Increasing the reach of online campaigns

In the online ad industry, the challenge is 2 fold. One is to increase the reach of your campaign by giving them a wide range of publisher sites to choose from. The publisher site can range from the basic publisher or premium publisher. The difference between the two is generally driven by the amount of traffic they attract to their website. Then there are a different level of publishers like "blogs", "twitters", "social-networks" which can either come in the basic or the premium size publisher. For example an ordinary blog might come in the basic publisher category and the social networking sites like facebook, twitter can come in a different bucket.

So the question is how to increase the reach of the ad-campaigns? Lets discuss what google has done in this regard. Google not only displays the search-ads which is tied with its search-engine, but also it displays context-based ads which are driven by context and user behaviour. But the google's publisher list is just ever expanding, which includes blogs, orkut, mails and other spawned mediums by the next generation web called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 enables websites to add dynamic contents into their page by the help of javascripts or widgets which can be referencing some remote ad server. So by these simple innocuous tools, Google has built its reach to such an extent.

The second factor that comes here is the relevance of ads. In terms of the relevance depending on the content and behaviour of user, Google has been able to deliver ads which are very much relevant to the person visiting the site. So relevance helps to improve the ROI of the campaign i.e showing the ads at the correct place, at the correct time and to the correct person can really improve the click-through rate for the ads.

Talking the explosive growth of google, it has benefited by it search engine ...hmm i would rather say the "matching engine" here which can match the words into appropriate content and calculate a relevant score. So this process works not only for Google's search page but also for the ads too. I am not bothered by how it's doing those matching very fast: most probabely by matching the metadata of the content with the searched key words, which is very powerful indeed to go to the depth of the searching process.

Is google's process replicable? May be but seems very difficult because this requires huge investment from Tech companies ... and some are doing it like Microsoft... but that will take time to catch up.

But there can be many small scale search done or in other words a search performed to a lesser depth with some customised variables..(very obvious??). There can be many improvements done by small tech firms and try to reach the customers to a higher degree of breadth.

Lets hope someone would come-up with some innovation ... specially in tech and Web 2.0 wise...