The Fifth Elephant 2013

Ad targeting has evolved by leaps and bounds over the past 5 years - right from Google Analytics based remarketing on Google to custom audiences, lookalikes and partner categories on Facebook to audience buys across display networks. Targeting your ads precisely to the right audience personas is nothing but a big data problem with hundreds of thousands of targeting variable combinations possible. Understand how to methodically manage ad targeting in this session.

Outline

Wonder why you see an ad for car rentals on a blog site right after you book your flight ticket on a travel site? Wonder how the ads on Facebook actually seem to be talking to you, using the right words to get your attention? Wonder why you see the kind of ads you see through your journey on the web?

In this session, ex-Googler and Sokrati CPO Rahul Kulkarni demystifies the complex world of ad targeting and presents it as a simple big data problem. Learn how a combination of customer behaviour data from website logs, transaction data from your ERP system and ad click URLs provide a powerful dataset for ad targeting when used in conjunction with ad platforms like Google and Facebook.

Speaker bio

Rahul Kulkarni is the Chief Product Officer at Sokrati, a digital marketing and analytics startup on a mission to delight advertisers globally. Before jumping into the startup world, Rahul spent about six years at Google - starting out as Google’s first product manager in India and managing various products such as Google Maps and Local, cloud computing, Orkut and Google Finance. Prior to Google, Rahul was the Product Manager for LabVIEW at National Instruments Corp in Austin, TX where for five years he led new product development efforts in the areas of design, prototyping and deployment of high speed control systems. Rahul holds a Masters degree in Engineering from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and Bachelors from VJTI Mumbai.