Lookery.com

We are proud to announce the availability of the Lookery Ad Controller featuring the Universal Ad Tag. We’re adding to the world of free ad optimizer and ad serving services, because we haven’t seen one yet for control freaks. Talking with our hundreds of Lookery publishers and thousands more over the past 18 months, it became clear that the most financially successful publishers leave little to chance.

Helping Publishers Take Control

As we discussed in the post Every Audience Counts, publishers need to start looking out for themselves especially with how they curate and monetize an audience. The more publishers take charge of their advertising, whether selling ads directly or by proactively managing 3rd party ad networks, the better off they will be. Lookery is and will always be on the side of publishers.

Publishers should control how they work with advertisers and ad networks. They should be in the position to decide which ad partner gets what and how much traffic. How much traffic requires a service to allow publishers to dictate how much traffic gets divided up between partners. Fairly straightforward. What traffic is defined by audience data – meta data such as demo data, behavioral data, etc. Ad partners ask for this data all the time. If a publisher gives that data away for free, then it loses control of the data and potentially has given away cow for free. The Lookery Ad Controller will ultimately help publishers control what data they share and with whom. Publishers should share and utilize user data – its just a matter of making sure they get properly compensated.

We are in business to make data work for anyone who touches advertising – this particular service only benefits the publishers but keep watching this space we’re going to make very precise empirical data work for both sides of the online advertising equation.

How the Lookery Ad Controller Works

This simply put is the easiest way for online publishers to take control of how multiple advertising and ad network tags are served. Literally you create a Universal Ad Tag at the Lookery.com site, add your 3rd party ad tags, tell us how you want to rotate between the ad tags, put the Universal Ad Tag code on your site and your done. Publishers control what percentage of traffic and by what geographies they send traffic to any third party.

There are certainly other ad optimization services and free ad servers available. We just felt there was a need for publishers who want control and yet did not need the overkill of an ad server – free or not. Unless you need to traffic multiple ad campaigns, publishers do not need an ad server. The Lookery Ad Controller is the solution – it simply rotates and thus is by far the easiest way to manage third party ad tags. It’s light weight, easy to use and incredibly fast.

Background

Until November of last year, Lookery had run a successful ad network for social applications where we managed the delivery of over 3.5 billion ad impressions a month. One of the key pieces of our infrastructure was a proxy server where all publisher incoming ad requests were proxied before being sent to the appropriate ad server. Lookery did not primarily sell ads directly – instead focused on maximizing the value of publisher’s inventories by sending traffic to various partners based on frequency, GEO and demographic data.

It occurred to us that getting out of the middle and giving our publishers direct control was an even more efficient idea. Thus by opening our proxy to publishers thereby turning it into a product, we would provide publishers almost everything they needed to take control of how they managed 3rd party advertising relationships. Thus even as we just are launching this service, the Ad Controller already supports just under a half a billion impressions a month as we’ve transitioned publishers from our our now sold ad network to the Ad Controller.