Currently, networks or advertisers sign up publishers, send them ad tags, and watch for impressions to grow. As networks or advertisers, how can you ensure the quality of inventory you get? How do you make sure that your ads only show up on content that you have approved? How do you make sure that publishers will only place ad tags where they say they will? What if you knew the URLs from which ad requests were made so you could track where your inventory was coming from? What if you could analyze how much is coming from each of those URLs? That’s what Right Media’s validated URLs (vURLs) does for our networks and advertisers.

What the heck is a vURL anyway?
A vURL is the domain of the site on which the user saw a particular ad. For instance, if a user is at “http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/23/index.htm,” we would first look for the vURL “money.cnn.com”. If that doesn’t exist, we’d try “cnn.com.” If neither of those exists in our database, we’d add the domain as a new vURL.

How can I see vURLs in action?

Analyze where your impressions are coming from by checking out the vURL reports, available via a link on your managed publishers pages, for each of your publishers. The report shows the number of impressions, over the last 7 days, across all the URLs we’ve seen for this publisher’s ad tags.

What does the vURL report tell me?

• Short list of relevant URLs
  Things are looking good. A short list of domain level URLs that logically are associated to the publisher is exactly what you expect to see here. For instance, for abc123.com publisher, you expect to see most of your impressions coming from abc123.com but may see some others URLs such as images.abc123.com.
• Long list of irrelevant URLs
  Most common explanations is that the publisher has provided their tags to adware/spyware companies to make an extra buck or two. You can start cleaning house by speaking with these publishers to get to the root of the discrepancy. We are currently working to get you tools to help you manage this problem more effectively.
• Adware/click fraud column says ‘Yes’
  These publishers have been identified as such on a case-by-case basis from a combination of industry knowledge and data from the Right Media Exchange. If you feel that a particular publisher categorization has been in error, please contact your account manager or the support team.
• Audited says ‘Yes’
  As part of the Media Guard process, we are working towards auditing URLs for content categorization. Keep in mind that this is still in beta. If have any questions, feel free to contact me or your account manager.
• Impressions attributed to the vurl id ‘0′
  This means that the URL wasn’t captured for that impression. If your publisher is working with spyware, there is a high chance that they are working with desktop software applications. Other reasons for this may be a corrupt referrer URL.

We hope you find vURL reporting useful. Use it as an opportunity to clean up your own backyard, as well as to leverage it to package up your offerings more attractively to potential advertisers.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under Advertisers, Ad Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.