AdJuggler (originally covered here) is an ad serving and management system which targets small and medium-sized publishers. Jonathan Rivers, Executive Vice President, took a few minutes to explain how AdJuggler is different from the big ad serving companies like DoubleClick and what the future holds for the company.
Jonathan, you’re quoted as saying, “For years we’ve been saying that companies can deploy AdJuggler’s technology to receive all the features provided by the three largest vendors but at a more attractive price.” (from About AdJuggler). How do you continue to stay competitive in an industry that’s dominated by DoubleClick (now owned by Google) who can also leverage price?
Jonathan: One of the great things about an industry thats dominated by large players is that they leave a lot of folk by the wayside for one reason or another. Our focus as a company is to lower the barriers to entry in the online ad serving market as well as providing boutique level of service and support whenever and wherever possible. One of the interesting things about Doubleclick is that they don’t actually leverage price. They still have high CPM’s and high monthly minimum. Their focus is really on the top tier of the marketplace and not really on the small to mid sized publishers, which is a space that we really shine.
When we talk about lowering the barriers to entry there are a couple of places that we do that. The first is focusing on the ease of use of the platform, the second is with service and support. When we sat down to launch the AdJuggler 6 platform, we spent months gathering feedback from our customers and traffickers and really concentrated on trying to refine the workflow of the product. One of the key design ideas was to reduce the number of clicks and particular action took and to reduce the number of steps that any task took. At the end of the day, our customers really want to focus on their business which is their site and their content, and we like to focus on letting them spend less time working with an ad server and leaving them more time for their core business.
When we talk about boutique levels of service and support, that is core to our company, our staff and our business model. We have 24/7 support via phone and email, and those are folks in our facility who are trained and responsible for supporting our products. The first part of taking care of customers is getting them well trained on the product so that they are successful right out of the gate, and our standard contracts contain 4+ hours of training. Most folks don’t need it, but hey if they do, its there for them. The second part is taking care of them once they are in production. This means answering their emails in a timely fashion and being there for them if they want to call and talk to someone about how to do something. Its our policy that email requests be addressed within hours of hitting our systems and our support team actively monitors open tickets to make sure people get taken care of.
The quote above was from the press release about AdJuggler becoming a member of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), and submitting AdJuggler 6 to be IAB certified. Besides being more competitive, are there any other reasons AdJuggler joined the IAB? I imagine having a voice in IAB standards would be very useful to product development.
Jonathan: In theory yes, but in terms of share of voice we would have little if any impact there. I think the standards are pretty well fleshed out at this point, and for us joining the IAB was really about commitment to our customers and our industry.
Speaking of competition, what are the challenges AdJuggler faces when working with third-party tags? How well do they work as far as tracking and serving? Have you run into any limitations?
Jonathan: The biggest challenge for us I think is the lack of transparency out there in the marketplace. There are some ad servers out there who dont have click tracking variables and that makes it difficult for people to traffic or track their tags. If there is a standard I would like to see the IAB chime in on it would be click tracking and the inclusion of variables or API style standards for ad servers to be able to better communicate with each other to help reduce discrepancies.
Many advertisers are very concerned about click fraud. How does AdJuggler mitigate the effect of click fraud on the stats for advertisers? Is click fraud as big of a problem as advertisers fear? What should advertisers worry about in terms of click fraud?
Jonathan: Our customers are primarily publisher and networks, so I cant directly speak for the needs of the advertiser community. That being said, I think click fraud is going to be an issue for the display (as opposed to search) side of things here shortly which is why we are in the process of integrating Click Forensics solution into AdJuggler now. This is one of those places it really made sense for us to work with an industry leader to provide better tools to our user base.
In terms of what people should worry about in terms of click fraud:
The more subtle fraud attempts. Blatant click farming is pretty easy to detect after the fact, what you have to watch out for is very slow methodical fraud which can be harder to detect, thats why we are working With Click Forensics.
AdJuggler offers full API access, as well as customization services. How are your customers taking advantage of these services?
Jonathan: The two biggest areas we are seeing folks use the API are back-end integrations and custom portals. On the integration side we have a number of folks who have plugged into either their billing or trafficking systems. This allows them to keep using the systems they already know and use and to have ad serving as a modular component. Next up are custom portals, we have had several customers do them for themselves and we have done a fair number to order. Customized portals are a great way for a network to really provide value for their publishers, it allows them to customize the experience to their publishers needs, or to provide that full level of integration with the site or other specialized technologies they may be using. On the publisher side its a great way to extend their services to advertisers (and increase revenues) by provide self service advertising tools.
Behavioral targeting has been a hot topic in Internet marketing circles as a way to reach customers throughout the buying process (and sales funnel). For example, a visitor to Cars.com may be interested in buying a car in the future and their behavior on the site may give clues as to which cars they are interested in. Advertisements targeted to those interests may be more effective for the advertiser. AdJuggler offers targeting based on cookies, keywords, geo-targeting, etc. How do these meet these goals of behavioral targeting? Are there other targeting methods planned for future versions?
Jonathan: Most behavioral targeting is being done via cookies, and we have a couple of customers who have built their own targeting engines doing just that. One of the great things about cookie targeting as a technology is its flexibility. It allows for behavioral and retargeting as well as multi condition display rules. (show x banner if they have seen y or z, but not w). In terms of targeting types we tend to like to provide raw technologies and help companies apply them in case specific solutions. That being said a simple retargeting module is in the planning stages, and we have a very deluxe header/referrer targeting module that is available on a custom basis.
What does the future hold for AdJuggler? Do you have any plans for future versions you can share with us?
Jonathan: More tools to simplify life really. I mentioned the Click Forensics integration which should be formally announced later this month. For the fall-winter season we are looking at another general product release that contains refinements as well as improved support for both XML based ad tags as well as support for XML feed advertising (receiving feeds from 3rd parties). Additionally we will be releasing a network centric version of AdJuggler with built in customizable portals for their advertisers and publishers.
Related Article: Web Ads – AdJuggler
Technorati Tags: AdJuggler, thruport, advertising, ads, display ads, online advertising