By kristennicole on January 15, 2009 2:28 PM

Lookery Moves to Ad Optimization with Universal Ad Tags

After selling its ad network to AdKnowldge last year, Lookery has been focused on pushing other tools for improving the overall business of publishing ads across the web. The latest in its feature set is the Lookery Ad Controller, which features the Universal Ad Tag.

This means that publishers can now push ad content out to multiple networks on a more automated basis, while still retaining control. It works by allowing publishers to create a Universal Ad Tag within Lookery, then add third-party ad tags and publishers can then determine how Lookery should rotate between the ad tags. Drop the Universal Ad Tag code on your site, and Lookery takes care of the rest.

This type of ad optimization is offered by a handful of other ad networks, but Lookery is promoting its free, lightweight version as an alternative to having an ad server. Given the increasing attention given to budget spending on marketing campaigns, avoiding an ad server could be beneficial to those publishers that operate on a cross-site basis for their material. And it looks as though the new Ad Controller is really geared towards those publishers that have multiple ads running across a number of sites, all of which need to be monitored and modified at the drop of a hat.

The ultimate goal, according to Lookery, is to provide a great deal more control placed in the hands of the ad publishers, who are collecting the necessary data that determines the success and future implementations of a given marketing campaign. From there, optimizing ads becomes less tedious and far easier to manage.

That doesn’t mean that Lookery won’t be finding some way to make this data useful for itself, and perhaps useful to other ad networks. Lookery has always been in the business of collecting data for others’ research purposes, and I tend to think that this is where the majority of such companies’ value lies. To that end, Lookery has mentioned that it will be continuing to build out its Ad Controller in order to become dually beneficial to both ends of the advertising spectrum. This type of data can only help in the end, enabling Lookery to offer improved features to publishers usingits service.