Build an Inclusion list for specific audience programmatic campaigns

Use syndicated research and website scoring tools to eliminate longtail programmatic websites.

By Cassie Stox   Media Director, Insight seeker, All views are my own

So, you want to run a programmatic campaign. You are a devout follower of Dr. Augustine Fou’s Slideshares and LinkedIn posts, you know there is a high potential for ad fraud, but you still need a way to reach a very specific audience across the web. Making sure you have the right measurements in place, using the Fou Analytics in-ad and on-site tags dashboard is a great way to monitor the impressions being served for a programmatic campaign. You can use the dashboard to check in weekly or biweekly on the placements and volume of bot activity. But trying to play “whack-a-mole” on websites week in and week out is hard. What you need is an inclusion list.

Where to start?

Start with data you know about your audience. Do you have any research on top websites for this audience? If you are trying to reach professional audiences in industries like Healthcare, Technology, or Finance, there is likely some syndicated research about this audience. Internal surveys via your sales team or via key publishers in your industry could uncover online habits of your audience. If you are trying to reach a consumer audience, leverage data on the top websites for your audience demographic and look for websites specific to your product category. A good online tool is SimilarWeb and syndicated research partner Kantar.

Then – if you still need more websites to build the list, check out DeepSee. DeepSee is a very helpful and easy to use website to identify good domains to add to your whitelist, as a starting point. The have a scoring system that ranks domains and gives them a grade. 

Another useful functionality of the DeepSee website is the ability to then upload the list that you created from your syndicated data research to get a score on your manually created list. A recent upload uncovered that diabetes.org & diabetesjournals.org do not have the ads.txt file on their website – so it could be open to fraud and domain spoofing. This is a candidate to remove from your inclusion list. 

As always – continue to monitor your placements via FouAnalytics in-ad tags and remove any of these websites that are flagged as high bot.