Why are you serving on anonymous inventory?
Many premium publishers choose to offer ad placements anonymously via the exchanges and therefore do not disclose their site names to advertisers. Publishers mask their brands because they end up offering what would normally be highly valuable and expensive inventory for a lower cost across the exchanges. It is also commonly done to prevent channel conflict with the publisher’s direct sales force. Inventory that is shown as "anonymous.google" is controlled by Google’s exchange AdX, and is not a Quantcast specific issue. This issue applies to all partners who buy inventory through the exchanges. We do not recommend blocking this inventory because, as with all inventory, we only serve ads there when the sites and/or the users browsing those sites have a high likelihood of driving your objectives.
Why are you serving ads on sites/categories that are not relevant to my brand?
As an AI-powered advertising platform, we identify users we predict will deliver the outcomes you want, and we optimize the delivery of your impressions accordingly. The volume of users who can drive value to your brand far outnumber the volume of sites that have an obvious relevance to your brand. We find those users across a broad spectrum of behavioral patterns. A particular domain may have no discernible relevance to your brand, but a user visiting that domain may have just completed a browsing path signaling extremely high affinity for your product. This visibility across the web is where we drive value and scale that others can’t.
Why are you serving on Facebook when my campaign is only IAB?
These ads are standard IAB sizes and are delivered when the game or application runs via Facebook. This is not FBX inventory. Facebook.com apps (tab or canvas) are allowed to serve ads sold in any manner, as part of their T&Cs. All such traffic will have their top-level domain captured as facebook.com, which is accurate since the ads did serve on Facebook through a 3rd party source. None of your media spend in these cases ever serve on Facebook.
Why do you have such a high number of gaming sites? My audience is NOT gamers?
The audience may not be primarily gamers, but a portion of your target audience is visiting gaming sites. Based on your target audience’s behaviors, we determined these sites and instances were relevant for driving your objective.
Why are you serving impressions to websites that aren’t driving conversions?
Because this report shows conversions based on last-touch attribution, the number of conversions alone may not reflect the value of a website’s impressions.
We target users as they move through the customer journey, which often means delivering on specific websites at specific points along the path to conversion. So, while some sites may not receive conversion credit, they were determined to be effective places to influence converters.
I don’t want to run on website XYZ for brand safety concerns. Would you please blacklist it??
Yes, we are able to add the website to the campaign blacklist; however, we generally do not recommend blacklisting extensively, because it limits the model’s ability to optimize most effectively towards your campaign goals. Blacklisting this site (or sites) alone is unlikely to negatively impact performance.
I don’t want to run on website XYZ [for performance reasons]. Would you please blacklist it?
Because our models rely on a wide variety of inventory to best optimize performance, blacklisting individual websites frequently reduces overall campaign performance. As a result, we strongly recommend not blacklisting a large volume of websites given your primary goal is overall campaign performance. With that said, we are happy to blacklist the site and evaluate the impact on performance to determine if further action is necessary.
Do we recommend blacklisting sites with low or no conversion rates?
Generally no. Our models automatically optimize for incremental conversions. A website which is not showing many last touch conversions may still be a good inventory source for impressions assisting the right user targets on their path to conversion. If a site is not performing, our models will automatically reduce it, but the models are first and foremost targeting users, not websites.
How do our algorithms use website conversion rates to optimize?
Websites are only one of the millions of signals entering into the model decisions.
Through our Quantcast Measure tags we are able to see more than 348 billion consumption events per month. The data collected from these tags, such as site visits, keyword searches, geography and conversions, are directly incorporated into our models. Our models then identify the patterns and signals associated with your converters, and scale those patterns to the rest of the web. This approach can be used to determine if someone is likely to be a good prospect, or if someone is likely to fit a certain demographic, such as Male 18-34.
When I load a domain from the delivery by website report it does not return any content or the domain does not have ads. Why is this happening?
There are a number of possible reasons why a site does not appear to exist. Some inventory sources appear under different domains than where the ad actually served. It can be due to being classified as an ad network, a publisher aggregating multiple sites, or from serving on a private exchange. If you have a question about the domains, we are happy to investigate.
How do you filter out fraud and sites that are not brandsafe?
Quantcast uses a two tiered approach to filter out non brand safe sites.
- Pre-bid screening based on advanced modeling
Our Inventory Quality team uses advanced algorithms as well as our unique visibility into Internet users to detect the differences in behavioral patterns between human and non-human traffic, weeding out fraudulent impressions. We then ensure that we only bid on brand-safe sites by screening all inventory pre-bid. Inventory that we filter out includes:
- Sellers/ Publishers who aren’t trusted (i.e. have served fraudulent cookies or suspicious domains in the past)
- Domains that are on our global blacklist
- Domains that are on the campaign blacklist
- Blacklisted IPs known to send suspicious traffic
- Any content classified as inappropriate, including but not limited to:
- Pornography and adult content
- Copyright infringement including piracy and torrent sites, MP3, MPEG and download sites
- Criminal activities
- Weapons
- Violence
- Extreme (politics and religion)
- Racist or sexist content
- Gambling
- Malware / malware activity
- Custom blacklist maintenance
Our dedicated Inventory Quality team continuously monitors and evaluates the sites that we buy inventory on to ensure that objectionable content is caught immediately, particularly as new sites enter ad exchanges daily. We maintain a proprietary internal blacklist of over 60,000 sites (and growing) on top of standard categorical blocking, such as file-sharing and adult content sites. Sites and domains flagged as inappropriate are added to this blacklist. The team also works with companies across the RTB ecosystem, like SSPs and exchanges, to identify and root out any inappropriate or miss-categorized inventory, adding to the blacklist as appropriate.
Additionally, if a client has a preferred ad verification vendor they would like to use, we can support their tags as long as it is a Google-certified vendor.