NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Quova, a Neustar Service and a leading provider of fixed IP geolocation data, today announced a partnership with XA.net, Inc., a fast-growing company creating technologies to help marketers engage their customers and prospects through real-time bidding for online display ads, to target advertising based on Quova’s IP data and intelligence. The combination now makes available Quova’s Audience Targeting Solutions (ATS) across XA.net’s demand-side platform: optim.al. ATS provides marketers with valuable intelligence based on IP addresses allowing for more precise targeting of business and consumer audiences.

“optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

“What is exciting about this partnership is that marketers can tailor their display ads to a specific audience in real-time by using Quova’s hyper-local data while bidding through the optim.al platform,” said Miten Sampat, vice president, Product Strategy, Quova. “optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

The companies also are collaborating on an innovative analytics offering that enhances XA.net’s industry-leading optim.al for Social advertising platform, the leading Facebook ad testing and management system.

“Though we have seen quite a bit of unbundling of data and media over the past several years, we fundamentally believe that our clients’ media-buys are more efficient and effective when data and media are priced and optimized together,” said Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO, XA.net. “We are excited to partner with Quova to bring our cutting-edge Real-Time Bidding expertise together with their world-class data, into one seamless and compelling package for our clients.”

Learn more about IP Audience Targeting

http://www.quova.com/ip-audience-targeting/

Contact Quova Sales: sales@quova.com

About Quova

Quova provides high-quality IP intelligence data. This data allows companies, large and small, to use detailed demographic and network characteristics to prevent fraud in online commerce; regulate online content (DRM) to stay compliant; and marketers to localize content and analyze traffic. Quova is the only full-service IP geolocation provider with a team of analysts, customer technicians and developer advocates who add human IP to network IP to offer consultative services along with its data. Quova is a Neustar Service, based in Mountain View, California. www.quova.com. Follow @quova on twitter.

Learn more about optim.al

http://optim.al

Contact XA.net Sales: sales@xa.net

About XA.net

XA.net is the first advertising technology company to be both an approved Facebook Ads API Tools vendor and have built its own robust real-time bidding and audience infrastructure, integrated with all major ad inventory sources. Based in San Francisco and backed by a proven team of social media and audience experts, the XA.net technology team created optim.al for Display and optim.al for Social, the leading multivariate ad platform for Facebook.

Americans aged 42 and older are underrepresented in Facebook. Here is the data comparing recent US Census results with Facebook penetration by year (all indexed to 100). Note that Facebook bundles people 64 and older together. So did we for this graph for Census data, and that group was particularly underrepresented. Grandma and Grandpa may be on Facebook to a greater extent than ever before, but we’re still a long way from it being representative of the US audience.

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.

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!

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.

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.