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Contact:
David Strassel
dstrassel@gmail.com
http://about.me/dstrassel
Table Of Contents
Table of Contents ...................................................................... 3
Introduction ............................................................................. 4
Project findings .......................................................................... 5
Ad tech on mobile sites ............................................................12
Targeting & tracking data tags .................................................13
Tags by type of site ..................................................................15
Appendix I List of vendors logged .........................................17
Appendix II Project methodology ...........................................22
Introduction
A frequent question among publishers, CROs and ad ops persons is some variation of
which ad tech vendor(s) should I use or at least consider.
Navigating this terrain with several hundred firms can indeed be a challenge. The idea
behind this project is to offer some additional (and hopefully useful) datapoints based
on an analysis of those ad tech vendors used by the Internets largest sites.
While the requirements and resources of a long tail content site are different from say
nytimes.com or wikia.com, some interesting and potentially useful patterns did emerge
from an analysis of those and other high-traffic sites:
Google is ubiquitous among even the largest sites; DoubleClick and Google
AdSense were the most-frequently logged vendor tags, appearing on 66% and
61% of sites respectively
Sites work with multiple demand partners; the average number of demand
partners was just over four per site and about one-in-ten (11%) had tags for nine
or more demand partners
Demand partners vary within sites based on page content; we found on
numerous sites that tags for certain vendors were logged, for example, only on
finance-oriented pages while one or more altogether different vendors were
logged only on sports-related pages and none of those vendors were logged on
the homepage or elsewhere across the site
Advertising networks remain highly relevant; across all of the demand partner
tags logged, 40% were related to networks and the average number of ad
network tags was 2.4 per site. It should also be noted however that no ad
network tags were logged on 21% of sites and on 27% only one was logged
Ad-based monetization on mobile lags; only 54% of mobile sites have any
advertising-related tags vs. 94% of desktop sites and those sites included tags
for an average 2.5 vendors vs. 7 vendors on the desktop sites
The rest of the report digs into these and other topics more deeply and provides
additional data. Before moving on though, Id like to mention that this report potentially
represents only a first pass which may be updated I nthe future. Some may take issue
with certain decisions regarding how specific vendors are categorized and with some
aspects of the underlying methodology (both of which are described in detail in the
Appendix) so Id be very interested in any reader feedback. You can email me at
dstrassel@gmail.com.
Project Findings
The core of this project was an automated survey that crawled 5,000 pages across the
top 100 websites 50 mostly random pages per site and logged a total of 28,519
scripts and HTML tags (scripts were not allowed to execute in order to minimize log
entries from daisy chaining) for domains known to be associated with specific ad tech
vendors. Those tags were then parsed to remove duplicative intrasite entries for each
vendor which ultimately netted 725 tags, each representing a specific vendors presence
on a single website.
In the broadest terms, an analysis of those tags associated 505 with advertising-related
vendors and 220 were associated with vendors of user tracking / targeting data (see
Appendix I for a complete list of firms).
Tags for one or more advertising-related vendors were logged on 94 of the sites while
user tracking / targeting vendor tags were logged on 87 sites. Among the 725 net vendor
tags logged, 70% were classed as advertising-related and 30% were related to user
tracking / targeting.
While tags were logged for an average of just over seven different vendors per site
across all 100 websites, tags for nine or more vendors were logged on one-third of the
sites. The next most-common observations were tags for five vendors (on 12 sites) and
for two vendors (on 11 sites).
Somewhat noteworthy, on many of the sites, tags for different vendors both
advertising-related tags and tracking / targeting tags were logged on different pages.
The most frequently observed examples of these differences occurred between pages
related to specific topics, in particular those related to money / finance / investing,
automotive news or information, real estate, and sports.
Amongst all of the advertising-related vendor tags logged, 87% were associated with
demand partners ad networks, SSPs / DSPs, exchanges and retargeters (the balance of
tags were primarily related to ad serving technologies see pages 13-14 for more). The
largest number of sites had tags from two such vendors (16%) followed by sites with
tags for four vendors (14%) and sites with tags for a single vendor (13%). The average
number of demand vendors logged across all 100 sites just over four per site.
The largest number of demand-related tags logged on a single site represented 19
different vendors; the next closest was 13 and two additional sites each had tags for 12
different vendors. Tags associated with nine or more demand-related vendors were
logged on 11 of the top 100 sites.
Almost one-half (40%) of the demand-related vendors logged were ad networks
(including 3% from video ad networks). The next most common vendors were
exchanges (27%) followed by DSPs (12%) and SSPs (8%).
Tags for performance advertising vendors were logged on 16% of the sites and
represented 4% of all demand-related vendors logged. Commission Junction accounted
for 53% of tags logged from performance advertising vendors; Clickbooth and Amazon
AdSystem accounted for ~24% each.
Tags related to native monetization vendors were logged on 13% of the sites and
represented 3% of all demand-related vendors logged. Content discovery network
Outbrain accounted for almost all of those tags (85%) while tags for Nativo and
ThoughtLeadr were logged on one site each.
Tags representing 33 different ad networks and five SSPs were logged across 79 of the
sites for an average of 2.4 such vendors per site. The largest number of ad networks /
SSPs logged on a single site was 12 and the next closest were two sites on which tags
for eight vendors were each logged.
The most common ad network tags (for Google AdSense) were logged on 61% of the
sites. The next most common tags logged were for Advertising.com, Quigo AdSonar,
Tribal Fusion and for the SSP, Pubmatic. Tags for no other vendor were logged on more
than 5% of the sites. (A complete list of all ad networks logged is provided in Appendix
I.)
Tags for 12 different DSPs were logged across 35 sites. The most common tags were for
Turn and MediaMath which were logged on 14% of the sites and 12% respectively. In
addition to the six most frequently logged vendors below, DSP tags were also logged for
Lucid Media (3 sites) and for DataXu, Dedicated Media, Tapad, Think Realtime and
TradeDesk which were all logged on a single site each.
Tags for eight different exchanges were logged on 70 sites. The most common tags, for
DoubleClick, were found on 66% of those sites where any advertising-related tags at all
were logged. The next most common tags were related to AppNexus (26% of sites) and
to Yahoos RightMedia (18%). Among those sites where tags for one or more
exchange(s) were found, we logged tags for an average of 1.7 exchanges per site.
Although we categorized tags for both DoubleClick and OpenX to indicate the presence
of an exchange, it should be noted that the exchanges are only part of the services
offered by each firm. It is possible or even likely that in some instances the presence
of those tags may represent a more limited relationship that does not include real-time
programmatic ad sales.
Retargeter tags were logged on 21 sites; among those sites we found tags for an average
of 1.2 such vendors per site. Tags for Criteo were the most common logged on 15 sites
or 71% of the sites with retargeter tags followed by Chango (5 sites), Dotomi and
Fetchback (2 sites each) and Steelhouse Media (1 site).
Source of Ad Element
DoubleClick
OpenX
AppNexus
Google AdSense
Rubicon
Advertising.com
Right Media
MediaMath
24/7 Media
DoubleClick Bid Manager
Criteo
PulsePoint
Turn
ValueClick Mediaplex
Pubmatic
PointRoll
Adzerk
Tribal Fusion
Rocket Fuel
BrightRoll
Impression
Volume
Share of Total
Impressions (1)
229.9mn
84.4mn
73.7mn
59.2mn
46.2mn
45.4mn
43.9mn
31.2mn
28.6mn
27.3mn
23.1mn
20.1mn
19.7mn
18.3mn
17.9mn
14.7mn
13.4mn
12.9mn
12.3mn
11.7mn
22.4%
8.2%
7.2%
5.8%
4.5%
4.4%
4.3%
3.0%
2.8%
2.7%
2.2%
2.0%
1.9%
1.8%
1.7%
1.4%
1.3%
1.3%
1.2%
1.1%
66%
11%
26%
61%
9%
10%
18%
12%
4%
5%
16%
4%
14%
9%
10%
8%
1%
10%
6%
1%
Sources: Evidon Ad Delivery Index, Sept. 2013, adtechReport Site Survey, Q3-2013
Notes: (1) Calculated as each vendors monthly impression volume as a percentage of aggregate impressions across
all 30 vendors that comprise the Evidon Ad Delivery Index (~1.03 trillion impressions served in Sept. 2013);
(2) Share among all 100 sites evaluated by adtechReport on which each vendors tags were logged
On a more expansive basis among the 10+ million users of Evidon Inc.s Ghostery
browser extension and from a slightly different perspective, almost one-in-four (22%)
ad impressions are served by DoubleClick. That analysis, which estimates the number of
impressions delivered by each of 30 different sources of ad elements tracked for the
Evidon Ad Delivery Index, found that the next closest vendors were OpenX (8% of ad
impressions), AppNexus (7%) and Google AdSense (5.8%).
A separate analysis, conducted by The Cookie Collective, found that targeting cookies
were dropped by Google on 39.8% of the 300,000 websites it evaluated. They also
logged cookies from AppNexus dropped on 11% of those sites, from Quantcast on
5.7%, from Turn on 4.5% and from Rubicon Project on 3.8%.
As mentioned previously we were unable to identify the exact activity associated with
vendor tags for DoubleClick and OpenX inasmuch as those vendors provide both ad
serving as well as demand-related services. With that qualification, we logged tags for
10
11
Tags for DoubleClick were logged on 26 of the mobile sites (31%) and for OpenX on
three sites (4%) in either an ad server or demand partner role. Ad server vendor tags
were also logged for mOcean Mobile on three sites, MediaMind (two sites) and for
Atlas and Auditude (one site each).
Google AdSense was the most common demand partner across the mobile sites with its
tags logged on 29 sites or approximately one-in-three (34%); the top ad networks and
SSPs logged also included Advertising.com and AdMarvel which each had tags on four
sites.
Other demand sources, in addition to those above, included AdMob, Casale Media,
Federated Media, JumpTap, Kargo, MyBuys, Nexage, Tacoda, Vibrant Ads and
YieldBuild which were logged on one site each. Tags for only two retargeters were
logged across all of the mobile sites, Fetchback and Steelhouse Media which were both
found on the same site.
12
With that said, the largest number of tracking / targeting tags we logged (41%) were
associated with data aggregators followed by conversion attribution and behavioral /
intent data which accounted for 22% and 21% of vendor tags respectively. Fifteen
percent of the tags were for DMP vendors.
We logged data-related tags for an average of 2.5 vendors per site. Although the largest
share of sites 30 sites or 34% of those with data-related tags had tags for a single
vendor, we logged tags for two or more vendors on a majority (57 or 66%) of the sites.
While not included in these results, we also logged data-related tags on more than onethird (36%) of the mobile sites (this analysis of data-related tags is confined to desktop
sites only).
13
The most common data-related tags were for Quantcast, which we logged on
approximately one-half of the sites (49%). Tags for DoubleClicks Floodlight
conversion tracking feature or its predecessor, Spotlight were logged on almost onein-three sites (30%) followed by Dynamic Logic and Audience Science which were
found on 14% and 13% of sites respectively.
14
Not surprisingly, content sites accounted for the largest share of data-related tags logged
as well as a disproportionate share of advertising-related tags. More noteworthy was the
ubiquitous presence of both ad- and data-related tags found on commerce sites; despite
their business model focused on the sale of products, we logged tags across these sites
as group for almost as many vendors proportionally as the content sites. We also found
that while corporate sites as a group were, not surprisingly, among the least likely to
embed advertising-related tags, they were also the most likely to have data-related tags.
15
Appendix I.
List of vendors logged
16
The following tables provide a complete listing of every vendor logged across all 100
sites along with an indication of how we categorized each company and the number of
sites on which tags for each company were logged.
Advertising-related Tags
Company
24/7 Media
Accuen Media
Adap.tv
Adblade
Adconion
AdExcite
AdMarvel
AdMeld (Google)
AdMob (Google)
ADTECH
Advertising.com
Adzerk
Amazon AdSystem
AOL Advertising
AppNexus
AT&T AdWorks
Atlas
Auditude
BlueLithium
BrightRoll
Casale Media
CBS Interactive
Chango
Chitika
Clickbooth
Commission Junction
Conviva
CPX Interactive
Criteo
DataXu
Dedicated Media
Dotomi
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Bid
Manager
DoubleClick DART
eBay Stats
Facebook Exchange
FeatureLink
Federated Media
Type of tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Type of company
Ad Network
Agency Trading Desk
Video Ad Platform
Ad Network
Ad Network
Video Ad Network
SSP
SSP
Mobile Ad Network
Ad Serving
Ad Network
Ad Serving
Performance
Display Platform
Exchange
Video Ad Network
Ad Serving
Ad Serving
Ad Network
Video Ad Network
Ad Network
Advertising
Retargeter
Ad Network
Performance
Performance
Video Optimization
Ad Network
Retargeter
DSP
DSP
Retargeter
See note 1
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
DSP
Ad Serving
Advertising
Exchange
Ad Network
Ad Network
# of
sites
4
3
4
5
1
1
4
5
1
4
9
1
4
1
24
1
9
2
2
1
6
1
5
2
4
9
2
1
15
1
1
2
62
5
3
1
2
1
2
17
Type of tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Type of company
Retargeter
Ad Serving
Video Ad Platform
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
DSP
Mobile Ad Network
Mobile Ad Network
Optimization
Video Ad Platform
DSP
# of
sites
2
5
5
4
58
1
3
2
1
1
6
1
1
1
2
3
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Ad Network
DSP
Ad Serving
Verification
Mobile Ad Serving
Ad Network
Ad Network
Native Advertising
SSP
See note 2
Native Advertising
Optimization
Ad Network
Video Ad Platform
SSP
Exchange
2
11
16
2
3
1
1
1
1
10
11
2
3
8
9
4
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Ad Network
Exchange
Ad Network
Exchange
SSP
Ad Network
Retargeter
Video Ad Platform
Ad Network
DSP
DSP
9
2
5
17
8
1
1
1
3
1
1
18
Type of tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Type of company
Native Advertising
Video Ad Network
DSP
Video Ad Network
Ad Network
DSP
DSP
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Advertising Tag
Ad Network
Ad Network
Ad Network
Display Platform
# of
sites
1
4
1
3
9
4
14
5
8
7
1
3
1
1
2
Type of tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Type of company
Data Aggregator
Behavioral & Intent Data
DMP
# of
sites
3
2
10
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
4
2
11
2
3
1
10
4
1
2
3
1
1
1
1
2
24
2
19
# of
sites
Type of tag
Type of company
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Attribution
Behavioral & Intent Data
Data Aggregator
12
2
7
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Attribution
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Data Aggregator
Data Aggregator
Data Aggregator
Data Aggregator
Behavioral & Intent Data
10
1
2
7
2
3
10
5
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
Data Tag
DMP
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Data Aggregator
DMP
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
Behavioral & Intent Data
5
1
1
1
1
1
1
43
6
2
2
2
1
1
Notes:
1. DoubleClick offers a broad range of services and was classified in this report under both the exchange
and ad server categories
2. OpenX offers several different services and was classified in this report under both the exchange and
ad server categories
20
Appendix II.
Project methodology
21
The core of this project is a list from Quantcast of the largest U.S. websites based on
monthly visits during August 2013. That list was edited to remove sites that A) used no
ad tech whatsoever (e.g., wikipedia.org), or B) used ad tech that was 100% homegrown
(e.g., twitter.com), or C) requested that their domains be hidden on the list. The final list
of 100 sites that we surveyed were ranked by Quantcast from #2 (youtube.com) to #127
(expedia.com). A complete list of sites included in the survey is on the next page.
The sites were surveyed in late September 2013 using a simple tool that navigated
through top-level pages linked from the menu of each site and through a number of
additional random pages; a total of 50 pages were scanned on each site. Each page was
evaluated for scripts and for HTML which contained one or more specific domains from
a list of more than 200 that are associated with leading ad tech vendors and every such
tag was logged. Scripts were not allowed to execute in order to minimize the number of
tags generated dynamically through daisy chaining and to limit the tags that were logged
to only those associated with vendors who have a direct relationship with the site. This
process logged a total of 28,519 tags which were then parsed to remove duplicative tags
(i.e., tags from the same vendor which appeared in more than one page on the same
site). This netted the working dataset of 725 tags from 144 different vendors upon which
this report is based.
Finally, a couple limitations / issues should be noted:
The process of analyzing the final dataset required that vendors be organized
into specific categories. Given the complicated landscape of ad tech today, this
is a challenging task and the results subject to debate. For this reason, the listing
of vendors in Appendix I also includes our categorization for each firm so that
readers may make adjustments as they desire.
In order to limit third-party cookies, some sites have begun to work with
vendors to drop cookies and serve ad creative through their own sub-domains
which are mapped back to the vendors own servers. Such arrangements are
difficult at best to analyze and therefore when present were not logged and do
not show up in our results.
Feedback or suggestions related to the methodology or to any of the data in this report
would be welcomed. Please dont hesitate to email me at dstrassel@gmail.com
22
urbandictionary.com
usmagazine.com
usps.com
vimeo.com
walmart.com
weather.com
webmd.com
wellsfargo.com
whitepages.com
wikia.com
womensforum.com
wow.com
wunderground.com
yahoo.com
yellowpages.com
yelp.com
youtube.com
zillow.com
23