The sleeping giant of web traffic

Google is like the modern version of the Yellow Pages. People are going there to solve a problem, but instead of letting your fingers do the walking, you let Google do it for you. And instead of taking three minutes to find something, it happens in roughly 0.06 milliseconds.

Google AdWords is the most perfect advertising mechanism in the history of mankind, and the reason for this is because you only really pay for what you use. It’s really, really relevant, so your ad only shows up if someone’s searching for something. A lot of people think AdWords is too expensive, and in some ways it is if you run it directly out of the box. But if you know what you are doing and you know which levers to pull and how to trim some of the waste out of it, then it’s amazing. It can become a money-spewing machine.

The modern coffee shop

Facebook is more like a coffee shop, where people are just logging in to hang out, but you can grab their attention. Now you can put your content directly in among their news feeds, and you can also put it off to the right-hand side as advertising.

Facebook is also an amazing opportunity because never before in the history of mankind have you been able to target at such a granular level – for example, females between the ages of 26 and 38 who live in Sydney or Melbourne, who are not on part of that list, and who are interested in horse riding.

If you think about display marketing – which is advertising using banner ads as a general rule – previously you had to advertise to people in this state or this city who are interested in that general topic. That’s as good as it was before, and then Facebook has changed that whole thing. In the US, they have bought a whole bunch of what they call ‘big data’, so now you can get really granular with your targeting (almost in a Big Brother way). For example, you can target advertising to a female aged between 26 and 38 who lives in San Francisco, is interested in horse riding, who earns more than $75,000 a year and has a credit card. You can see how powerful it’s getting and how you can target direct buyers in your market.

Bigger than Facebook and Google combined

The third biggest traffic source of the web are demand side platforms (DSPs). Most people don’t know about this – it’s mainly really just agencies and uber marketing geeks. Basically, a DSP is like a trading desk where you can buy wholesale traffic in enormous volumes, so it really is bigger than Google and Facebook put together because it uses both of them as just part of its traffic sources.

As an advertiser, you buy traffic from a trading desk (which is in this case the DSP) like SiteScout.com. SiteScout is just like an AdWords interface that you log into. It isn’t the only DSP – it’s just got the best user interface and is growing really, really fast. SiteScout buys traffic directly from exchanges, so they can be buying traffic from Google, they can be buying traffic from Facebook or Rubicon, or a whole bunch of others.

Then you have people with websites (for example, their blogs) saying, “Yeah, you know what? I’m happy to advertise, to sell this ad space”, and so the whole channel flows down.

You can use DSPs to advertise to people who are roughly this age, in roughly that town, who are roughly interested in something. It’s not as exact as Facebook, but you can still do interest targeting and geographical targeting.

Facebook Atlas: the sleeping giant of traffic

This is about to change the game, big time. Facebook has bought an ad server called Atlas. What this means is that very soon you’ll be able to easily target people while on Facebook and when they leave Facebook to navigate around the web.

You can just imagine how enormous that’s going to be – you've got the granular targeting of Facebook, but [now] anywhere on the web. That’s a big game changer, and they’ll do it all by using a combination of cookies and Facebook IDs that are logged in on the device, because they’ll know you are that person and you’re part of that audience as you navigate around the web. They call this ‘people marketing’ – you’re not just marketing audiences – you’re marketing to individual people (you don’t know who those individuals are, but Facebook does, and that information is hidden from you).

I think you’ll hear a lot more about this area later in 2015. It’s still to be known how they’re going to dish up ads with it. Hopefully they make it self-serve ads like Google AdWords and Facebook so that you do not have to go off to a graphic designer and get banner ads created and all that kind of thing. I think if you can make the ads yourself, their adoption of this whole thing will be much bigger – but I'm sure they've already thought about that.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this – will you start to use this in your business? How do you think it will change your advertising results? Would you expect to see conversion increase dramatically with this kind of targeting?

Greg Cassar is an internet marketing strategist at The Collective.