RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Search’ Category

Google Product Listing Ads, Mobile Surged In Q4

PLAs-AdobeTwo trends dominated the paid search space during the holiday season of 2012: mobile impressions and spend, and Google’s new Product Listing Ads.

Google transitioned its Google Shopping search from a free model to a paid one. The new PLAs work more like AdWords, with retailers and merchants providing Google with information about a product, including an image and the price, and then working through an auction-based programmatic bidding approach.

According to data from Adobe, PLAs are more effective than traditional text ads and, by mid-December, PLAs accounted for 17% of all ad spend on Google and 10.7% of paid search ad spend overall.

(more...)

Priceonomics Discovering Market Clearing Prices For Consumer Products

Rohin Dhar of PriceonomicsHaving spent five years growing job marketplace Personforce along with a partner, Rohin Dhar and his co-founders are taking aim at the price of things with Priceonomics, a pricing search engine.

The idea sounds straightforward enough: crawl through the web and figure out how much used things  (e.g. your old iPhone 4) are worth based on secondary markets. The startup has also delivered in-depth analysis of pricing inconsistencies that it sees - such as television resale prices. Read this Priceonomics blog post.

Incubator Y Combinator helped propel the startup to an initial $1.5 million investment early last year. Though Dhar wouldn’t divulge traffic figures today, he confirmed that the 65% month-over-month growth the company was experiencing last April has continued into a “hockey stick moment” – presumably even better than April's momentum.

AdExchanger spoke to Dhar last week.

AdExchanger: What problem is Priceonomics solving?

ROHIN DHAR: When you are trying to buy or sell anything in any market, you need to have a market clearing price in order for the market to function. Today, there is no well-known market clearing price for most used items. For a handful of things like iPhones, televisions or other popular items, you can go on Ebay and Craigslist and find a price you can sell it at - and that the market will clear it at. But what we do is set up a market clearing price for millions of products like a bicycle, an iPhone, a 20 year old pickup truck or a $2,000.00 turntable - things that aren’t sold that often.  We’re trying to make markets work better by having a price.

(more...)

Adchemy CEO Nukala On The End Of Cookies

AdExchanger caught up recently with search services and ad tech provider, Adchemy, and its CEO Murthy Nukala. Nukala sees a change in the way intent will be captured in the future. Is the power of bottom-of-the-funnel search going away? Read on.

AdExchanger: What are the touch points for capturing intent in digital, in your estimation? Traditionally, people think of cookies.

MURTHY NUKALA: First, to answer, let's step back. Imagine the web as it exists five years from now. It is more than likely that it's going to be a multi‑device, multi‑form factor world. It's not going to be web‑centric the way it is today. It's going to be mobile‑centric, tablet‑centric and each consumer will have more than one device. That's the first big trend we see happening.

The second big trend we see is that a lot of the search behavior, which today is very query‑centric – as in using a search box and typing things in - we see that becoming more implicit search as opposed to explicit search.

For example, Yelp, or Urbanspoon. You go to Yelp and you try to find a Thai restaurant in Redwood City, California. By doing so, you're not using Google or Bing to find a Thai restaurant in Redwood City. Using Yelp, in many ways, is a substitute for using search.

These "information utilities" are very vertical specific and you find their growth exploding. As an aside, Roger McNamee breaks out the two types of search like this - "index search" for Google and "behavioral search" for these information utilities.

(more...)

Why Advertisers Still Love Yahoo (Axis Edition)

Yahoo AxisSetting aside for a moment the credibility gap inherent in any new Yahoo product launch – let alone a search product – you have to admire the company's brazenness in talking up the ad potential for Axis, its new lightweight browser geared toward smartphones and tablets.

Below are a few choice comments Ethan Batraski, director of product management for Yahoo Search, shared with AdExchanger in discussing the new product (which for the record does not launch with any advertising or data collection).

On mobile search retargeting, Batraski says, "There's a huge opportunity to use that data. The advertiser benefits and the user benefits."

On data: "With Axis, because of the experience of the browser, I can target on a number of things. I can see what your search history is, what you're browsing history is.

On new formats: "As we make search more visual, you start to think about display ads. What if I could take a screen shot of the landing page for the advertiser and drop them in among results?"

On cross-device addressability: "[Users are] reachable within all three devices [PC, smartphone, tablet]. We can have a conversation with them across all three devices."

This is one reason marketers continue to adore Yahoo, despite the mishigas. Whereas Google, Facebook and other platform giants rarely talk openly about their ad targeting strengths, except in the context of user privacy, Yahoo seems to embrace it. To some extent you can chalk up the lack of reticence to its underdog status. Privacy watchdogs and legislators don't perceive Yahoo as a threat, so it runs on a longer tether. But to a larger extent the openness is simply Yahoo's legacy; the company was an early adopter (inventor even) of search retargeting and behavioral advertising and so the practices are expected.

(more...)