Moderator: Matt Kain, SVP, Business Development, 24/7 Real Media

• Marcelo Sant’Iago, Director of Business Development, MídiaClick Brazil
• Lawrence Herman, VP of Business Development and Sales, Miva

Matt Kain

The first of the challenges in a global campaign is how to mobilize your own resources. You may have limited choice in that; if you’re a US-based company, you need a different set of services than someone in many countries.

Lawrence Herman

We pick and choose our business—we don’t try to be all things to all people. Our major advertisers want to get local customers in the UK, and likewise, people in France and Britain looking for US vacations, it’s good to have that geo-routed to the US.

The value of local market expertise and local language experience—a lot of people consider Latin America as one language and one culture

Marcelo Sant’Iago: that’s the biggest misperception. Brazil, the largest country—the Spanish-speaking audience of Latin America online is smaller than the Brazilian online audience. Search platforms give you complete control to run international campaign. Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea—most don’t speak English. It’s a challenge to deal with local culture and local languages. In Brazil we have three different words for a tangerine, depending on the region. If you go to Spain—Barcelona—Catalan.

Lawrence: I think that he’s very correct (Catalan is right on). Google and Yahoo have virtually 0% penetration in Korea because the structure of the language is entirely different. People say things to create a feeling in others, not to make a point. Also, the logic structure is completely different: in Korean, start with the most obscure irrelevant point to come to the thesis at the very end. Keyword density might not be there—not a great factor for algorithmic search. They’re dominated by a human-powered search. This really requires a lot of human intervention to make it work. Ultimately you’ve got to be handed off to locals who can make it work.

Marcelo: A lot of US agencies are using us to localize their ads for Brazil. English-language ads don’t fly there; but some words aren’t translated (spyware is spywares in Brazil). Deal with local ideosyncrasies. It’s not just keyword translation.

You have to localize, but you also have to leverage. What do you say to clients who say that they want to set one campaign for all Spanish speakers?
Marcelo: Why not; it’s not hard to divide up the campaigns. There’s no inventory available in some places.

You can geotarget based on location, OS in another language (esp asian language).

Marcelo: For example, Google doesn’t have local search in Brazil. You can look at [exonyms/endonyms]. In one country, it’s a local ISP that’s #2 after Google. In most of the world adCenter isn’t available. In Latin America, MSN is still part of the Yahoo network. [You really have to look at the local markets—lots of partnerships, different models in different markets.]

Matt: Once you’ve overcome the issues of language, management, currency, speak with someone at individual engines/sites, and understand how those sites work. #1 in Korea is Naver.com: the SERP can be 3, 4, 5 scroll pages deep: several different indices, several different ad programs. Very much human edited.

Lawrence: The nature of what you’re getting stems from the difficulty of algorithmic search in the Korean language. Getting placement here is a completely different calculus than in the US.

Lawrence: Mobile phones as payment options: has resulted in different way of running mobile search, pushing local coupons directly to phones.

Marcelo: And that’s a good point, that there are a lot of different ways to push your content beyond keywords. Social media: Facebook and MySpace in the US, Bebo in UK, Orkut in Brazil—if you’re going to do social, it has to be done locally.

Matt: Advantages to having lots of different partners around the world: they have established relationships within their markets—a contact at Google, etc. If you’re going to operate in lots of different markets, you have to support all those different engines/APIs/platforms, etc. And then you have to have it report on lots of different charsets.

Another advantage (when the US$ is strong): with a local agency, your account can be in local currency, which can have a lower incremental bid, relatively smaller than a US$-based account.

Marcelo: There aren’t any real global search agencies; still partnering and acquiring to get that reach.

Lawrence: It’s not just a matter of linguistics: the nature of ads are very different. US/UK: price competitiveness. Based on CTR, quality is more important in Germany. That creative has to be localized to cater to linguistics and sensitivities.

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Chrysi Philalithes, MIVA’s VP of Global Marketing & Communications, said in a chat with WebProNews that the InLine component of MIVA’s Monetization Center represents a point of difference between their new self-service offering for webmasters and competing products. They are the first to offer an inline product alongside a content ad solution.

She stressed that the Monetization Center would not be a conduit for ads-as-content pages. Their quality team would look at sites for editorial content when webmasters apply to be participants in the program.

For those who make the cut, MIVA will reward sites that perform well. Revenue sharing will tilt more favorably toward the webmaster on high performance sites. Philalithes did not provide figures on what the revenue percentages would be; as a point of reference, dominant online ad provider Google reportedly pays about 78.5 cents per dollar in revenue back to its AdSense partners.

The customization and flexibility of the MIVA product should be welcome in the SMB market. Philalithes anticipates MIVA will likely target those small- to medium-businesses as advertisers on its network.

They will want to keep a substantial ad inventory in place to satisfy their publisher participants. Expanding the points of presence where advertisers can expect to see their ads displayed will be necessary to build on the success MIVA has had in attracting clients in the US and UK markets.

Webmasters can choose from three ad products in the Monetization Center: content ads, search ads, and the InLine option. Philalithes also noted some other features of interest for site publishers:

•  Multiple URLs: online publishers can manage multiple URLs under one MIVA MC account and create separate implementations for each.
•  Sophisticated reporting: daily, monthly, quarterly or annual reports can be created that provide up to date summaries of revenue generated.
•  Transparent earning’s calculations: MIVA MC partners in the United States can see the exact share of revenue they generate from the Ads on their site.
•  Channels / sub accounts: enable partners to develop groups of pages and track and compare revenue against these groups.

Sites can take part in MIVA’s network on a non-exclusive basis, meaning they do not have to be concerned with juggling competing ad products that may be in place on a given site.

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• Content Ads: keyword or contextually targeted Pay-Per-Click Ads displayed in fully customized implementations beside site content.
• MIVA InLine Ads: Pay-Per-Click Ads that appear when users mouse over hyperlinked keywords within actual site content.
• Search Ads: Pay-Per-Click Ads displayed in response to specific typed-in search queries.

One of the most interesting ad options is the MIVA Inline Ads - those underlined text ads that often look like hyperlinks. Publishers can control the look, the pop-up window properties and even how many keywords to tag and which areas of a page to show the ads. It all works well, and very easy to add to any web site.

That being said, I’m still struggling to identify where you’ll be able to use inline ads without annoying your readers. Maybe a publisher, that doesn’t often link to external sources, may find more tolerance for them, but bloggers may discover a little more of a backlash – as most readers expect underlined links to go somewhere other than an ad.

In any event, there’s enough ad options for MIVA MC to be a good compliment to a publisher’s other ad units – MIVA does not require exclusivity – and MIVA can be commended for being transparent in sharing with publishers the revenue share amount.

If anyone signs-up for the service, and would like to write a review for Marketing Pilgrim, drop me a line.

Disclosure: No real hyperlinks were hurt in the testing of MIVA MC, and Andy bought his own Subway sandwich to eat while watching the demo.

Related Posts

• Miva Serves Up In-line Text Ads
• Is Miva Looking for a Buyer?
• Yahoo Publisher Launches Ads in RSS
• Miva Still Looking for a Buyer?
• Google Launches Cost Per Action Model for AdSense

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

MIVA said in its papers that it will adopt Google advertisements on applications and sites managed by its subsidiary, MIVA Direct, which produces white-label toolbar and Web search. The deal, which will run for two years and has “broad termination rights,” will begin within 30 days.

The market responded by bidding Miva’s stock from $3.40 up to $4 a share. What does that mean to marketers?

If a small ad network makes more profit redistributing the ads of a large player than selling ads directly they probably don’t have much value in their advertising product. This is why increasing the efficiency of your AdWords account by 10% is worth far more than trying to find under-priced clicks from 50 pay per click search engines you never heard of.

The second interesting thing worth noting from the market reaction to the Miva / Google partnership is that if changing from Yahoo! to Google increases the value of the company by 15% that shows how efficient Google’s ad platform is compared to Yahoo!’s or that the stock market just loves Google…either way, it is going to keep smaller public companies favoring partnerships with Google over Yahoo!. It also shows the strong consolidating trend amongst ad networks. If Google is worth 15% more than Yahoo! then they are probably 40% or 50% more than Microsoft, and as monetization rate drops off there is no reason for anyone syndicating search and contextual ads to look far beyond the top few players.

The search market is also going to parallel the ad market. Google’s ad network is so strong because they own so much of the search market. If you can get a few more high quality editorial links that will boost your authority in Google that is worth far more long-term than picking at the edges gathering hundreds of low quality links which may hurt the stability of your rankings.

Lots of money is being spent on new ad network start ups which largely duplicate one another. Networks that are able to deliver real tangible value and get enough media exposure to become synonymous with their ad or media type will thrive while most will fall to the fate of a Miva or a Looksmart…a legacy network with random bits and pieces which makes more redistributing someone else’s ads rather than by innovating and selling their own ads.

Google is already getting a foothold in print, audio, and video ads. I just saw a Fat Joe Cadillac Escalade AdSense video ad on this page, pointing to a site called MyCadillacStory.com. That is pretty slick and streamlined for how new Google’s video product is.

The race to create an ad network and buy distribution has changed to a race to create toolbars, applications, software, communities, and plugins that allow people to redistribute ads. Even some password applications (such as Roboform) have search built into them, and Google Custom Search Engine makes it easy for anyone to get paid syndicating Google results (or a biased subset of them).

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The service is called Miva InLine, and is similar to the type of ads already offered by IntelliTXT. As ClickZ reports:

When a user mouses over an InLine ad, a floating ad appears, showing the top-bidded pay-per-click ad from Miva’s advertisers for that keyword. Later this year, InLine ads will also include advertiser logos. Ads are clearly labeled, with a link to more detailed descriptions of the source of the ads.

I have mixed feelings over these ads. As a reader, I often get annoyed when I think I’m clicking a link, but instead clicking an ad. However, I can see the appeal for publishers, looking to monetize their content.

Anyone care to share their thoughts?

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

But the PPC search model has grown to mammoth proportions over the past few years, and companies are putting more and more of their media dollars into search to the point where there’s not enough inventory (via number of searches) to go around.

This drives up the cost of search for advertisers, and makes the channel less effective due to the glut of ads competing for consumer attention. Let’s face it, if there are 12 ads for cell phones in the first page of Google’s search results, it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd. So what’s a marketer to do?

Spending media dollars, one click at a time

There are a number of smaller, second tier, PPC search engines you can add to your media mix including MIVA, whose distribution network incorporates a selection of search engines and web sites including superpages, InfoSpace and search.com and boasts over 2 billion queries per month. Other tier 2 engines/networks include Enhance Interactive and eSpotting (for the European market). Be sure to track conversion and ROI closely with any PPC search campaign – Tier 2 engines are notorious for click fraud, although all engines claim to have processes in place to limit this.

Quigo is a contextual PPC network which is similar to the Google’s content network. You cannot target via keyword on Quigo, you target by category or “channel.” Quigo uses a PPC bidding model. Quigo’s distribution network is impressive and includes top destination and news sites such as Newsday.com, USAToday.com, Chicago Tribune, marthastewart.com and eDiets.com. Quigo provides advertisers with small budgets a way to get their ads on premium web sites affordably, and it’s easy to track ROI since it’s a cost per click model.

ContextWeb is another contextual PPC network. As with Quigo, advertisers do not bid at the keyword level on ContextWeb, but target by category. Ads appear on pages that are contextually relevant to them (e.g., an ad for cell phones might appear next to an article about wireless technology). ContextWeb works very well with popular categories such as health, travel, and technology. ContextWeb also sells graphical ad placements on a CPM basis.

Snap- It seems fitting to end this post with a paid search engine, although Snap.com offers a fascinating new twist to the current paid search model. This is a brand new search engine developed by IdeaLab, the brain child of Bill Gross (founder of GoTo which became Overture and is now Yahoo! Search).

Snap.com is different from the Yahoos and Googles of the world because the search results are visual. Advertisers bid on keywords and their ads are displayed beside an image of their landing page (via a split-screen interface). Snap.com is also the first paid search engine to offer ads on a cost per acquisition (CPA) basis. Advertisers define what an acquisition is when they set up their campaign (e.g., registration, newsletter sign up, sale, etc.) Currently there are about 2000 advertisers on Snap.com, so while there may not be a lot of traffic to the site , there also isn’t a lot of competition.

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Michael Pedone is the President / CEO of eTrafficJams.com, a search engine optimization and website marketing company <http://www.etrafficjams.com> located in Clearwater, Florida that specializes in getting targeted, eager-to-buy traffic to your site. You can catch him blogging at: <http://www.etrafficjams.com/blog/>.

Dominic Preuss, product manager for Google Local advertising, couldn’t be happier about the formal arrival of the local business ads product for AdWords. Testing began in December 2005, where occasional notices of the ad balloons on Google Local maps drew commentary in the blogosphere.

Another early test, of a Barnes and Noble advertisement that appeared with searches for “booksellers nyc” on a map of Manhattan, also found considerable attention online as a few users spotted the “ad balloons” Google (NASD:GOOG) used for testing.

Preuss said in a phone call that advertisers participating in the initiative have been “very positive” in their assessment of the latest service. Click-through rates have been very good too, Preuss noted.

There are a lot of “levers” for advertisers to pull in AdWords for the local business ads, to control the locations and keywords for campaigns. It sounded like advertisers were just beginning to scratch the surface of what Google has made available.

From a user perspective, Google’s usual contextual ads appear with the Local search results. The “booksellers nyc” example returns one ad atop the results and three below that list. Then the newest features for local businesses can be seen in those Local search results. Google described this in further detail:

A search on Google Local for “designer boots austin tx” demonstrates the new feature. Each local listing shows the business name, address, and phone number; below each listing, a link to the business’ website and a text excerpt related to the search terms appears.

Google did manage to finish slightly up for the week in the stock market, closing at $390.00 on Friday; after-hours trading has pushed shares down 40 cents at press time. Other Internet advertising plays had relatively flatter performances.

MIVA (NASD:MIVA) suffered a drop after it reported a greater than expected loss for the fourth quarter and readjusted forecasts for the first quarter as the company anticipates a loss then as well.

The company has been trying to pull out of the doldrums with a series of recent deals. One pairs MIVA with Intellext, a provider of search tools and services. Intellext will deliver MIVA pay-per-click and pay-per-call advertising to users of Intellext’s Watson desktop search tool.

ValueClick Inc (NASD:VCLK) finished the week up at $16.92, but well off its 52-week high of $20.98. The company recently completed the integration of its ValueClick Media and Fastclick display advertising networks and named the division ValueClick Media.

The company said it can reach over two-thirds of the US Internet-using public per statistics from comScore Media Metrix. Analyst William Morrison of JMP Securities upgraded ValueClick to a rating of “strong buy” and raised his target price for VCLK to $25 in an advisory note to clients earlier this month.

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The company tapped Deutsche Bank Securities to help Miva’s board of directors explore options that could include “the raising of capital through the sale of securities or assets of the company, a recapitalization, strategic acquisitions, and the combination, sale or merger of the business with another entity offering strategic opportunities for growth,” according to a statement issued today.

“The board and management believe our current share price does not reflect the inherent value of the company and its opportunities, and the engagement of Deutsche Bank will help us to methodically examine a range of short-term and long-term alternatives as we continue to focus on growing our business,” said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, Miva’s chairman and CEO.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

In what should be a delight to Blinkx users, the company will begin utilizing MIVA’s contextual advertising on its products. The blinkx video search engine and blinkx toolbar will deliver “geo-targeted, content-related paid-listings” to viewers, the two firms announced via a statement today.

The planned advertising platform goes beyond traditional paid ads in search. Search engines need a user to enter keywords or phrases first, and return relevant ads based on those searches. The Blinkx offering will eliminate the need for that initial user action to begin getting ads displayed:

MIVA executive Seb Bishop noted in the statement how the deal will extend his company’s reach into the desktop search space. “Blinkx’s unique method of retrieving information from different sources is a perfect fit with MIVA’s philosophy of allowing our advertisers to reach the right people at the right time, regardless of what they are doing on their computer.”

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Miva has finally been able to resolve a long-standing patent suit with Yahoo. The patent infringement case started four year’s ago, according to Clickz.com, spurred by a successful patent filing by Overture in 2001.

Overture, now owned by Yahoo, filed suit against FindWhat, now known as Miva. The suit alleged patent infringement of 6,269,361, “System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine.”

That patent forms the core of bid-for-placement technology Yahoo uses to sell advertising on its network of web sites. Google had to settle a similar suit with Overture/Yahoo in August 2004, just prior to Google’s stock IPO. That settlement gave Google a “fully paid perpetual license” to the technology.

Miva will have to pay a license fee on an on-going basis to continue using the technology. That fee and its terms were not disclosed. Miva had announced in a statement a loss for the recently completed financial quarter of $125.2 million; that figure included settlement charges related to the Yahoo case.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.