Third Party Ad Server Report 9/11/06

The third party ad server, or 3PAS, is a technology that advertisers can use to track customer behavior in response to their advertising across different websites. Instead of working directly with a website where the agency would have to check each website to see how their ad is doing, the agency placing the ads, can see up to the minute tracking information for a user in terms of what adds particular demographics go to, what their buying patterns are, what’s being sold; what is important to a particular demographic in a collective summery of how each ad is doing over various websites.

This service, for customers such as auto insurance companies, credit card companies and travel agencies, consolidates all the statistical data of those internet users who visit the sites on which they have bought media and are displaying ads. A unique aspect of this technology is that 3PAS providers are able to actively place a particular ad on a particular computer’s browser based on the cookies of that computer.

The third party ad servers are a vehicle to generate customers, and to track what is working to attract a certain demographic or what is not working, and then change what that particular demographic sees on a particular website, by going into a URL and changing the ad tag. This change is made immediately to the ad that is running.

This technology is being used by agencies that rep different marketers or advertisers like Telecom, Financial Services, Orbitz and Geico. They are generally companies that that have a high turnover of customers. Within a given month, the impressions delivered per client across all of the media buys can range from a few million to billions even trillions depending on the client. This technology has been around for over 10 years, and is widely used. The expectation is that there will continue to be a steady growth throughout the rest of the decade.

Back in the early 1990’s, simple online advertising would have been simple text links or ads of sort, hand coded directly onto a Web sites page. If an ad were to change on the site, someone would have to reprogram the html code for the site. As more Web sites were published, different code was written to help rotate ads across the sites, but there were still complications. Advertisers also had to go to each Web site they posted an ad on to check on responses and had different reports from each of the web sites they used. The third party ad server technology was conceived with the idea of consolidating the tracking and delivery of customer data

One of the special features of the 3PAS is the ability for these servers to read the cookies of computers that check out a website, and provide a specific ad for each computer based on the cookies (if the user has opted out of their cookies, a generic ad is shown). Computer users always have the ability to opt out of saving cookies. Although these third party ad servers actively seek out cookies on peoples’ computers, they work within the boundaries of established laws.