Adchemy Stitches Together Intent: Search, Social, Mobile, Behavior

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Adchemy will release information on an underlying technology its engineers created that allows marketers to analyze consumer intent across marketing channels, Anurag Wadehra, the company's vice president of products, told MediaPost.

The "IntentMap" technology aggregates signals across search, social media, display, behavioral, local and other media, pulling it into one platform to serve the most relevant ads across the Web. It allows disparate media-buying teams to analyze various intent signals that would otherwise remain in silos. One team might bid on mobile, and another on search or display.

The fundamental technology, in the works for more than two years, maps a structure of keywords, check-ins, demographic data and more across channels to recognize consumer intent patterns. The dotted line may begin in search and link to Likes in social media, then tie to location, for example. Consumers looking for an inexpensive small television for the kitchen might express that intent differently, depending on whether they seek information on a search engine or Facebook.

A signal in search, an expression of intent in a keyword phrase, might read "cheap kitchen tv," compared with a "Like" on a brand's Facebook fan page or reviews on CNet.com. The process remains transparent to consumers traversing the Web.

Consumers signal intent across channels intuitively, but marketers cannot. Adchemy's IntentMap acts as a common translation layer across channels. Expressing intent and combining the signals across channels into one platform allows marketers and advertisers to more finely target advertising based on consumer intent.

It's too early to tell whether Adchemy's strategy of adding a layer across channels to map intent makes more sense than those offered by BlueKai and others, but intuitively it's appealing, according to ThinkEquity Research Analyst Robert Coolbrith. "Companies leave too much opportunity on the table in terms of monetizing assets, and there's a need for more intelligent data use," he says.

Reducing the number of ads required to convert consumers from lookers to buyers may become one benefit from integrating data and mapping intent. But finding new customers and selling them more products or services becomes key. "It may help lower waste, but it's not the central selling point for brand marketers who I think will buy into these solutions," Coolbrith says.

Today, signals pull from Adchemy Wordmap for search and Adchemy Landing Pages for Web sites. The company plans to launch other applications supporting social and mobile later this year. In search, the technology looks for keywords that get translated into intent. In landing pages, content pages map to intent. For display ads, signals from search -- what consumers clicked and searched on -- are fed into the platform and mapped to demographic data.

In a preliminary test, an unnamed auto insurance company among the top 10 managed to increase quotes by 36%, conversion rates rose 19%, and cost per quote declined 27%. Prior to using the technology, the auto insurance company did not segment by audience. It bid on 77,000 search keywords and had 851 search ads. Searchers clicking on the ads found themselves on one generic landing page. After deploying the technology, the audience intent segments rose to 10, expanding the search keywords terms to 134,000. It resulted in 116,000 search ads that led those clicking on the ads to thousands of customized landing page variations.

Accenture Interactive, a unit of Adchemy investor Accenture, has begun using the technology for clients and will provide support for the technology, according to Wadehra.

 

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