Monetate Gives Control ...

Earlier this month, Monetate , the platform that provides marketers with testing and targeting services for their websites, announced that it had closed a $15 million series B funding round, led by OpenView Venture Partners, which added to the $5.1 million series A round the company raised back in December from First Round Capital and FLOODGATE. With over $20 million in the bank, Monetate has been developing a new platform that gives marketers greater control over messaging and promotions on their websites as well as testing, targeting, and personalization tools. As we reported a few weeks ago , the coolest part about Monetate’s platform is that it can be installed using a single line of code. The startup’s newest version of its cloud-based platform enables marketers to integrate customized content and features between the eCommerce server and the site visitor’s browser. “One of the unfulfilled promises from the early days of eCommerce was that marketers would be able to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time”, says Monetate CEO David Brussin. “With Monetate, we have inserted a new level of agility into the eCommerce marketing experience, providing marketers with the ability to make educated campaign decisions that will directly contribute to increased conversion”. What’s more, as marketers and marketing teams are so often on the go, Monetate 11 allows its customers to test, target, and personalize their websites on the iPad, giving users that extra layer of mobile functionality. Another bonus: All current Monetate users will be automatically upgraded to the new version of its platform. Monetate 11, like its predecessors, aims to cut out the IT middleman by giving control of creating and measuring marketing campaigns and serving customized user experiences back to marketers. They simply enter the “who, what, when, why” of the campaign into the Monetate dashboard, and the platform takes care of the rest, offering users the ability to take advantage of campaign cloning, tagging, and filtering. Marketers will also be able to do automatic A/B testing against a control group, tracking the results in realtime, so that marketers can quickly see the impact their new campaigns will have. Users will also have the added benefit of new targeting options, including geotargeting to tailor messages and promotions to a visitor’s specific location, weather-based targeting, and behavioral targeting. Monetate customers will also now be able to test and deploy their own HTML and JavaScript, target recommendations based on complex business rules, and access all the data they need about traffic segments and purchasing patterns to make informed decisions about the promotions, messages, and other content they deliver to consumers through its analytics and reporting features. Monetate is really a no-brainer for eTailers and eCommerce marketers. It’s a great solution, and along with an infusion of new capital, the startup’s new version may very well have legs. After all, its platform has already attracted brands like Petco, Urban Outfitters, Sports Authority, QVC, Casual Male, Dick’s Sporting Goods, to use its targeting and testing services on their eCommerce platforms — and Brussin told us that the company has added hundreds of millions in collective revenue to these businesses, removing the need for businesses to hire specialized teams and decrease bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment.

RadiumOne About To Corn...

RadiumOne is emerging as a leader in a new breed of advertising networks, with enhanced targeting based on social data. The company is positioning itself to lock in data sources before competitors even get rolling. “Behavioral targeting in advertising led to double digit increases in effectiveness,” RadiumOne’s CEO Gurbaksh Chahal tells me. And he should know, this is his third advertising network. The last one, BlueLithium , sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million . “But it’s commoditized now, and it’s time to innovate and differentiate.” The key is to know what ad to show to a person, and when. That can turn low value remnant inventory to premium ad space, no matter what site or service that ad is being served on. When a user visits a site the ad networks determine in real time, often through an auction, what ad to show you based on the profile that’s been built for you. RadiumOne builds a different profile for you than it’s competitors, though, and may grab ads that others leave untouched (or just pay more). The reason? They’ve built your profile based on what your friends like, too. These ads appear to work. One retailer who was achieving $8 per dollar spent on advertising increased that to $14/dollar spent with RadiumOne, says the company. A credit card company decreased cost per acquisition from $200 to $75. This also makes intuitive sense, of course. The problem is really how to get the right data. Previously only Facebook has a high level view of hundreds of millions of Internet users and are able to build an interest graph based on what those users’ friends like. It explains why Google is so interested in being Facebook – it’s all about the ad dollars. The Data Is The Hard Part How does RadiumOne build the interest graph at scale? Via data deals with all those sharing widgets you see on websites from companies like ShareThis , AddThis and AddToAny . Users of those services spread links on social networks. Through a combination of unique URL shorteners and cookies they are able to create a profile for people clicking on the links, as well as the implied social connection. RadiumOne has deals with many of these widget providers, covering hundreds of millions of Internet users. They combine the data from the partners to extract more useful information about relationships and interests, and then target ads based on that. So if you’re using those widgets, or clicking on links from friends that use the widgets, there’s a good chance you’re seeing RadiumOne served ads around the web. Here’s where things get really interesting. RadiumOne is using the $21 million warchest from their just-announced funding to begin to buy the widget guys outright, ensuring that no one else down the road can get the data. And anyone they don’t buy should watch out. RadiumOne says eventually they’ll probably pay sites to include their widget to get more distribution and data, possibly edging out anyone they haven’t bought. If they pull this off, and there’s no reason to think they won’t, Everyone is going to want to own this company. Chahal, who dropped out of high school to start his first company at 16, may have his third ad network liquidity event on his hands in the near future. I can’t wait to see what his fourth looks like. CrunchBase Information RadiumOne Information provided by CrunchBase

Online Video Ads Expect...

Advertising on television is far out of the reach of most small businesses, but advertising on online video is very dooable and may be just as effective in the near future. It’s become so accessible, that the respondents on “BrightRoll’s new survey chose it as the category likely to see the biggest spend increase in 2011. 65% of the respondents said they would be shifting money from TV advertising to online advertising. 30% said they felt that online video was equally as effective as TV and that’s likely to swing upward as more people move away from TV and on to some form of computer. When asked about the factors that influenced their decision to buy online video ads, 91% said it was all about the targeting. When it comes to the type of targeting, there is no clear winner. The largest bite, with 27%, was for behavioral targeting.  24% chose contextual and demographics got 21% of the vote. As for what’s stopping most people from buying video ads, it comes down to money, data and education. A clear system for gauging success was seen as an issue for a third of the respondents. A quarter felt that video ads were still too expensive, though it’s possible that they’d change their mind if they were presented with well-documented data. 96% said that research into areas such as TV vs Video, brand lift and impact on offline behavior were important, only 35% of companies said they did this kind of testing themselves. What is clear from this mass of percentages and bar charts, is that slowly, but surely, online video advertising is taking hold. As more people come to understand the ROI and video companies are able to offer more precise targeting, it’s likely to become a common channel for marketers.

Rise in Mobile Spurs Gr...

When asked which trend has had the biggest impact on search marketing, 40% of business surveyed said it was the rise in mobile internet usage. Following closely behind that was the personalization of search results and behavioral targeting. New tools aplenty, and yet 95% of the search marketing dollars are still being spent with our old friend Adwords. The Bing / Yahoo combo got 70% of the vote and a respectable 47% of respondents said they run PPC campaigns on Facebook. The info comes from the new State of Search Marketing Report 2011 , which is produced by Econsultancy. The results indicate a rise in social media marketing to the point where it’s nearly equal to that of paid search (74% vs 79%). Facebook usage alone has risen from 73% to 84% (that’s general Facebook for marketing, not just PPC). Other key findings include: More companies are outsourcing search and social media . Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year. Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% a year ago. Companies and agencies are increasingly using third party bid management technology for paid search marketing. Just under half of responding companies conducting search engine marketing rely on basic tools. Overall, Econsultancy is predicting 16% growth in search marketing which is slightly higher than last year’s prediction. If the number is right, we’re looking at 19.3 billion in North America. Where do you stand with search marketing? Are you spending more, less or about the same?

The Council For Account...

The advertising technology world is confusing. There are hundreds of ad tech startups and technologies, but few standard ways or APIs for marketers take data from one and mix it with another. The Council for Accountable Advertising , a new industry trade organization I first caught wind of in January, hopes to change all that. It is now about to formally launch. The Council’s goals are to create standards for data integration and transparency, define standards of accountability for the online advertising industry, suggest best practices, and provide original industry research. “You can’t even download reports from two different tools and put them next to each other and know what they mean,” says Stephen Messer, one of the founding members of the Council and vice chairman of Cross Commerce Media. The ad tech industry needs to simplify things and make them less confusing. The Council will be more inward looking than other industry groups like the IAB (it will also launch a private blog for industry executives and their customers). But it will also provide a forum for the industry to coem together around some of the privacy issues bedeviling the online advertising industry. WIth the FTC calling for a Do Not Track list and concerns about behavioral targeting on the rise, the industry obviously still needs to figure things out. The main goal of the Council is to promote interoperability and to educate marketers about the industry. To that end, it will commission original research. Forrester analyst Joanna O’Connell and Colin Gillis of BGC Financial will act as the Council’s chief research officers. Evan Korth, a professor at NYU, will act as chief academic officer. The Council at this point is invite-only. The founding members are Cross Commerce Media, MediaMath, and TARGUSinfo. The other launch members include Admeld, AdSafe, AudienceScience, Peer39, Solve Media, and TidalTV. CrunchBase Information Cross Commerce Media MediaMath TARGUSinfo Information provided by CrunchBase