Tallying the hits: NetGravity's AdServer displays an advertiser's profile, showing a five-month record of forecasts and impressions.

Performance check: NetGravity graphically displays a record of traffic at a web site, showing how many impressions each ad had.

NetGravity puts a Las Vegas web site on a classified roll

The folks at Vegas Deluxe, a Las Vegas-oriented web site, had two features in mind when they began shopping for an ad server: accountability and manageability.

Bryan Allison believes they found both when they chose NetGravity's AdServer.

"We consider ourselves a national market, and we look for national advertisers," said Allison, general manager for Vegas Deluxe (http://www.vegasdeluxe.com/). "These folks tend to be more savvy about this type of advertising, and they look for more reporting. AdServer has an excellent reporting feature, and it's a good sales tool."

Vegas Deluxe bills itself as a "complete guide to everything Las Vegas," featuring coverage of Las Vegas from its print publication, the Las Vegas Sun, plus updated news from the Associated Press, New York Times and Christian Science Monitor.

Allison said that even local advertisers have been impressed that they can see exactly how many hits their on-line ads have accumulated. "We're the only ones in town with that sophisticated a setup for advertising."

Vegas Deluxe looked at several ad servers, he said, including setups by Real Media (whose clients include AT&T, Disney on-line, GTE and New Century Network, which recently dumped NetGravity in favor of RealMedia's Open AdStream system) and Accipiter (whose clients include Microsoft, Cnet, Lycos and ZDNet, the on-line presence of Ziff-Davis).

"We found that NetGravity had a nice GUI and was an easy system for inserts. We were impressed with its flexibility," he said. "We've been tying NetGravity to a Cascade media system that rotates ads based on the site's editorial content."

AdServer 3.0 uses a visual interface to access ad inventory on-line and schedule ads in real time. The program automates the process of managing on-line ad inventory and placing ads on the site, a feature NetGravity says virtually eliminates the risk of booking too many ads in the available space or underutilizing ad space.

The system analyzes historical data to forecast inventory capacities and deliver real-time availability reports. The system also incorporates an interactive graphical Java interface that facilitates manual adjustments to forecasted inventory levels.

NetGravity, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., says that manual adjustments may be necessary when a site runs special promotions and significantly increases incoming traffic. AdServer streamlines usage by allowing users to book ad runs immediately after checking on required availabilities.

Short-term experience is promising

Allison said Vegas Deluxe bought AdServer about three months ago, and it's been up and running for two months.

"There are a lot of different levels of use with the system," he said. "At first we had a bit of trouble hooking up with our Oracle database, but we were able to solve that with some good support from NetGravity."

NetGravity says AdServer data is stored in industry-standard SQL databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix or Sybase. AdServer's open architecture contains a C application programming interface (API) that enables web sites to extend AdServer's capabilities. This allows sites to customize AdServer functionality to their needs, and also integrate AdServer with third-party software packages.

Allison said that one thing newspapers need to keep in mind when they go shopping for an ad server is that no system will be ready to run right out of the box. "Anything you buy is going to have to be customized for your needs. There's a lot of complexity involved -- we've been throwing our tech guys and our ad guys at it since we got the system up."

Vegas Deluxe is one of more than 200 web sites using NetGravity's AdServer. Other clients include Ameritech, Bloomberg News, the Boston Globe's on-line effort boston.com, the Chicago Tribune, CNN Interactive and the Los Angeles Times on-line division, latimes.com.

The Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspapers share an advertising staff through a joint operating agreement, but the Vegas Deluxe on-line venture falls outside this agreement. So, instead of sharing an advertising sales staff that would have to be retrained in the ways of selling web space, Vegas Deluxe was free to hire its own sales force.

Allison said the challenge instead "was in convincing businesses that they weren't paying for images on a page, a piece of paper, that they could see. It was on a web page -- but a page that included reporting that showed exactly how their ad did from day to day."

Response to the new advertising setup has been strong, Allison said. "One site has already done around a million impressions."

Still, many clients have needed some education in the ways of the Web. "When you deal with traditional advertisers, they're used to working in the print medium, and they're not sure what works on-line. We've been helping them along, with things like, 'If you give something away, you'll generate more click-through rates.'"

Several clients have signed long-term contracts. One casino has inked a one-year advertising deal with Vegas Deluxe, Allison said, and it has attracted between 100,000 and 200,000 impressions a month.

With AdServer's reporting system, advertisers can check their ads daily to see how many click-throughs they've attracted. A client can either log in with a user name and a password and look at the hits, or he or she can get an automatic e-mail that shows the hits.

"NetGravity also gives us flexibility with ad rotation," Allison said. "For example, a lot of people are used to going to bookmarked sites, bypassing a lot of pages on that site. With ad rotation, people don't get burned out seeing the same ad over and over on the bookmarked page," and ads on non-bookmarked pages have a better chance of being seen.

AdServer is a powerful program, Allison said -- perhaps a bit too powerful for Vegas Deluxe's needs. Still, he's not complaining.

"The program is capable of many things beyond advertising. We're really happy with the system, but since this is a new medium, some of these folks [advertisers] want to slice and dice, really try to micro-manage what the program is capable of doing. We've been trying to tone down the hype, because we don't want to spend all our time customizing ads too specifically -- you'll end up using all your time and energy on that, and the ad will become impossible to manage. We want to make sure we meet the advertisers' goals."

Meeting a smaller demand

For the small and medium-sized ad-supported sites who don't need or want that level of power, NetGravity has tailored its ad server.

On Dec. 8, the company announced the addition of AdCenter, a new full-service ad serving solution based on NetGravity's AdServer Network technology. AdCenter is designed for small and mid-size sites, enabling them to generate advertising revenue without investing in the technical infrastructure required to manage ad operations.

This new AdCenter service makes NetGravity the only on-line advertising management company with both software and service offerings, giving customers the ability to migrate from service to product as they grow.

"The decision to either buy advertising management software or outsource to a full-service advertising management bureau depends much on the size of a web site," said Evan Neufeld, senior analyst for Jupiter Communications. "The advantage of service bureaus for ad management should be a boon for second- and third-tier content players, which would no longer have to devote extensive resources to the complex task of ad management in-house, opting instead for the more efficient path of paying a service fee and outsourcing."

AdCenter customers will have on-line access to NetGravity AdCenter to manage advertising inventory, schedule ads and receive reports, as well as have access to NetGravity's nonstop support.

AdCenter offers customers a number of features, including: