Analyzing Social Conversations to Identify Audience Segments – Compass Labs

Marla Shaivitz March 11, 2011 Tweet

Compass Labs offers an innovative social advertising solution, allowing advertisers to reach highly targeted and “precise users” (e.g. users who are about to buy) on Facebook and other social applications.

Traditional online ad networks do not have the ability to target specific user segments on social media. They have limited targeting information, and can only deliver ads on non-social web or mobile sites. Compass Labs is different:

“Unlike these players, we have developed sophisticated technology to identify highly targeted user segments on social media – e.g. users who are in-market to buy, or users with specific interests, activities, demographics. In addition, we can reach users where they spend an increasing portion of their time – right on social networks.”

Compass Labs’ team is led by CEO Dilip Venkatachari, who previously led Google mobile ads, ran risk management for PayPal, and founded two other successful start-ups, after stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Co-founder Arjun Jayaram was previously VP, Engg for Become.com and has deep search and enterprise software experience while Ian Eslick is another co-founder leads social media analytics efforts including intent and interest algorithms. He is a successful entrepreneur having previously founded Silicon Spice, later acquired by Broadcom, where he held a senior executive role. Ian is also working on collective intelligence and information extraction for his PhD at MIT. He holds a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees from MIT and is an inventor on more than a dozen patents.

How does it work?

When developing campaigns, Compass Labs considers advertisers specify target audiences based on both interest segments and their target customers’ level of “purchase intent.” Once the campaign is defined, Compass Labs’ natural language processing technology analyzes social conversations in real time to identify hyper-relevant audience segments based on publicly shared social conversations.

You may find yourself in some of the examples of audience segments: In market to buy a camera, outdoor enthusiasts, college students worried about costs, frequent travelers, smart phone owners.