• by Laurie Sullivan , November 23, 2018

On pace to achieve 30% year-over-year revenue growth by helping brands bring in new revenue, adMarketplace has been working to sign major companies, increase options for use of their data, and bypass what Adam Epstein, president-COO, adMarketplace, calls the “SERP Swamp.”

Space on the SERPs -- an acronym for search engine results pages -- has become crowded on engines such as Google, Bing and others. The search company is finding ways for consumers to bypass the SERPs and land directly on the brand’s website or publisher’s page.

Epstein said the company has begun to work with a browser called Cake, a “swipeable” mobile app that processes the search query to load the most relevant pages, based on keywords.

“There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the search space in about a decade,” Epstein said. “It’s all about making the search journey faster and coming up with ways to skip the search results page.”

Epstein called the search engine results page “a swamp” -- where advertisers compete against each other, including Google, and where consumers need to click to the third or fourth page to find results to bypass the advertising and knowledge graphs.

Also, performance marketers are becoming savvier on how they allocate funds, taking more of a data-driven approach. Automation is helping to perfect the amount marketers spend. More tools give marketers the confirmation they need to ensure the quality of conversions.

“It used to be what’s the cost per click or the cost per conversion. Now, it’s the quality of the conversion and incremental lift,” he said. “Marketers are doubling down on data, and you’re seeing that in ecommerce, travel, finance and real estate.”

LiveRamp partnered with adMarketplace to use IdentityLink, which employs technology in people-based marketing to support companies like Macy’s, which are looking for cost and volume commitments for search campaigns.

“Media-mix modeling and multi-touch attribution were buzzwords a couple of years ago. Now, you’re beginning to see real data-driven analytics being applied to media spend,” he said.