In response to this low creative budget we came up with the innovative approach of using a completely invisible banner ad for the campaign. Very creative if we do say so ourselves!

Now you may feel that an invisible banner would be slightly ineffective at building demand and driving conversions but we are happy to report that thanks to our cutting edge post view conversion tracking technology we were able to track 501 conversions from users who were exposed to this banner.”

Campaign Summary

• Campaign Impressions: 13,849,407
• Campaign Clicks: 0
• Campaign Conversions: 501

Ok, all a bit silly, but this campaign is real. TPN created an invisible banner (a 1×1 pixel) and ran this across a few popular websites on our network. We used “standard” post view (impression) conversion tracking to tag users with a cookie once they had loaded the invisible banner and then the system followed them though to the advertisers site where conversions were recorded using a TPN tracker pixel.

If this campaign was real (visible banner) we would have expected 1000 post click conversions, so 500 for not even displaying a banner is not bad

Why would we do this?

Use of  ”raw” post view conversion data is common place in the market and we wanted an easy way to illustrate the issues using such data.  ”Raw” post view conversions is really a measure of a channels reach and not of its direct influence effect. For example if you exposed 100% of the internet population to a banner then all your conversions could be linked to the banner via raw post view tracking.

Just because something is an industry standard does not mean that it is correct, nuclear testing in the pacific was the “industry standard” but maybe it was not the greatest idea ever.

Now we are not saying that exposure to display ads does not indirectly benefit site traffic and conversions, but we would say that using raw post impression tracking is misleading and is often used irresponsibly just because it generates a big number and ROI.

How should you do it?

It is possible to use post view conversion tracking in a responsible way by working with a network like TPN who can exclude a “control group” who are still tagged with a view pixel but are blocked from seeing any ads from the campaign. The conversion rate of this “non-exposed” group can then  be compared to the “exposed” group with the difference in conversion rates being the post view “uplift” of the campaign. This data allows the real post view conversion to be calculated.

There are still a number of other aspects that need to be taken into account if your mission is to estimate non-direct benefits of your campaign but at least you will be working with meaningful post view data rather than the “industry standard” BS.

“Real Post View” tracking is currently in beta so please contact us if you are interested in trialling with one of your TPN campaigns.

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The Webjet vs Dan Brown example below illustrates the power of even the simplest targeting and the dramatic impact this can have on publishers earnings given TPNs commitment to the CPC (cost per click) model. As we can see if users in their 20’s and 30’s are shown the Webjet ad they are 7 times more likely to click on the ad than users over 50.  To further validate this targeting model we can see that users over 50 are 3 times more likely to click on the Dan Brown ad than the Webjet ad.

So what does this mean for publishers?
Because TPN favours CPC campaigns the higher the CTR (click through rate) the higher the eCPM (earnings per thousand ad impressions) for the publisher. If a few simple assumptions are made then it can be demonstrated that the use of targeting on these two campaigns would increase the networks average eCPM payout by 60%.  What’s more publishers with a tight set of demographics could increase earnings by a few hundred %.

Webjet vs Dan Brown - Targeted Placement

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