According to company officials, the agreements expand DoubleClick's search engine marketing solutions for its clients -- its customers are already able to use the DART For Advertisers and DART for Publishers interfaces to traffic and track their paid listings through Click Commands and Tracking Ads.
Paid listings (or paid placement), which ensure that a website or Web pages appear in a specified position in the sponsored search results set, represent just one available search engine marketing tool, DoubleClick said.
Recent DoubleClick research shows that search engines have the greatest impact on users researching a purchase (41% report using search engines most often to find a website.) As a result of the reseller agreements, natural search engine optimization and paid inclusion will now be made available to DoubleClick clients through its direct sales team.
On the wings of this announcement, a research study released Tuesday afternoon by Vivisimo, a provider of software for clustering search results, showed that Web searchers click 30%-100% more on paid listings when presented with search results using real-time clustering technology. When users view clustered search results rather than simple ranked lists, the page views per search session increase by 100%-150%, which leads to breakthrough improvements in paid-listings click-through rates (CTR).
Clustering organizes documents or search results into groups based on their overall similarity. Traditionally, this has required taxonomy building and classification schemes, which are costly, complicated and time-consuming. With real-time clustering, search results are automatically organized into meaningful hierarchical folders completely on the fly and out of the box, without requiring any pre-processing. The user is presented with organized information rather than long lists of results.