Summer has finally arrived and we're busy improving our offering for publishers. We are excited to announce that we've been certified as a KIA-Index measurement provider.
Very soon we will be announcing a new product that will solve the "big" data challengethat modern publishers face. Stay tuned for more information shortly!
Product News
As part of our endless commitment to make tools for everyone in the publisher value chain, we have continued to refine our products and make important changes and enhancements based on customer feedback. Below is a short summary.
Burt for KIA. We have introduced a new app that provides an overview of the data reported to KIA and enables publishers to compare important metrics across sites.
Campaign Reporting. Our upgraded Campaign Reporting app enables customers to benchmark campaigns compared with their own site(s) or against the network average. The new tools includes key ad performance metrics such as viewable and engagement rate, click-through rate, and more. It also displays more comprehensive ad reporting in a more compact and easier to read layout. And we're improving performance for customers tracking 10,000+ campaigns with Burt.
Time Series. Added possibility to view placements across categories combinations and unique visitors per device type.
Recommended Reading
Great reading about how Fi redesigned USA Today.
In Media, Big Data Is Booming but Big Results Are Lacking
High scalability at Tumblr and Burt
The technology behind Burt
Because of Yahoo's recent acquisition of Tumblr, High Scalability had a blog post about the architecture behind the billion dollar blog platform. It's apples and oranges but we thought some of the numbers they wrote about looked very similar:
Tumblr serves 500 million pageviews per day, and Burt tracks about the same number of pageviews and ad impressions
Their peak request rate is around 40K/s, ours isn't very far behind.
Their analytics system processes a terabyte of data every day and so do we!
A part of gathering all the data and crunching it is also to be able to make assumptions on future trends. So here's and idea how we could visualize those predictions. Given the past four weeks, how should next week’s pageviews look like - hour by hour.
You'd be able to quickly answer questions such as: What’s the number of pageviews, exposures you’ll be able to serve, as well as predict worst and best case scenarios…
We’re flirting with the idea of creating tour guides for our apps. Here's an example how it could look like for our Campaign Reporting app. Take it right away or pick it up at some other point when you have time.
You forget things, right? Everyone does. The viewable-active-visible-durational-collegial-clustered-megaflips. ..per second? Huh.. How’s that important, again?
We do try to avoid confusing and un-actionable metrics, but we also release new apps all the time. This’d be a good way of getting quickly (re-)acquainted.
View all your placements at a glance, drag them around, pinch and spread to get deeper insights using your mobile, tablet or computer.
This view emphasises only the most significant about your placements. Viewing it as rows in a table can draw your focus away from what’s important - just because you can see and sort placements by number of clicks doesn’t necessarily make it the only way you should look at it. Colour coded in positive green for your best performing placements and alarming red for those that might need more of your attention. Quickly choose placement of your interest and get more data by pinch and spread. Easy peasy.
Design for Appraisal: Introducing the Burt Designer Suite
When it comes to advertising, we at Burt abide a simple but time proven and effective philosophy: if consumers like what they see in an ad, it will work. If they don't, it most likely won't.
Most adtech companies base their business on the notion that powerful algorithms can deliver -- say it with me now – the right ad, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time - and that’s all they need to do. We, on the other hand, believe ad placement is only part of the challenge and if digital advertising is to be successful, there needs to be as much focus on the non-technical function of design as on the technical issue of inventory. That idea was the original inspiration behind Burt Designer Suite.
In print, when the creative is good, and the content of the ad appeals to the reader, the ad actually adds value to the page. So much so, if you asked the average reader if they’d prefer their glossy lifestyle magazine with or without ads, the vast majority would opt for ads and would feel gypped if there were none. There is a mutual appreciation, a harmony between the media, advertiser and the user, and that’s the dream of every advertiser because - when consumers like not just the product they see in an ad but the ad itself, they often buy the product. That was inspiration number three.
We at Burt want advertising to create a kinship with a reader and in our mind, that can only be achieved through great design. And great design requires insights on how the user experiences the media. Until Burt Designer Suite, analytics tools for understanding and optimizing digital media were almost exclusively for e-commerce – typically testing out design details such as which layout and button colour drives the most clicks and conversions. In publishing, there is a greater need for a more holistic understanding of the entire visitor journey. Inspiration number four.
Designing great content experiences is a separate challenge with a whole other set of goals. You want to maximise time spent with content, reader loyalty, and engagement as that’s when real value (and money) is made. You want to measure time spent, not transactions completed. And you don't want to optimise one page, you want to optimize the entire media experience, as that helps build relationships over time.
So far, we've seen incredible results from giving designers better analytics to create better experience and more profitable media properties. Getting started is a matter of cut-and-paste, so there's no excuse for anyone to not start using it now.
Media owners we work with often own several sites. While they usually want to optimize every site as separate entity there is also a need to have an overview over entire business they own.
In other words our starting point solving this problem was to provide media owners with an overview of different sites and easy comparisons between them without digging too deep into details.
That being said, Network Monitoring, the helicopter view across entire media business is fitted best for executive use. When you just want to spot irregularities or areas for improvement but not necessarily do the work yourself (you’re lucky enough to have others to do that for you=). Taking it a step further by setting up parts of sites in specific groups, for example for specific sales packages and following up on of these is no biggie either.
So if the quick video of the newborn in the Burt.hub above convinced you (or even more so if not) don’t hesitate to drop Daniel a line if and he'll hook you up with a helicopter seat of your own!
More news at the Burt.hub - the Audience Disovery app
We know all there is to know about your demographics. It's been a part of our major apps for a long time. You want to know who saw your advertisers' campaign? We got you covered. What's the age distribution for people visiting this webpage or a certain category? Not a problem. You have all the information already there, but it isn't very accessible and it requires a lot of manual labor to dig out, polish and present. The things get further complicated if you have multiple sites.
Well, good news buddy! We've just built a tool like that!
Audience Discovery is the tool to find your customer's audience on your sites. It gives you demographics overview across all your sites. It can filter out the desired audience and give you target audience reach and affinity for each and every one of them. It allows you to mix and match multiple sites to build a media plan that caters your advertisers' goals.
Audience Discovery will combine the sites and estimate target audience reach and affinity, automatically discarding overlapping visitors. You can get even closer estimates by selecting a share of voice and picking individual placements. And when you're done, you can export the entire plan to excel and email it to Alice over at booking. =) Thank you, thank you. Please. Hold your applause please. =) You haven't even tried it yet. But of course we want you to, so do get in touch with our guy Daniel and he'll hook you up with a demo.
(*) 'Reach' is the amount of unique visitors. 'Affinity' is the percentage of your selected audience as compared to the whole, i.e. if your site has 100 visitors and 20 of them are male, your male affinity is 20%.
Just Released in the Burt.hub: Awesome Time Series App
We just introduced a brand new app to our Burt.hub family and we thought we'd share some thoughts and deliver some background to this sweet new analytics ride.
We always strive to make our apps simple, fun and beautiful. And relevant. Relevant - that's a huge part of it. And it's a lot harder that it seems. We collect these vast oceans of data and then we filter and process and crunch and analyze until what we've got is as potent as Uranium-235 and means something to our customers. Then we wrap it all up nicely and make it fast and intuitive to discover and consume. Great success!
In doing so, however, we end up with a lot of good data getting overlooked. We had built a system we used internally for a couple of months to see trends and figure our differences across various dimensions over time when one of our more active customers came to visit and got blown away. He'd loved our other apps and our approach thus far, but this was something else. He could see all sorts of uses for our little tool and demanded we'd give to him.
We didn't.
Thing is, you can say a lot about Burt but damnit we don't do anything half-arsed. We do it right, or we don't do it at all.
So we sent him home and told him to keep a keen eye towards the skies in the west. We proceeded ripping the tool apart, making it faster, more flexible, hotter and added vitals such as excel export, hourly-, daily-, weekly-, monthly- rollups, freely selected time-spans, device type separation and just maxing it all out.
Check out the video below. Not bad a start, ey? We've got great plans for the app and will add additional data-sources and other improvements continuously. And as we always say for all of our apps - they really come to life when you put some real chunky data in there =)
Want to see more and play around with you own data? Get in touch with my super friendly colleague Daniel Alman at [email protected] and he'll hook you up.
As of yesterday all the apps in the Burt.hub got some minor touch-ups and fixes. From a purely technical standpoint, nothing has even remotely changed and all our apps will continue to deliver the ease of use and stellar results you’ve come to expect from us here at Burt.
As you cruise through our apps the one thing you might notice is that we stopped using the term In-Screen and opted instead to go with the more common terminology, Viewable Impressions. We are basically only changing one word: Viewable instead of In-screen. It sounds quite insignificant maybe but is far from that. It is very important for us and our clients to speak in the same terms avoiding every possible confusion.
The problem that we encountered when discussing In-screen with our customers was, that it was often confused with First Screen. Especially on the US market the latter is an established term quite different to what we define as In-Screen and therefore people find it confusing to understand what our In-screen in relation to that is.
To clarify: basically we will continue to measure and report the In-screen just as we did so far, there will be no changes in how we technically measure it, we are only taking a strong position towards using terminology that is internationally recognised and based on mutual definition of viewability.
By doing this we are also taking a lead on a concept that is rather new, not everyone are positive, many are afraid of it and there is no lack of healthy skeptics (would need more of those when talking about regular impressions).
So the reason we are doing this now is that internationally the Viewable Impression has been gaining recognition, furthermore there is also an ongoing lobbying process in the US for its introduction as a general standard. The proposed criteria or standard for viewability, recommended by the industry leaders who participated in Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), is at least 50% of pixels in view for a minimum of one second. This definition is thus in line with how we at Burt define an Viewable (former called In-screen) Impression.
The 3MS initiated to enhance and standardise digital metrics and establish a measurement governance model that allows for cross-platform comparison. As part of this, the initiative created “5 Guiding Principles of Digital Measurement.” where the first principle takes on a new standard of Viewable Impressions.
"Principle #1 – Move to a “viewable impressions” standard and count real exposures online. Today we count “served impressions” as recorded by ad servers. Often, ad units are not in a viewable space to the end-user or fail to fully load on the screen – potentially resulting in substantial over-counting of impressions. Viewable exposures are increasingly the norm across other media and better address the needs of brand marketers. (Source: 3MS)"
If you have any further questions on how we measure Viewable Impressions or how you can make use of the metrics in your work you can always contact our guys at the Support Team. Just send a quick note to Niklas and you can set up a date whenever it fits best.
Read more about the process of establishing Viewable Impression as a standard by the MRC Viewable Impression Advisory.
If you are interested in the topic and want to learn some more here are a few additional recent articles that provide some good insights on the topic:
Viewability Technology Primer, Part 1: Promises & Pitfalls
Viewability Technology Primer, Part 2: Vendor Selection & Applications
Trade Groups Release Some Viewability Data; IAB Says Metric Not Ready for Prime Time
Not only did we get a great response but the users are quite happy with using our apps. As promised in our call for help we randomly chose two respondents that will receive a Burt Goodie Bag. And we sure are keeping the promise: Congratulations and gratefulness go to Gorazd at TS Media in Slovenia and Janne at Talentum in Finland.
We packed up the good stuff as we speak and soon it will be posted to Finland and Slovenia… Two very different countries but they sure do know how to do their business if they are smart enough to use our apps=)
We can't reveal all the secrets that the goodie bag consists off but we can say that hopefully they will be happy to wear it and read it. We'd send you some super tasty Burt beer and snacks but unfortunately that seemed pretty risky to send off. We'll rather treat you those when the guys are visiting Sweden.
A couple of weeks ago in Olso, INMA held an AdOps conference. Gustav von Sydow, Burt Founder and CEO, was invited together with Ted Persson, Founder and CCO at Great Works, to give a kick-ass inspirational talk to provoke thought and a creative conversation. The audience of media techy AdOps guys got to hear a talk about why the agency folks don't care much for the digital display environment. And what can be done about it. How to bring the sexy back, as it were.
It's a novel approach really - looking at the digital media from a creative agency's perspective. It's not unheard of, but it's certainly been neglected during the recent era of digital marketing development. The audiences have been steadily shifting to consuming online services for years, but as long as the most creative people of the industry aren't crazy about working on digital content no big brands are prepared to follow.
So, how do we win the creatives over to online media? Gustav and Ted propose that media owners need to start focusing on the people creating the online content. They urge the media companies to work on their digital stand and raise the quality and the status of it in order to trigger higher creativity and a bigger slice of the brand advertisement budgets.
Cassandra: Cassandra Butterflies-cluster, node 101 speaking, how may I help you?
Me: Yeah, Hi. I’m the administrator. I was just checking on you a little bit.
C: Oh.. Well, it’s been a little hectic latelty. It looks like someone..
Me: … someone killed a couple of your nodes. Right. Eh.. That was me. Sorry about that.
C: Oh. Oh! Oh, that’s actually good news. ‘cause me and the gang we’re sort of starting to worry that you were about to shut us down.
Me: Oh no. Dude. Nothing like that. I was just playing around with the servers and I.. Look, it was an accident and it won’t happen again. You're still very much our production DB env.
C: Ok, cool.
Me: Great. I’m glad to hear you’re all right.
C: Yeah, no worries. We’re redistributing the data right now. So.. You know. It’s a couple of terabytes, so it’ll be a little while.
Me: Cool. Cool. I’ll try and pull the servers back online as fast as I can.
C: No rush. We’re serving requests and everything’s ticking.
Me: Great. So, no data loss then?
C: Nope
Me: Awesome. Talk to you soon. Bye.
Act II
Cassandra: Cassandra Butterflies-cluster, node 101 speaking, how may I help you?
Me: Yeah, Hi. Me again. Listen, I got the nodes back up and everything …
C: Yeah, we noticed. Thanks. Really boosted the morale.
Me: … thaat’s great. So. The thing is.. There’s a lot less disk usage.
C: Oh?
Me: Yeah and it’s sort of bugging me a little bit.
C: M-hm?
Me: The thing is, you used to have about half a terabyte of data per node, and now there’s closer to 250 gig. Sooo what’s up with that?
C: Well.. You know, we replicate all data to at least two other nodes and the cluster didn’t completely die when we lost the nodes.
Me: Riiight. Riight. Still though, the diskspace is really worrying me. Are you sure you’re ok?
C: I’m fine.
Me: Sure?
C: Yep.
Me: Well.. How can you be so sure?
C: Dude, I’m fucking sure. I just know, alright?
Me: You just know?
C: I just know.
Me: … How can you ‘just know’? Isn’t there some sort of a counter? Is there somepleace I can get like a list of all the rows and data, or some counts or some shit like that?
C: Not really, no. If you ask me for a particular row, I can go and check if I have it.
Me: Dude, there’s literally billions of rows with more or less random keys. That’s no good.. I need some sort of a statistic.
C: Hey listen. I’m not the one zapping nodes willy-nilly. If it was that important, why didn’t you have a backup?
Me: There’s terabytes of data, updated thousands of times per second! There’s no backup. You ARE the backup. The whole point is to build a system… You know what, nevermind.
C: Look, I’m sorry, but..
Me: Don’t be. It’s not your fault. We’ll just have to figure something out..
C: Alright. Later then.
Me: *sigh*. Later. =
If you’ve read any of the trades recently, you’ve heard the buzz about native advertising and its promise of improved engagement.
Discussions, fueled largely in part by Facebook’s introduction of sponsored stories and Twitter’s promoted tweets, have pushed the case for native’s importance beyond the usual advertising technology circles into broader channels like Business Insider, TechCrunch and publications that typically cover a more holistic beat.
Where our industry has gone wrong, though, is in equating native ads to a format that’s only technically the same as the normal user experience. Take Facebook as the perfect case in point. The logic behind Facebook advertising asserts users “like” and “comment” on stories friends post in their feed. Facebook wisely used this dynamic by creating sponsored stories — and that name pretty much says it all: an ad format customized for specific users that’s displayed inside the feed and that people can like and comment on.
Thus, we conclude that if the sponsored story bears any kind of resemblance to other content on the page, it is, by definition, native.
Wrong.
Even if sponsored stories are technically the same as other content, they — to use Clayton Christensen’s “milkshake metaphor” — don’t help users accomplish the job they’re hiring Facebook to do. For example, I’m an active Facebook user; I hire Facebook to share my thoughts and experiences and to see what my friends are up to. A sponsored story, in my case, does nothing toward helping me accomplish this goal. Contrast that with Google AdWords, a format that supports the reason I visit Google in the first place: to find what I’m looking for.
Advertising is native only when — and if — it aligns with our goals as a media consumer. This is not a new idea. On the contrary, it’s how all great advertising works, not limited to highly functional examples like AdWords. Native advertising, done right, is the perfect recipe to deliver happy customers (both consumers and advertisers) and to develop a profitable media property.
My favorite example of well-integrated, value-adding ads are in lifestyle magazines. We buy these glossy publications to be inspired, entertained and informed, and we also look to them to find products we might buy. Ads in lifestyle magazine are not shouting at us; rather, they’re an integral part of the experience and in some cases, are more welcomed and appreciated than the content alongside of which they run. In fact, I’d argue that if you were to ask the typical Vogue reader to buy the magazine with or without ads, most would choose the issue with the ads. In effect, readers pay for advertising in print, whereas in digital, they pay to get rid of, bypass or skip ads. Is it possible to recreate print’s success in digital media? The short answer is yes. In fact, we know of several publishers that create and deliver advertising products that add value to the user experience.
As readers get more advertising on their screens, they stay longer, return more often and are more likely to share content with friends. And advertisers pay more for each contact, driving revenue to publishers who, in turn, can be invested in creating an even higher quality experience. That being said, there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe to solve this. Every combination of readers, content and advertisers is different, and the only effective solution is one that’s been customized against specific goals and objectives.
The key to success is for media companies to stop looking at advertising as a necessary evil to monetize their audiences and start thinking of how advertising can add real value to the user experience. From where we sit, one great way to do that is by going native. Let the ads compete with editorial content. Done right, you’d be surprised how often the ads come out on top.
ExchangeWire: A False Allure of a Premium Panacea by Carl Nelvig, VP Product Development
Yet another great read by our VP of Product Development, Carl Nelvig. This time he takes on the ongoing discussion about misconceptions of the premium.
"Let’s face it. We’re an industry that loves a good buzzword. We latch on to certain terms as if our careers – our very lives – depended on it. A couple of industry visionaries get to talking about some trend and we seize on it like it’s Gospel. Next thing you know, lunch tables and water coolers around the industry are abuzz with what promises to be the next big thing.
However of all the buzzwords we hear (and admittedly incorporate into our lexicon), perhaps the most trite and overused is ‘premium’. Premium gets bandied about like a Justin Bieber song lyric, and we’re so fascinated by the guy and his manicured hair, we overlook the fact he can’t sing (sorry Justin).
In our circles at Burt, we regularly hear, “I only buy premium placements for my campaigns,” or “This is a premium ad network,” or “We only work with premium sites,” or, my personal favorite, “We have both premium and non-premium placements.” The term ‘premium’ is so overused in so many contexts we no longer know what it means."
On yet another occasion there has been proven that Swedish soil has something special for breeding successful start-ups! The 2012 Bully Awards* announced last week place no less than 9 startups on the list of 30 winners. And it sure feels great to be one of them. They've given us a Yearling badge, in their own terms defining that we are a classic start-ups. A classic - we like the sound of that: just as a classic car like Ford GT40 or you know a classic pair of Converse sneakers or a classic action hero such as Superman himself=) Ok we might've pushed it a tiny bit too far comparing us with SUperman but you gotta love it being labeled a classic! Honoured and happy for the award we strive further of really becoming a classic of our costumers world. We're celebrating with a classic playing out loud at the office:)
*We would like to take the opportunity to explicitly state that this is not an award given to us for bullying someone. Just to be on the safe side we do not tolerate any acts of that kind at the office or at any Burt held occasion. We don't like, tolerate, encourage or employ bullies. There you go - just wanted to make that clear=)
