MetaMuse

Google Targeting Ads by Credit Score

Neal forwarded me the MediaPost article "Google Tries Hand At Targeting Consumers With Good Credit" which describes how Google has been testing the ability to lay consumer FICO scores on top of its Google Content Network to identify/target people with good credit. Some interesting takeaways:

• will be offered to Google text and display advertisers.
• partnered with Compete.com and their panel of 2M opt-in users, which means it will not be "explicit" FICO score information but rather paneled data (Web sites which index well for high credit scores). Compete's sister company integrated the FICO data with searches done by participating consumers who applied for a credit card between January and March 2009.
• According to their marketing person, "Google's Content Network can reach 70% of credit card applicants with a high FICO score, 87% of mortgage applicants with a high FICO score, and 90% of the people who visit small business sites who have a high FICO score."
• Consumers with high FICO scores use non-branded search terms more than branded -- approximately 60% of high FICO searchers.

Top Search Advertisers on Google

Interesting stats found this morning at AdQuants, a company that does a lot of SEM analysis. They list the top advertisers for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft by number of advertisements, and by average daily ad spend.

What's most interesting to me is the volume of ad arbitrage revenues Google takes in. I looked at the top 100 advertisers on Google (by daily ad spend) and did a quick SWAG on how much is pure ad arbitrage (they advertise to get traffic, which they monetize thru ads themselves) or affiliate arbitrage (they advertise to get traffic, which they monetize thru affiliate relationships), versus real businesses (United, Nordstrom, HomeDepot, Chase, etc.). Based on this rough analysis, appears that:

• >19% of Google's ad revenues are based on pure ad arbitrage.
• >39% of Google's ad revs are based on affiliate arbitrage.
• Which would mean that the majority of Google's ad revenues are based on arbitrage! For instance, AOL, Yahoo and Ask.com are all in the top 12 advertisers.

Full lists below. And if you click on the links, AdQuants gives you more info.

Drop in Social Media eCPMs and Forecasts

Just read two separate data points regarding social networking advertising, and the struggle for advertisers to figure out how to make it work -- resulting of course in a hindrance on average eCPM rates earned by social media companies.

First I read that eMarketer has lowered their estimates for US social networking ad spend in 2008, from $1.6B to $1.4B. They claim the economy is partly to blame for this decrease, as companies cut experimental ad dollars first. As important, they claim that social networking sites are still trying to figure out what works. Net net, it's the same reason -- the ROI isn't there yet for advertisers.

Next, I read PubMatic's AdPrice Index for May which is real data (not a forecast). They found that eCPMs earned within the social networking category of sites dropped 47% , from $.37 in March to $.19 in April. Average eCPM for large Web sites (>100M pageviews/month) dropped from $.38 to $.18, and 95% of all Web sites with >1M page views per month earned less than $1 eCPM. (Keep in mind that PubMatic's data set is only remnant inventory, not direct sales.)

I've been talking a lot lately with social media companies, and they are indeed having a tough time monetizing their page views. Ironically it's such a rich source of information in terms of describing an audience and their affinities, yet it's so undervalued by advertisers. What they need are tools to help them harness that information and segment their audience into concise targeting parameters.

Social Media Research

Great stuff on social media usage, activities, trends, numbers, etc.

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