Many of us are familiar with the “Quaker Man” – the gentle smile and old-world attire of the Quaker brand logo. Quaker is a household name that’s been around for over 130 years and is one of the most popular brands in the world.

Quaker needed something to reinvigorate the product and get consumers excited about oatmeal again. Kevin Ryan, of iMedia Connection, gives Kontera and OMD (Quaker’s ad agency) kudos for taking oats to the next level, making them just a little bit sexier.

Click to view demo

In an ad shaped like the Quaker Oatmeal package, that included recommended recipes, Quaker succeeded in engaging with consumers for 12 seconds (!) while they review the content of the ad, achieving Click Through Rates as high as 15.6%. The Quaker In-Text Freedom Ads delivered the highest CTR across the entire campaign, across all other media types.

Pranav Pandit, Group Director of Digital Strategy at OMD, acknowledges the success of Kontera’s In-Text advertising solution in tying unique and engaging creative with relevant context to help users connect the dots from Quaker to a rich oatmeal experience.

In-Text advertising has always delivered performance because of its superior relevancy and unobtrusiveness – as the website visitor has to trigger the launch of the ad by hovering over the highlighted keyword in the text, and the ad is closely tied and extremely relevant to the content of the page and to the user intent behind it.

In the online advertising world, where banner ads are almost universally ignored by consumers, getting extremely low click through rates of 0.7%, In-Text ads, which are actively triggered by consumers, who want to engage with the content, deliver impressive average CTR of 10% and above. In an industry measured by advertisers on conversion and campaign ROI, and by publishers on the CPC paid for each of those clicks – high CTRs and user engagement mean big business all around.

Go on, awaken your sense with Quaker oats and take a look at the demo of the Quaker Freedom Ads.

Download the presentation given at the iMedia Brand Summit on the Quaker Case Study.

Check out more of our latest videos on YouTube

Freedom Ads offer Kontera’s large brand advertisers a unique way of capturing the consumers’ eye and imagination, while delivering record-high engagement, brand response rates, and CTRs.

Freedom Ad units are highly-relevant rich-media in-text ads that appear in the actual form of the product they advertise – thus bringing these products to life through an engaging out-of-the-box experience.

For example, when advertising its newest mobile phone and its video capabilities, Samsung chose to have the ad itself shaped like the actual mobile device, simulating its capability to stream live video coverage of the Winter Olympics. Consumers immediately experience the Samsung phone, its unique product design and video capabilities. The ad also conveys the Olympic experience and associates the Samsung brand with the Olympic spirit.

There are two types of Freedom Ads; the Product Freedom Unit, and the Brand Freedom Unit.

The Product Freedom Unit delivers an elegant, instantly recognizable visual depiction of the advertiser’s product, directly from within a highly relevant key phrase. Product Freedom units employ a clean design, and are ideal for product focused advertisers like Consumer Packaged Goods, Automotive, Apparel, Beauty, Consumer Electronics, and Retail.

The Brand Freedom Unit brings to life elements of the brand that are instantly recognizable, and it delivers a unique and holistic brand experience through tasteful interaction that engages, educates, and delights the consumer.

In a survey conducted among 15 brands and agency teams who launched campaigns using the new Freedom Ads, all of them replied that they would use the Freedom Unit again! This great advertiser reception is indicative of positive consumer results, and it is translating into a positive financial impact for Kontera’s publishers.

Other advertisers that have used the new Freedom Ads include FedEx, Adobe, the Republic of Ireland and Curel. See these campaigns and experience the Freedom Ads for yourself on our demonstration page.

You can also check out some of our additional Freedom Ads resources:

• The Official Kontera Press Release
• Freedom Ads Covered on MediaPost
• Download the PowerPoint presentation presented at iMedia Brand Summit
• See this and other Ad types in The Kontera Ad Gallery
• Watch the short video interview with Ammiel Kamon, Kontera’s EVP marketing, given at the iMedia Brand Summit about the future of in-text advertising

You may already know that the year you were born is considered the year of the rat, ox, or horse according to the ancient Chinese zodiac.  What you probably didn’t know yet, is that at Kontera, we’ve proclaimed 2010 as the year of relevancy.

What does this mean for our partners?  Well, it’s pretty simple, higher relevancy means that:

• Publishers don’t sell out their users to irrelevant ad exposure and are not hurting their users’ experience. Happy users mean increased traffic, time on site, and loyalty.
• Higher CTR – as you get paid by the click, more clicks means more money for your website
• Advertisers don’t have ads served to users who aren’t interested, thus getting high conversion on their campaign

Essentially everyone profits!

Relevancy is a mark at Kontera that we take very seriously.  Our relevancy efforts start at the “story-level” targeting where we interpret the meaning of the page then matching it with contextual ads that are the most relevant ones.

One measure of relevancy is in the form of a metric called CTR.  CTR or click through rate is a frequency ratio between the number of times an ad is viewed and the number of times it gets clicked on.  Experts agree that as the net becomes increasingly more built up, advertising campaigns that were formerly effective may not hold effectiveness.   In fact, recent statistics indicate that classic banner ads carry a mere .07% CTR rate bringing further understanding to the rise in the phrase “banner blindness”.  In contrast, ads on the Kontera network are characterized by starting click through rates that exceed 10% with some campaigns reaching upwards of 14% (!).

CTR is just one measure of a publisher’s ad performance, but is one of the most honest ways to gauge user satisfaction and interest.  Many publishers  find that after testing with other In-Text ad networks, their user experience suffers and many users desert their site due to the low relevancy threshold so be sure not to compromise when it comes to relevancy.

The next time you read your zodiac sign at your local Chinese restaurant, be sure to remember 2010 as not only the year of the tiger but also as Kontera’s commitment to relevancy.

Using a unique tag for each one of your sites is important as it enables us to separately track individual performance, as well as make sure that the tag settings are fully optimized to specifically match your sites’ attributes. By using the correct tag you ensure that we’ll provide you with the best and most relevant ad targeting for your site’s content niche and structure.

Say that when you first signed-up to join Kontera, you applied with your computing related blog. A few weeks later, you decided to add your forum which deals with mobile phones as well as your extreme sports site to your Kontera account. While our contextual analysis technology analyzes each page in real-time to identify its topics and main Keywords, some of the ad settings are changes by our Optimization Team. These tweaks are based on each site’s performance, traffic trends, length of its pages, content niche etc. Needless to say that by using the same tag across multiple and diverse sites will result in your missing out on the benefits of this optimization.

Having accurate knowledge of each of your sites’ individual performance is important as it provides us with a clear indication if everything is running smoothly, or if further optimization is required. As a publisher this gives you the option to customize yourKontera ads and detailed reporting. With separate tracking you can accurately analyze your sites’ metrics, which as we all know, is a well known hobby within the internet community

A few months ago we published a post containing glossary terms and metrics relevant to the online advertising industry in general and more specifically to Kontera.  We’ve received some warm responses for this post and so we’ve decided to expand, introducing additional terms to the list:

Campaign Related

Cost Per Click- The amount paid by an advertiser per each click on their contextual ads.

Campaign Targeting- Gearing an advertising campaign to a particular demographic.

ROI – an acronym for Return on Investment.  In other words, the percentage of profit that an advertiser accrues from a marketing or advertising campaign

Technology Related

Semantic Analysis- Semantic analysis involves text mining, term/phrase extraction, page vector analysis, associations and and other parameters. Semantic analysis is used to determine the context of the page and respond with relevant advertising or related content.

Contextual Ad Relevance- in the field of In-Text contextual advertising, this term refers to the strength of the connection between an underlined keyword and the advertisement paired with it.

Computational Linguistics- a field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.  Kontera’s contextual ads analysis technology is based on the principles of computational linguistics.

Industry Related

Interactive Advertising- the type of advertising that allows active participation from the user.  See Kontera’s interactive advertising.

Rich Media Ads- a term for advanced technology used in internet ads, such as streaming video, applets that allow user interaction, and special effects.

IAB- The Interactive Advertising Bureau. The IAB is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising.

References:

We put this list together using the following great resources:

Wikipedia

Yahoo Publisher Network Blog

IAB website

Kontera’s Contextual Ad Technology

Today we wanted to show a simple outline of user interaction with our ContentLink ads.  If you are entirely new to Kontera, we hope you will find this explanation especially helpful.

For those of you interested in learning about the principals behind our contextual analysis technology, visit our Contextual Advetising Technology page.

Kontera’s In-text advertising is an ideal medium through which to meet this challenge.  ContentLink ads are placed where users’ attention is focused, within the text, while Kontera’s advanced technology, ensures maximum relevancy between the ads and the content in which they’re featured. ContentLink is a rich advertising tool which simultaneously provides added user-value and a particularly well targeted advertising campaign.

Below is an example of a rich media campaign recently launched:

Read more about “Looking Outside the (Search) Box” in online advertising.

We mention this since we’ve been getting an increase of questions from publishers regarding Flash and ContentLink ads. Will ContentLink ads be affected by flash units featured on a webpage?

ContentLink Ads are usually unaffected by Flash units. Still, as there are multiple parameters incorporated in each flash code, if you feel that they’re causing any irregularity in your ads’ appearance you can follow these steps:

Use transparent mode when loading the Flash unit to your HTML code. Transparent mode allows the background color or image of the HTML page that contains the Flash unit to show through.

This can be achieved by making the following adjustments to your Flash unit’s code:

1. For the <OBJECT> tag, add the following parameter: <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
2. For the <EMBED> tag, add the following parameter: wmode=”transparent”

The web provides ample resources for anyone interested in learning more about creating and using Flash, but be sure to stop by Flashkit.com, a great site that Kontera’s  very own Flash developers recommend.

Information- the more we have of it, the better? Sure, so long as we know how to use it.

This is the simple conclusion I came to in one of my ventures through Google Analytics.  With so much information around to explore, one has to know how to ask a question accurately.  Needless to say, narrowing down the mounds of information to a set of central parameters is an important step in learning how to utilize such an advanced tool to one’s benefit.

Today I’d like to suggest a few Google Analytics parameters that can aid you in optimizing the performance of your Kontera pay-per-click ads .  If you’re new to Google analytics, you may find this information especially useful. I’ve narrowed it down to 4:

• New vs. Returning visits- Returning visitors tend to generate a higher CTR for ContentLink® ads.  The reason for this is that visitors who return to your site are already familiar with the information you serve, and with the advantages of Kontera ads.  They are more trusting of ContentLinks and they tend to click the ads more often. For advice on how to get more of your site’s visitors to become returning visitors, consult this great post on entrepreneurs-journey.com

To find out your site’s ratio for New/ Returning Visitors- on your Analytics account, go to Visitors and then click New vs. Returning.

• Top Content Pages – To get the best results, it is recommended that you place your ContentLink tag on all your website’s pages.  However, if you choose to place ContentLinks on a few pages rather than all, make sure the pages you choose are ones that generate traffic.  I’m sure there’s no need to explain why traffic is important for making the most out of your ContentLink ads.

To find Top Content Pages on your Analytics account, go to Content then click Top Content.

• Top Search Engine Keywords- we have published a series of posts on how to maximize your ad earnings by optimizing your site’s content. Knowing which keywords bring the most search engine traffic to your site is important because these are likely to be the more popular keywords, often sought after by advertisers.  These keywords have better monetary potential.

Go to Traffic Sources and then click Search Engines.  Select a search engine and make sure you see the first option on the dimension field: “keyword”.  Google analytics enables you to see all keywords typed into any search engine for your selected date.

• Map Overlay – where are your users coming from?
  Kontera’s top earners are publishers whose sites  get over 55% US traffic.  The reason for this is that online advertisers invest much of their resources on traffic from the US.  While Kontera has partnerships with advertisers all over the world, the highest CPCs generated by your site originate from your US visitors.  An increase in US traffic has an immediate effect on earnings.

Use Analytics Map overlay to see exactly where on the globe your traffic is coming from.
Click Visitors then go to Map Overlay.

I hope you will find this information useful in making the most out of Kontera ContentLink ads  on your site!  If there’s anything I left out, or any additional tips you’d like to share please drop us a comment below.