Sift Media hits the mark with contextual advertising campaign - Trial shows two-fold increase in clickthrough rates

Published 29th February 2008

27 February 2008 - Following a two-month pilot, Sift Media believes it has proven the value of contextual advertising campaigns by achieving more than double the average clickthrough rate (CTR) with Grapeshot technology.

From December 2007 - January 2008, Sift Media worked with five of its high profile client’s trialling technology from Grapeshot to run targeted contextual advertising campaigns alongside its online B2B communities. A summary of results showed that Sift Media boosted the CTR on its ads to an average of 0.75 per cent, more than double the industry average of 0.125-0.3 per cent.

The trial involved clients placing rich media assets including video clips, audio podcasts and product literature alongside Sift Media's online communities and editorial content. Each webpage was analysed and matched with the most relevant advertisement, based on selected keywords and descriptions. The offering is designed to place the most relevant rich media alongside relevant editorial.

Sift Media believes that its new strategy builds on the ideas of Google AdSense, however, it has the ability to target more specific audiences with more relevant advertising.

Tom Dunkerley, head of sales at Sift Media says, “While Google's method is successful in a mass market environment; we believe a more refined strategy is needed to maximise value for online campaigns to niche business audiences. With this new approach we can target specific audiences in line with their key business interests.”

By utilising Grapeshot technology, Sift Media has been able to offer its clients quantitative results from this trial.

John Snyder, director at Grapeshot adds, “We are delighted Sift Media's clients were able to see double the clickthrough rates using Grapeshot technology. Today advertising budgets are coming under more pressure and marketing managers need to achieve more focused results and we have proven that contextual advertising campaigns are a great opportunity to achieve just that.”

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About Sift Media
Sift Media is a leading business-to-business publisher specialising in online, interactive professional communities.

With a range of services including websites, email publications, industry awards and events, Sift Media delivers original, branded content to over half a million professionals in accounting and finance, HR and training, IT, marketing, customer management and knowledge management.

About Grapeshot
Grapeshot has packaged a contextual and behavioural capability into a web service called Grapeshot DNA. It sits between an ad tag in the publisher’s HTML and derives optimal sets of words and categories to retrieve information, real-time, from ad servers or content management systems. Grapeshot Limited is an advanced search technology company based in Cambridge UK. www.grapeshot.co.uk