Don’t mistake it. 2013 will be the year of a battle royale with the biggest players the Internet has seen. It’ll be a fist fight of the highest order. And you’re going to be able to profit from it.
Everyone knows Google’s been making billions per quarter selling traffic through their various properties. They kill it in the “personal intent” category. When you search for a blue widget it’s pretty clear what you’re interested in.
Now Facebook has joined the fun. Why let Google have all the advertising dollars? Facebook is on track to do $1 Billion in a year from their ad exchange.
No big shocker there either though, right? They have the best database of user’s personal information available.
Amazon has watched and waited. And now they’ve launched their own RTB ad exchange to cash in. It’s a bold and smart move for the eCommerce giant.
Here’s what the RTB battle royale looks like from a birds eye view:
Amazon: Owns the best database of actual shopping history and purchases. This type of data is like gold for advertisers. Clients have long awaited the day when “the sleeping giant,” as it is known in the ad biz, finally wakes up to advertisers. That day has dawned, it seems.
Facebook: Owns the best database of personal information about consumers. 1 billion users strong, with all their interests and friends, it’s terrifically useful stuff for marketers.
Google: Has traditionally dominated the “purchase intent” sector of the category. When people search for “Star Wars DVD” online, that’s a pretty good indicator they want to buy said movie. Google has been serving ads (and retargeting ads) against such requests for years. But its data on shoppers and their histories has never been as good as Amazon’s or Facebook’s.
Why should you care? Well as we’ve been discussing RTB is the next generation of traffic buying. A subset of RTB traffic is retargeting (which you should all be doing on your money sites – just saying) which is booming as well.
It’s your chance to start pulling traffic from the biggest players in the game. As if RTB wasn’t attractive enough, you’ll now be able to pull traffic from Amazon too. There’s a traffic revolution happening and it’s just starting.
