As search engines broaden distribution, Quigo goes vertical
Search engines are jostling for bragging rights in the paid listings world over who’s got the broadest distribution, but that’s a horizontal play. Search marketing and technology company Quigo Technologies Inc. is pursuing search in a different way: by going vertical. Because the approach delivers more qualified traffic to marketers, they are willing to pay as much as five times the CPC they’d pay on other engines, CEO Michael Yavonditte tells Internet Retailer.
AdSonar Exchange, a contextual ad-targeting platform that currently includes 150 publishers, operates like a sort of mini-Google AdSense, but with a key difference. “We verticalize the world,” says Yavonditte. “Say someone buys the Google keyword ‘California.’ Google analyzes a page and decides it`s about California – but are they serving up an ad from the advertiser who bought ‘California’ for real estate purposes, or for travel purposes? That’s a problem with their system.”
Yavonditte says Quigo solves that problem by confining advertisers from different vertical markets – so far, travel, education, and health and fitness – to separate databases, and connecting those databases only to publishers that operate in relevant markets. “If Fodor’s is a part of our network, we know Fodor’s is 100% about travel. We will only connect Fodor’s to the database of travel advertisers and use our algorithms to match between travel and travel. It gives our advertisers a much higher degree of confidence that they are not going to show up on the wrong pages,” he says. Thus, the system assures automobile product advertisers, for example, that their ads will be served only in the context of automobile-focused sites, and not next to a news article on traffic jams.
Advertisers pay a premium for that extra degree of confidence. Yavonditte says advertisers’minimum CPC for the travel vertical in Quigo’s publisher network, for example, is about 500% higher than Google’s minimum CPC. “FindWhat has a CPC marketplace that is about 16 cents per click and Overture’s is somewhere in the 40 cents range. Ours is about 70 cents,” he says.
Yavonditte says Quigo expects to publish figures on marketer ROI for AdSonar, released just this June, this fall. In the meantime, he says, anecdotal evidence demonstrates that the ROI is there. “We’ve seen a lot of advertisers renew their accounts, add more money into their accounts and bid higher. There is a lot of active upward bidding across the verticals, which tells us that the ROI is there, or they wouldn’t do that,” he adds.
Quigo also is moving to increase the size of its online publisher distribution network, which includes National Geographic and USA Today, among others, while taking care that those additions don’t dilute the quality of traffic generated. “There are a lot of sites out there today that have been put up just to collect from Google,” he says. “We want to find sites that develop proprietary content that people seek out and go to multiple times for resource purposes.”
AdSonar Exchange is Quigo’s second product. Under its original offering, two-year-old platform FeedPoint, Quigo is a major provider of paid inclusion services for online marketers.
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