The Search Agency Report Also Finds Smartphone and Tablets Driving Paid Search and Yahoo!-Bing Network’s Traffic Growth Outperform Google Quarter Over Quarter

LOS ANGELES - The Search Agency, a global online marketing firm and the largest independent U.S. search marketing agency, released its State of Paid Search Report. The report found that across all search engines, click traffic increased by 27 percent year over year, and U.S. impressions have increased by 21 percent. The quarterly report analyzes aggregated client data on paid search marketing trends across search engines, devices, and industries on a year over year (YoY—Q3, 2011 to Q3 2012) and quarter over quarter (QoQ—Q2 2012 to Q3 2012) basis.

“The search industry overall is continuing to thrive. Over the last quarter we’ve seen higher quality traffic on Yahoo!-Bing, driving advertisers to invest more in the growing search engine,” said Keith Wilson, vice president of Agency Products at The Search Agency. “Another area of rapid growth is on tablets and mobile—we expect this growth to continue to pick up pace, especially as we hit the holiday shopping season and new tablets are introduced in to the market.”

Additional findings from The Search Agency’s State of Paid Search Report include:

Yahoo!-Bing Network traffic growth surpasses Google quarter over quarter

Google remains the dominant search engine; however, Yahoo!-Bing outperforms Google QoQ in traffic growth – evidence of growing competition in the search engine marketplace. Yahoo!-Bing’s click traffic increased by 9.6 percent in Q3 2012, while Google’s click traffic only increased by 0.7 percent.

Mobile is driving growth in paid search; tablets are picking up speed

Smartphone click traffic increased by 105 percent YoY, with a 13 percent increase in cost per click (CPC). Tablets traffic has spiked, with click traffic increasing by 339 percent YoY with flat CPCs. Smartphone CPC discounts remain unchanged; in contrast, CPC discounts on tablets more than doubled from 7.6 percent in Q3 2011 to 17 percent in Q3 2012. Additionally, smartphones showed the largest increase in CTR (click through rate) with a 27 percent increase YoY.

Google’s product listing ads showed triple digit growth

Spend on Google’s Product Listings increased by 378 percent QoQ, and share of click traffic increased by 656 percent, indicating steady growth over the quarter. Product listing ads were largely valuable to advertisers this quarter, with QoQ increase in CTR of 25.4 percent and a CPC decline of 36.5 percent.

Consumer goods, consumer services, and media and entertainment industries flocking to mobile and shifting away from computers

In the consumer goods industry, overall clicks were up 9 percent YoY. The share of clicks on smartphones and tablets jumped from 4.9 percent in Q3 2011 to 21.1 percent in Q3 2012 (a 331 percent increase YoY). In consumer services, click traffic on mobile devices increased by 117 percent and CPCs increased by 19.3 percent in Q3 2012. Computer click traffic decreased 30 percent YoY and sustained an 8.8 percent increase in CPCs. In the media and entertainment industry, smartphone and tablet click traffic share increased by 132 percent YoY.

To uncover key trends for the Q3 State of Paid Search Report, The Search Agency extracted client data from search engine advertising tools. The research sample included advertisers who had 15 consecutive months of data with The Search Agency, and had an established and stable business model from Q3 2011 to Q3 2012. All results are based on U.S. campaigns only.

To download the report, go to http://www.thesearchagency.com/classroom/white-papers/.

About The Search Agency

The Search Agency is a global online marketing firm that combines high-tech and high-touch strategies to help clients engage their customers online and measure ROI beyond a reasonable doubt. With a deep-rooted history in paid search and SEO, The Search Agency understands how activity on the web intersects at search, and executes smart digital marketing strategies that drive measurable results across multiple platforms. Services include Paid Search, SEO, Landing Page Optimization, Display Media, Social Media and Comparison Shopping Management, which are strategically leveraged to maximize the efficacy of clients’ integrated marketing campaigns. The company is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing search marketing firms – named the largest independent U.S. search marketing agency by Advertising Age and among Deloitte’s 2011 Technology Fast 500™. Founded in 2002, The Search Agency has grown to more than 180 employees worldwide with headquarters in Los Angeles, CA, and additional offices in San Francisco, East Greenwich, Baltimore, Tampa, London, Sydney, Toronto and Bangalore. For more information, go to http://www.thesearchagency.com.

PALO ALTO, CA - Infolinks, a global leader in monetizing digital advertising for publishers, brands and their agencies, today launched Infolinks In³, a new suite of real time intent-based advertising products that creates new revenue opportunities for website publishers and maximizes returns for advertisers. Simultaneously, Infolinks announced Dave Zinman as its chief executive officer. Zinman is the former GM of Display at Yahoo! and is credited as co-inventor of the ad server.

Despite reports projecting an increase in display advertising, industry growth rates are expected to decline over time. Infolinks is advocating for more creative solutions to address key challenges as online content consumption continues to grow and as larger percentages of ad budgets shift to online channels. But to accelerate the migration of dollars from traditional media to digital, banner blindness and declining engagement metrics must be overcome.

“Online display advertising is fundamentally broken,” says Zinman. “Site visitors rarely notice ads, there are too many and most are irrelevant. Engagement metrics are down. Banner blindness is killing the golden goose. This is the reason I’ve joined Infolinks. The In³ platform was developed expressly to deliver high-performing, creative solutions. In fact, Infolinks ads have been shown to deliver 30 times the engagement rate of standard IAB units.”

In³ Delivers New Revenue Opportunities for Publishers, Higher Engagement for Advertisers

The In³ platform addresses the “elephant in the room” of online advertising by introducing clean ad units that appear in unexpected but sensible spots on the page. The suite includes four ad units that target user intent and drive engagement in creative ways:

• InFrame capitalizes on expanding screen widths by monetizing unused margin space, framing publisher sites with contextually relevant display ads that remain stationary even as users scroll down pages.
• InSearch ads only appear when needed, introducing visitors who have arrived via a search to an unobtrusive overlay featuring messaging directly relevant to their query. Effectively, it is display advertising with search relevance.
• InTag recognizes the most valuable keywords relevant to a publisher’s content and displays them in an attractive tag cloud.
• InText highlights valuable keywords within a publisher’s content, inviting readers to interact with relevant brand messages and click to learn more.

With this diversity of ad units, all configurable by publishers to fit their sites, Infolinks is creating fresh incremental revenue opportunities for publishers of all sizes, and high-engagement advertising opportunities for marketers that target real-time user intent. All of these units are sold on a CPC basis.

Top 100 Publishers ChaCha and Investopedia Increase Revenue with In³
ChaCha is the leading, free, real-time answers service that has emerged as the #1 way for advertisers and marketers to reach and engage with the audience of their choice anytime, anywhere. Through its unique “ask-a-smart-friend” platform, ChaCha has answered over one billion questions since launch from more than 32 million unique users per month, and is ranked among comScore™’s top 100 websites. ChaCha was seeking to monetize their organic search traffic, but were reluctant to introduce new ad units to their pages. Infolinks addressed their needs by generating a highly targeted ad tailored to a user’s intent at that moment.

“Display ads may solve some problems for publishers, but we need to create new revenue opportunities without disrupting the customer experience or devaluing advertiser ROI,” notes Shawn Schwegman, CMO of ChaCha. ”Infolinks targets our visitors’ current intent, which makes the ads relevant for them and more effective for our advertisers. Engagement rates have increased dramatically since we began our program with Infolinks.”

Investopedia, a premiere resource for online investors, is benefitting greatly since implementing Infolinks In³. ”As a site that sees six million unique visitors per month, Investopedia was seeking an additional revenue source for our organic search traffic, which we rely heavily upon,” said Mark Ly, VP of Operations and Technology, Investopedia.com, a ValueClick company. “Incorporating Infolinks into our website was extremely easy and requires very little maintenance. The ads are very engaging and tailored to a particular visitor’s intent at that very moment. We were able to boost our eCPMs from that location by 100% since implementing Infolinks and would strongly recommend it to other website publishers.”

About Infolinks
Infolinks is a global advertising company that makes sense of digital advertising for publishers, agencies and brands. Its In³ platform powers a suite of intent-based advertising products, including InFrame, InSearch, InTag and InText. The products overcome banner blindness to create new revenue opportunities for publishers, while improving results for advertisers. In³ powers the fourth largest publisher marketplace in the world, analyzing over one trillion words a month in real time and driving revenue for over 100,000 sites in 128 countries. Infolinks is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with R&D out of Tel Aviv, Israel. Visit Infolinks at www.infolinks.com,
find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

 

Provides Update on Third Quarter Outlook, Adjusted for Divestiture

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. - ValueClick, Inc. (NASDAQ: VCLK) today announced the divestiture of Search123, its self-service paid search business operating in Europe.

“Search123 has been a small business for us and does not fit with our long-term strategy. Its divestiture allows us to focus on our significant growth initiatives as we build out an integrated solution to help digital marketers drive multi-channel brand engagement and customer acquisition through one strategic partner,” said James R. Zarley, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “As our updated third quarter outlook illustrates, we expect another solid quarter of financial performance, with all segments generating growth in-line with our prior expectations.”

Search123 Divestiture

Operating in Europe, Search123 is a self-service offering that generates search traffic through relationships with third-party content websites. Search123’s revenue is generated on a cost-per-click basis through a relationship with a major search engine provider. The business was previously included in the Company’s Owned & Operated Websites segment.

The Company is selling Search123 to Carl White, the former executive in charge of the Company’s European operations. The terms of the transaction, which are not material to the Company’s financial position, consist of future contingent payments based upon the performance of the business over the next four years. In accordance with applicable accounting standards, ValueClick anticipates presenting the Search123 business as a discontinued operation and restating the Company’s historical financial statements and segment operating results to reflect this change. The transaction is expected to close by the end of September.

Search123 generated revenue of $31.4 million in fiscal year 2011 with the first, second, third, and fourth quarters contributing revenue of $7.7 million, $8.5 million, $8.1 million, and $7.1 million, respectively. In the first two quarters of 2012, Search123 generated revenue of $6.4 million and $7.0 million, respectively, representing approximately four percent of the Company’s total consolidated revenue in each period.

Updated Third Quarter 2012 Outlook

Today, ValueClick provided an update on expected results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2012. The Company currently expects third quarter revenue and adjusted-EBITDA from continuing operations (excluding Search123) to be near the high-end of the respective guidance ranges provided on August 2, adjusted to exclude Search123. ValueClick’s third quarter and fourth quarter 2012 guidance assumed that Search123 would contribute revenue in the range of $6.0 million to $6.5 million each quarter with operating income margins of approximately 25 percent.

The Company anticipates releasing third quarter 2012 financial results on Thursday, November 1.

About ValueClick

ValueClick, Inc. (NASDAQ: VCLK) is one of the world’s largest digital marketing companies. Through a unique combination of data, technology and services, ValueClick increases brand awareness and drives customer acquisition at scale for the world’s largest advertisers, and maximizes advertising revenue for tens of thousands of online and mobile publishers. ValueClick’s brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Dotomi, Greystripe, Mediaplex, Smarter.com, CouponMountain.com, Investopedia.com, and PriceRunner. The Company is based in Westlake Village, California, and has offices in major advertising markets worldwide. For more information, please visit www.valueclick.com.

 

One of the Largest Real-Time Bidding Buyers Now Offers Support for Facebook Exchange®

NEW YORK - Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, announced support for Facebook® Exchange, which enables real-time bidding on Facebook.

As a global partner of Facebook Exchange, Criteo is capable of providing tens of thousands of unique ads per second, with advertisers in over 30 markets on five continents.

“Facebook Exchange is a tremendous opportunity for Criteo’s network of over 3,000 advertising partners,” said Greg Coleman, President of Criteo. “Facebook has identified a major opportunity by letting us show users relevant ads for things they actually want to buy. Further, this will open up to our advertisers the ability to reach more than 955 million people on Facebook.”

“We now have over 250 engineers working to build a global solution for the age old problem of marketing: how to identify the right person and then show them the right ad at the right time. As a result, our individually personalized ads deliver post-click conversion rates that have until now only been possible in search marketing,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer of Criteo. “Real Time Bidding is a highly sophisticated and technologically efficient solution: as one of the largest global buyers with most RTB platforms, we are delighted to continue leveraging Facebook Exchange.”

About Criteo

Criteo is the global leader in Performance Display. Thanks to Criteo, advertisers can reach more customers with the same return-on-investment as they get from search marketing. Every day Criteo generates millions of high-quality leads through dynamically generated ads which are personalized with the products and services that consumers are searching for.

Criteo is measured purely on its post-click performance and offers a turnkey pay-per-click model including extensive real-time bidding tools, category and product level optimization and an in-house creative studio.

Criteo partners with over 3,000 leading ecommerce brands and 5,000 Web publishers, and operates in 30 countries across America, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit http://www.criteo.com.

 

Search Syndication Platform Reinventing Industry

NEW YORK - Another quarter, another record for adMarketplace, the New York City-based advertising technology company.

Revenue from adMarketplace’s search syndication network grew 112% in the first quarter from the same period last year, as it continues to innovate and consolidate the $10 billion search syndication market.

The revenue surge was fueled by adMarketplace’s focus on growing its roster of direct advertisers looking for keyword-targeted traffic outside of search engine results pages. Revenue from direct advertisers jumped 171% year over year, while the number of managed accounts skyrocketed 254%.

“Increasing our direct advertiser base significantly improved our value to publishers, as did launching a transparent interface that allows publishers to build their business,” said CEO Jamie Hill.

By signing more direct advertisers, adMarketplace was able increase its average cost-per-click (CPC) 120% from March 2011 to March 2012.

This, in turn, lead to higher-quality traffic and gave adMarketplace more performance data to better optimize that traffic.

“More advertisers mean higher CPCs and more performance data, which helps us attract more premium traffic – this is a virtuous cycle,” said COO Adam Epstein.

Following a breakneck 2011 that saw year-over-year revenue increases in Q3 and Q4 of 77% and 78%, respectively, this continued growth enabled adMarketplace to double its staff size.

About adMarketplace: The Internet’s largest marketers and agencies rely on adMarketplace to deliver search performance outside of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. With over 250 million searches each day across distribution channels worldwide, and backed by powerful, easy to use tools and expert account specialists, adMarketplace is the leading platform for search syndication advertising.

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Leading Global Search and Social Media Marketing Event Features Learning Strategies for Experienced and Hands-on Online Marketing Professionals

SES Toronto 2012

TORONTO - SES Toronto, the global Internet marketing education and training event being held June 11-13, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto, offers a full slate of advertising and PPC panels and presentations for experienced and hands-on advertising and marketing professionals. The session, Driving Mobile Traffic: PPC and SEO, will take the experienced marketer to the next level of marketing to smart phones and tablets with inexpensive and effective strategies. “As the level of expertise in the industry has accelerated, so has the programming,” said Andrew Goodman, Page Zero Media, SES Advisory Board member and conference speaker. “While we’ve included advanced panels and presentations to address experienced advertising and marketing professionals, we continue to expand our content for newcomers eager to get on the fast-track,” Goodman added.

“Mobile device usage continues to surge among consumers accessing the web,” said Matt Lawson, Vice President of Marketing, Marin Software and speaker. “I look forward to sharing insights from benchmark data and best practices culled from our client list of over 1,500 leading advertisers to help marketers understand how to increase relevance and conversions from mobile.”

Other sessions for the professional marketer include Paid Search Analytics & Multi Touch Attribution Analysis and Crossing the Digital Divide: From Search To Display. Effective Paid Search Tactics will provide a kick start for those in need of sprucing up their campaigns. These sessions address the fundamentals required to understand customer behavior across all digital channels in order to optimize future efforts.

Marketing and advertising professionals participating in SES Toronto can sign up with Vivastream to begin networking with other like-minded marketers attending the conference and planning their day-to-day schedule.

To attend the conference, fill out the SES Toronto registration form here.

About SES

Incisive Media’s SES is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources for interactive marketers include ClickZ for digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion and research and Search Engine Watch, which provides news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry and tools for improving search marketing effectiveness.

Incisive Media is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information, in print, in person and online. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, Post, Risk, and SES Conference and Expo. For more information, visit www.incisivemedia.com

For more news and event updates visit the SES press room.

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Marketers discover competitors’ keywords, spend, impression share and more to help optimize performance and maximize search ROI

CHICAGO - Digital marketing intelligence provider AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com) unveiled Industry Insight, a versatile search marketing dashboard that provides advertisers and agencies with instant access to the world’s largest search intelligence database, including years of proprietary pay-per-click (PPC) data on virtually every industry and advertiser.

AdGooroo’s search intelligence database analyzes and collects data on millions of keywords and billions of individual search impressions per month for virtually every advertiser across more than 160 industry categories. Industry Insight enables search marketers to access this data—including specific keywords, estimated share of voice or impression share, estimated PPC spend, clickthrough rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and more—for each advertiser and industry category.

Using Industry Insight, search marketers have the ability to:

• Mine competitors’ keyword lists to uncover new traffic opportunities
• Quickly assess the competitive landscape and larger trends that may impact budgeting and performance in any vertical
• Gain immediate insight into any advertiser, including those too small to show up in panel-based datasets
• Compare any two advertisers across any time period by spend, clicks, CTR, CPC, ranking and more
• View historical/seasonal trends
• And more

“Industry Insight enables search marketers to easily monitor their competitors’ every online move and to better understand trends across their vertical category,” said Richard Stokes, founder and CEO of AdGooroo. “That means having meaningful, actionable data to benchmark and optimize your own campaign performance relative to the competition and maximize your search ROI.”

“FRWD has found AdGooroo’s Industry Insight to be instrumental in helping size the search and content opportunity in new categories, for both potential clients and clients new to search or affiliate marketing,” commented Aimee Reker, partner at digital marketing firm FRWD. “Industry Insight helps inform our content creation and content marketing recommendations by revealing historical competition within the context of demand and cost. It’s a simple and immediate way to see competitive trends back in time.”

Industry Insight can also be integrated with SEM Insight™, AdGooroo’s tactical intelligence tool for PPC managers, enabling daily visibility into competitors’ PPC campaigns, including all ad copy and landing pages. As an example of the benefits of integrating the two products, search marketers can filter Industry Insight reports by keyword group such as product category or top-performing keywords in order to view competitors’ PPC spend on individual product lines and more.

Central to Industry Insight is the accuracy of its data. AdGooroo measures more than 2.5 billion search impressions each month using servers located in local markets—the most accurate method of data collection possible. AdGooroo also utilizes proprietary PPC spend estimation models that are verified each month against known ad spend. Further, the company’s automated quality assurance solution provides proactive, seamless problem detection and resolution, 24 hours a day. In addition, the methodology noted above is backed up by dedicated engineering and support teams to help ensure customers’ success.

About AdGooroo:

Founded in 2004, AdGooroo is a leading provider of Digital Marketing Intelligence that drives competitive advantage for Internet marketers. More than 4,000 advertisers and agencies use AdGooroo’s on-demand tools to tap into the world’s largest database of search and display marketing data and gain actionable intelligence on their top competitors’ keywords, ad creative, backlink data, campaign statistics, budgets and more. For more information, visit AdGooroo.com.