• by Ross Fadner , June 22, 2004

IndustryBrains, a provider of search and contextual marketing services for industry verticals, is beta testing two new products for its advertising partners.

One is a rating system that measures campaign effectiveness as compared to other advertisers in the same industry categories. Dubbed "Relevancy Rating," this product will be a supplement to IndustryBrains' Relevancy Ranking system, which is not dissimilar to pricing systems like Google Smart Pricing or Kanoodle's ClickFactor. The other new offering is a real-time bidding system called Max Bidding that allows advertisers to update their bids more quickly.

Like the Kanoodle and Google products, IndustryBrains' Relevancy Ranking rewards ads that generate higher click-through rates with a higher listing position, using a combination of click-through rate and price per click. Relevancy Rating is designed to help advertisers that have a poor ranking understand why, when measured against other advertisers' listings. The program rates campaign click-through performance from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). The increased disclosure of bid and rank should result in increased competition and more revenue for publishers.

Max Bidding is also aimed at driving advertiser campaign optimization. Like other keyword search- and category-based contextual bidding systems, Max Bidding enables advertisers to put a ceiling on the amount they are willing to bid for a keyword, and then it automatically increases bids by one cent over the last bid until it reaches that ceiling. The system is designed to eliminate the need for advertisers to stand by and bid manually.

Elke Wong, VP marketing, product development for IndustryBrains, says that Max Bidding is the result of advertisers asking to be able to update their bids without having to go into the system and manually do it themselves. She says the new program encourages optimization and advertiser control. For publishers, the idea is that advertiser optimization will lead to more conversions and greater revenue. She adds that all IndustryBrains advertisers have the opportunity to participate in the beta-launch. Wong says that both products are expected to launch in July.

IndustryBrains also offers its publishers the opportunity to expand their revenue capabilities through other content distribution platforms like email newsletters and RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds. Wong says that adding distribution channels is "a collaborative process that happens organically."

RSS, popular with the blogging community, is an XML-based technology that pulls headlines and text from content sites and displays them through RSS readers, or aggregators that appear on user's desktops or on their Web sites.

Wong notes that publishers can extend sponsored links offerings to these new distribution channels, but advertisers cannot choose not to run ads on certain distribution channels, as they buy by category.

According to Wong, advertisers like the extra distribution channels because they are essentially buying a qualified audience; she says that only the most qualified users sign up for newsletters and RSS feeds. BusinessWeek.com and Kiplinger.com are two publishers that use IndustryBrains' newsletter offering, while InfoWorld and TechWeb have tested RSS feeds.

However, as yet IndustryBrains does not break down conversions by distribution channel for each publisher. The company only measures clicks and conversions by publisher, but Wong says that IndustryBrains is looking add these separate metrics in the future.

IndustryBrains' publishing partners include Ziff Davis, IDG, Motley Fool, Kiplinger, PCMag, InfoWorld, and TechWeb, among others. According to Wong, the company expects to announce BobVila.com, GolfWeek, and American Express as new publishing partners in the coming weeks.