Proximic has an interesting business model – they take listings from shopping comparison sites and turn them into contextual ads. Done before, of course, but that doesn’t make it worth a look.
TechCrunch reports that Proximic’s ads get a clickthrough rate of 1.5%, vs. 0.25% or less for a typical AdSense campaign. The 0.25% claim about AdSense CTR surprises me, since my own CTR here has been between about seven times that since I optimized back in October – but perhaps my site is wildly different from the norm. Anyhow, let’s take Proximic’s claims at face value and suppose they really can convert to clickthroughs at 6x the rate of AdSense. Why is this? The TechCrunch article (and Proximic) strongly suggest that it’s because Proximic has superior technology for doing contextual ad targeting – ‘proximity analysis’ based on character patterns.
Maybe so, but a little more skepticism might be in order – from what I can see, the Proximic ad widget both combines pictures with the ad text and combines the ads with links to relevant content, and either of these could be responsible for the increase in CTR. I think mixing commercial and non-commercial links is a particularly smart way to beat banner blindness – it’s exactly the same thing Facebook’s doing with sponsored listings in their feeds. So before taking any claims about Proximic’s technology at face value, I’d like to see an apples-to-apples comparison – contextual links only, without the content and pretty pictures.
I don’t blame Proximic for talking up its technology, since technology is hard and therefore defensible. But I suspect most of the ad performance gains, if there actually are any, come from much-simpler and much-less-defensible format tweaks.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’ve seen a LOT of companies go down this path (even consulted for a couple and helped them change paths away from this methodology). Even if they do a better job of targeting, for most sites, ads trying to sell a particular product are not the ones that will earn the most. Product sales from banners are generally not effective. SO no matter how well they target, chances are on most sites/placements a different ad (even if less targeted) will earn more.