PANELISTS:Arjun Jayaram, VP of Engineering, Become.com

Jack Mardack, Director of Marketing, EventBrite

Shelley Ellis, CEO, Shelley Ellis Consulting

Measurement and Metrics

PANELIST:Arjun Jayaram, VP of Engineering Become.com

Measurement and Metrics: Scalability, Optimization and Measurement for your content advertising

Size of SEM Portfolio at Become.com• Developed the SEM platform internally. Initially for keyword search and then extended for content

• Active portfolio of over 8 million keywords. Keyword corpus of over 50 million keywords

• Built the Keyword Generation and analysis

• Bid Optimization at keyword, account and campaign levels

• Tracking, Reporting and analytics by channel and by session

• Had to retool our processes for content networks

Different strategies for keyword and content ?• Unlike search, the user is not typing in something in a content network

• There is an order of magnitude more web sites that use Google content ads over search ads

• In search, if a keyword is underperforming, either your match type is sub optimal or the keyword is bad (small variance for position and network)

• In content, the same ad can perform very differently across domains

• The ad generation, tracking, and optimization is very different in keywords versus content.

Ad Generation strategy for content• In content match, your ad gets displayed (not your keyword)

• You need to help the search engine determine when to display your advertisement. This is the ‘related keywords’ for Google

• Researching on the ‘Related keywords’ is very important for the success of your ad. Semantically related keywords are likely to improve the performance

• If you have very similar ads, they can compete with each other – Evening dresses, cocktail dresses, prom dresses etc.

Keyword Lifecycle in content

• The first couple of days of an ad , the traffic is low• It ramps up very quickly • It shows the day of the week cyclicality • There is more volatility in traffic for content ads

Keyword death spiral for content keywords• Unlike Search, you need to be with in 5 positions for your ad to be shown on a page

• Google tries to show an 5 ads for ever page for each publisher. So a near identical page is likely to have different set of 5 ads

• If you lower the CPC rates, your ads are likely to show up on lower quality networks.

• Your ROI may actually hurt instead of improve by dropping CPC rates

• Don’t try to low ball your bid initially. Also be aggressive in trimming ads instead of lowering CPC aggressively.

Keyword death spiral for content keywords

Optimal keyword life cycle

Bidding strategies for content

• Most publisher pages display three content ads per page

• If you are below third position, your ad is likely to show up on ‘lower quality’ sites

•Determine the optimal traffic quality that is required. There are distinct tiers for Quality/Price ratio

• Content ads display good bid compression. So your cost is likely to go down over time

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Bid Dynamics over time

This is for one ad

URL tracking and analytics

• Tracking performance of content is different than search.

• In Search you look at performance of each ad individually

• In content, each ad should be further broken up by its performance per URL/Domain

• Quality is judged on performance of the Ad to a URL

• Conversion should be tracked on a URL basis

• Treat each URL as an individual listing rather than the ad group as a whole

Conclusions

•Contextual ads is a good and reliable source of traffic

• Your keyword generation strategy needs to be optimized

•Measurement metrics – KPIs measure

• Conversions measured at Ad/URL level

• CTR of existing ads when you publish new ads

• CPC, conversion trend over time