Shanghai-based Admaster (admaster.com.cn) provides online ad performance tracking, research, analytical and optimization consulting services for advertisers. According to its CEO Vincent Yan, advertisers can save up to 30% of their online marketing budget using their services.
“In China, there is no third party organization to provide accurate market information about the online media. A lot of websites overstate their daily visitors and pageviews, which is unfair to those high quality media who tell the true traffic. Moreover, click-fraud is still prevalent in China. Many pageviews and click-throughs are artificially created by machines,” said Vincent.
Admaster’s services help advertisers to track real traffic to their advertisements and detect incidents of click-frauds. “If a publisher has overstated its traffic, we will know and the advertiser can ask for a refund or another forms of compensation,” said Vincent.
Apart from these, it can also track if there is overlap between media coverage. There are tools for media saturation and reach & frequency analysis. Advertising spending is wasted if the ad is shown to the same users many times without a proper frequency control. Admaster can also provide the demographic data of audience of different websites, helping advertisers to evaluate the target audience concentration of each website.
“Through a partnership with a global research agency, we have installed hundreds of thousands cookies onto a well-managed online user panel pool in China. We know their demographic data and where and when these panel are reached by advertisers’ ads (coded). We use these data to estimate the demographic data of audience in different ad campaigns and on different media. And then, we can evaluate which media has the best cost per target audiance reached” said Vincent.
Admaster charges about 3-4% of the advertiser’s online budget as fee for its services. Vincent said, this is worthwhile as Admaster can improve advertisers’ ROI – usually 10%-30% of their online ad budget is saved. The core product Ad-Master has launched about one and half year and Admaster has 60 clients so far, including McDonald, Puma, Johnson & Johnsons, Unilever, Acer, etc. It expected to have 200 clients this year.
“Also in 2011, new products such as Survey-Master, Panel-Master, Buzz-Master will be introduced to the market to meet the more sophiscated needs from Chinese advertisers,” said Vincent.
He thought there are 5,000 potential clients for his services in China. “There are 3,800 advertisers just on Sina alone,” said Vincent, “Every of them can be our clients.” By 2013, Vincent hopes to expand his company to the global market. There is already a believer of his ambition. Admaster has got an investment of several million USD from GSR Venture, a China and silicon valley based VC firm.
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