With the Republican primary election campaign getting into full swing, the XA.net data team decided to mine our proprietary optim.al social media graph, in order to shed light on the race’s themes and personalities; and perhaps even to steer us toward a prediction of who might take on President Obama in next year’s general election. [...]

Facebook is quickly becoming a premiere advertising destination on the web due to its large amount of user data which allow advertisers to target users by a number of targeting criteria. With 8 parent categories and 83 subcategories of users, Facebook will hopefully make the targeting process easier and better for advertisers. To read more [...]

In my first post on audience valuation, we asked a question about how difficult it was to find and define a certain audience. Online and offline targeting companies have long worked to create interesting buckets of users that will provide a lift to marketers when targeted with a related product or service. One of the [...]

We shared some interesting pricing data related to workplaces, on the.optim.al blog here. What it showed basically was recent data on the median of suggested CPC bid ranges for people who have certain workplaces on their Facebook profiles. The notion being, that advertisers will seek to target based on the targeting that is available and [...]

We’re helping many clients now by building custom models of what their audiences look like. It’s quite simple – we’ll model the converting user by matching to the data segments we have created and then be able to go and purchase other users that look the same. The idea is to compare the distribution of [...]

I am sometimes frustrated not just at the volume of junk mail that I receive from companies often on very glossy and heavy paper stock, but that in many cases it is coming to me advertising a product I already am a customer of. Being in the ad business, I know that sometimes it makes [...]

The past couple years have been a nervous time for conference planners across the advertising industry: recessions have forced both B2B and B2C marketers to tighten their purse strings, potentially threatening both attendance of conference sessions and the amount of exhibitors and traffic on the show floor. The  exhibit floor at SES San Francisco had more [...]

XA.net CEO Rob Leathern has been confirmed as a “Introduction to Remarketing” panelist for the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (SES) conference taking place August 16-20th at Moscone West. SES San Francisco is part of the larger Connected Marketing Week, which includes events hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Online Marketing Summit (OMS).