Contextual Insights Report

Overview

Contextual Insights reports describe the contextual categories of the best performing audiences. Identified contextual segments can help scale your performing audiences through the content that is most relevant and engaging to them.

Contextual targeting has always been one of the more powerful tools in programmatic advertising—over 70% of all DSP customers use some form of contextual targeting in their campaigns. In the new identity landscape, as 3rd-party cookies are being phased out by major browsers, contextual targeting will become even more important. This report type is unique to Basis Technologies and uses our partnership with Peer39 to provide a full breakdown of campaign performance, mapped to Peer39's contextual segments.

While we currently only provide reports using Peer39's segments, we are exploring adding new partners.

Using Contextual Insights Reports

There are two primary reasons to use this report:

To report performance and delivery by the classification of the actual content that ads were placed with, which is a more relatable and manageable list than using domains.
To make optimization decisions by identifying contextual segments that you may want to target. For example, you might observe that a contextual segment you had not previously considered, such as Home & Garden, performs especially well for your campaign's KPI. Based on this information, you can set up a campaign that directly targets "Home & Garden" to maximize performance.

Before you create a Contextual Insights report, you should have a campaign that has generated enough impressions and conversions to allow you to establish a baseline KPI. Filter the data in the report to identify segments that land within your target parameters.

This is a report on any impressions purchased—you don't need to be using contextual targeting today to benefit from this data. In these cases, use Contextual Insights reports to discover if there are contextual segments in existing campaigns that might deliver high performance based on their observed historical buying and how the contextual categories overlap.

Using contextual segments can expose tactics to much more content than before. We recommend using optimization features (either Machine Learning Optimization or Algorithmic Optimization) to help manage this broader exposure. See Optimization for more information.

There are a few important points to keep in mind as you pull Contextual Insights reports:

Contextual Insights data is available for all DSP line items as of April 1st, 2021.
- You can select any online tactics or any offline or archived tactics that were still spending on or after April 1, 2021.
To get actionable results, look for tactics that are spending and generating clicks, conversions, and completions.
Your tactics don't need to already target contextual categories. All contextual categories are reported for any tactic, regardless of targeting.
The segments in the report vary depending on the inventory your campaign targets. For example, if your tactic bought mobile app supply, the Contextual Insights report only shows relevant Peer39 categories that support mobile apps. If the campaign bought connected TV (CTV), it only shows categories that support CTV.
You can run Contextual Insights reports as a one-time report or as scheduled reports.
Reports are available at the tactic level.

Look at the following fields in the report to assess the performance of contextual segments:

Number of impressions
Number of conversions
Video Completion Rate
KPIs your campaigns are targeting
Names of contextual segments with optimal performance data for future targeting

You cannot add the numbers for different segments to produce a total number of impressions (or clicks, conversions) in the campaign. A page can fall into many categories, so impression counts can overlap between segments. Additionally, the estimated costs and KPIs don't include the costs to target those segments. You shouldn't compare grand totals with tactic-level totals.

After you review the report, you can create a new tactic that targets the contextual segments with high performance numbers or add those segments to existing tactics.

Creating Contextual Insights Reports

Contextual Insights is a dimension of Data Segment reports.

To create a Contextual Insights Report:

Create a new Data Segment report. See Creating a New DSP Report.
For the Report Type, select Data Segment Report.
Set the report dimension to Tactic > Contextual Insights.
Finish setting up the report, then click Create to add it to the queue.

Report Data

Review the following table to see a breakdown of the dimensions and metrics available in this report.

Name	Example	Description
Segment Name	Peer39 > Personal Finance	The name of the contextual segment
Imps. Won	774	Total number of impressions won
Clicks	8	Total number of clicks
CTR	2.08%	Click-through rate
Total eCPM	$21.75	Total effective cost per thousand impressions
Total eCPC	$1.04	Total effective cost per click
Total eCPA	$2.74	Total effective cost per acquisition
CTC	2	Click-through conversions
VTC	6	View-through conversions
Total Conversions	8	All click-through and view-through conversions
Click CVR	65.38%	Click-through conversion rate - the proportion of people who converted after clicking an ad, calculated by this formula: CTC / Clicks
View CVR	88.51%	View-through conversion rate - the proportion of people who converted after viewing an ad, calculated by this formula: VTC / Clicks
Total CVRM	302.72%	Total conversion rate per thousand impressions
CTC Revenue	$15.00	Total revenue from click-through conversions
VTC Revenue	$25.00	Total revenue from view-through conversions
Total Revenue	$40.00	CTC Revenue + VTC Revenue
Media Spend	$1.98	Amount spent on media
Data Spend	$0.11	Amount spent on data
Total Spend	$2.09	Media spend + Data spend
Audio/Video Starts	100	Number of times the audio or video ad began to play.
25% Complete	99	Number of audio or video impressions that reached the first quartile marker
50% Complete	60	Number of audio or video impressions that reached the second quartile marker
75% Complete	45	Number of audio or video impressions that reached the third quartile marker
Completion Rate	25	Number of audio or video impressions that reached the fourth quartile marker, that is, viewed to completion
eCPCV	$1.01	Effective cost per view

Sample Report

Download a sample Contextual Insights report (XLSX).