I’ve been updating the senior management of the major ad networks today that SearchForecast has been “de-anonymizing” the anonymous URLs Google show on their ‘placement targeting’ within Adwords for advertisers who spend money on their Content Network.

As pictured here, we are providing to media buyers and advertisers a list of URLs which we believe are those URLs which Google run the ads on across their Content Display Network and 3rd party networks via the exchanges.

For those technically minded, our “de-anonymizing” process includes the following:

1. The first method is to basically match the numbers in the PubID string. So if for example the Pub ID is 5ca654dd9821cb84, we check for the following sequence numbers in our adsense database:

1.       654 – how many id’s match this number
2.       9821 – how many id’s match this number
3.       84 – how many id’s contain this number
4.       654 and 9821 – how many id’s contain 654 and 9821
5.       654 and 84 – how many id’s contain 654 and 84
6.       9821 and 84 – how many id’s contain both these combinations
7.       654, 9821 & 84 – how many id’s contain all of these combinations

2.       The second method is to use a standard bit encryption on our database of adsense id’s. So for example if the id is 654981, we run an encryption code sequence of 16 bit upon it. This gives us a alphanumeric character string of 16 characters. We then use the same code we used in the above example to run a combination.

3.       The third method is to do the same with an advanced bit encryption sequence
4.       Fourth method is to use an proprietary encryption sequence.

The simple fact is that advertisers are spending with Google and don’t know where their dollars are being spent. Lack of transparency leads to market inefficiency affecting advertisers and agencies. Advertisers and large media buyers are welcome to contact us for further information on how we can provide more transparency when advertising across the Google Content Network.