How Brokers Are Using Ad Exchanges to Generate Clients

Welcome to the silent online marketing revolution. Already more then 10% of online ad revenue, automated ad exchange sales are estimated to reach 34% of all online ad sales by 2017 according to some sources.

Going back to basics for a moment; An automated ad exchange in principle is an auction. Every time a website has not sold a banner impression directly and they have plugged in an ad exchange, this unsold impression will be sold to the highest bidder on the ad exchange. On the publisher side this is a great way to sell an otherwise perishable good (once gone, this impression can never be monetized so it’s better to get any price then nothing) and for the advertiser it means cheap banner inventory.

Taking it slightly more in depth, since the advertiser can buy a myriad of data, use smart data mining, do contextual targeting and a whole host of other techniques, they can turn an otherwise value-less impression into one that is meaningful. Saying that in a different way; since we can ‘know’ whether someone is a high net worth individual, plays golf, tends to visit financial sites, lives in a country where we can accept clients and is currently browsing on a site that has financial content we can be fairly sure this person is relevant for certain brokerages. Of course this is just one possible tactic, in an industry where you can literally get data on everything and match it to a site visitor, we can also do things like show our banner to someone that has already seen our banner on another site or has visited our site before.

The ‘knowing’ is being done by data mining and you can use own data or third party data. There are for instance providers that buy data from popular FX sites and use that to target these people across the web. We can also look at your current site visitors and see what profile is most alike and start finding people that are similar. Another way is to look at the page content like a program that Google runs via the Google Content Network, we can do that on a much larger scale via exchange based buying.

Also interesting for many brokers is that we can target a certain set of sites at a much cheaper rate then you would be able to by buying them directly. Premium financial sites like Forbes, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist and many many more all sell their unsold inventory on these exchanges and CPMs are typically much lower in return for the fact that impression volume is not guaranteed.

Whatever tactic we end up using, chances are as a marketer at a brokerage you have come across RTB or Ad Exchanges in some way or another. Media Group World Wide can help you optimize your campaigns and use it’s experience to take it to the next level and generate leads and clients at scale.