Since the launch of the contextual link advertising product on ReadWriteWeb, we at Hakia have been anxious to see the results and evaluate the success of our contextual advertising product, Contexa. The Contexa system matches the semantic context of a blog post with a sponsor's criteria on the fly to deliver relevant ads to the reader. Participating ReadWriteWeb sponsors have provided the contextual engine with up to three "trigger phrases" that define their business. As a reader of the blog, you may have seen the product's implementation at the bottom of certain blog entries, as shown below. You can see another example here.

As we began this exciting journey, the ReadWriteWeb team defined its objective as follows:

1. "To offer value to our readers by providing advertising links in the context of what they are reading, links that would therefore more likely be of interest to them, and
2. To offer a higher level of engagement to our advertisers, resulting in both more branding impressions and more click-throughs."

The preliminary aggregated statistics of the six participating sponsors (excluding Hakia), covering a 40-day period, demonstrate that the Contexa system has met ReadWriteWeb's objectives:

• The Contexa system increased ad clicks by 14% (i.e. advertiser received, on average, 14% more ad clicks).
• The click-through rate (CTR) for Contexa was more than twice that of ReadWriteWeb's 125 x 125 banner ads.

We decided to turn the tables and interview Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb's COO and Feature Writer for his feedback! Hakia's own COO, Melek Pulatkonak, poses the questions.

Melek: Bernard, we have been working together on the ReadWriteWeb contextual link advertising system for a while. Has the system met your expectations?

Bernard: Yes, it has. We wanted to see if it would generate a meaningful uplift in CTR, and it has.

Melek: What feedback have you received from advertisers? And what would you recommend to participating advertisers going forward?

Bernard: Advertisers have to get the traffic–relevance balance right. You can drive a lot of clicks with a hot term - something we are writing about a lot - but if the relevance is low, the advertiser won't get good conversions. As with any new type of advertising, an art and science emerges over time. People know how to buy search terms on Google, but this is a bit different. I think we need to get better at creating more of a feedback loop (e.g. stats on how different terms have performed) so that advertisers can tune their keyword selection accordingly. Each advertiser has different needs and knows its market intimately, so it is best positioned to decide what works and how to tune its selection.

Melek: What's next? What is your vision?

Bernard: For this first phase, we provided Contexa to our long-term sponsors. In the next phase, we want to offer Contexa as a standalone offering, so that advertisers can purchase keywords (or trigger phrases) directly on ReadWriteWeb. This will be an entry-level self-service advertising option that many smaller startups have requested.

Melek: Anything else you would like to add?

Bernard: Context matters to engagement. That is an obvious statement, but doing it right has been hard, and the opportunities for bloggers to offer ads that engage readers well and offer them value have been limited. Contexa is a good step in this important journey.

We thank the ReadWriteWeb team for working with us closely to create a new contextual ad system for blogs and other publishers. To learn more about Contexa, please contact us at bdev@hakia.com.

Barnes says his new service Panels.net gets reader engagement numbers above 10% - an astonishing number in advertising. He says that's because his Panels are genuinely useful. At first blush they strike us as a little awkward but the potential here is big. Well selected, up-to-the-minute info about any link we see online sounds like a great idea - if it works.

Panels.net requires one line of Javascript to be added to web pages. The service then ads a little icon to any link that goes to an "entity" - like a person or business. The links can be styled to your liking as a publisher, and when hovered over they produce a pop up "panel."

There's a site: search function for any domain in its panel, there's info pulled in from the Crunchbase database, there's a lot of information available in these little panels.

The variety of information is quite diverse and Barnes says what's served up is customized depending on what kind of entity you're looking at. You can see Panels in action over on Barnes' personal blog; the service will be rolled out to bloggers over the coming months.

Serious Technology

This isn't a fly-by-night organization deciding to throw a handful of RSS feeds into a Javascript pop-up either. Craig Barnes is a four time CEO who started then sold for $140 million what's now one of the top handful of font management software companies in the world, Extensis, in 2001. He then served as the CEO for venture backed enterprise RSS company Attensa. Now he's out on his own, making hires and getting ready to launch a service for which neither the market nor the storage and delivery technology was prepared when he thought of it years ago.

Is it Unobtrusive?

As many of us found out with the recent launch of Google SearchWiki, adding symbols to a familiar, simple web page can be very disruptive. Ostensible Panels competitor Snap has faced years of criticism for their over-eager pop-ups.

We're not sure how Panels scores on obtrusiveness. Its popups are polite and relatively attractive, but the icons you have to click on to launch them are a little hard to swallow. It's a very fine line for services like this between being invisible and being used. We don't know what the solution is, but we do know it's a big issue.

Is it Truly Useful?

Fortunately the usefulness is immediately apparent when you look at a Panels popup. If you're interested in an organization's web traffic, financial trends, recent mentions in the press - and many of us are - then for many links Panels will serve you well.

Is it Up to Date and Well Populated?

Barnes says that a signifigant amount of thought has been put into caching much of the information served up through Panels. That's smart and we hope it will make a big difference. When we tested the panels they were sometimes a little slow to respond and many of the display options just said "coming soon." We would need to see this resolved before we were to, for example, put Panels on our site.

Is It Intelligently Delivered?

There are some decisions that can be presumed in the user experience here that don't appear to be now. We need clicks to be kept to a minimum. If, for example, we've clicked on 3 Panels icons on a page and navigated to the website traffic numbers first for each of them - then we'd like to have the panel pop up and go immediately to the website traffic view. (Update: On second look, it appears this is done to some degree, at least the first level of navigation is repeated in subsequent Panels.)

The point is that the user experience needs to be as smooth as turning a box of cereal around to look right at its nutritional panel. Right now the user experience doesn't quite feel that easy.

It's early days, but we hope the company is prioritizing user experience. We suspect that forthcoming improvements in browser handling of Javascript will also help make Panels smoother to use.

Long Range Outlook

Panels is a very good idea. If it can be executed upon well, and overcome the kinds of obstacles listed above, then we think this just-launched startup has as good a chance as any. We want it to work better than it does today, but we're sure it will.

Key information available about people and companies online could soon be at our fingertips at a moment's notice as we browse the web. That really is how it ought to be.