More Information on SmartAd

The Internet's new Easy, Flexible & Accountable Ad Tracking system!

SmartAd is our new advertising tracking solution currently in testing. It essentially will allow the publishers to precisely (or rather as precisely as the Web will allow) charge the advertisers for hits and clickthroughs. If a publisher's site is not large enough for the IBM-types to bother with, they will also benefit from the collective "selling power" of other publishers like them.

Now, if you've looked at any of the other ad-tracking schemes out there the publishers' side of things is not that much different. The only things that we do that some of the other systems don't are:

1) the ability for the publisher to exclude any of the advertisers' banners from showing on their site;

2) the ability to serve targeted ads. For example if a publisher had a dynamic page on their site that was custom-generated for a particular visitor, they could serve banners targeted to this visitor by specifying keywords in the banner code. So, if a visitor is interested in sports programming, the HTML code used to display the banner would be:

IMG SRC=http://206.54.62.3/NS/am/sa/Pict?h=x&p=x&keywords=sports,athletic,etc.

This way SmartAd will dynamically serve a banner out of a pool of advertisers who have specified that these keywords are relevant to them

(Note that this functionality is not yet available in the alpha release)

Although many publishers may find these reasons compelling enough for choosing SmartAd, our system is really more for the advertiser than the publisher and it is in the advertiser features that we really stand out:

1) SmartAd gives small advertisers exposure on frequently-visited sites.

2) SmartAd is the only perfectly accountable system available today. With other methods, the advertiser has to rely on somebody else's figures of their hit and clickthrough counts. That somebody has a very good reason to inflate these numbers as much as they can. With SmartAd, the advertiser does not need to rely on the publisher for hit counts. Nor does he need to rely on us! The advertiser has a precise count of every impression that his banner received throughout the Internet and the precise count of the number of clicks on that banner. Because the banner is stored only on the advertiser's server, the advertiser's server log is what gives him these numbers, not some third-party service (that gets paid for each hit) and not the publisher!

3) Other systems give advertisers aggregate analysis capabilities, so that the advertiser can calculate which publisher results in higher clickthrough rates, but SmartAd goes far beyond that. SmartAd is a truly intelligent system. SmartAd automatically calculates the best clickthrough rate for each banner on each site and adjusts the serving of the banners to maximize the clickthrough rate. For example, if after a short test period, Ad A gets a 5% clickthrough rate on Host (Publisher) 1 and a 4% clickthrough rate on Host 2 and Ad B gets a 4% rate on Host 1 and 5% on Host 2 (so, the opposite of Ad A), Ad A will get served to visitors on Host 1 and Ad B to visitors on Host 2!

4) In addition, SmartAd can also serve banners based on the cost-per-clickthrough rather than just pure numbers. In the previous example we assumed that Host 1 and Host 2 charge the same rates for exposures and clickthroughs. However, if Host 2's rates are half of Host 1's rates, SmartAd can serve Ad A to Host 2 even though its clickthrough rate there is lower but the cost is also much lower!

5) SmartAd advertisers have immediate access to their banner. They can modify it at any time. They can also configure their options, exclude sites, and view reports by querying our database through an easy-to-use web interface at any time.

SmartAd will soon be extended with SmartTrack.

Our philosophy on advertising is that the advertiser should pay proportionally to what the publisher delivers. Using SmartAd and SmartTrack, a publisher could offer the following pricing breakdown (the numbers are purely for example purposes):

$0.01 per each exposure (Note that SmartAd's banners are NOT cached by proxies, AOL, etc., therefore the exposure count is far more accurate. If a visitor views a banner on more than one page in one publishers site (or on different publishers), each one of those will be recorded as an exposure. The only time when an exposure is not recorded is when a visitor presses the "Back" button in their browser and goes back to a page he has already seen with the banner on it)

$0.10 per each click on the banner (There may be a few more clicks than actual visitors to the advertiser's site because their server may have been unavailable at that time)

$1.00 per each "in-depth" visit to a site. Using SmartTrack, the publisher can track the visitor's movement throughout the advertiser's site. People who actually bothered to look at literature or download a demo or check out pricing are far more valuable to the advertiser than those who simply took off right after hitting the home page.

$10.00 per each person who actually e-mailed something to the advertiser's sales. (Data obtained through SmartTrack) This is a real prospect for the advertiser!

Note that all the SmartTrack tracking data is completely confidential and is not available to either the publisher or other advertisers. It's only used by us to bill the advertiser for delivered prospects.

Our pricing will be a percentage of the publishers' advertising fees.

Although our precise rates are yet to be set, an estimate would be 15% for advertisers found by the publisher and 30% for advertisers we bring to the publisher.

In conclusion, I would like to note that SmartAd is also extremely flexible and will work well in conjunction with other dynamic targeting methods used by the advertiser and the publisher. It is also much more scalable than other ad tracking solutions because our server DOES NOT ACTUALLY SERVE THE BANNERS.

I hope that you will participate in our testing. Feel free to contact us if you have any other questions.

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