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.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – August 18, 2010) –  XA.net, providers of advanced online media management and optimization platforms and services, celebrated its third consecutive profitable quarter, and announced the expansion of their partner service offerings with the Creative Media Hub, a marketplace of trusted partners providing scalable creative services and solutions.

“The XA.net team continues to add value and deliver performance for our clients with our audience-based advertising solutions,” said Rob Leathern, CEO and founder of XA.net. “Just like our data partner integrations, our Creative Media Hub allows our clients to find valuable services integrated with our buying platform to fit their needs,” Leathern added.

The Creative Media Hub’s initial vendors offer a variety of products and services fitting the budgets and needs of advertisers and agencies of all sizes:

• 4delite offers the first self-service rich media publishing platform to make eye-catching flash and HTML5 display ads for the web and mobile devices in minutes. All without writing one line of code.
• BoostCTR offers the only service that lets advertisers outsource the creation and testing of text ads through a marketing copywriter network. Advertisers only pay for ads that beat the performance of their best existing ads.
• Interpolls‘ next generation rich media technologies power campaigns for Fortune 500 marketers and their agencies, providing custom scalable solutions via HTML5, Flash, Video, and social media strategies.
• Oggifinogi is the leader in advanced rich media solutions providing the Real Time Rich Media (RTRM) suite of creative ad products delivering high-impact, feature-rich ad units with cutting-edge technology and analytics designed to deliver market leading ROI.
• OneScreen provides a video syndication and monetization platform enabling advertisers to deliver rich video experiences integrated with XA.net’s platform.

With offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and previous funding provided by prominent advertising technology investors including WGI Group, XA.net is poised to continue its momentum with proprietary real-time bidding and audience management technology, delivered through an easy and intuitive interface.

XA.net strives to bring value to advertisers through transparency and was excited to see that almost a third of the first organizations to commit to self-certification made up a significant portion of our inventory partners: AOL/Advertising.com, ContextWeb, Inc./ADSDAQ Exchange, Fox Audience Network, Google, and Yahoo!. XA.net’s CEO, Rob Leathern is a current member of the IAB Networks and Exchanges Committee.

Read the IAB’s full press release for more information about the certification process.

Read the feature on AdExchanger.com

http://bit.ly/facebook500mm

Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding

According to some predictions, up to a third of network advertising may be moving through real-time bidding systems by the end of this year. This latest technology trend promises to match the right ad to the right person within milliseconds of their entering the page. The technology and the algorithms are complex, but do they always work as advertised? Do agencies and brands know what they are buying…and what they are buying into? Are the RTB systems out there working in the publisher’s best interests or the media buyers? We bring in some of the top competitors in the field for a class OMMA grilling in order to determine how RTB vendors differentiate themselves and answer the hard questions both publishers and media buyers must bring to the table.

If you’re going to be at the event and would like to catch up with us, send us an email.

Register and Get $400 Off OMMA Ad Nets with Code: ADNETSXA

The code is only good for the first 20 registrants, so act now!

The conference takes place on Monday, July 19, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, located on 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. We hope to see you there!

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.

This month, we continue to follow the growth of Facebook and the countries with the highest percentage of their population with accounts. According to XA.net’s analysis of Facebook’s figures, the social interaction hub has grown its worldwide audience to 465.6 million people (as of June 1st), growing 42% since November 2009 (326.9 million). We found some interesting trends forming in the data, too:

When You’re Hot, You’re Hot. When You’re Not, You’re Not

The Top 15 countries with the deepest Facebook audience penetration (Chart 1) also showed a good deal of penetration growth, indicating that Facebook audience’s continuing viral growth. On average, the penetration growth for the top 15 Facebook countries (by audience penetration) was 9%, while the remaining countries only showed an average penetration growth of 5%.

Iceland remains the most Facebook’ed country, with 60% of its population on Facebook, almost 20% more than the United States’ 41% penetration.

Fastest Growers

The Top 15 fastest growing Facebook audiences almost all doubled in size since November 2009, with Romania more than tripling their audience size to 1.3 million users. While audience growth has continued its phenomenal pace, Facebook’s worldwide penetration is only at 10%, showing they still have a lot of room for further growth!

Indonesia, Mexico, and India all show tremendous opportunity for continued penetration growth: All three countries are amongst the fastest growing and largest audiences, but only have 11%  (Indonesia, Mexico) and 1% (India) penetration into their respective populations.

Large countries like China, Japan, and Russia have 1% or less of their population on Facebook, also leaving room for tremendous growth.

Size Matters- United States Still the Largest Facebook Country

The US still maintains the largest Facebook audience with 125.5 million people, followed by the United Kingdom with 27 million, and Indonesia with almost 25 million users as of June 1st, 2010. The US Facebook audience grew by 29% since November 2009, but its audience only represents 41% of the total population, ranking it 10th in the world by penetration (Chart 1).

Indonesia continued a sharp growth trajectory, and became the 3rd largest Facebook audience overall, jumping past Canada, Italy, France, and Turkey in Facebook population size. Mexico more than doubled its Facebook audience, landing it in the 9th position of the Top 15. India broke into the Top 15 largest Facebook audiences, displacing Chile from the list.

XA.net’s API Produces Results for Facebook Advertising

As one of Facebook’s first API-enabled advertising partners, XA.net can help you effectively manage and optimize your Facebook ad campaigns via its multivariate text ad platform.

Find out more today: contact our account management team to start advertising on Facebook.

Check out the full set of Facebook audience data.

“On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising.”

Through this membership, XA.net strengthens our commitment to the advertising industry and the larger conversation that will inform future standards and practices of online advertising. In addition to  our efforts to create transparency, value and efficiency through our technology platform and services, our participation in the IAB’s Networks and Exchanges Committee will help to develop best practices that protect consumers and our industry.

As technological advances push the capabilities of online advertising further, education, communication, and participation will be of the utmost importance to lift the industry as a whole. The team here at XA.net looks forward to further contributing to our industry’s future gains.

XA.net helps clients buy all forms of media and data, via real-time and non-real-time systems including advertising exchanges, marketplaces, publisher aggregators and publishers. The company has built core technologies that greatly streamline and make more efficient the process of creating, running and optimizing ad campaigns across all media.

XA.net’s online text and display advertising buying platform retains its current CPMatic.com brand name. XA.net is also announcing today two new initiatives it is making available in the marketplace in Q2, 2010:
BrandX – a brand safety system for large advertisers and agencies
AudienceX – an audience extension product for publishers

BrandX is a methodology that combines comprehensive screened pre-campaign site lists with post-campaign tracking and reporting for XA.net clients, offering unparalleled transparency and efficiency in media buying.

AudienceX lets large publishers sell access to their audience quickly and easily across a variety of media placements, and manage these advertiser buys centrally via CPMatic or have them created and managed by the XA.net team.

“Our CPMatic platform has always been open for anyone to sign up and immediately use which allows us to continually evolve its features and functionality,” commented Rob Leathern, CEO of XA.net.

“We want the overburdened marketing manager at a company or agency to see us as a single place they can get both media and data, and view consolidated reporting with a single payment relationship. We make it easy to buy any online media with access to every data source, with integrated support from our account team. We’re creating a single hub for the best online advertising services,” added Leathern.

XA.net makes advertising more powerful and simpler to understand and manage for marketers. XA’s CPMatic.com and its related technologies allow both small and large-scale media buyers the ability to create hundreds of campaigns and ad tags across every available supply channel in an easy and efficient manner, and to scale up media buys based on goal-oriented performance metrics.