Overture’s paid placement goes where it’s never gone before: content pages

Paid search placement pioneer Overture Services Inc. delivered some 2 billion consumer clicks to advertisers last year, and the Pasadena, CA-based company says advertisers are asking for more. To provide them, Overture is taking its advertising platform and its keyword-bidding model to where it hasn’t been before–-beyond search results listings directly to the pages of content publishers. Overture this week announced the launch of a new product, Content Match, which places Overture’s paid search results on relevant content pages of its distribution partners’ web sites.

Overture announced it’s already distributing the contextual advertising product to MSN and other content-oriented businesses such as the MyFamily network of web sites, which operates sites such as Genealogy.com. It’s also in talks with other content-focused sites that have participated in tests of Content Match over the past four months, including the auto and real estate sections of Yahoo, says Bill Demas, senior vice president and general manager of Overture’s Partners Business and Solutions Group. The Content Match product is similar to Google’s AdSense program which places contextually related ads on non-search sites.

How does it work? Consumers logging onto MSN to find content about jazz singer Nora Jones, for example, might see ad links to related products such as Nora Jones CDs or videos to the side of or at the bottom of the content on the page. Clicking on that link delivers the consumer to the advertiser’s site where the consumer can buy the product; clicking on the back button gets them back to the content on MSN. Advertisers bid on the contextually placed keywords as they do on keyword positions in search results. The difference is that the link to a relevant shopping opportunity is delivered on a content page, to a consumer who’s chosen to view particular content but not actively looking to buy something.

“The links are done in a non-intrusive way so as not to hinder consumers’ experience with that content, but at the same time, they’re relevant to the story they’re reading about. So there’s a greater likelihood they might go ahead and click on that link,” says Demas. Overture at this point isn’t releasing any data on click-through or conversion rates of Content Match among sites that have tested it, but he terms the early response “positive.”

In addition to new opportunities for existing partners such as MSN, Content Match opens up advertising opportunities for publishers previously unable to participate in the Overture network, such as Genealogy.com, because they didn’t have search boxes, adds Demas.

In addition to new distribution partners, “You could expect that much of our existing network will be interested in this, and we’ll be announcing those implementations as they happen,” says Demas.