Columbus, OH (PRWEB) August 31, 2010Virtualization and cloud computing adds tremendous value in reducing IT complexity and enabling IT as a service. At VMWorld, San Francisco, Moscone Center, August 31-September 2, ClearSaleing, the industry leader in advertising analytics and attribution management, and Hosting.com,a global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions, services and facilities, will explore how cloud hosting, via Hosting.com, has enabled ClearSaleing to provide the industry’s most sophisticated hosted services for its clients. Luke Tuttle, CIO of ClearSaleing, will join Hosting.com at its booth, #1608.

Aaron Hollobaugh, Director of Marketing for Hosting.com, comments that, “We are pleased that ClearSaleing is joining Hosting.com at VMWorld to help illustrate the value our new Cloud 2.0 initiatives are bringing to clients. Early adopters, like ClearSaleing, know that cloud hosting can help them scale quickly and effectively – now their expectations have turned to functionality and manageability of cloud and hybrid solutions. We’re excited to tell that story at VMWorld together.”

Tuttle notes, “As our attribution management platform has evolved, and we are adding increasingly complex data such as the effect of social media on the Purchase Path, and expanded Cost of Acquisition analysis, we need hosting technology that can support this level of scale. We find Hosting.com provides us the means to give our clients a superior user experience.”

Employing Hosting.com’s technology, ClearSaleing has grown from a dedicated server solution to a large hybrid solution encompassing cloud technologies. At the Hosting.com booth, Tuttle will answer questions about his solution, his experience with Hosting.com and how virtualization technology supports ClearSaleing’s advertising analytics platform.

Tuttle also notes that Hosting.com’s technology has worked well with ClearSaleing’s many online retail clients who scale up in the fall and winter months and then tend to lessen in demand, post holiday. “ClearSaleing found Hosting.com lets us seamlessly ramp up or down without any change in efficiency, speed or support for our clients.”

For a more detailed look at ClearSaleing’s use of Hosting.com’s solution, visit http://www.hosting.com/resources/case-studies/clearsaleing

ABOUT CLEARSALEING
ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) 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.

ABOUT HOSTING.COM
Hosting.com is a global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions, services and facilities. Hosting.com’s geographically-dispersed data centers and Cloud Super Sites coupled with the industry’s top networking and connectivity technologies provide clients with the highest levels of security, reliability and support. The most recognized names in Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, Technology and Web 2.0 rely on Hosting.com’s colocation, cloud hosting, dedicated and managed hosting solutions.

Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.

All Hosting.com products and services are supported by 24×7x365 live expert technical support through toll-free telephone, email, and online chat. Hosting.com’s Entourage Support and Migration Managers set the industry sta

A/B Testing

Historically, display optimization has been done through A/B testing. You run the display campaign, you look at how that affects your KPIs (profit, revenue, ROI, CPA, etc.), and if you see lift in the KPIs you’re focused on, you can “attribute” that to the campaign working. If your numbers stay flat or go down, you can conclude display isn’t adding value.

With more A/B testing…

Read entire article on Search Engine Watch blog

Listen here

The introduction of seller ratings is important because it can significantly increase paid search traffic and click-through rates, and potentially increase conversions due to the visibility of the seller ratings and the inherent trust that is created by their presence. Seller ratings are akin to a personal referral from your peers about which merchants to purchase products and services from.

With the addition of seller ratings, your ads should receive a higher click-through rate due to the bright color of star ratings and the increased size of ads when seller ratings are added. That causes ads with seller ratings to stand out from other ads because they include elements that are not included in your competitor ads. Another big benefit is that there is not a cost per click when the visitor clicks the seller ratings to view your reviews. Ad spend is only charged when that ad itself is clicked and the searcher is directed to your landing page.

The rules from Google on which ads will include seller ratings are simple. In order for seller ratings to accompany your paid search ads, it requires 30 highly rated reviews on various review sites across the web. Your overall rating must be 4 or more stars for the links to be included with your ad. Since this feature is still relatively new, there is plenty of opportunity to capitalize on the seller ratings before other merchants get involved. As Google expands to more review sites over time and other merchants realize the significance, they will become commonplace for all advertisers.

The sites that contribute to Google Seller Ratings are not provided in detail, but a review of existing seller ratings reveals the following list of sites from which most of the reviews have been gathered:

Reseller Ratings – http://www.resellerratings.com

Bizrate – http://www.bizrate.com

Bizrate U.K. – http://www.bizrate.co.uk

Review Centre – http://www.reviewcentre.com

Viewpoints – http://www.viewpoints.com

Epinions – http://www.Epinions.com

Yahoo Shopping – http://shopping.yahoo.com

Mr. Rebates – http://www.mrrebates.com

Rate It all – http://www.rateitall.com

Rate It All – http://www.rateitall.com

Review Stream – http://www.reviewstream.com

Google Checkout Reviews – These are reviews that are available to merchants that use Google Checkout as a part of their e-commerce shopping cart.

The reason that more merchants do not have seller ratings included with their ads is because there are not 30 reviews of their site on the various review sites mentioned above. Many of the larger advertisers, like eBay, Amazon, and Macy’s, have seller ratings, but smaller merchants do not. This can provide your site with a competitive advantage for keywords on which you are bidding because other merchants will not have seller ratings which will allow your ad to stand out.

The biggest challenge is gaining the 30+ required reviews. Reseller Ratings accepts all merchants and appears to be the easiest site to add reviews and start receiving ratings instantly.

If your challenge is gaining the required number of reviews, here are a couple of suggestions:

1)      Existing Customers & Employees – Request that existing customers and employees to complete a review. These are people that are familiar with your products or services and can make an immediate review based on their experiences. They are also more likely to provide a positive review which will be helpful in the event that your site receives some unfavorable reviews.

2)      Conversion Page Request – After a person has made a purchase on your site is a good time for you to request a review. They have demonstrated their desire for your product by their purchase, and this is also an ideal time to elicit a positive review. Only a small percentage of those that complete a purchase will complete the survey, which is to be expected, but this method requests a review at the very moment they feel their best about the website.

3)      E-mail – Sending out an e-mail periodically (daily, weekly, monthly) and requesting reviews from your readership is another great method of increasing the number of reviews for your site. E-mail subscribers usually have favorable views of the products and services that you offer and simply need to convey this in a review. Including a list of the review sites would be helpful to ensure that your reviews are spread out across several sites.

These are just a couple of ideas to generate reviews for your website that will lead to seller ratings being included with your ads. The success of seller ratings heavily hinges on how quickly your website can have them included with their ads before it becomes standard for all advertisers and consumers have developed a blindness for the ratings. Based on the improvements and results that we have observed, it is well worth the effort to make sure that your site has the number of reviews available to be included in the Google Seller Ratings.

To find out more information about Google Seller Ratings and the official documentation, visit

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-seller-rating-extensions-on.html

Controlling advertising costs is a top-of-mind consideration these days, but negotiating a lower Cost of Acquisition (CPA) is tough without convincing data to back it up. At booth 320 during Search Engine Strategies San Francisco, August 16-20, ClearSaleing, the industry leader in advertising analytics and attribution management, will show how applying attribution criteria to CPA ad vehicles like display and affiliate networks can help advertisers better control ad spend costs.

“By applying attribution to our marketing spend, we save about 18% to 20% per campaign,” says Tessa Fraser, Senior Marketing Manager, American Greetings Interactive. American Greetings uses ClearSaleing’s attribution technology to determine the effectiveness of campaign spend across all marketing channels.

Most recently, American Greetings has been using attribution to work with performance display partners on serving media to increase audience reach. “Through ClearSaleing’s attribution model we know that our display partners are helping us reach new and effective audiences. We are also limiting spend waste on customers we would have received anyway,” says Fraser.

It’s a classic win-win, says ClearSaleing co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Adam Goldberg. “American Greetings controls CPA costs and gets better reach while performance media can adjust their campaigns to serve media where there is the most potential for credit, and therefore the most money. It is another example of how attribution is helping advertisers optimize their ad spend.”

SES SESSION
ClearSaleing’s Adam Goldberg will be participating in the SES session, “Channel Surfing, Measuring Profit and ROI Across Channels,” Thursday, August 19 from 12 to 1 PM. The session will examine the use of attribution to determine which types of ads or combination of ads are the most likely to lead to conversion and to result in the highest profit and ROI. In this session, the panelists will identify various methods for determining attribution and will pinpoint common attribution misconceptions.

Participants are moderator John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive; Mikel Chertudi, SES Advisory Board & Sr. Director, Online & Demand Marketing, Omniture; Justin Merickel, Vice President, Marketing & New Product Development, Efficient Frontier, and Chuck Sharp, Senior Vice President, Analytics, iCrossing.

ClearSaleing was named an interactive attribution leader in Forrester Research Inc.’s report The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009.

ABOUT CLEARSALEING
ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) 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.

Register now for the upcoming webinar Let’s Hear It For The Brand: Attribution Management.
Knowing that there are more effective ways to measure and budget is one thing; knowing how to put that knowledge into action for your specific business goals is quite another.

Join Range Online Media and ClearSaleing as we approach attribution modeling and cross-media management from the perspective of the brand marketer. Learn from real-life experiences of the triumphs and challenges of some of the world’s most recognizable brands and make attribution modeling actionable within your organization.

Join for this webcast and learn:

• First-hand takeaways from brands at various stages of attribution sophistication
• How to analyze and act on the variety of touch points in the online marketing mix
• Ways to illuminate and address common barriers brands face
• Making attribution work for your unique brand

Register Now

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 10 /PRNewswire/ — ClearSaleing, the industry leader in advertising analytics and attribution management, and Mindset Media, the makers of the world’s first and only psychographic ad technology, today announced a partnership to provide advertisers with a powerful new means for understanding their online consumers.  By combining Mindset Media’s psychographic profiling capability with ClearSaleing’s multi-channel advertising analytics, advertisers can now identify the personality traits of their online consumers and determine which psychographic traits, or Mindsets, drive profit.

While advertisers have been able to profile consumers demographically and behaviorally for some time, psychographics represent a powerful new lens through which buyer behavior and brand choice can be better understood.

“Savvy advertisers are increasingly moving away from a ‘last click’ ad model and are seeking an in-depth knowledge of their entire marketing portfolio to make informed decisions that drive more profit. In doing so, those advertisers are looking for innovative ways to better understand their target consumers,” said Dustin Engel, ClearSaleing Vice President, Business Development. “As we looked to further develop our Attribution Ecosystem™ of digital technology and data partners, it became quite clear that Mindset Media provides unparalleled methodology, technology, and scale.  This partnership will give our clients access to the strongest determinants of purchase decisions — buyers’  personalities.”

This revolutionary combination of psychographic profiling and attribution-based analytics allows advertisers to capture and monetize consumers like never before. The partnership will also help advertisers identify the most efficient multi-channel advertising sources and offer the unique opportunity to tie psychographic insights to profit metrics.

“We are proud to partner with ClearSaleing,” said JB Brokaw, Executive Director of Market Development, Mindset Media. “Being part of ClearSaleing’s state-of-the-art Attribution Ecosystem will let us apply the power of psychographics to the world of e-commerce.”

ClearSaleing was named an interactive attribution leader in Forrester Research Inc.’s report The Forrester Wave(™: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009.

ABOUT CLEARSALEING

ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) 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.

ABOUT MINDSET MEDIA

Mindset Media produces the world’s first and only psychographic ad targeting technology.  This capability gives blue-chip advertisers the power to reach mass audiences of consumers with the psychographics that fit their brands, and allows web publishers to deliver media against the 21 elements of personality known to drive buyer behavior and brand choice.  Mindset Media also provides research services that help advertisers and agencies refine their targets and read the impact of Mindset-targeted campaigns.

Mindset Media is headquartered in New York, and has field offices in Chicago and Kansas City.  Mindset Media is a member of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF).  For more information, visit www.mindset-media.com.

Recently, I was exposed to a company that has developed a technology that allows marketers to find and market to people that are friends or “connections” to their current customers.  This company cannot do this over Facebook, so there still is a challenge in valuing a Facebook Fan in the “ultimate” way, but they can do this over many other aspects of the social landscape.

The company I learned about is called Media6Degrees (M6D).  M6D is a social targeting company that leverages the power of social media to identify new audiences to target for their clients. M6D does not use any personally identifiable information (PII) in order to build these new audiences, so it cannot carry out the ultimate tracking for a Facebook fan, as described above, but it can get us pretty close. M6D is interested in the entire social universe, which includes blogs, photo sites, sharing sites and social networks. M6D labels customers of their clients as brand loyalists, and then scours the social media landscape to find ‘connections’ to the brand loyalist without using PII to retarget. Typical retargeting shows display advertising to people that have already visited your site, but have not converted. M6D performs traditional retargeting, but also develops whole new audiences by ‘retargeting’ connections of the brand loyalists.

Here’s an example of how M6D might identify a friend of a brand loyalist to start retargeting to:

• The M6D pixel can identify the types of blogs one of their brand loyalists visits. It then discovers through the M6D network that someone else reads similar blogs. Given that some of these blogs are read by a very small audience, M6D makes an educated, data driven assumption that these two people might know each other, or at the very least, are similar in their interests. They call this the social graph. Once they identify this new person, they will then begin to target ads to this potentially new prospect using retargeting, even though this new person has never been to their customer’s site.

With most retargeting and ad networks, it is a challenge to prove their contributions to the bottom line because most marketers value the last click versus looking at the entire Purchase Path. When marketers do look at the entire Purchase Path and give value to introducers and influencers, in addition to closers, the real value of display advertising begins to show. If you are a current customer of ClearSaleing, and are also using Media6Degrees, we’d love to analyze your data to see how many conversions were introduced by M6D’s advanced targeting technologies.

This latest enhancement lets marketers embed maps within expandable ad units, and then target the ads according to a customer’s immediate location. When the ad is expanded, it pinpoints the business’ location on a map along with a click-to-call phone number and an option to ask for turn-by-turn directions.

The kicker is this: Advertisers are only charged when the business is called or its website visited. Google has been rumored to be working on a cost-per-action online ad format.  As it launches, a larger question looms: will it lead to a wider offering – and acceptance on the part of ad networks – of a CPA online model?

Local Ad Market

If this format is ever to take off, it will be for a local offering, says Adam Goldberg, co-founder….

Continue reading article on MarketingVOX

AdMe is a company started by an ex Googler named Matt Ochsner. AdMe is actually an add-on to Firefox, which, once installed, will place a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ icon on display ads you see. If you click a ‘Yes’, you’re indicating to AdMe that you like that ad and would like to see ads similar to it. If you select ‘No’, that lets AdMe know that you no longer want to see ads from the company, nor ads similar to it. This easy-to-use, self-policing system puts a lot of power in the hands of consumers, while at the same time saving company’s lots of money by insuring they don’t show ads to uninterested people and allowing them to target ads to people that have indicated they want more.

A startup called Better Advertising, founded by Scott Meyer, a former executive at About.com, is another self-policing advertising technology. Their product is called Power Eye. Companies that employ the Power Eye solution will display a Power Eye icon in their display advertising. When a consumer mouses over the icon, they will see the data that was used to target the ad and have the option to opt-out of future targeting by those companies.

Given that I’m in the industry, I certainly would be curious to see an ad with Power Eye, so that I can discover what information was used to target that ad to me. I am not so sure that Joe Consumer would have as much interest in targeting data as I would. I am also curious about learning how I am perceived on the Internet. I have to imagine there will be many times where people are put into categories which they truly do not fit. I also wonder what affect this will have on the companies that display those ads. For example, I’m a male, age 35, but if Power Eye said I was being targeted in ad because I’m a woman over the age of 65, what would that make me think of the company that displayed that ad? Should I feel insulted or should I be concerned that my online behavior is indicative of a female over the age of 65?

I can certainly see how this type of technology can be a win-win for consumers and companies. Like with all things, adoption is the key. If consumers don’t use it, companies don’t learn anything new. It could be that these new technologies turn out to be just a preemptive strike against pending legislation trying to reduce the impact of online advertisers by limiting the amount of information they can know about consumers.

I encourage you to try AdMe, it’s a Firefox download, which is available at www.admeonline.com, and please let me know your thoughts.