How do you compete with the advertising networks run by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the like? One possible way might be to offer ad products that they don’t. Another might be to integrate those products into a platform that could attract a wide range of Web publishers, giving your network a unique reach advantage. And where those big general networks are mostly horizontal, you might also want go vertical, building in some targeting capabilities, to let advertisers access users who are more highly qualified and might convert at better-than-average rates.
Those are some of the tactics that the MIVA ad network has deployed over the last two weeks, right up to today’s launch of the MIVA Precision Network—a portfolio of 18 vertical Web content categories here in the U.S., and a corresponding network of five categories to start with in MIVA’s U.K. territory.
On this side of the Atlantic, the MIVA Precision Network (still in beta testing) will start out offering online ad inventory in adult content, apparel, automotive, dating, education, electronics, entertainment, finance, health, insurance, mobile, office supplies, pharmaceuticals, professional services, real estate, sports and recreation, technology and travel. The U.K. version will include automotive, finance, gambling, health/beauty and jobs.
MIVA Precision Network will co-exist with what the company is calling its Core Network, which offers broad distribution across all industry sectors served by MIVA participating publishers.
“We’re encouraging advertisers to use both the Precision Network and the Core Network because we believe they meet different marketing objectives,” says Chrysi Philalithes, MIVA’s vice president of global marketing and communication. “The Precision Network will drive higher-value leads but at a lower volume, while the Core Network will provide higher volume, but at a lower cost.”
The new vertical MIVA network will be auction-based and built on cost-per-click for keyword bids, just like the company’s core network. Advertisers who opt to use both will be able to get reports that separate activity on the two networks and will be able to track their return on spending on each.
Philalithes says that Web publishers who now take part in the core network won’t necessarily get a guaranteed slot in the new one, even if they do fall under the 18 headings in the beta version. “We’ll decide on inclusion based on a number of factors, one of which is the depth of content in the vertical category,” she says. Web publishers will also have to agree to sign onto the MIVA Precision Network.
The new vertical slant is just the latest move by MIVA to distinguish its offering in a landscape increasingly dominated by one pay-per-click ad power. Two weeks ago, the company introduced the MIVA Monetization Center, a self-service platform that lets Web publishers sign up for and manage the placement of the company’s different ad products on their sites: search ads, contextual ads and, for the first time, the in-line text ads that MIVA introduced last September.
Those MIVA InLine ads pop up when users mouse over a keyword in a line of Web content and display a bubble containing a PPC text ad linked to that keyword, along with links to other related articles on the publisher’s site. When the ads were launched last fall, MIVA had to work individually with Web publishers to manage their placement, describing the parts of their site that could accept the in-line ads.
But with the new monetization center, dubbed MIVA MC for short, publishers will be able to set up those rules for themselves, identifying pages and sections of pages that they will be willing to sell in-line ad space on.
Web operators will also be able to choose to allow standard contextual ads along the right rail of their pages, or to accept keyword-based search ads with the addition of a MIVA search box on their sites. They can also choose to block certain ads from their sites even when the keywords that would generate those ads are present. And publishers can opt to let MIVA to spider their content to find ad-delivering keywords or they can set those contextual keyword triggers for themselves.
“The premise was to help Web publishers monetize their properties in a way that gives them more control and more choice,” Philalithes says. Making the system self-service through a dashboard will also make it more available to Web publishers who might otherwise be too small to get the customized treatment from MIVA that the in-line ads required.
Publishers using MIVA MC will also be able to get some very transparent ad revenue reports on a daily, monthly, quarterly or annual basis, along with an earnings calculator that will let them see the exact amount of revenue they’re earning from the ads based on the specific sharing deal they’ve struck with MIVA.
“With some PPC ad providers, Web publishers just get a check at the end of the month,” Philalithes says. “With MIVA MC, they can see the actual revenue share they’re earning.” She says MIVA revenue sharing operates on a sliding scale, so the Web sites in the network that perform better for advertisers get a better share of the take from MIVA.