Here are some questions we often receive about Magnetic. Please keep sending your comments and questions.
What is Magnetic?
Magnetic operates a marketplace for advertisers and publishers to apply search data to all online advertising. Advertisers and publishers can use search data as the key indicator of intent to re-target campaigns to the most relevant audience online.
Why is there a need for Magnetic?
Targeting advertisements to visitors of websites without direct knowledge user intent is difficult. Many targeting and data companies lack transparency in customer segmentation. To overcome these problems, we need to harness the power of search. Sponsored search ads are the highest converting ads on the internet, perhaps in the world. By using search as the key indicator intent, we provide better performance and transparency.
Who do you work with?
We are currently working with ad networks, publishers, and ad exchange buyers/DSPs who can effectively use the data to serve targeted ads. We additionally sell data+media directly to advertisers and agencies.
Who do you compete with?
We differentiate ourselves from other data exchanges by working with search data. We compete with Yahoo search re-targeting and Google interest-based advertising.
How are you different from other data exchanges?
Data exchanges compile structured data from eCommerce sites, for example the one hundred travel destinations or one hundred automobile models. Magnetic compiles millions of user-entered searches from search engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads. Magnetic’s advanced algorithms and interfaces extract maximum value out of search data.
How is your approach different from other re-targeting companies?
Magnetic helps advertisers use search data to re-target customers through all online advertising while they are in purchase mode. Advertisers can re-target customers who have searched for a set of keywords. This is very different from re-targeting companies that let you only target those who have searched and then visited your site. By using search data from the search engine itself, we allow advertisers to reach people that are in purchase mode for their product but have likely never visited their site.
Where do you get data from?
Magnetic compiles data from search engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads.
Do these data providers include Google and Yahoo?
All of our data providers are search engines and websites that are serving sponsored search ads from major sponsored search marketplaces. Google and Yahoo are examples of major sponsored search marketplaces.
How would an advertiser use your marketplace?
We are able to run search re-targeted campaigns for advertisers via partnerships with the multiple ad networks, exchanges and DSPs we work with.
What ad formats can the data be applied to?
We can work with any ad technology that supports re-targeting, and this includes all common forms of advertising and all IAB standard ads including video, mobile, etc.
How will you protect consumer privacy?
Magnetic leads in user privacy standards by targeting keywords – not users. Magnetic implements the best practices in privacy: human-readable privacy policies, P3P compact privacy policies, W3C policy placement standards and user opt-out.
Why the new name?
We believe search re-targeting today is the most efficient way to find customers because of the large amount of display media, strong indication of intent in search data and other market dynamics. However, we wanted a name that represents us at our core. Magnetic describes the pulling force we provide our customers in finding their customers.
How is Magnetic different from Google AdWords Re-targeting?
Google’s re-targeting product allows you to do site re-targeting. Google provides you with a pixel tag that you can put on your web site and then target ads at users who have visited your site. Magnetic allows you to re-target users who have searched for a keyword who most likely have not visited your site. This allows you to reach more users who are actively searching for your product type but have not yet visited your web site. All modern ad servers and ad exchanges support re-targeting tags just like the recently added Google AdWords tag. Magnetic integrates with all of these tags including Google AdWords Re-targeting tags to provide you the power of search re-targeting, something Google does not offer.
Can I get a list of your full taxonomy of categories?
Search data works better than intender categories because the segments are customized for each advertiser (i.e., art classes or MBA vs. simply an online education segment). In order to make the process of building customized segments easy, we have built an advanced keyword generation system based off of a semantic web enabling you to enter one or more seedwords to generate a segment. Thus, our taxonomy works differently than companies selling intender categories (i.e., travel desitnations, auto models). If you would like us to create a set generic segments for a taxonomy (i.e., finance, education, etc.), we can, however you will gain the full power of the search data by letting our technology create custom segments. We recommend that we come up with a set of segments and we will build you a custom taxonomy. In order to do this we just need to enter short descriptions of all the categories in the form of seedwords and then we can export these lists along with their monthly forecasts (i.e., “athletic sneakers”,”hybrid car”,”online mba”, etc.). This process is so easy that you can do it yourself in minutes but to get you started we would be happy to do this for you.
