March Madness Search Strategies

It goes without saying that during the NCAA Basketball Tournament, visits will increase to the websites that provide coverage of the games – particularly on those that offer live video during work hours. As the tournament gets underway, we decided to look at the search terms that are driving traffic to websites hoping to attract viewers and ultimately drive ad revenues during March Madness.

We created a portfolio of the most popular search terms around the NCAA tournament to understand what search strategies are being employed to drive traffic. Last week, the share of clicks to the portfolio from organic search results was 90%. Among the top 10 search terms ranked by the share of clicks, 5 received 100% of their clicks through organic results.

This high share of organic results shows that many of the websites are well-optimized for the top search terms, with the official website of the NCAA leading the pack.

Of the 10% of the traffic that came from paid clicks, Google captured the majority of the traffic coming through sponsored listings. 94% of the paid clicks for all of the search terms within the NCAA March Madness portfolio for the week ending 03/14/2009 were through Google.

The overall share of paid traffic is fairly low for the portfolio of NCAA March Madness search terms and many of the terms are only driving organic traffic, so there should still be affordable opportunities across all of the search engines. Some of the players can take advantage of sponsored links for placement next to the organic results and possibly intercept some traffic.

Early Beta Data From Microsoft AdSense Competitor Encouraging

techcrunch:

We are getting reports that Microsoft’s PubCenter, a self serve thirty party ad publishers platform through AdCenter, is doing quite well with beta testers. Microsoft began testing PubCenter last summer.

One beta tester we spoke with said PubCenter is paying significantly more than Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher. All three of these programs let third party publishers add contextual ads next to their content via a self-service format.

Google has dominated this space in the past (and all other contextual advertising) because it offers publishers higher fees for ads. But this might change when Microsoft unveils PubCenter to the greater publisher community, particularly if Microsoft is aggressive in revenue splits to gain market share.

Currently, PubCenter is being tested by a small subset of web publishers. Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content. He says that Microsoft seems to be more stringent about letting advertisers into the program, versus what seemed like an advertiser free-for-all though Google’s AdSense. Of course, with a smaller inventory of advertisers, it’s tougher to provide contextual ads for obscure content.

We also heard that Microsoft is allowing publishers to get creative with ads by allowing them to set background images. Google AdSense only allows publishers to change the color of the ads.

Microsoft is allowing test partners to publish Google ads on their site as long as the publisher doesn’t have an exclusivity agreement with Google. Third party ads are a controversial concept, since advertisers expect the click throughs and conversions that they get from search. Google has been sued for fraud because ads placed on parked pages weren’t producing results. But if Microsoft is offering a better program, with nifty, more targeted ads, then publishers and advertisers alike might make the switch (or use both, if possible).

Microsoft recently enlisted digital media executives, including execs from IAC, Wall Street Journal Digital Network, The New York Times Co., Time Inc. and Viacom Inc. to consult on next-generation advertising platform.

Microsoft said this about PubCenter in February:

PubCenter will be built on the existing adCenter Publisher architecture that is currently in beta and will include the convergence of technologies and tools provided by the former Atlas and Rapt solutions, as well as a self-serve offering. The new platform will provide innovative forecasting and order management solutions, advanced analytics tools, and enhanced targeting functionality to enable all digital media publishers to have access to the tools and technology they need to provide valuable and relevant ad content to their advertising partners.

Here are some screenshots of Microsoft’s ads on a publisher’s site and an ad with an image in the background: