Last week, Anchor Intelligence announced its new “Clearmark For Keywords” product for search marketers, “a predictive, keyword bid optimization system.” Read the release.
Ken Miller CEO of Anchor Intelligence discussed the new product and its implications.
How does keyword valuation relate to a marketer’s propensity to target audience?
KM: Keyword valuation is directly related to a marketer’s ability to reach the target audience for each unique keyword. If you think about it, a keyword term has a very specific audience in mind; and search advertising is designed to match audiences with the appropriate keywords. However, we all know that the match making process is imperfect.
That’s where ClearMark for Keywords comes in. If the keyword “iPad apps” attracts mostly ad clicks from audiences that have absolutely no relevance to the keyword, then ClearMark would reduce the revenue prediction for this keyword and therefore reduce the bid.
What problem is ClearMark solving for marketers?
ClearMark for Keywords is designed to solve two problems facing search marketers today. The first is the challenge of effectively managing bids for high volume head keywords. These keywords are super-competitive and have a tremendous impact on revenue. However, very few marketers have the ability to make dynamic, intraday bid decisions to adjust for changes in the expected performance of each keyword. Using audience insights from each inbound ad click, ClearMark enables advertisers to predict revenue for each keyword. As a result, it starves keywords that are not hitting their target audience by reducing their bids, and feeds keywords that are attracting high value audiences by increasing their bids.
The second major problem that ClearMark solves is the challenge of making informed bids on belly and tail keywords that typically have very scarce or unreliable performance data per keyword. How do you set a bid for a keyword that’s received 75 clicks but no conversions yet? Today, marketers typically take a best guess at an opening bid, then wait a long time for reliable performance data before making bid changes. That’s a big opportunity cost especially when you have hundreds of thousands of belly and tail terms. ClearMark predicts the revenue per keyword by matching each inbound ad click against thousands of audience profiles we’ve developed from our traffic quality data. As a result, we’re able to get the marketer as close as possible to setting the perfect bid for each keyword.
Do you consider ClearMark to be a tool for search or display marketers? Why?
ClearMark for Keywords is primarily designed for search marketers. However, the audience profile data and matching capabilities that are at the core of this technology will also be applied to the display space. More to come on that down the road.
From click fraud services to revenue estimates – have you thought about starting your own media business? Given Anchor Intelligence technology, it would seem to make sense.
The online ad industry benefits far greater from Anchor as a third-party solutions provider than that of Anchor as a media business. As a third party, we can continue to build up our data footprint and predictive analytics across the ad chain while enabling advertisers, agencies, ad networks and search engines to make smarter decisions about their business. At its core, ClearMark empowers our customers to leverage the “network effect” of the Anchor Intelligence data. Our ClearMark for Traffic customers learn about threats that occur anywhere within our network and can therefore proactively protect their advertisers. Our ClearMark for Keywords customers learn how well their keywords will perform based on matches against our audience profiles and can then place optimal bids. The entire media industry wins with Anchor as a third party provider powering each piece of the chain.
ClearMark would seem valuable to publishers, too. Thoughts?
Absolutely. Our system is designed to improve the alignment between an advertiser’s keyword and the audience it reaches. By setting optimal bids based on the predicted value per keyword, advertisers see better performance from their ad spend. Users also have better experiences as ad relevancy improves. Finally, publishers benefit as well since improved CTRs will lead to higher revenues for publishers. That said, we also have future plans targeted specifically at the unique needs of publishers.
By John Ebbert
