Kanoodle PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing

Kanoodle definition: to pet, to snuggle, to make out a fitting name for a company that cuddles up to the advertising market by supplying online companies with an interesting model for ad placement, through its URL submission services. Kanoodle was founded in October, 1999 by Kent Keating, who currently resides as chairman of the board. Kanoodle’s offices are located in Amherst NY and New York City.

Kanoodle is a pay-per-click (PPC) search engine geared to displaying text based ads within a search, with the objective of driving web traffic to advertisers’ sites. They are partnered with content sites and search engines across the net, bestowing these companies with advertising listings. Some of the key content sites include: MarketWatch.com, MSNBC.com, USAToday.com and AutoBytel.com. All ads supplied by Kanoodle are equipped with the name of the advertiser, a brief description of their service, and the URL to their website.

The cost to the advertiser comes in the form of PPC, as well as bid costs for listings (the more you pay, the higher ranked your listing). With pay-per-click, companies pay a set fee every time a customer clicks through one of their text based ads.

Advertisers get to choose the categories they want their ads to appear under, and they are not restricted to placing ads under only one category. Here’s how it works: advertisers put in a bid for placement under their selected categories. After the bid(s) is submitted it is reviewed to make sure it’s relevant (listing requests can take up to three business days before a bid is approved). Bids for listings cost anywhere from $0.20 to $2.15. Kanoodle suggests users bid for top placement, “Since our partners list only 3 – 5 sponsored links for each topic, it is imperative that you bid within the first 5 positions to receive traffic.”

Kanoodle offers ad placement service under one of four different catagories. These include: ContextTarget, LocalTarget, BehaviorTarget and KeywordTarget. Proprietary ContextTarget technology is the main algorithm that powers Kanoodle’s ad placement strategy.

ContextTarget is a sponsored links product that targets content rather than keyword matches. Instead of utilizing dynamic page scans to figure out how or where an ad should be placed based on key words, ContextTarget examines the entire content of pages, and places the ad based on the context. For instance, webpages about video cameras will display video camera ads.

Ads for products must appeal to a wide enough spectrum in order to appear under generalized categories. If the ad for products is too specific, and does not apply to a general topic, it will not be listed. For example, companies that buy and sell cars of all shapes and sizes would be accepted under the automobile buy and sell directory; whereas sellers of one specific type of car would not be placed under this category.

Advertisers have the ability to block competitors’ ads from appearing on their sites, and ads can be targeted to go live or dead at times chosen by the advertiser. Kanoodle guarantees no inappropriate or illegal ads will appear on pages, and ads will be targeted to the right audience by appearing on the appropriate context relevant pages. A ClickFactor’ is also assigned to an advertiser’s listing to rank it. This is increased or decreased via the amount of traffic driven to that advertiser’s site.

LocalTarget is based on the ContextTarget service, but instead of ads appearing on web sites all over the world, this service lets advertisers target local towns or cities. For instance, a company’s ads will appear on local radio or TV station websites.

With BehaviorTarget, ads are placed based on users’ online surfing patterns. For instance, if you visit a lot of sites about dogs, you will be shown ads that pertain to dogs, even when you are not visiting sites about dogs.

KeywordTarget supplies ads based on keyword searches. Ads appear within Kanoodle’s partner search engines (Dogpile and Webcrawler for example) based on the keywords that a user is searching for. The advertiser gets to choose keywords based on the content of their site, and they pay a fee every time a user clicks through an ad to their site.

Kanoodle also shares revenues with its BrightAds campaign. Web site owners can generate revenues by joining BrightAds and placing content relevant ads on their sites via ContextTarget and BehaviorTarget. They are then paid 50 percent of the charges levied on the advertiser from PPC. Through BrighAds, publishers can also include ads to their RSS feeds.