• by Ross Fadner , March 22, 2004

Kanoodle, the sponsored search and contextual listings provider, unveiled a new proprietary ranking/listings management service on Monday designed for its advertising customers. Kanoodle executives, many of whom are formerly of Sprinks, say the new service could give their customers a new degree of control over how their ads perform--something that has long been one of the biggest complaints among advertisers about Kanoodle's ContextTarget sponsored listings program.

Called ClickFactor, the new system will determine how listings appear on affiliate Web sites. For these publishing affiliates, Kanoodle President Lance Podell says ClickFactor is designed to bring greater relevancy to the listings on content sites. For advertisers, he says ClickFactor is designed to determine advertisers' rank, and show them how exactly that rank was determined, based on a combination of bid price and the ad's click-through performance.

Kanoodle determines an ad's performance rate based on the number of clicks it received versus other advertisers within the same topic and bid price.

Podell maintains that the new Darwinian approach to listings empowers advertisers to produce a more refined marketing message, as they will be able to watch their respective ads move up and down the rankings table based on the ads' performance.

ClickFactor also gives advertisers specific feedback about what can be done to improve ranking results in the future. Podell notes that low ranking can be a function of either a low asking price or an advertising message that doesn't play well with consumers. The new system tells advertisers the bid price they need to request in order to raise ranking. In the case of under-performing creative, ClickFactor enables advertisers to cancel an ad and re-enter the listings program with the same neutral rating as a new entry-- a ClickFactor of 50 percent.

Podell says that ClickFactor represents Kanoodle's response to advertiser complaints that they don't have enough hands-on control over the way their ads perform in sponsored search and contextual listings. "Advertisers would tell us 'I have no idea how [the ranking system] works, and we want more control,'" Podell comments. Many advertisers never understood why they were being out-bid, or why certain ads were under-performing.

Mark Josephson, senior vice president, marketing and business development, Kanoodle, adds that ClickFactor comes from the accumulated knowledge of the Kanoodle executives who came over from Sprinks in late 2003. He says the executives were able to apply their knowledge about what Google's AdWords does and does not do well.

Josephson maintains that Google's relevancy ranking is about maintaining its network: "They built their relevancy ranking in order to determine who's a waste of bandwidth." Podell notes that Google drops under-performing advertisers without advance warning, and that it doesn't offer advertisers any feedback system, although the metrics are available for proactive advertisers to consider.