Columbus, Ohio (PRWEB) November 5, 2009 — In the midst of the crucial holiday buying season, interactive agencies and online advertisers need to know which ads are the most profitable and be able to make quick adjustments to ad creatives across multiple search engines, in order to optimize conversions and profit. ClearSaleing, a technology and thought leader in attribution management and advertising analytics, today announced Release 4.4 of its attribution analytics platform, which allows marketers, for the first time, to make and schedule ad text changes across all search engines. This capability expands on ClearSaleing’s capability to analyze ads by profit, cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per lead (CPL) and many other metrics.

“While other analytics programs can show you top rankings, ClearSaleing moves far ahead by using our attribution platform to accurately assess an ad’s true performance by profit, revenue, and other appropriate metrics. And, since immediate action is so critical during a peak buying season, we enable the marketer to create and push ad changes out to all the search engines right from ClearSaleing’s platform,” says ClearSaleing Chief Innovation Officer and co-founder, Adam Goldberg.

For example, if a marketer or agency finds that a “15% discount” pay-per-click (PPC) ad is not pulling in profitable traffic, using ClearSaleing’s Release 4.4, they can make a universal switch across all search engines, rapidly changing and testing alternative ad text.

“What’s tremendously helpful is that the marketer or agency does not have to log on to each search engine to make these changes. They just have to log on to ClearSaleing and push these changes out to all the search engines,” adds Goldberg. “By using the many filters we provide, marketers or agencies can now manage their pay-per-click campaigns toward profit, and with our attribution technology, correctly attribute profit credit to each and every ad and creative variation.”

ClearSaleing has also added enhancements to its Advertising Logic Builder in Release 4.4 so marketers can create bidding rules that include first page estimated bid and keyword quality score metrics.

Creative Management
During the holiday season, marketers or their agencies are faced with managing and revising a staggering number of ads. ClearSaleing’s Release 4.4 makes that complex process easier and more efficient. By allowing the agency or marketer to rapidly and efficiently test alternative ad text and determine the most profitable option, ClearSaleing provides its advertiser and agency customers with a huge strategic advantage over their competitors. With the new Release, marketers or their agencies can upload seasonal ads according to their planned schedule and ClearSaleing’s technology will push the ads out according to schedule. For scheduling and ad changes, ClearSaleing enables marketers to export files to Excel for ultimate flexibility. Marketers can also copy creatives to any other campaign or ad group, from one search engine to another.

Social Media Monitoring
In Release 4.4, ClearSaleing now incorporates social media tracking into its attribution analytics platform. Marketers can track over 3,000 social media sites, applying ClearSaleing’s profit attribution modeling to see whether or not social media traffic is contributing to conversions and profit.

“We know that marketers have a need for sharper insights into the influence of social media on buying behavior. ClearSaleing now shows where a customer visits a social media site along our purchase path. If a brand creates a fan page on Facebook, ClearSaleing shows the value of the traffic from that social media site and how customers are interacting with it, and their other advertising,” explains Luke Tuttle, ClearSaleing’s Chief Information Officer.

“ClearSaleing customers now have the combined firepower of attribution management to determine the true profit generated from each ad, efficient management of ads and bids across all search engines, and a means of capturing the impact of the growing number of social media sites,” says Tuttle.

About ClearSaleing
ClearSaleing has been recognized by Forrester Research, Inc. as an Interactive Attribution “Leader” in an independent report: “The Forrester Wave^TM: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009″ (October 2009). Also named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES Awards, ClearSaleing’s advertising portfolio management platform helps marketers identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments.

ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and publishes www.AttributionManagement.com that provides a rich repository of ClearSaleing and externally published articles, white papers and other material focused exclusively on attribution management.

ClearSaleing’s unique ability to give marketers telescopic insight into their online ad investment is attracting major brand customers such as American Greetings and Nationwide Insurance. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, please visit www.ClearSaleing.com.

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There have been numerous reports published over the years by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that attempt to prove how the use of display advertising, when combined with search, can increase your overall campaign performance.

A recent report published by iProspect, Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Integration Study was featured in an article for MediaPost titled Study Confirms Display Ads, Paid Search Work in Concert. Robert Murray, iProspect’s CEO is quoted in the article, saying “Internet users are more likely to engage and/or eventually make a purchase from brands with which they are already familiar.” Display ads help breed familiarity. The article also reports findings that suggest that of the people that react to display ads,  31% of those people click on display ads, and 27% go to search engines to do a search related to the ad (brand, offer, product).

At ClearSaleing, we have been tracking the relationship between display and search for over 2 years. We assemble advertising into what we call a purchase path, which is the chronological sequencing of display impressions, ad clicks, organic visits and direct visits that lead to conversions and/or non-conversions or abandoned paths. When we analyze the purchase paths of our clients that use display and search advertising, and specifically look at the types of searches they do after being exposed to display, we learn something very interesting.

Based on our observations, the combination of display advertising and paid search can indeed reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA). Our analysis shows that the most common type of search by a user after being exposed to a display ad is a branded search. We have found that with some of our clients, upwards of 50% of the searches that occur after being exposed to a display ad are brand searches.  A brand search is a search for your company name, a misspelling of your company name, or a typo of your company name that leads a consumer to click on your sponsored listing (your PPC ad).  Brand ads are almost always the cheapest PPC ads that you can buy. Many companies have trademark restrictions on other companies bidding on their branded terms, and for those that don’t have trademark protection, they are still likely to pay a very low CPC when compared to their non-branded PPC ads.

For example, if you were in the auto insurance business and are not running display ads, the most common search for your products is likely “auto insurance,” which is a keyword with a per-click cost between $15 and $30+ historically. Our research shows purchase paths that are all search-based typically start with a general term, and often include a second search for a non-branded term, and then close with a branded term. They also go from a general term to a branded term and then convert. The CPA, when considering the entire purchase path in this case, typically runs in excess of $30 to $60+.

If this advertiser ran display ads in addition to search ads, the search the consumer most often does after seeing that display ad is for a brand term. When we measure just the cost of the advertising in these converting paths, the cost for a banner impression is just fractions of a penny, and the cost of a click on a branded term is typically no more than $.25. Therefore, the cost of these converting paths can be as low as $.25 versus a cost of $30 to $60 for the previously stated search-only converting Paths.

By adding display to your campaigns today, you will create new paths for your consumers to navigate, which are much cheaper than search-only paths, and this can allow for your CPA to decrease and searches for your cheaper brand terms to increase.

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site.

Andy Beal thinks that the development of the PPA beta represents a serious threat to the affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and Linkshare.

A lot has already been said on this announcement, so we won’t spill more much ink. But a few items are worth commenting on:

1. We agree with Andy Beal that this development will challenge the affiliate networks. But don’t underestimate their ability to adapt and refocus their efforts on value added service that Google probably won’t provide.
2. CPA is only being offered on the Content Network on a limited basis. It’ll take some time for advertisers and publishers to figure out the nuances before they can make a significant commitment to the new model. Until then, CPC will continue to be the dominant component of advertising & probably for years to come.
3. For more sophisticated advertisers, there’s really nothing new in a CPA model. If you advertise with a CPC model, you already have an implicit CPA based on your CPC conversion rate (even if you don’t realize it). If you’re tracking your sales down to the granular, profit level, then you can and should be deriving the CPA you can really afford, in addition to managing your spend by profitability.
4. If you choose a CPA based on percentages, a retailer with higher average sales prices will, all things being equal, always rank higher than you.
5. If you choose a straight CPA based on sales, then you’ll still have to account for a variable profit margin. If you’re not tracking your sales back to your keywords, you won’t be able to determine which keywords deliver the best orders.
6. We believe CPA will help many advertisers who had to abandon the content network due to low quality traffic. The CPA model will help them get back into the content network, but they will require detailed tracking to determine which CPA type works best for their mix of products and services and their average sale price and actual profit per order.
7. We also like CPA for lead generation, but as with any lead gen activity, you MUST have a system that can track off-line conversions. Without the connection to an off-line sales system, you won’t be able to accurately assess the quality of the leads being delivered through CPA ads.