What with its current buying spree and the recent comScore finding that Google’s share of search grew to just a skosh under 50% in April while all its competitors declined, it’s easy to see Google as virtually unstoppable. But Ask.com believes it’s found a chink in at least a portion of Google’s armor.
The fourth-ranked search engine (and third-largest search ad network, according to its own internal data and comScore findings) last month launched a new contextual network as part of its Ask Sponsored Listings platform. Starting with selected properties owned by Ask.com parent company IAC and some third-party Web sites, advertisers will be able to place contextually relevant pay-per-click ads within the Ask.com network.
IAC sites delivering the new contextual ads will include dating site Match.com, online invitation service Evite, and local directory Citysearch. The next phase of the controlled introduction should see Ask contextual ads appearing on Ticketmaster and Expedia, among the 20 IAC sites that are part of the IAC Advertising Solutions division.
Those are “not just premium brands, but the top brands in their respective verticals,” says Paul Vallez, director of product management for search marketing at IAC Advertising Solutions. They’re also sites with audiences that advertisers have not been able to reach, since the sites were not previously delivering pay-per-click contextual ads from the Google AdSense network, in which other IAC sites do partner. “We’ve started out using inventory that was previously unsold by our direct sales team,” he says. “From an advertiser perspective, it’s almost like an invitation into our proprietary network.”
Vallez says the company’s contextual ad platform differs from those offered by competitors such as Google and Yahoo! in that marketers and publishers will both have a greater degree of control over, and visibility into, the ads and their placement. As the contextual network grows, advertisers will be able to see where their ads are appearing and will be able to impose competitive blocking, to ensure that rivals’ ads don’t appear next to the same content.
In order to work for advertisers, a contextual network also has to have demonstrable benefits for publishers. The Ask.com launch offers Web publishers a number of unique features. For one thing, they can use tools that let them balance the twin values of ad relevance and page yields. Operators who are looking for a lot of ads producing a lot of impressions can set that level high, at the possible cost of running some ads that are less relevant to their visitors. But those publishers who may be more concerned about protecting their brand from less targeted ads can set the relevance lever to high and choose to give up some potential ad revenue for the sake of a better visitor experience.
“We started out by listening to the issues that Web publishers had with the ad products from the big networks” Vallez says. “Even talking to our own IAC properties--in conversations with Match.com for example--they made it clear that their business models don’t revolve around advertising. Match.com or Ticketmaster are squarely built on selling tickets or memberships, and advertising is incremental to their business. So they want more control over the ads that get placed on their pages. And from our point of view, if we’re serving up [contextual] ads to those pages, they damn well better perform.”
“We have teams on Ask.com that focus on optimization, making sure we give the user the right experience at the right time,” he says. “Publishers want to do the same thing: optimize their sites and make them perform better. By offering them the chance of control over relevance, views and ad content, we’ve giving them what they’ve been asking for for years.”
The Ask contextual ads will also be distinguished from other search networks by their look, a kind of hybrid that can combine graphic images and text ads. “Everyone who browses around the Internet is familiar with the AdSense-style product where you have a white background and green links,” Vallez says. “It becomes something that you almost don’t pay much attention to. We’re trying to take a whole new fresh look at the format, adding a contextually relevant image to text ads. So we’re combining a brand element through the images with a direct-response advertiser, putting them into a brand-heavy environment.” The Ask contextual ads can also be set apart with frames or given background shades that make them more visible on the page.
The aim with these design tricks is to get a better response than rivals have been able to garner with their contextual products. “Publishers I’ve spoken to who use the AdSense product or Yahoo!’s contextual ads report that clickthrough rates are typically a fraction of a percentage point,” Vallez says. “But on search results pages, the clickthrough is closer to 20% in most cases. Why is that? We’re trying to find ways to bring that performance level over to the media side of the Web and to make more value out of this inventory, for both publishers and advertisers.”
Publisher feedback also went into the initial set of customized ad units available to advertisers in the network. Later enhancements should include an interface that will let publishers customize those formats to best fit the look and feel of their Web pages. The next 60 days should also see a self-service interface that will let advertisers look at ad performance data from specific sites and set up rules blocking their ads from sites they feel aren’t producing the necessary returns.
Vallez says the Ask.com contextual network will give advertisers that element of control over ad distribution without any additional fees—unlike rival networks, he says. “We got some feedback from advertisers that Google was offering to give advertisers lots of control in terms of choosing sites, but in return was requiring them to pay on a cost per thousand [CPM] basis. We ‘re not requesting that they pay any additional fees or on any different kind of business model; we’re just giving them the ability to police their own contextual campaigns.”
While Ask isn’t ready yet to name the outside Web sites that will be part of its contextual network, Vallez says that company is “having a lot of great conversations” with Web publishers who are growing wary of the larger networks’ hold on the market.
“We’ve gotten lots of calls from some of the biggest publishers out there,” he says. “They’re getting frustrated with those relationships [with Google and Yahoo!]. They can’t tell what sort of revenue share they have, and they have no control over content, monetization or relevance. And since we’re not requiring exclusivity, the end of almost every conversation with publishers has been, ‘Yes, we’d like to try your network.’”
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