Content Consumption Trends: Vacation Rentals vs. Hotels

Did you know that over the last 2 years, more people have opted to stay in vacation home rentals like Airbnb over hotels? Using the Advanced Contextual platform, we found this statistic to be true based on content consumption data as seen in the chart below.

Advanced Contextual creates custom segments using seed URLs that represent what a brand's ideal audience would be reading/watching online. Then Advanced Contextual analyzes the page, identifies the topics within the content, and finds additional relevant content to reach ideal audiences. Applying our methodology to a brand looking to align with hotel and vacation rental content, see the pages and anonymous user IDs available for targeting in our custom segments:

Based on recent travel trends, and the content identified within our advanced contextual platform, it is clear that people have been searching for vacation rentals over hotel stays more often. Advanced Contextual’s results of estimated pages and anonymous user ID counts provide scaled estimates to expect during a campaign.

Advanced Contextual can reach your target audience across the open web through managed service media or programmatically, and on social platforms, once they’ve read content about vacation rentals and/or hotels. Using Advanced Contextual audience segments or page-level segments allows marketers to advertise to their ideal clients in a brand-safe way. Contact us below to learn more.

Introducing Advanced Extension from Advanced Contextual

First to market KPI result driven contextual audience extension, extending reach and performance

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE via PR Newswire: February 2, 2022, New York, New York

Advanced Contextual, a comprehensive contextual platform designed for the post-cookie and privacy enhanced world, announced the first to market programmatic audience extension product. Advanced Extension provides a future-proof safe harbor that scales and performs, providing brands with needed capabilities to reach more of their target audience more effectively and frequently.

Key to brands navigating a world where the cookie and related 3P data are quickly disappearing is a solution that can provide them with intelligence and activation to target audiences outside of endemic content. Advanced Extension builds on Advanced Contextual’s unparalleled capabilities in topic-based contextual audience extension by including the brand’s KPI achievement in a topic.

“KPI and relevance driven audience extension has to be part of the open web’s post cookie and third party data world”, said Dave Hills, CEO of Advanced Contextual. “The simple fact is that 50% of programmatic impressions have no ID attached and that number was 100% as recently as three years ago. With this release we allow brands to safely leverage their achieved KPI’s along with relevance and comp index, which we provide. The result is a power rating for non endemic content which will scale and perform.”

Context as a targeting signal in programmatic advertising will rise from its historic attach rate of 8 to 10 percent to likely 60% to 65% in the next two years. Just recently Google announced that its FLoC product will migrate to topics, albeit behavioral topics which likely do not survive the impending changes in programmatic audience targeting. Advanced Contextual believes these are half measure moves by walled gardens to preserve their ability to obfuscate and limit brand controls over where they place and optimize ads. Advanced Extension provides a new bar for programmatic targeting by placing controls in the brand’s hands and giving them the transparency they need to control how and where ads are placed.

“We’ve come to depend on Advanced Contextual for innovative, scale and performant solutions to leverage context on the open web”, said Mike Kujanek, CEO of Magnitude Digital. “When we look into a future where KPI’s like LTV become permanent being able to programmatically leverage that data will allow us to achieve more efficient KPI’s and broader reach.”

Building on Advanced Contextual’s topic-first approach, the platform will now provide brands with both a topic comp index score and their KPI. The topics with the highest affinity and best KPI performance will achieve the highest ratings and the most spend in plans done by Advanced Contextual.

“We think the walled gardens will continue to fight any effort to increase control and transparency in programmatic activation and optimization which provides opportunities for the open web,” said Andy Crossen, CTO of Advanced Contextual. “We look at Google’s recent nod to topics and wonder how behavioral topics survive in the future. So we took an innovative approach of combining relevance and KPI efficiency in building Advanced Extension and our customers, we think, will reward us with increased spend.”

Advanced Contextual leverages a proprietary search engine and index of over 5BN pages that looks back 18 months, along with industry leading flexibility, control and transparency to deliver a signal of content consumption that is easily configured and delivered to any DSP. The company continues to innovate on its platform by bringing new ad products which are specifically designed for a post cookie/3P data world.

Read Street Fight editor, Joe Zappa’s take on Advanced Extension here.

Topics from Google - Eureka!!!

By now we’ve all read about Google’s latest announcement about how they’ll target audiences in the post-cookie/3P data world. For once we find ourselves applauding Google for moving to topics. Topics have been a fundamental concept in our platform at Advanced Contextual since we released it.

Here our product and engineering team, all SMEs in topics and programmatic, provide their take on the Google announcement.

We have to initially point out that while Google announced the leveraging of topics, the topics are applied behaviorally. As a product and engineering team looking at a bidstream where 50% of the impressions don’t have an ID, we wonder if behavioral topics are practical for Google or for anyone else. People increasingly don’t want to be tracked and behavioral topics won’t change that rising tide. The newly proposed legislation backs that up.

We’ve learned and innovated a lot on topics and contextual understanding of content, and we have these observations and questions:

1. 300 topics isn’t enough to eliminate ambiguity, and Google knows that, but they’ll have a hard time expanding to a deeper taxonomy. Any of us who’ve been in search know how difficult it is to manage a portfolio of keywords and phrases to eliminate ambiguity. We have a topic model of 1,500 topics and we openly integrate other topic models from vertical experts like B2B companies. In expanding their behavioral topic taxonomy, Google will likely run afoul of their own benchmark of maintaining high k-anonymity. They won’t achieve cohorts big enough and they’ll be stuck at 300 topics.

2. Site-based vs page-based. Putting people into buckets based simply on the domain they visit is a surefire way to introduce ambiguity. Sites aren’t nearly precise enough to telegraph interests in any meaningful way.

3. Transparency in topic definition. Will Google make transparent the classification methodology they use to establish their topics? Transparency is key in establishing a robust topic framework. We know this and our customers know this, and as such we built complete transparency into our platform, including sophisticated ways to leverage KWs, sentiment, psychographics as well as first party audiences.

4. One topic a week from the last three weeks seems overly arbitrary. How do we know this? We map content consumption through our 18 month index of billions of open web pages and videos. For purposes of activation, we use all topics consumed in the last 30 days.

5. How will Google handle transparent audience extension providing brands and publishers with control? It’s not mentioned by them, but being able to extend an audience by matching non-endemic consumption to endemic consumption is table stakes for leveraging topics, which is what we do today. But it has to be done transparently and has to also be informed by a brand’s 1P data.

With FLoCs now Topics we think progress has been made. No one understood how FLoCs would be identified and it all seemed overly complex. But we wonder why they are spending any time at all on behavioral targeting. That doesn’t seem like a permanent solution given the way the wind is blowing on it.

And will they make all of this transparent? Of course they won’t and that’s unfortunate. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in building the best of breed contextual 2.0 platform it’s that transparency results in better scale, precision and performance. There shouldn’t be anything to hide from in contextual analysis.

Unless you have something to hide…