YieldBuild is in the news raising another $6M capital with a solution to “maximize advertising revenue for web publishers”. It’s an AdSense layer of code that monitors and tunes your ad for you. Nice. I mention this because it’s just another validation of the very real risk from ad blindness eroding the impact of your ad spend in the industry and I applaud it. The online ad industry has grown so huge and so multi-faceted that many advertisers and publishers become complacent with their campaigns because they are so easy to traffic now and that is when your KPIs start to fall off. Just watch the conversion rate of a campaign after a week or so and you will see the creeping effects of ad blindness setting in. Frequency capping and day parting may help but a good campaign is one that is constantly being evaluated and tuned against your KPI. YieldBuild’s whole business model is based on that truism! A good online ad partner should always be talking to you about tuning and optimization. But more importantly, your ad network should be proactively showing you every single impression down to the URL level. If not, what is it they are trying to hide? It’s the reality that your promised impressions are either eluding them or not having the contracted impact and they are farming out your ad to anyone who can get them some numbers so they don’t have to put up the “mea-culpa” make-good at the end. So please, for me, ask your ad network for a report of every impression and every URL where you are running. Ask them what content you are running on and don’t settle for site level or network level themes. Then re-tune constantly for performance where your ads are getting traction. And if your ad network doesn’t have that kind of real transparency and accountability baked into their DNA, then shop your ad network around until you find a partner who is confident enough to open their kimono and show you everything. Only then can you truly keep ad blindness out of the picture and make the most of your ad spend.