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

1
Measurement and Metrics

• PANELISTSArjun Jayaram, VP of Engineering,
  Become.com
• Jack Mardack, Director of Marketing, EventBrite
• Shelley Ellis, CEO, Shelley Ellis Consulting

2
Measurement and Metrics Scalability,
Optimization and Measurement for your content
advertising

• PANELISTArjun Jayaram, VP of Engineering
  Become.com

3
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

4
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.

5
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.

6
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

7
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
• Dont try to low ball your bid initially. Also
  be aggressive in trimming ads instead of lowering
  CPC aggressively.

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Keyword death spiral for content keywords
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Optimal keyword life cycle
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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
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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

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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