Guides
How-tos, explainers, and deep dives.
DoubleClick Integrations: How Ad Tech Companies and Ad Agencies Can Benefit
DoubleClick is one of the longest-standing companies in the online advertising world, having been founded in 1996 by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. After being acquired by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman…
What AdTech and MarTech Platforms Can Gain From Salesforce Integration
Salesforce has fundamentally reshaped how sales organizations operate. Its cloud-based sales automation software has turned what was once a largely intuition-driven discipline into something increasingly data-driven —…
AdTech Targeting Methods: A Practical Guide
Before launching a campaign, advertisers need to decide which targeting methods to deploy. Behavioural targeting? Demographic targeting? A mix of both? Choosing wrong — or choosing nothing deliberately — means wasting…
Deterministic and Probabilistic Matching: How Do They Work?
Identifying and tracking visitors across devices is one of the more persistent challenges in digital advertising — whether you're an advertiser, marketer, or publisher. There's no foolproof method for recognizing the…
What Is AdTech? A Deep Dive into Advertising Technology
Advertising technology — AdTech — has fundamentally reshaped how brands connect with audiences and how advertisers and publishers interact with each other. Understanding what AdTech is and how it works is essential for…
Building on AppNexus: What Agencies and AdTech Companies Can Create and Why It Makes Sense
AppNexus launched in 2007 as an ad exchange for programmatic media buying, and in the years since it has grown into one of the largest AdTech infrastructure providers in the world. Two characteristics have consistently…
What Is MarTech? A Guide to Marketing Technology Across the Customer Journey
Marketing technology — more commonly known as MarTech — is one of the fastest-growing areas in technology today. This guide maps the full MarTech landscape to each stage of the customer journey, from initial awareness…
What is Taxonomy in a DMP?
There's a popular joke among software developers that goes: there are two hard things in computer science — cache invalidation and naming things. This guide covers the latter — naming things — specifically in the…
How to Boost Display Ad CTR With Content Personalization
When was the last time you actually clicked on a display ad — intentionally? Most research puts banner ad click-through rates (CTR) at around 0.06%. On a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, that translates to roughly 60…
What Is Cross-Device Attribution and Why Is It So Difficult?
Accurate attribution has always been one of the harder problems in digital marketing. The core concept is straightforward enough — identify which events and touch points contributed to a conversion throughout a…
How Ad Blockers Work — and What Publishers Can Do About Them
Ad blockers have made publishers genuinely nervous — and rightly so. Reports from Adobe and PageFair have documented the global growth of ad blocking software and the measurable financial toll it takes on online…
7 Multi-Touch Attribution Models Every Conversion-Focused Marketer Should Know
The end goal of any business — online, offline, or both — is to generate revenue and grow it over time. Much of that responsibility falls on marketers, who operate across three primary stages: building awareness,…
The 4 Types of Online Attribution Every Marketer Should Understand
Attribution remains one of the most persistent and demanding challenges in online marketing. This guide breaks down the four main types of attribution that the AdTech and MarTech industry is actively working to solve —…
Waterfall Auctions vs. Header Bidding: How Each Model Works
Two mechanisms dominate how publishers programmatically sell digital ad inventory: waterfall auctions and header bidding. Understanding how each works — and where each falls short — is essential for anyone involved in…
What Is Device Fingerprinting and How Does It Work?
When advertising migrated from the offline world to the online one, it brought with it a capability that had never really existed before: individual-level ad targeting. Rather than relying on contextual cues — placing a…
Retention, Retargeting, and Re-Engagement: Three Essentials for E-Commerce Marketers
There are three strategies every e-commerce marketer should have a firm grip on: retention, retargeting, and re-engagement. They're interconnected, and together they address one of the most persistent revenue leaks in…
What is Waterfalling and How Does it Work?
Ad networks were among the first technology platforms introduced to the online display-advertising ecosystem, designed primarily to help publishers sell inventory that hadn't moved through direct buys — commonly…
Header Bidding for Publishers: Benefits, Drawbacks, and What to Expect
Anyone with a working knowledge of programmatic advertising will be familiar with real-time bidding — the auction-like process that runs inside an ad exchange each time a unit of ad inventory becomes available. Header…
Can Beacons Solve Offline Attribution?
Mobile marketers face a persistent gap in their attribution picture: nearly two-thirds of purchases that result from a mobile search happen offline — either by phone or inside a physical store. That means a significant…
Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud: Key Differences and Trade-offs
Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, and Google — some of the largest names in computing have all been moving in the same direction: hybrid cloud. Over a relatively short span, these giants scrambled to bring hybrid-cloud startups…
Data Controllers vs. Data Processors: Why Ad Tech and MarTech Companies Should Favour the Processor Role
Control and security over customer data — especially personally identifiable information (PII) — is a persistent compliance concern for ad tech and martech companies, given the wide array of regulations in force and the…
The Case for a First-Party Cookie Approach in Online Advertising
The debate over the long-term role of third-party cookies in digital advertising has been ongoing for years. Some argue they remain a necessary fixture of the online advertising ecosystem; others contend they're on…
3 Missteps to Avoid When Building a Minimum Viable Product
The days of investors cutting cheques for ideas with zero validation are largely over. Today, capital more often flows toward scaling proven companies than funding initial market and customer testing. For most startups…
How the Digital Advertising Ecosystem Works: Publishers, Advertisers, and the Intermediaries Between Them
The digital advertising ecosystem can feel overwhelming at first glance, but its complexity is easier to navigate once you recognize what sits at its foundation: the relationship between the parties who want to sell ad…