• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 2, 2010

Search re-targeting company Magnetic launched Thursday a self-service platform for display ads designed to help search marketers get in the game and "crossover" into display through a simple user interface and pricing model that matches how they already create, buy and serve text ads on engines.

Though the self-service interface offers features, SEM agencies and in-house search marketers can create text ads, upload keywords and make buys on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Marketers can leverage Magnetic's keyword generation and expansion tools and match types that enable targeting of upper funnel keywords. The challenges driving search marketers to explore alternatives such as search re-targeting could reduce PPC cost, according to Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO of Magnetic.

Google, Bing and Yahoo make a tremendous amount of profit from text ads. "Those text ads are the highest converting ads on the Internet, but people only spend about 2% of their time on search engines and the remainder is spent on sites serving display ads by companies like DoubleClick," Shatkin-Margolis says. "Our focus is to bring that power generated by the 2% of search data into the 98% for display."

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and Econsultancy reported earlier this year that the North American search engine marketing industry would rise about 14% to $16.6 billion in 2010.

Magnetic, which targets display ads from consumer search history, wants a piece of that for display ads, so it's making the process familiar to search marketers, removing complexities from display advertising.

The platform programmatically buys inventory on the ad exchanges for advertisers interested in the data. When advertisers bid on "cellphone," Magnetic's platform attempts to connect them with consumers who had previously searched for the keyword. The platform can identify the connection through browser cookies and partnerships with search engines, ecommerce sites, toolbars, and comparison shopping sites. The consumers are put into audience segments, but those segments get processed by keywords.

Some search engines support "pay for positions," Shatkin-Margolis says, where the higher an advertiser bids, the higher the ads show on the search engine. Magnetic offers a feature that the higher advertisers bid, the more inventory become available on publisher sites.