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Tag: Efficient Frontier

  • Adobe Reports Search Spending is up 16%

    Adobe Reports Search Spending is up 16%

    According to a recent report from Adobe, search is still “the biggest driver of return on investment,” in regards to advertising. The quarterly report, entitled “Adobe Digital Index: Global Digital Advertising Update,” stated that compared to Q1 in 2011, search expenditures increased 16 percent in the U.S. and 3 percent in the United Kingdom.

    An increase in clicks is driving the growth, and not higher prices advertisers are forking over for these clicks, which reportedly fell 5 percent for Google. It should be noted that the above graph might also suggest that search spending was down from Q4, 2011, though this might be plainly a seasonal variation.

    While traditional search advertising is steadily growing, newer areas like mobile and social are expanding at a faster pace. Accelerated by tablet adoption, mobile traffic overall is up 4-fold. At present, mobile makes up 8 percent of U.S. search spending, and 11 percent in the UK – that’s 250 percent growth in the UK from this time last year. Facebook spending is up 93 percent, and general engagement rose 176 percent.

    The Adobe report prognosticates that ad search spending in the U.S. will grow 10 to 15 percent over the course of the year, and that tablet and mobile spending will comprise 15 to 20 percent by the end of the year. Digital marketing company Efficient Frontier, recently acquired by Adobe, conducted the study, though the actual report is not yet online.

  • Adobe’s Acquisition of Efficient Frontier Now Complete

    Adobe’s Acquisition of Efficient Frontier Now Complete

    In November, Adobe announced its intent to acquire Efficient Frontier to bolster its digital marketing strategy, something the company seems to have been more focused on with recent acquisitions and partnerships (such as its partnership with OptiMine Software and its acquisition of Auditude). Today, Adobe announced that the Efficient Frontier acquisition is complete.

    “The acquisition of Efficient Frontier adds cross-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite, along with a social marketing engagement platform and social ad buying capabilities,” an Adobe spokesperson said in an email to WebProNews.

    “With the completion of the Efficient Frontier acquisition, we are focused on aggressively integrating cross-channel ad buying and optimization capabilities with our Digital Marketing Suite,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Marketing, Adobe. “Enterprises and agencies that count on Adobe to optimize digital business will benefit from exciting advancements in our ability to help them better turn ad spend, social media initiatives and campaigns into real business impact.”

    Details of the product-integration roadmap will be shared at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 March 20-23 in Salt Lake City.

    The acquisition was about $400 million, and Adobe expects it to bring in $60-80 million this year.

  • Adobe Efficient Frontier Acquisition Revealed To Be About $400 Million

    At the end of November, Adobe announced its intent to acquire Efficient Frontier, thought the price was not disclosed.

    “The purchase bolsters Adobe’s strategic focus on digital marketing and expands the company’s solutions, which are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed measured and optimized,” an Adobe spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    Adobe released its Q4 earnings yesterday, and on the conference call, the company revealed the price to be around $400 million. CFO Mark Garrett said, “Assuming we close the transaction as planned later this quarter, we would expect the acquisition to add between $60 million and $80 million to our annual revenue in fiscal 2012. It would also result in the use of approximately $400 million of our domestic cash and add approximately 350 employees to our headcount. We expect the acquisition to be slightly accretive to non-GAAP earnings for the year.”

    Seeking Alpha has a transcript from Adobe’s earnings call. Here’s what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say about the acquisition:

    Late in Q4, we announced our intent to acquire Efficient Frontier, a leader in digital ad buying and optimization. In the acquisition, which we expect will close later this quarter, we’ll add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to our existing Digital Marketing Suite. More specifically, Efficient Frontier strengthens our digital market offering in several key areas.

    In social marketing, Efficient Frontier brings a social ad buying capability for Facebook, and we expect synergy with our existing Facebook ad buying functionality in our SearchCenter product. They also bring a social marketing engagement platform to help customers build, manage, monitor and measure their brand presence across the social Web. We will augment the social engagement capability with our social analytics product to provide an analytics solution that moves beyond social monitoring to tie social media to business results.

    In search marketing, Efficient Frontier extends our SearchCenter solution with a complementary search portfolio optimization system.

    In display marketing, Efficient Frontier has a real-time bidding system to enable our digital marketing customers to increase ad performance on major display inventory sources.

    And in multi-channel optimization, Efficient Frontier enables marketeers to take the guesswork out of how to spend marketing dollars across search, display and social media platforms by optimizing bids and allocating budget across all these digital channels for maximum ROI.

    Included in the pending acquisition is Context Optional, a subsidiary of Efficient Frontier. Context Optional provides Fortune 500 companies with brand management, monitoring and analytics tools.

    Adobe has been more focused on its digital marketing strategy lately, with recent acquisitions and partnerships (such as its partnership with OptiMine Software and its acquisition of Auditude), and of course the Efficient Frontier acquisition.

  • Adobe to Acquire Efficient Frontier

    Adobe to Acquire Efficient Frontier

    Adobe announced its intent to acquire Efficient Frontier to bolster its digital marketing strategy. The company seems to have been more focused on this side of its business with recent acquisitions and partnerships (such as its partnership with OptiMine Software and its acquisition of Auditude). Probably not a bad idea considering the direction Flash is going.

    “The purchase bolsters Adobe’s strategic focus on digital marketing and expands the company’s solutions, which are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed measured and optimized,” an Adobe spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    Efficient Frontier will add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization features to Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite.

    “With the explosion in global Internet advertising, our customers need to know where, when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest return,” said Brad Rencher, SVP and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business. “The addition of Efficient Frontier will give our Digital Marketing Suite customers a leading platform for turning ad spend into business impact.”

    “Adobe’s vision of digital marketing is perfectly aligned with the Efficient Frontier approach – use data and intelligence to manage risk and drive ROI across a growing number of digital channels,” said Efficient Frontier President and CEO David Karnstedt. “Adobe customers will have greater insight into how their social, search and display spend impact one another and how to optimize their cross-channel campaigns.”

    Included in the pending acquisition is Context Optional, a subsidiary of Efficient Frontier.

    @ContextOptional
    Context Optional    Exciting News! @Adobe announces definitive agreement to acquire @efrontier (and @contextoptional ) 1 hour ago via Social Marketing Suite · powered by @socialditto

    Context Optional provides Fortune 500 companies with brand management, monitoring and analytics tools.

    Adobe itself, it says, currently captures nearly five trillion digital transactions per year for over 5,000 customers, which include some of the world’s largest publishers, ad agencies and advertisers.

    Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

  • Report: Facebook CPCs Up 22% for the Quarter

    According to the latest Global Digital Marketing Performance Report from Efficient Frontier, Facebook ad CPCs increased by 22% from Q1 to Q2.

    “We predict that brands will double their Facebook fan base by October of 2011 and the cost for acquiring these fans will increase,” the firm said.

    “Increased presence on Facebook from advertisers continues to push up CPCs,” it said. “This means that the longer brands wait to engage with consumers on Facebook, the more expensive it will become to acquire fans. Although the previous quarter’s CPC growth was 40%, we do not consider this a deceleration. The immaturity of the medium results in high volatility in the data.”

    Facebook Spend is incremental as budget mostly cones from offline media such as TV and print,” Efficient Frontier notes. “Facebook is around 5% of Search budgets, though for some advertisers this can peak to 25% during time sensitive, offer led promotions.”

    In its outlook, the firm said Facebook CPCs will continue to rise at double digit pace. “Even if CPCs increase at 20% per quarter for the remainder of the year, this will still result in an 80% growth in a year. This could reasonably equate into a doubling of Facebook’s revenue from marketplace ads,” it said.

    Here are some interesting charts included in the report:

    Efficient Frontier Facebook Data

    Efficient Frontier Facebook Data

    Of course businesses have a new social network to consider in Google+ which quickly surpassed 10 million users even in its limited field testing phase. It’s rapid growth is expected to continue. Next week, Google will start letting some businesses launch brand profiles. It’s still unknown at what point the option will be available to all businesses.

  • Efficient Frontier Documents Search Spending Bounceback

    Marketers are returning – or even rushing back – to the practice of employing search ads, according to the latest data from Efficient Frontier.  Efficient Frontier found that spending on search ads increased by 24 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2009.

    That’s good news for the search industry, and arguably great news for Bing in particular.  Jack Marshall explained earlier this morning, "[T]he report found Microsoft’s Bing engine increased its portion of U.S. spend significantly in the past 12 months, growing from 4.1 percent in Q2 2009 to 6.4 percent in Q2 2010, representing a 54 percent increase."

    Then here’s another key point: "Despite Bing’s failure to wrestle spend from Google, the report found that advertisers using Microsoft’s product are continuing to receive greater return on their investment.  The data suggests advertisers experienced 21 percent greater ROI using ads on Bing than they did on Google."

    Of course, it’s hard for everyone to win at a single game, and since both Bing and Google succeeded in different ways, that means Yahoo wasn’t exactly looking competitive.  Efficient Frontier believes its share of spending dropped from 20.4 percent to 18.0 percent on a year-over-year basis, and on average, Yahoo offered just 75 percent of the ROI advertisers saw with Google.

    Still, all three companies are doing well on the stock market this morning.  Indeed, Google’s up 1.38 percent, Microsoft’s up 1.29 percent, and Yahoo’s up 1.00 percent right now.

    The Efficient Frontier report could definitely translate into positive news for everyone as we head into another season of earnings reports, then.

  • Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

    A little bit of data from the Efficient Frontier Q4 2009 Search Engine Performance Report has been made available, and it’s completely un-shocking in that it shows search marketers are still more than happy to spend their money with Google.  The interesting thing, though, is that Bing seems to have gained a little ground on the search giant.

    To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow).  It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

    Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

    From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least.  And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

    As for the future, Johnson wrote, "Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks."  The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, "SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010."

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