Blacklists and Whitelists – New Self Service Feature

We launched the latest addition to the Adcash product lineup a few weeks ago: Self Service for Advertisers. We’re constantly working on new options and features to give our users more freedom and added flexibility.  So, this brings us to the latest addition to the list of Self Service features: Blacklists and Whitelists.

What are blacklists and whitelists?

Programmatic advertising is becoming more and more commonly used by advertisers online, as it makes reaching audiences quick and easy. But the downside of this is it makes narrowing down and focusing on your target audience more difficult. Blacklists and Whitelists can be very useful by helping to narrow down your target audience. Fundamentally, a blacklist is a list of places where your ads won’t be displayed, whether that’s because you know that type of traffic doesn’t convert for you or if it’s not an audience you think will engage with your brand or product. If you have a blacklist setup for your campaign, you know that it will never be displayed in the places included in that list.

Similarly, whitelists exists to perform the same function, but in reverse. So, by adding places to a whitelist, you can be sure that your ad campaign will displayed in that place and that place only. It’s pretty simple, really: blacklist a place and your ad will appear anywhere but there, whitelist a place and it will only appear there.

What are the benefits of using blacklists and whitelists?

First, let’s take a look at how using a whitelist can help your improve your campaign’s effectiveness. You’ve done your market research. You’ve put the effort into identifying your target audience and now you want to optimise your online ad campaign based on that knowledge. With a whitelist in place, you can be sure that the target audience your research has identified will see your ads, and only them. That way your campaign budget will be spent on reaching the audience most likely to bring you revenue by being relevant to the interests of those users.  There’s no need to worry about your ads being irrelevant to the people they’re reaching.

There are certain drawbacks when using whitelists, because they rely on you knowing exactly the audience you want to reach. If you know who you want to target, and you want to target those people only, then great, a whitelist will allow you to do that. But, in this ever changing world, even the best market research may not give you a 100% picture of who you should and should only be targeting. That’s where a blacklist can come in handy. It allows you to exclude audiences your market research has identified as non-converting, but still reach potentially new and untapped areas, thus giving you a better return on your investment.

So, which is for me?

As with many of these things, that depends. If you know very specifically who you want to be targeting with your ads, then whitelists are the way forward for you. If on, the other hand, you know that certain groups of people are extremely unlikely to convert and you know there’s no point displaying your ads to them, but you still want to reach new audiences outside of those your market research may have identified, then blacklists are probably more for you. We have built this feature to give you the choice as to how you would like to optimise and target your campaigns, rather than deciding that one or the other is “better” and only offering that one.

So, now you know what blacklists and whitelists are and what they can be used for, you can start putting them to use. If you’re already an Adcash advertiser, you can visit the support center for some more technical information on how to go about implementing blacklists and whitelists. If you’re not already an Adcash advertising partner, but would like to become one, you can join today.