that advertisers need to distinguish sites from each other, but rather people from each other. Engagement is a term being applied as an attribute of a site, not a person. That's just wrong IMO. That's online advertising 1.0, not 2.0. As long as the industry continues to think in terms of targeting sites and not people, there will only be small incremental improvements to online advertising performance.

Affinity is a term which we feel best describes attributes of people, and what we actually care about. Since Others Online is all about targeting people and not sites/pages (based on our understanding of what they care about), that's clearly the label we need to use.