adMarketplace was the title sponsor of MediaPost's Search Insider Summit for the second consecutive year, and once again, the spotlight was on.

First, Andries de Villiers, VP of Revenue for adMarketplace, conquered the mobile dilemma on the Mining the Data that Measures Mobile Search ROI panel.

But the highlight of the event came from Lenovo's Global Search Manager, Limin Zhao, when he shared Lenovo's success utilizing adMarketplace in addition to Google and Yahoo/Bing. See the clip here:

Every day digital advertising companies generate large amounts of data. These are Big Data companies, and the massive data they take in every day is one of the most important assets for their business.

At a recent DataWeek San Francisco panel, moderated by Russell Sullivan of Aerospike, adMarketplace CTO, Mike Yudin, joined BlueKai CSO, Alex Hooshmand, and LiveRail CTO, Andrei Dunca, to speak on the topic Instant Ad Response via Real-Time Transactional Analysis.

How much data is Big Data? Yudin, defined it very simply:

In the case of real-time response, more data than can feed into a servers’ physical RAM and more data than traditional databases can deal with, and querying should happen very fast in both cases; 1 millisecond or less in real time, and 1 second or less for the user interface.”

Hooshmand tells his description more literally:

We do that about a trillion times a month, and last month we actually hit run rates of about 2 trillion times a month. So, all of that information has to get captured because we're also the platform that accounts for what's happening with this data. We have to understand where the source of the data is, where it's going, and in some cases we have to charge people for it. So, there's a class of problems around taking that data and aggregating it in a way that can then show up in our reporting. There, the big problem is just the sheer volume of data that you have to deal with.”

Digital media is a global industry, not beholden to physical boundaries or country borders. Last week’s massive ad:tech London convention proved this once again, bringing the advertising and technology world together and effectively creating a forum for the digital community on an international scale.

adMarketplace was on the frontline in London, giving major advertisers an opportunity to get more of the premium quality traffic they are already buying on Google. Our strong presence on the exhibition floor combined with our gold sponsorship and reputation in the search industry made it easy for ad:techies to strike up a conversation with our team.

Our Director of Account Management Mateo Llinas looks at how account managers analyze and optimize keywords in the adMarketplace search network:

Reaching an account’s performance goal tends to take some time, as account managers need to compile sufficient data. But at adMarketplace we analyze historical patterns to identify strategies that will help your account hit performance goals as quickly as possible.

How do we rank the value of different keyword targeting levels, keeping in mind both available search volume and expected performance? Let’s review:

At around noon on Monday, we began to notice some strange fluctuations in our traffic patterns. Something didn't look right: after a quick investigation and calls to some premium publishers, we pinpointed the issue: domain provider GoDaddy had crashed.

News of the outage spread quickly across the (still-functioning) Internet. When one of the world’s biggest site hosting firms goes down, it’s a big story. Not just in the technology industry, but for every company that relies on the web to conduct its business.

Our account managers moved quickly after noticing a drop. They re-allocated budgets across several publishers who weren’t affected and made sure that our advertisers' offers continue to reach users.

Once again, we're excited to welcome a new class of account executives and coordinators to adMarketplace. They're here to help continue our sales team's growth and expand our roster of premium managed and self-serve accounts. Say hello to, from left to right...

Kevin Carney, Account Director
Prior to adMarketplace, Kevin was in the interactive agency space with organizations such as ConvergeDirect, Atrinsic and 360i, where he drove strategies for new client acquisitions, as well as campaign and cross-channel growth for existing clients. Kevin has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, 15+ in the online space specializing in search and affiliate marketing. He resides on the south shore of Long Island with his wife, Kathleen, and two daughters, Kaitlyn and Kayla. He is passionate about spending quality family time outdoors, especially in the ocean and bays and has an appreciation for swimming, fishing, gourmet cooking, film and sports, especially soccer, football and thoroughbred horse racing.

Alexandra (Ali) Erwin, Sales Coordinator
Ali comes from Pennsylvania where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics. She enjoys tennis, volleyball, cooking, and watching the food network.

Marshall Mann, Account Executive
Marshall graduated in 2008 with a Bachelors of Business Marketing from the University of Utah. Prior to joining adMarketplace he was an account supervisor at Crowell Advertising and an Account Executive at McCann Erickson. Besides being a proud 2011 Fantasy football champion Marshall enjoys sports, outdoor recreation and traveling.

Chloe Slobotkin, Account Executive
Chloe is originally from New York City and recently graduated from Villanova with a bachelors in communications. She loves surfing and the beach and just got back from a week-long surf trip in Costa Rica. She has also surfed in Hawaii, Thailand, and California and was fortunate enough to have lived in Rome for four months while in college. She loves traveling and music. Although U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are her two favorite bands, she recently discovered a newfound love for reggae and will always be a huge Bob Marley fan.

Kimberly Yarborough, Account Executive
Kim is from Nashville, TN and has spent the past year living in Spain as a Fulbright scholar. She graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in May 2011 with a Bachelors of Science in International Relations and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish. She is fluent in Spanish and in her free time enjoys traveling, reading, and salsa dancing.

If you want to work at a fast-growing company with an energetic and entertaining staff, room for growth and many fun events out of the office throughout the year, we're hiring.

While the athletes of the 2012 Summer Olympics were running and jumping, throwing and rowing, tumbling and stumbling, swimming and spinning (and sometimes not grinning), Internet users around the world were searching.

We took a look at the searches on the adMarketplace search network to learn which athletes took home popularity gold, which countries stood ahead of the pack, and what sports the world was most interested in from July 27, date of the Opening Ceremony, through the Closing Ceremony on August 12. Here is what we found:

Our first (of what we expect and hope will be many more) infographic created by adMarketplace Graphic Designer Ryan Cherchio

Above are the smiling faces of adMarketplace employees who are moving in, moving up, and moving on. From left to right we present:

Amid all the bad news about Facebook this week — misstating its Monthy Active Users numbers, its stock price dropping below $20 for the first time (sinking California’s revenue estimates along with it), major executive brain-drain, and its M&A department trying to strong-arm a young app developer into selling them his company — one story in particular stood out because it goes to the heart of Facebook’s advertising business:

Facebook has been accused of delivering non-human Pay Per Click traffic to advertisers.

New York-based start-up Limited Run bought Pay Per Click advertising through Facebook and noticed that only 15-20% of the clicks on the visits it received were getting reported by its website analytics tools. That can happen sometimes since analytics tools rely on sampling and the sample size is not always big enough. But with further digging, the advertiser finally determined that roughly 80% of its Facebook ad traffic came from users who did not accept JavaScript.

We're happy to welcome two new members to our tech team this week:

Shane Sorbello, Sys Ops Engineer
Shane comes to adMarketplace with a background in IT and education and a degree in mathematics and computer science. Alongside his technological pursuits, he is a guitar player and enthusiast with particular interests in contemporary and blues guitar music. Recently, Shane has taken up astronomy as hobby, seeking out deep sky views with a large aperture Dobsonian telescope. Fond of the humanities, he enjoys the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and Joseph Campbell's comparative studies in mythology.

Mariyan Stoyanov, Software Developer
Mariyan has interests in computers and natural sciences but also enjoys activities such as painting, playing piano (or rather trying to renew that skill), listening to jazz, blues, rock and classical music. Some of the favorite composers, performers and bands are Queen, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Ritchie Valens, Frederic Chopin and Beethoven. He also plays badminton, soccer, basketball and does yoga.

For more our Instagram pictures, follow @adMarketplace. And if you're looking for a job in New York City, we're hiring!

We welcomed a new class of account executives and managers to the adMarketplace team last week. These new hires bring a wide array of backgrounds and experience that will undoubtedly lead to even greater growth for the company and our clients.

Overseeing the new and improved sales department is Mike Salzman, who joined adMarketplace last month from Google and brings with him an impressive sales track record. We're happy to introduce the newest dedicated group of adMarketplace employees:

Yesterday, Marissa Mayer was Google's Vice President in charge of its Local, Maps, and Location Services. Today she becomes the President and CEO of Yahoo.

Only 37, Mayer was Google's 20th employee and spent ten of her 13 years there in the search division. This may suggest Yahoo is interested in reclaiming some of the market share it continues to siphon to Google and Bing. How will Mayer turn those numbers around? Danny Sullivan posits in Search Engine Land that she will completely "write-off" search to focus on other aspects of the company.

What type of commitment will Mayer make to Yahoo's content producers? Yahoo had been transitioning away from advertising and into media under CEOs Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson and interim CEO Ross Levinsohn. Will Mayer stay the course or pivot to products, of which she's much more experienced?

So many questions for Mayer. Fortunately, we won't have to wait long for answers. At 2 PM this afternoon, Yahoo is holding its second quarter earnings call. While analysts don't expect much good news from the recent past -- aside from the weak numbers, there's the pesky little matter of 425,000 passwords being breached -- this may be the most optimistic and forward-looking call in recent memory. Michael Arrington certainly sees the positive, calling this a "paradigm-shift" for Yahoo.

But by looking ahead, what will this mean for Levinsohn? We were fairly certain that the Yahoo board would make the safe play and remove his interim tag, but now that they've gone in another direction, will he stay in the fold? He certainly has a track record and reputation that makes him highly-coveted, and if Mayer does in fact move Yahoo away from media, he could become expendable as well. That would be a big loss for Yahoo.

When the news broke yesterday afternoon, Mayer had just north of 152,000 Twitter followers; she's now up to 173,000 (and counting). If you'd like to learn more about Mayer, Fast Company profiled her in last year's Most Influential Women in Technology issue. From Gawker, in typical snarky fashion: Google’s Most Glamorous Employee Now Head of World’s Least Glamorous Company. And here she is dancing and bowling.

Congratulations, Marissa Mayer (both on the new job and the pregnancy). When you're ready to fix Yahoo's search syndication, give us a call.

We are excited to welcome Michael Salzman to the adMarketplace team. Mike joins us from Google Offers and brings a considerable amount of experience and knoweldge with him. We're thrilled to have him on board.

You can read the full press release on Mike's hiring here:

adMarketplace is a platform fueled by performance data and built for advertisers to access search channels outside of the major engines. Data-sharing is crucial to the success of any campaign, and can come in many fashions: dynamic variable pass-back (keyword, source, etc), engagement metrics by referrer URL, ranking top revenue sources. But the ideal, most accurate way to track and share data with our platform is by implementing the adMarketplace tracking pixel.

If you're not familiar with pixel placement, it is a transparent image placed on the "Thank You" page of your client's offer to record a full conversion. The success rate for clients using this tracking method is staggering. Roughly 85% of advertisers who provide sufficient, relevant performance data via pixel increase their budgets since our analysts and technology are able to more readily pinpoint efficient sources and keywords.

In addition to tracking via pixel, we work with many bid/analytics platforms, including but not limited to Kenshoo, Atlas, Omniture and Google Analytics.

adMarketplace should be viewed as an extension of your search strategy. By re-allocating 10-20% of incremental spend from Google to adMarketplace, advertisers extend their ROI instead of being forced to bid on terms that are low volume and not profitable. Advertisers are unable to access our search channels when they are only on Google, and this is an easy way to increase visibility and therefore profitability.

So talk to your Account Manager about placing a pixel; it's the best way to take advantage of all adMarketplace has, and very soon will have, to offer.

Last month we shared tips and stats to help plan your Mother’s Day PPC campaigns; with Father’s Day fast approaching, it’s time to do the same for the men in your and your customers’ lives.

If you haven’t updated your ad copy or landing page yet, it’s not too late. A whopping 79% of shoppers won’t purchase gifts until a week before June 17th (18% even wait until the day itself). Compare that to Mother’s Day, where over half of shoppers purchased gifts more than two weeks prior.

And while customers won’t open their wallets quite as wide on Father’s Day as on Mother’s Day (when they spent an average of $152), the average person will still spend $117, 8.5% more than last year, according to a National Research Federation (NRF) survey.

The NRF also found that “online retailers will see their fair share of ‘traffic’ this year as well – nearly three in 10 (28.4%) will shop online, up from 22.1 percent who said so last year.” More money spent online creates greater opportunities to reach new customers. But how will you find them? And how will they find you?

1. Know what customers are buying.
Here’s the lowdown as provided by the NRF:

- Special outing, such as golfing, eating out or heading to a sporting event: $2.3 billion (vs. $2.0 billion last year)
- Electronic gift items: $1.7 billion (vs. $1.3 billion last year)
- Apparel: $1.7 billion (vs. $1.4 billion last year)
- Gift cards: $1.7 billion
- Sporting goods: $641 million
- Books or music: $645 million

2. Update ad creative.
Have any Father’s Day deals or discounts? Highlight them. Offer overnight shipping? Let customers know. As comScore reports, 30% of online shoppers expect overnight shipping options, and 42% abandon shopping carts because of too long delivery timing estimates.

3. Create a Father’s Day-centric landing page.
Centralizing specials and offers right on one page makes for a quicker and easieping experience.

Are fathers getting what they want? Despite increased spending on electronic gifts, one TechBargains.com survey, though perhaps a trifle biased, states that while almost half of dads want a tech gift, less than a quarter will get one. More helpful stats in this infographic:

The final installment in our look at Distribution Channels focuses on that most ubiquitous of modern technologies, the smartphone.

With each new model, app launch, and additional G, smartphones keep getting smarter, faster, and even more indispensible. No surprise, then, that their value to advertisers has increased exponentially.

Are you working with adMarketplace to ensure your ads are shown to the more than 100 million smartphone users in the US?

Quantity alone is not the only benefit. Mobile advertising comes with some other advantages:

Following a brief hiatus due to breaking Yahoo news, Mother’s Day, and SIS Captiva, we’re back with our latest installment in our series on adMarketplace’s Traffic Sources. This week: Rollover/In-Text.

If you’ve ever read an article with a specific word or phrase double-underlined so when you hover over it an ad appears, you’ve encountered rollover in-text ads.

These types of ads work very well for advertisers as they allow them to source traffic based on very specific keyword targeting. These rollover ads also allow advertisers to gain access to unique inventory on a CPC basis, rather than the normal CPM-based banner ads normally seen on content and article sites.

"From a traffic quality standpoint, we have found rollover in-text inventory to perform very well across advertisers in a wide array of verticals,” says adMarketplace Director of Account Management Mateo Llinas. “Due to the nature of this traffic, and the high-intent quality of the users, rollover in-text traffic typically exceeds expectations when optimized appropriately.”

Rollover ads benefit consumers as the ads are more relevant due to the fact that they are selected based on the content of the page, and embedded directly into that content. Since most of these in-text ads are in actual content articles related to a specific subject, the users are not just casual surfers; rather they are reading content online instead of skimming over it. These are highly-interested users looking to garner information on a specific topic.

By being engaged and interested in the article’s subject, these people can be viewed as high-intent users. For instance, if a user interested in organic food is reading an article about healthy recipes, he or she would more likely be receptive to food-related ads. Thus, when the user’s cursor rolls over the underlined text for, say, “chicken” or “quinoa”, he or she will see, read, and click the ad – quite a few steps to get to the advertiser's landing page, but since the user is already interested in the subject, rollover in-text ads engage at a higher rate than is seen on various other types of inventory.

Quinoa is healthy for you and simple to cook; rollover ads are healthy for your CPA and simple to manage.

Read previous entries on traffic sources here:

Part 4: Email
Part 3: Toolbar Search Party
Part 2: Mastering Type-In Domain Traffic
Part 1: Flipping Through the Distribution Channels

Pope Urban VII. President William Henry Harrison. Jets coach Bill Belichick…now add Scott Thompson to the list of very short tenures. His reign as CEO of Yahoo came to an abrupt and inglorious end this week, a mere five months after being anointed the savior of the struggling technology company.

Thompson’s self-inflicted wounds seem so foolish and trivial. He was listed as having degrees in both Accounting and Computer Science, despite only earning the former. But regardless of whether he or a recruiting firm fabricated his resume, he is responsible for his own biography, especially on official company documents. He was either negligent in not noticing a major discrepancy and correcting it, or deceptive by lying in the first place.

Last week, our President/COO Adam Epstein (now on Twitter!) spoke at DigitalSummit 2012 in Atlanta. He presented on the benefits of Search Syndication, how the industry functions, and why working with adMarketplace is vital to the success of your SEM campaigns. Click here or below to view the slideshow presentation and contact usif you have any questions or would like more information:

Mother's Day, second largest gifting holiday after Christmas, is a little over a week away. Recent presidential campaign controversies have reiterated what we all know: being a mom is hard work. For search engine marketers, reaching the husbands and kids looking to buy the perfect gifts for their loved ones is hard work too.

If you're worried it's too late to reach customers, no need: a PriceGrabbers.com survey shows that 30% of shoppers wait until the last week to buy gifts, and 18% leave it until the last minute, within 48 hours of the holiday.