lessons learned from applying semantics to blogs

Semantics & Blogs

Lotico San Francisco Semantic Web Meetup Hosted by Federated Media Publishing

August 8th 2012

Tim Musgrove Chief Scientist, Federated Media Publishing

©2012 Federated Media Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Who is FM?

John Battelle

http://FederatedMedia.net

Founded in 2005 to help hundreds of high-quality independent publishers band together to earn sponsorship and ad revenue Now a top-ten US audience (comScore) and growing fast Historically: have paid out well over $100 million to our authors and publishers

A couple of lessons I’ve learned about semantics & blogs

1. With display ads on blogs, you need semantics even more so than with a general audience

2. Higher level semantic features, such as reading level, can predict how much and where a blog post will be shared in social media

Part One

Display Ads On Blogs

An open secret

• Supply-side advertising players (including content networks like FM) often don’t like targeting to be too focused

• Why not?

• Because the math isn’t nice to them Let’s see that…

Ouch…….

To sum up:

Broad targeting increases both CPMs and sold inventory, but….

Narrow targeting brings a sharp decline in sold inventory

So, even though it has a higher CPM, narrow targeting isn’t done much.

$0

$200,000

$400,000

$600,000

$800,000

$1,000,000

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$1,400,000

Run-of-network Broad targeting Narrow targeting

Is there another way to implement this?

• Q: What’s the one case when narrow targeting can have the effect of expanding the inventory purchased by the advertiser, instead of shrinking it?

• A: When it makes the advertiser comfortable going outside their usual content category Let’s see that….

Typical buy pattern (without conversation targeting)

Finance Tech Sports

Government & Law

Small Business Lifestyle

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

Suppose: Advertiser comes to FM w/a “cloud computing” campaign. This is what their buy usually looks like:

Modified buy pattern (with conversation targeting)

Finance Tech Sports

Government & Law

Small Business Lifestyle

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

But when the advertiser learns about Conversation Targeting, this is what their buy starts to look like:

Another implementation technique : Target conversations, not topics

• What’s the difference? – Topic = a particular theme of subject matter – Conversation = a cluster of related topics comprised of

various themes

• Results: simplicity for advertiser, and way more inventory!

• Let’s see an example….

The Small Business Conversation (just a subset of the topics)

affiliate marketing facebook marketing series online advertising small business week

better business bureau family business payroll tax social entrepreneurship

business advice family businesses product marketing social media marketing

business succession planning franchise association quickbooks startup catalyst

center for entrepreneurship franchise business review referral engine startup company

chamber of commerce franchise consulting rieva lesonsky startup magazine

customer service franchisee association ryan hanley startup weekend

dell small business franchisee of the year s corporation susan payton

digital marketing global entrepreneurship week sba 504 loan tj mccue

direct-response marketing guy kawasaki search marketing toilet paper entrepreneur

duct tape marketing ivan walsh small biz tech tour twitter marketing

entrepreneur corner linkedin small business book awards u.s. chamber of commerce

entrepreneur of the year marketing management small business expo viral marketing

entrepreneurs marketing strategy small business influencer viral video marketing

entrepreneurs roundtable multi-level marketing small business jobs bill yahoo small business

facebook marketing national small business week small business trends young entrepreneur council

Does it work?

• Aligned CTR: 49% higher than broad targeted ads

• Global CTR (including non-aligned): still 39% higher than broad targeted ads

– “Aligned” means the subject matter targeted has an obvious connection to the ad campaign. Occasionally this isn’t the case!

Exceptional lift in CTR

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Channel CTR

DFA-IB CTR

CT CTR

This charts the first 50 campaigns we put through Conversation Targeting at FM

RED: the industry standard CTR YELLOW: the typical CTR for the parent category in FM (Sports, Business, etc.) BLUE: the CTR attained by Conversation Targeting at FM

Exceptional lift in CTR

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Channel CTR

DFA-IB CTR

CT CTR

CT usually outperforms the channel it is in.

The exception that proves the rule

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Channel CTR

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CT rarely underperforms the channel it is in. The few exceptions are unaligned campaigns

An unaligned campaign is, for example, a car ad targeted to art, museums, fashion

The blog audience dilemma

• A network like FM’s – communities that are passionate about a common interest – presents a dilemma to advertisers

• One the one hand, it represents a denser concentration of influencers and thus is desirable for advertisers

• On the other hand, this type of audience may react differently to advertising

– They sometimes can be seen to engage more in endemic, conversational material….

– And less with conventional display ads (if targeted using only conventional methods)

Two ways that FM resolves the blog audience dilemma

1. FM encourages advertisers to utilize content-rich, conversation-oriented marketing pieces, e.g. sponsored content series, etc.

2. For display advertising, FM encourages advertisers to use “Conversation Targeting” to make sure their ads fit better into the specific conversation happening on a blog

Success of CT in the blog audience

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Channel CTR

DFA-IB CTR

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CT can lift up audience engagement from below the norm, to above it

Lesson learned

• Those who supposed that avid blog readers are necessarily more adverse to clicking on ads than the average internet user, were not quite right

• It turns out, when the ads are made really relevant via semantic targeting, the CTR’s pop right up – even above Internet averages

• But it means you need semantics even more for blog-based ads than for general web-based ads

How far down the tree will they go?

• Advertisers presently are moving below top-level to “mid-level ontology” for targeting

• As this market matures, it seems they’ll keep driving down the tree

Tech

Bio-tech

Green-Tech

Enterprise Computing

AWS Storage

Cloud SaaS Cloud

Storage

Servers & Net-Ops

Consumer Computing

Cloud PaaS

Computing

Cloud Computing

Google Cloud

Storage Dropbox

AWS Storage

Integrators

AWS Storage Tool Kits

This is going to break the “classifier” approach to targeting, in favor of more scalable approaches (can you build a 1-million node classifier tree, which morphs daily?)

Part Two

What makes a blog post get shared more (or less)

on various social networks?

The case study

Measured two hundred blog posts from leading bloggers, by these criteria:

– Length of post

– Estimated grade level of post (6th grade, 7th grade, etc.)

– Number of: • Tweets

• Facebook shares

• LinkedIn shares

• StumbleUpon’s

• Google+1’s

How grade level was established: a voting engine

Implemented several formulas established in the literature Updated the vocabulary lists where applicable Discarded the high and low Took a weighted average of the remaining scores (weightings tuned manually)

Formula #1 #2 #3 etc….

Effects found: post length We all know that, in general, writing a longer text can turn out worse than writing less:

Long version:

Short version:

Effects found: post length

• In posts ranging from 100 to 600 words in length, there is more social media amplification as the posts get longer

• But this effect tapers off in the 600-1200 word-length range

• For posts longer than 1200 words, the effect reverses, i.e, adding more words seems to hurt amplification

• The above pattern held across all the social networks measured

Effects found: grade level

• Generally the grade level on FM’s network was about a grade-and-a-half higher than the Internet average, sometimes more

• Taken en masse, the amplification level of posts did not correlate strongly with grade level

• However, on closer inspection, we saw that different audiences with opposite preferences were cancelling each other out

• The biggest contrast was between Facebook-sharers and Linked-In sharers

Effects found: grade level Facebook vs. LinkedIn

• Facebook shares, especially on posts longer than 600 words, were inversely correlated with grade level

• LinkedIn shares, especially on posts shorter than 1200 words, were positively correlated with grade level

Effects found: grade level Summary

• Grade level works together with post-length to affect amplification with some audiences

• Facebook sharing is weak on longer posts unless they are at a lower grade level

• LinkedIn sharing is weak on shorter posts unless the writing is at a higher grade level

• Googlers and Stumblers and Tweeters lie at various points in between these extremes

Finding the sweet spot

The “sweet spot” would appear to be:

• Posts between 600 and 1200 words in length

• Written at a slightly higher-than-average (but not too high) grade level

Finding the sweet spot

• Posts in the “sweet spot” get the best overall amplification – avoiding a “penalty” from any of the audiences measured

• Caveat: this was a limited sample and a broader study is required

to validate these early results

600 1200 Words words

4th grade 8th grade 12th grade

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Contact Tim Musgrove E-mail: tmusgrove@federatedmedia.net Twitter: @tmusgrove http://tech.federatedmedia.net/ http://about.me/tmusgrove http://www.slideshare.net/TimAtFM