The interest graph is dominated by a dense, central cluster of Republican politicians (‘mike huckabee’, ‘tim pawlenty’), media personalities (‘bill o’reilly’, ‘sean hannity’), and Republican boosters (‘federalist society’, ‘positively republican’, ‘tea party patriots’).  Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry are all solidly in this cluster, expressing the sort of ‘race-to-the-base’ into which presidential primary contests tend to evolve.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is just barely connected to the core cluster; suggesting that, despite years of rumor regarding a presidential candidacy, Palin is not a viable Republican contender.  In fact, the actual Sarah Palin who emerges from this interest graph is less a politician and more a suburban strip mall celebrity, hovering between teenage heartthrobs, reality TV stars and fast food chains.

Similarly, Ron Paul also comes across as an outsider in our research, though this is a characterization that he would likely appreciate.   Paul hovers near radio host/conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as well as keywords such as ‘libertarian’, ‘constitution’ and ‘common sense’.  That said, neither Paul nor Palin is completely disconnected from the cluster at the graph’s core.  For example, Paul shares a connection to ‘constitution’ with Mitt Romney; Palin shares a connection to George Bush with both Romney and Bachmann, and a link to keyword ‘jesus is the son of god’ with Rick Perry.

To the extent the primary election becomes about policy instead of personality, it appears that Perry may have an edge.  While the 3 core candidates are all associated with themes around healthcare reform repeal (‘repeal it now’, ‘scrap the bill’, ‘choose freedom stop obamacare’), Perry is out ahead of his competitors with regard to other key issues important to the Republican base (‘secure the border’, ‘defeat debt’, ‘guns and patriots’).  Perry is also the candidate most closely associated with ‘college republicans’, a sure source of motivated and inexpensive labor, willing to brave the desolate winters of Iowa and New Hampshire, where the election will be fought.

Perry is also the only candidate who shows a strong affinity with Ronald Reagan.  If the tone of the primary moves away from policy and becomes an exercise in occupying and mobilizing the cult of Reagan; well, Perry may have that wrapped up as well.

To read more about this topic and see charts and statistics go to Wedbush’s This Week in Social Media (TWISM) XA.net – Closing Gap Between Time Spent on Facebook vs. Ad $’s Spent written by XA.net’s CEO, Rob Leathern.

Read articles like this one relating to Facebook advertising at our new social media blog, the.optim.al.

As we consider data and targeting within the social media world, it is fun and instructive to look at the meta data on audience segments and make some inferences about how likely we are to be able to target a large proportion of our desired group. Using the example from our last post, if 54% of people drink coffee, but say we are only able to find 5% of them because they somehow exhibit this behavior in an addressable way (e.g. filling out a warranty card in the offline world tied to their home address as has been done for decades) we can say that our “find rate” for that audience is about 9%.

In social media, with audience-supplied information, find rates are going to be quite low. Thus targeting models and targeted marketing are going to flow towards those people on whom we or our partners have data. The ideal solution is a combination of audience-supplied and inferred data. And with that – I refer you to the latest posting on our optim.al blog about the broad category data targeting on Facebook.

Audience valuation, the trends underlying it and how they change are all key parts of what we do everyday at XA.net. When you think about audience value, you should think about a few components – which I helpfully frame as questions here:

1. How difficult is it to identify this audience, find the audience, and is targeting it even possible at all? (fundamental, not trivial questions!)
2. What is the premium to target this audience versus the audience that contains it?
3. How much response lift does targeting this subset of the larger audience provide?
4. Does the targeting method/medium place any special constraints on the message you can deliver?
5. What operational costs are involved with targeting the audience via this methodology?
6. Is it possible to measure effectiveness using controls, and/or does showing something to this audience make it impossible to properly measure effectiveness (a la Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle)

A silly example to think through some of the above might be let’s say, identifying coffee drinkers. So while it is easy to identify someone who drinks coffee (ask them!), finding them in our chosen medium (online) is far more difficult than offline. The value of this audience is also probably fairly low compared to the cost to target it  — 54% of US adults drink coffee daily and so the general value of someone who is a coffee drinker may not actually be that high. In Part II, we’ll share some ideas and thoughts here on other ways to think about audience targeting, and provide some specific examples.

The idea is to compare the distribution of conversions or successes (e.g. sales of a product) as against the distribution of the online audience. So for a given segment, if I see 1.5% of the converted audience matching that segment, and 0.75% of the online audience typically being in that segment, I would have an index value of 200 ~ my converters are twice as likely to be in that group as an average online user.

Here is what a chart of this looks like for a single product, for example. The upper line is the conversion cumulative audience count by segment and below it in yellow is the segment distribution for the online audience. In this case we can see the first vertical line and box indicates that about 20% of the typical US online audience accounts for 40% of conversions — and depending upon what basis we pay for the segment data we have we could continue to buy data up to a point on the right.

We’re conducting this analysis for both cpmatic.com and optim.al clients right now to help come up with the unique audience-conversion concentration picture we can harness to drive extraordinary results!

I do unfortunately notice that a lot of companies do this online as well, showing me expensive retargeted ads for products I already use and of course I’ve read the inevitable articles in places like the New York Times decrying ads that follow users surfing around the web (http://1ad.me/v). It’s a lot easier to control this online than offline – simply drop a piece of code on your page that removes the user from the retargeting segment. Users who are prospects but have not yet turned into customers should be targeted for retargeted ads, but those who have already become paying customers should NOT be retargeted, unless of course there is an upsell opportunity to a higher tier of service.

That’s problem 1 – showing ads to people that already buy your product. And part of the reason for this, I know from one company that has been doing this and who described to me how they set this up, is that companies are still getting great ROI and vendors are making a lot of money while still being lazy about how they set these things up. A client that sees a 3x performance boost versus a traditional campaign will be very happy – but when you show them that if they’d eliminated the wasteful impressions in the campaign they would be at an 8x ROI, they are a little less happy.

Consumers are being drowned in retargeted ads today — vendors are not properly controlling frequency on retargeted campaigns – part of the reason for that is that retargeting campaigns are typically small in size. Let’s say that you have a 200,000 user segment you want to hit every month, you bid a $6 dynamic CPM (ceiling) and end up at a $3.00 CPM rate across ad exchanges – you’re a whopping $600 a month account for one of these vendors…. and they cannot afford to service you for that price hence they pump up the ad volume to $1000-2000 a month. Maybe they charge you on a CPC, maybe something else – or maybe they convince you that their view-based conversion numbers are metrics you should pay attention to (and pay them for!).

Be careful. This is a treacherous path to walk down and is the reason if you browse around having visited your own site you may see a few of your ads but beware if you see too many! It’s impressive to see your ad on a large publisher website, but if you’re seeing it four or five times a day on various sites you might be getting a raw deal.

Given the opportunity to speak about remarketing/retargeting, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, was pleased with the crowds and session attendance and had this to say:

“People across online advertising disciplines are committed to learning all they can – to incorporate best practices and new technologies for improved campaign performance. Remarketing connects search and display advertising efforts like no other technology, and, when used correctly, can drastically improve conversion metrics for both mediums. It was good to see so many people engaged on the subject.”

Rob’s portion of the panel presentation focused on case studies that showed the best practices XA.net has used implementing retargeting/remarketing for clients’ display campaigns.

Check out Rob’s Introduction to Remarketing presentation slides.

Rob will be featured on Tuesday, August 17th as a panelist during “Introduction to Remarketing”. In this session industry experts will share their experiences with Remarketing (also known as retargeting) and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI. The panelists will also address the lack of awareness and the issues that have arisen surrounding Remarketing as a result.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – March 29, 2010) – XA.net’s CPMatic.com, the first broadly-accessible advertising platform to allow advertisers automated, optimized access to both media and data, and eXelate, the first and largest open marketplace for online targeting data, announced today the results of the recent integration of eXelate data into the CPMatic platform and the dramatic results for clients that they have been able to generate together.

For the past several months, CPMatic customers have had one-click access to eXelate data across multiple media exchanges including Right Media, Google DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange, AdBrite, AdMeld, PubMatic and others, and the results have demonstrated the value of using eXelate’s audience targeting data when combined with CPMatic’s proprietary frequency and site quality control systems.

A computer retailer accessing eXelate data on CPMatic.com using multi-day variable frequency caps saw a 92% ROI lift on the targeted campaign vs. a single-frequency-cap no-data control on the same site inventory. The campaign ran from January 1st, 2010 through March 15th, 2010. The ROI lift figure includes the cost of the data and media, both of which CPMatic managed and handled payment for via a single insertion order.

XA.net’s CPMatic makes advertisers more efficient by streamlining media, data, testing design, decisioning and payments. CPMatic accesses online media from all ad exchanges and major inventory sources, and data from a range of data providers including eXelate. Dozens of CPMatic clients have seen powerful results using data from multiple data providers including eXelate, Blue Kai, AlmondNet and TargusInfo to run data optimized campaigns via CPMatic.com. CPMatic also makes it easy for advertisers to use their own audience data for retargeting campaigns.

Advertisers can now easily access and leverage identity, interest and purchase intent targeting data on over 150 million monthly U.S. users across multiple media exchanges and receive centralized billing and analytics on CPMatic.com related to eXelate data.

“We’re pleased that our data is so easily available and has been leveraged to accelerate performance for CPMatic clients. CPMatic.com is the only self-service advertising platform that allows advertisers both large and small to access eXelate’s broad pool of deep targeting data quickly and at scale, leveraging our dynamic integration and business model, to reach the exact audience in any part of the purchasing funnel they are targeting, in an optimized media environment,” commented Mark Zagorski, Chief Revenue Officer of eXelate.

“We’re excited to be working with eXelate as a partner to offer clients direct one-click access to their powerful online targeting data, and look forward to further leveraging some of the new segments eXelate continually adds to their offering,” said Rob Leathern, CEO of XA.net (formerly CPM Advisors), which runs CPMatic.com. “Both our full- and self-service advertisers are seeing great results with our retargeting and behavioral targeting solutions. We’ve set up a site at http://buy-exelate-data.com to show advertisers just how easy it is to start buying data.”

The eXelate-CPMatic integration enables use-based pricing which guarantees that the advertiser only pays for data when the desired user is reached. All data costs are paid to eXelate by CPMatic without any cost markup — and the media costs from multiple exchanges and media partners are also centrally measured and billed by CPMatic for the client in its user interface reporting.

About XA.net and CPMatic.com:

XA.net provides technologies and related services that help advertisers buy and manage all forms of media and data, via real-time and non-real-time systems. XA.net harnesses the power of billions of daily interactions to manage, optimize and scale advertising processes for advertisers. CPMatic accesses media from all major inventory sources, and data from a range of providers including eXelate, Blue Kai, AlmondNet, TargusInfo and others. Visit http://buy-exelate-data.com, http://cpmatic.com or http://xa.net/technology to learn more.

About eXelate:

The eXelate eXchange is the world’s first and largest open marketplace for behavioral targeting data. Through participation on the eXchange and access to proprietary data management tools such as eXelate’s teXi, data buyers build an instant behavioral targeting function and optimize their campaign delivery, while data sellers gain direct control over their audience data distribution and build a new privacy-friendly income stream. The eXchange includes over 40 top ad network, agency and demand side platform buyers and dozens of leading publishers, who deliver targeting data on 150M U.S. unique users in lucrative verticals including Business-to-Business, Auto, Travel, Finance, Shopping and registration-based Demographics. For more information please visit http://www.exelate.com.