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:

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.

The following video comes from last week's FairSearch.org Searching for Innovation and Competition in the Onilne Marketplace conference held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. If you have some time and are interested in the current state and future of the search industry, Google's domination of it, and the antitrust issues associated with it, the video is well worth watching.

The panel featured an impressive lineup of legal minds and government officials:

• Bert Foer, American Antitrust Institute
• Pamela Jones Harbour, Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., former FTC Commissioner
• Patrick Lynch, former Rhode Island Attorney General, past president of National Association of
Attorneys General, Consultant to FairSearch
• Nathan Newman, Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute, NYU Law, head of TechProgress.org
• Jim O’Connell, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Antitrust
Division, partner with Covington & Burling LLP

And here's the FairSearch recap of the event: Panelists Review Investigations of Google, Potential for Action 

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.

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:

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.

This article is reprinted with permission from Search Engine Watch. You can read the original article here

By Alistair Dent

Search partners are search engines that syndicate Google's AdWords ads. These websites aren't large enough to build their own ad serving platform, and don't have enough users to attract advertisers to it.

Without wanting to sound overly harsh: if you had an extra hour to spend on your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, would you use it building an Ask.com campaign or optimizing Google? There's no contest.

We sent a large team to Captiva Island, FL, last week for MediaPost's Search Insider Summit, where our VP of Revenue Andries de Villiers participated on the panel "Search + Data: Accelerating the intersection of Keywords and Audiences."

The conversation broached on the following questions: What type of technology/infrastructure needs to evolve to package search with data for media targeting? What capabilities are needed? What will marketers expect from these types of companies? What do success metrics look like? How do we scale keyword search?

When you bid on exact match at adMarketplace, we exact match. Unforunately the same can't be said for Google AdWords. This thorough analysis looks at the upcoming changes to AdWords and gives you instructions on how to opt out in order to prevent yourself from spending way more money than expected. The quick overview:

Starting next month, Google plans to silently change the way your existing Adwords campaign works. These are changes that, unchecked, could cost you a ton of money. And what’s worse, is that you may never figure out why – because the cause of the decreased performance would be completely hidden from you.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

Google has made “improvements” to Exact match and Phrase match to make them fuzzy. That means that when you advertise on a keyword, you’ll now be automatically advertising on misspellings, plurals, and any other form of the word.

Our customer support department recently received a question we feel deserves its own post:

Q: How do I raise the “Combined Daily Budget”?

A: In order to raise your budget above $200 per day, you need to get verified. The process works like this:

Self-serve users can run up to $200 per day until they are verified by adMarketplace. Once adMarketplace account managers validate the client’s account, the user is free to spend over the $200 limit. This limit was put in place to prevent users from draining their account budgets too quickly.

For example: if you have three ad groups with daily budgets of $100 each, your account will be capped at $200 until you are verified. Then you will be throttled up to $300.

Once you start spending $1000 or more per day, you will be assigned a full-time account manager to help you optimize your campaigns. And if you sign up as a managed account, you are automatically verified.

Whether you want to raise your budget beyond the $200 threshold post-verification, or up to that cap prior to it, the process is simple:

1. Click on the campaign you want to adjust.

2. Within the campaign, click on the pencil icon next to “Daily Budget” and adjust accordingly.

If you want to verify your account, upgrade to a managed account, have interest in managed services, or have any other questions,  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

And now, part 4 of our series on Distribution Channels: Email.

While text messaging, Twitter, and in-app chatting may be younger, sexier forms of online communications, email is still the overwhelmingly dominant method of staying in touch and informed.

For advertisers, high-performing email traffic comes from highly engaged users who have signed up for email subscriptions. When users sign up for email updates from a trusted merchant or site, they're often given the option to receive news or offers from related categories or brands.

Any questions? Leave a comment below, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , or reach out on any of our social media outlets, and we'll be happy to answer them. We're always here to help.