• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 18, 2010

Search engine marketing has long offered methods to target consumers with high-converting paid-search ads based on consumer intent, but Magnetic and Tumri created a display retargeting tool to find those consumers searching for products across the Web.

The lift in conversion rates for product-specific ads served to consumers searching on a Web site provides promise, but the ads only reach previous site visitors. The partnership enables product-specific ads at a much larger scale. Rather than only reaching consumers searching for flights from Los Angeles on Travelocity, now the advertiser can target ads to consumers searching for airline travel anywhere across the Internet.

Magnetic serves advertisements to consumers based on search history, whereas Tumri targets product-specific ads with the ability to process unstructured data and turn that into dynamic creative ads. "Only 2% of time is spent on the search engine and 98% of the time people spend with display ads on someone's site," says Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO and founder of Magnetic. 'We focus on using the power of search data in the display space."

Shortening the time between awareness and purchase requires several exposures to a brand or a product. The two companies hope to achieve the goal by retargeting display ads based on search data. For example, a retailer with red dresses can find consumers searching on the keywords "red dress" and then serve up a display ad, wherever they are on the Web, while featuring red dresses in the ad available through that retailer.

Retargeting generated the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1046% among six different media placement strategies and increased click-through rates, according to a recent study from comScore and ValueClick Media.

For every ad served, Tumri and Magnetic track the ad's performance--what users click on and the merchandise they purchase. A dashboard allows users to monitor and determine the combination of targeting data and custom creatives that work best.

Today, there's not much overlap in client adoption for retargeting tools at each company, but the potential to get everyone on board is there, according to Shatkin-Margolis. He says it's partly because the combined technologies assist in reaching consumers before they visit a competitor's site. "This offering will enable us to acquire new customers and deliver better performance for existing customers," he adds.

Tumri Co-Founder Hari Menon says Tumri supports retargeting for companies like Amazon, Travelocity and others. The next steps for Tumri includes expanding into Europe next year, as well as new verticals like travel and local similar to Groupon, and social and mobile media channels.