Kontera enters ad partnership with Microsoft, LinkedIn - Advertising - BizReport

Kontera enters ad partnership with Microsoft, LinkedIn - Advertising - BizReport

Online Searches for Auto Insurance Quotes up 35%

Online Searches for Auto Insurance Quotes up 35%: "Online Searches for Auto Insurance Quotes up 35%

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008;
-- Janet Meiners |

comScore reports that more people are searching for auto insurance quotes online. It also looks like people are more influenced by paid search than natural search results. The queries for auto insurance quotes were up more than 35% in 2007.

There were nearly 9 million search-referred auto insurance quotes made in 2007. More than one-quarter of were made through a search engine. The overall growth for online auto insurance queries increased only 15%.

If you’re in the auto insurance industry, here is some advice: rather than advertise your company name, like “Geico” use generic terms, like “car insurance quote.”

* For paid search, branded terms didn’t lead to completed quote applications (19% did) compared to generic search terms (33% completed quote forms).
* In the organic search, generic also led (22%) over branded (11%).
* After seeing an insurance ad, people were much more likely to visit the company website or do research on the company.

Paid search keeps getting more expensive, especially for generic terms. For local insurance companies and national, running local ads usually mean less competition. You can spot a local ad by seeing the nam"

E-Mail Works for Banks and Card Issuers

APRIL 8, 2008

They are getting better ROI than other industries.

If you have a mailbox, it will come as no surprise that US credit card companies and other financial services firms spent more on direct marketing in 2007 than any other industry. Banks and credit card issuers are masters of mailing targeted offers, and that mail accounts for nearly 42% of their direct marketing budgets.

E-mail is becoming part of this massive direct marketing effort as well, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s "Direct Marketing Facts and Figures in the Financial Services Industry."

The DMA had previously released some information from the study in a press release, but a recent Marketing Charts article cited more, revealing e-mail as the number three direct marketing tactic in the industry.

The DMA also said that banks and credit card direct marketers had a better return on investment in 2007 than did any other industry, at $13.37 per dollar spent.

That may have something to do with the high open rate that the financial services industry gets.

E-mail list management company MailerMailer found that nearly 29% of direct marketing e-mails sent by financial services companies were opened during the second half of 2007—more than for any other industry.

eMarketer predicts that financial services spending on online advertising will also continue to increase through at least 2011. That means more offers on any given Web site, not just in your inbox.

Since e-mail marketing works for banks and card issuers, consumers can also expect more offers in their inboxes to join those in their mailboxes.

5 factors that determine your advertising CPM rates

An interesting post at Techcrunch: Pubmatic Data Suggests Small Sites Command Higher Rates For Remnant Ads Than Large Sites.

I love seeing this cross-site ad monetization data, since it's rare to get your hands on it unless you work for an ad network. For people outside the ad industry, advertising CPMs seem like black-boxes.

How to guess CPMs - 5 factors
At Revenue Science, a regular game of mine was to eyeball a site and guesstimate the CPMs.

A couple of the factors that I'd use:

1. Is the site "sticky" or is it a one-hit wonder (like a reference site)?
2. Is the site pretty general, or is it in a particular category (like cars)?
3. Who uses the site? Everyone (including international) or just US?
4. How dependent is the site on Google SEO versus a community site that draws people back?
5. How many pageviews does the site have? Is it a lot? Or is it a small amount

Easy to monetize, hard to monetize
For the people who are curious, this is the easiest to monetize:

One-hit wonder site that exist in a particular category, are based in the US, and have lots of search traffic

In particular, your site is likely to have high CTRs since people are in a "transactional" mode. If you have all of those, and have a ton of pageviews, then you'll make a ton of money.

The hardest to monetize?

Highly sticky sites that are general (like communication), based 100% outside of the US/Europe/Japan, with lots of pageviews

In a setup like this, not only are people unlikely to want to buy anything, even if they did, there'd be no way to make money off of this group.

Example categories
As a rough rule of thumb, I'd typically guess the following - these are very rough approximations, just to illustrate a couple points:

• Social sites (forums/chat/etc) without direct ad sales teams: <$0.25 CPM
• Largely international sites: <$0.50 CPM
• Medium-sized sites that use banner ad networks: <$1 CPM
• Reference sites in a specific category: >$5 CPM or sometimes much higher, depending on category - we ran into home improvement reference sites that did $20 CPMs

Because we were mostly dealing with so-called "remnant" advertising, these numbers are likely to be at the bottom of the range for these sites. That is, social networks might quote a CPM of $20 CPM, but what they really mean is that 1% of their inventory is sold at that, and the rest of the 99% is sold at <$0.25 prices.

As you can see, as a website property, you fall into either of two categories:

• Horizontal sites used daily which command low CPMs with huge pageviews
• Vertical sites that capture user intent - often used intermittently (with lots of traffic from search) with high CPMs and low pageviews

Horizontal sites, when scaled up to a large enough site, can employ direct ad sales teams that raise the CPM by a significant amount, but the entire process is demand-constrained.

Google is lucky to be both horizontal and vertical - it's used everyday by people, but also captures user intent.

As stated before, social networks monetize poorly
Of course, sites with lots of pageviews are often ones that are general, are sticky, and have lots of context-less social content. I've written up a broader discussion of social network monetization at "5 things that make your social network monetize like crap."

Back to small sites versus large sites
Now, the Techcrunch article discusses the idea that small sites monetize better than large ones. I think that's actually a correlation rather than a causation. There are a ton of small sites out there, and much of their traffic comes from Google. It's much harder to build a functioning social site where people coming back daily than a site where people occassionally stumble on it through their search engine.

As a result, my guess is that the mindset of the typical user includes intent - and that makes all the diference.

The Growing Influence of Online Social Shoppers

APRIL 7, 2008

Who do consumers trust?

Increasingly, each other.

According the Edelman “Trust Barometer,” consumers feel the most credible source for information about a company—and by inference, products— is a “person like themselves.”

Now with social shopping sites, product blogs and online ratings and reviews, consumers have the means to communicate their opinions about products and companies to tens of thousands of other consumers “like themselves” at a critical point in the sales cycle—the beginning.

“While blogs and customer ratings and reviews have long been a familiar part of the Internet commercial landscape,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Consumer Interactions: Social Shopping, Blogs and Reviews, “over the past two years social shopping sites have emerged as another way for customers to share product experiences and opinions.”

Social shopping sites attempt to replicate the emotional and social aspects of real-world shopping—such as strolling through mall stores with friends or swapping product stories at the office with colleagues.

“The sites typically provide tools for users to download photos of interesting products found on retail Web sites to their profile page or blog. Users then share and discuss their findings with the community,” says Mr. Grau. “To buy an item, a shopper simply clicks through on the product photo to the retailer’s Web site, where the purchase is made.”

And shoppers do click.

According to the “Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape” report from JupiterResearch, online social network users were three times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions.

A survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that the two leading reasons why people contribute content to social shopping sites are the need to feel part of a community (31%) and recognition from peers (28%).

“Today, marketers are increasingly reaching out to the growing number of online consumers who take their shopping cues from peers by targeting influential product reviewers, bloggers and social shoppers,” says Mr. Grau.

A Google Reality Check

APRIL 3, 2008


David Hallerman, Senior Analyst

Last week, MarketWatch quoted comScore data showing a second straight month of slower growth in paid clicks for Google's main ad-serving business.

A note from Bank of America (BofA) analyst Brian Pitz pointed out that the comScore data showed a mere 3% growth in Google's paid clicks in February compared with the same month a year earlier.

MarketWatch also noted reduced growth in Google's paid clicks in January, again reported by comScore, and concluded that these results could cause concern about the company's economic health.

Pause for a reality check. Growth in US online ad spending is indeed slowing. However, let's remember that this means smaller increases but still increases. Slower growth is a world away from a fall.

It would be very hasty to infer from slower growth in the number of paid clicks that Google is in an economically weak position. Relative to the three other major portals, Google's position is one of great strength even with slightly reduced growth this year.

The paid click measurement is critical for Google because the company's business is dominated by search advertising services.

Looking at data from five key researchers reinforces confidence in Google's short-term prospects. There is a robust degree of consensus that US spending on search advertising will increase by more than 20%, despite a temporarily weak economy.

eMarketer's online ad spending projections factor in a US economic slowdown in 2008. Learn more in the US Online Advertising: Resilient in a Rough Economy report.

Selling Performics Search Marketing

4/02/2008 02:08:00 PM

Posted by Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration

Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

We plan to integrate the affiliate marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our affiliate advertisers, and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. Together, we believe that we can continue to grow this business and deliver on the high expectations from partners.

Where it’s applicable in Europe, these plans and their implications for employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives. During this transition, we will ensure that all affiliate and search marketing customers receive the same high level of service they have always experienced.