Marketing Blog

GumGum recently wrapped an innovative campaign with a simple goal: to entice leisure-loving guests to visit our clients’ hotels and resorts, whether for quick weekend getaways or longer holiday travel. To achieve this, we leveraged our proprietary targeting capabilities to find travelers in the US dreaming about or planning their next getaway. Then, we served up our highly visible contextually relevant ads while they searched for content relevant to adventure and relaxation. The results? Resounding success: GumGum's targeted ads earned a leading hotel and resort chain 148K extra visitors, at a cost per acquisition of $4.73—that's 12.75 times cheaper than other marketing channels typically considered for performance marketing, such as Google Search.

As marketers, it’s our job to be in touch with the unique sensibilities of the many audiences that make up our customer base. After all, it’s extremely difficult to sell someone a product if you don’t know where to reach them or how they like to be addressed. Moreover, when we are able to communicate effectively with members of a given demographic, we’re far more effective at cultivating loyal customer relationships and achieving our marketing goals. This is of utmost importance when that audience group is growing in size.

In order to find out where people are really turning their attention on the mobile web, we decided to conduct an eye-tracking study. In this experiment, we measured how more than 1,000 consumers interacted with editorial and advertising content on several mobile web pages, using eye-tracking technology to tell us where their eyesight was focused at any given moment.

In early 2018, Google Chrome will introduce a new ad blocker designed to prevent pop-ups and other ads deemed “intrusive” by the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA). While this change will create a better user experience for consumers, it also means that us marketers will have to re-think how we do things.

When the IAB first announced ads.txt, a scheme to combat the massive fraud that occurs when bad actors spoof premium inventory to siphon advertising dollars, we assumed every publisher would implement it immediately. After all, that breed of fraud costs the industry billions each year. And it’s not just marketingblogs who lose, every quarter; publishers lose untold million when the programmatic budgets meant for their sites are redirected to the pockets of bad actors.

Ads.txt is the direct result of an IAB project to put an end to domain spoofing through transparency. As the IAB explains: “Ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers and is a simple, flexible and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly declare the companies they authorize to sell their digital inventory.”4

GumGum has embraced header bidding because it offers tremendous benefits to our publisher partners, and it allows us to compete for impressions on behalf of our clients that may out of reach in a waterfall set up.

Less than three weeks after the Charlottesville protests (and barely six months after the Independent’s study on YouTube’s epic ad misplacements) a friend of mine posted an item from a fake news site to his Facebook page.