Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #17

There's quite a lot to get through today so I'll just start right now. I attended an AMNET Team meeting where we discussed the benefits of using what is known as search retargeting, a kind of retargeting based upon the movements of individual consumers through their conversion path, the decisions made as they go remembered by cookies so that they can be segmented into possible consumer groups such as interest-specific, sub-culture-based etc. so that the end result delivers a personal creative in the ad space to hopefully drive them to clicking and -hopefully- converting as well. It was a very interesting meeting with a leaflet handed out to illustrate the benefits and in general was an inspiring event, that kick-started the day and injected life into me, which is why I think I got through so much.

 A New Strategy!

My main tasks for the day however were focused on more spendchecks and site transparency reports for our clients, filling in the previous days' spend and then using those to ascertain the main performing sites and then to specify the ones dragging the campaign performance down. Using these facts I was able to write up suggestions for the campaign in the future like I have done previously. There were actually some surprising results in the exchanges that weren't driving performance, and in certain -very popular sites- that, although drove very high levels of impressions (and therefore had low CPMs) they didn't drive any clicks or conversions which either lead to underspending or overspending on too few clicks or conversions e.g. some CPAs went over £100. In the end these were rooted out and so with a little luck and further trial and error, we'll ideally strike that golden balance we seek and find the sites that are best for us, combining them with exchanges that position them optimally.

This pretty much sums up the day, but it feels like I did more. I reality it was just the same few tasks completed for a few different clients, with some 4-5 site transparencies completed along with a couple of spend checks, which are becoming easier I am glad to say. The main benefit of these last two or three weeks however is not so much in the completion of reporting tasks but in interacting with our DSPs, with a colleague showing me how to plan strategy via the relevant tool, which was very enlightening in how we select groups of people from preset lists and place undesirable websites into either the basic exclusion list, that gets continually updated if particular URLs deliver poor results across multiple exchanges, and the blacklist, which stores bad sites such as the porn sites and -I imagine- sites associated with unsavoury political groups like terrorist organisations etc. All in all, I hope that you found this informative and I hope you'll come back next week.