lessons learned from applying semantics to blogs
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Semantics & Blogs
Lotico San Francisco Semantic Web Meetup Hosted by Federated Media Publishing
August 8th 2012
Tim Musgrove Chief Scientist, Federated Media Publishing
©2012 Federated Media Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Who is FM?
John Battelle
http://FederatedMedia.net
Founded in 2005 to help hundreds of high-quality independent publishers band together to earn sponsorship and ad revenue Now a top-ten US audience (comScore) and growing fast Historically: have paid out well over $100 million to our authors and publishers
A couple of lessons I’ve learned about semantics & blogs
1. With display ads on blogs, you need semantics even more so than with a general audience
2. Higher level semantic features, such as reading level, can predict how much and where a blog post will be shared in social media
Part One
Display Ads On Blogs
An open secret
• Supply-side advertising players (including content networks like FM) often don’t like targeting to be too focused
• Why not?
• Because the math isn’t nice to them Let’s see that…
Ouch…….
To sum up:
Broad targeting increases both CPMs and sold inventory, but….
Narrow targeting brings a sharp decline in sold inventory
So, even though it has a higher CPM, narrow targeting isn’t done much.
$0
$200,000
$400,000
$600,000
$800,000
$1,000,000
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Run-of-network Broad targeting Narrow targeting
Is there another way to implement this?
• Q: What’s the one case when narrow targeting can have the effect of expanding the inventory purchased by the advertiser, instead of shrinking it?
• A: When it makes the advertiser comfortable going outside their usual content category Let’s see that….
Typical buy pattern (without conversation targeting)
Finance Tech Sports
Government & Law
Small Business Lifestyle
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
Suppose: Advertiser comes to FM w/a “cloud computing” campaign. This is what their buy usually looks like:
Modified buy pattern (with conversation targeting)
Finance Tech Sports
Government & Law
Small Business Lifestyle
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
But when the advertiser learns about Conversation Targeting, this is what their buy starts to look like:
Another implementation technique : Target conversations, not topics
• What’s the difference? – Topic = a particular theme of subject matter – Conversation = a cluster of related topics comprised of
various themes
• Results: simplicity for advertiser, and way more inventory!
• Let’s see an example….
The Small Business Conversation (just a subset of the topics)
affiliate marketing facebook marketing series online advertising small business week
better business bureau family business payroll tax social entrepreneurship
business advice family businesses product marketing social media marketing
business succession planning franchise association quickbooks startup catalyst
center for entrepreneurship franchise business review referral engine startup company
chamber of commerce franchise consulting rieva lesonsky startup magazine
customer service franchisee association ryan hanley startup weekend
dell small business franchisee of the year s corporation susan payton
digital marketing global entrepreneurship week sba 504 loan tj mccue
direct-response marketing guy kawasaki search marketing toilet paper entrepreneur
duct tape marketing ivan walsh small biz tech tour twitter marketing
entrepreneur corner linkedin small business book awards u.s. chamber of commerce
entrepreneur of the year marketing management small business expo viral marketing
entrepreneurs marketing strategy small business influencer viral video marketing
entrepreneurs roundtable multi-level marketing small business jobs bill yahoo small business
facebook marketing national small business week small business trends young entrepreneur council
Does it work?
• Aligned CTR: 49% higher than broad targeted ads
• Global CTR (including non-aligned): still 39% higher than broad targeted ads
– “Aligned” means the subject matter targeted has an obvious connection to the ad campaign. Occasionally this isn’t the case!
Exceptional lift in CTR
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Channel CTR
DFA-IB CTR
CT CTR
This charts the first 50 campaigns we put through Conversation Targeting at FM
RED: the industry standard CTR YELLOW: the typical CTR for the parent category in FM (Sports, Business, etc.) BLUE: the CTR attained by Conversation Targeting at FM
Exceptional lift in CTR
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0.10%
0.20%
0.30%
0.40%
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0.60%
0.70%
Channel CTR
DFA-IB CTR
CT CTR
CT usually outperforms the channel it is in.
The exception that proves the rule
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Channel CTR
DFA-IB CTR
CT CTR
CT rarely underperforms the channel it is in. The few exceptions are unaligned campaigns
An unaligned campaign is, for example, a car ad targeted to art, museums, fashion
The blog audience dilemma
• A network like FM’s – communities that are passionate about a common interest – presents a dilemma to advertisers
• One the one hand, it represents a denser concentration of influencers and thus is desirable for advertisers
• On the other hand, this type of audience may react differently to advertising
– They sometimes can be seen to engage more in endemic, conversational material….
– And less with conventional display ads (if targeted using only conventional methods)
Two ways that FM resolves the blog audience dilemma
1. FM encourages advertisers to utilize content-rich, conversation-oriented marketing pieces, e.g. sponsored content series, etc.
2. For display advertising, FM encourages advertisers to use “Conversation Targeting” to make sure their ads fit better into the specific conversation happening on a blog
Success of CT in the blog audience
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Channel CTR
DFA-IB CTR
CT CTR
CT can lift up audience engagement from below the norm, to above it
Lesson learned
• Those who supposed that avid blog readers are necessarily more adverse to clicking on ads than the average internet user, were not quite right
• It turns out, when the ads are made really relevant via semantic targeting, the CTR’s pop right up – even above Internet averages
• But it means you need semantics even more for blog-based ads than for general web-based ads
How far down the tree will they go?
• Advertisers presently are moving below top-level to “mid-level ontology” for targeting
• As this market matures, it seems they’ll keep driving down the tree
Tech
Bio-tech
Green-Tech
Enterprise Computing
AWS Storage
Cloud SaaS Cloud
Storage
Servers & Net-Ops
Consumer Computing
Cloud PaaS
Computing
Cloud Computing
Google Cloud
Storage Dropbox
AWS Storage
Integrators
AWS Storage Tool Kits
This is going to break the “classifier” approach to targeting, in favor of more scalable approaches (can you build a 1-million node classifier tree, which morphs daily?)
Part Two
What makes a blog post get shared more (or less)
on various social networks?
The case study
Measured two hundred blog posts from leading bloggers, by these criteria:
– Length of post
– Estimated grade level of post (6th grade, 7th grade, etc.)
– Number of: • Tweets
• Facebook shares
• LinkedIn shares
• StumbleUpon’s
• Google+1’s
How grade level was established: a voting engine
Implemented several formulas established in the literature Updated the vocabulary lists where applicable Discarded the high and low Took a weighted average of the remaining scores (weightings tuned manually)
Formula #1 #2 #3 etc….
Effects found: post length We all know that, in general, writing a longer text can turn out worse than writing less:
Long version:
Short version:
Effects found: post length
• In posts ranging from 100 to 600 words in length, there is more social media amplification as the posts get longer
• But this effect tapers off in the 600-1200 word-length range
• For posts longer than 1200 words, the effect reverses, i.e, adding more words seems to hurt amplification
• The above pattern held across all the social networks measured
Effects found: grade level
• Generally the grade level on FM’s network was about a grade-and-a-half higher than the Internet average, sometimes more
• Taken en masse, the amplification level of posts did not correlate strongly with grade level
• However, on closer inspection, we saw that different audiences with opposite preferences were cancelling each other out
• The biggest contrast was between Facebook-sharers and Linked-In sharers
Effects found: grade level Facebook vs. LinkedIn
• Facebook shares, especially on posts longer than 600 words, were inversely correlated with grade level
• LinkedIn shares, especially on posts shorter than 1200 words, were positively correlated with grade level
Effects found: grade level Summary
• Grade level works together with post-length to affect amplification with some audiences
• Facebook sharing is weak on longer posts unless they are at a lower grade level
• LinkedIn sharing is weak on shorter posts unless the writing is at a higher grade level
• Googlers and Stumblers and Tweeters lie at various points in between these extremes
Finding the sweet spot
The “sweet spot” would appear to be:
• Posts between 600 and 1200 words in length
• Written at a slightly higher-than-average (but not too high) grade level
Finding the sweet spot
• Posts in the “sweet spot” get the best overall amplification – avoiding a “penalty” from any of the audiences measured
• Caveat: this was a limited sample and a broader study is required
to validate these early results
600 1200 Words words
4th grade 8th grade 12th grade
amp
lific
atio
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Contact Tim Musgrove E-mail: tmusgrove@federatedmedia.net Twitter: @tmusgrove http://tech.federatedmedia.net/ http://about.me/tmusgrove http://www.slideshare.net/TimAtFM
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