It's no secret that advertisers want as much information as possible about their clients and the people who view their ads.
One of the advantages of mobile advertising is that you can target people much more specifically – and learn more about them – than with traditional print and broadcast ads or even internet advertising. Knowing someone's location, for example, can allow an advertiser to provide discounts or promotions at nearby stores and restaurants.
Some handset manufacturers and internet browsers make this hard to do though.
Blackberry and Operal Mini, for example, use proxy servers.
These proxies do two things which can affect your campaign's performance:
First, proxies hide the end user's location. When you look at the MSISDN and IP data related to your content, you could easily think that all your traffic is coming from a single country. But this is just the place where the proxy is located, not where your viewers really are.
Second, the proxies hide other details about a user's phone as well – like its operating system and screen size. This can make it particularly difficult for advertisers and content providers that make apps to deliver the right app that suits the phone.
So basically, advertisers could just be wasting their money trying to reach consumers with these devices. As a result, some clients – particularly VAS (Value Added Services) partners and performance-based advertisers – prefer to exclude this type of inventory when they are setting up their campaign.
Here's how to do it . . .
Under Ad Management on the Advertiser dashboard, click on “My Campaigns”, then Create Campaign. Scroll down to where it says “Audience” (on the left) and “Campaign Targeting” (on the right). Now click on the + sign under Device Targeting (and next to 'All Devices').
Now, there's a two-set process. First, you can decide not to serve ads to browsers that use proxies. To do this, under Selected Devices, click on 'Others'. Now you have a choice of which mobile browsers to exclude. Choose “Exclude Proxied-browser Traffic” if you would like to avoid Opera Mini, UC (which is primarily used in China and India) and Ovi (for Nokia S40 phones). Alternatively, you can choose any one of the three.
After excluding a browser, your choice will be reflected in the Audience box on the left.
You can also choose to deliver your campaign exclusively to consumers who use the Opera Mini browser.
I hope you found this to be useful. If you have any questions, please let us know. Proxy-exclusion is not for everyone. If your campaign is focused on branding, this is likely not an issue you need to think about. However our clients with sales-driven campaigns - particularly companies that sell games and apps, who really need to know a user's operating system - find Proxy Exclusion to be a useful tool.
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