Covario Introduces New Display Advertising Insight Software

SAN DIEGO, CA -- February 3, 2010 -- Covario, a provider of search and display advertising software and services for Fortune 500 companies, announced today the release of a new technology solution – Display Advertising Insight (DAI).

DAI is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution designed specifically for large advertisers, as well as their agencies, allowing them to manage the financial performance of their online display media spending on a global basis.

DAI, along with Covario’s Paid Search Insight and Organic Search Insight solutions, leverage advertisers existing systems to get complete visibility into the performance of all of their online media spending. The advertiser uses the information to drive optimal online media performance, and manages the attribution of credit for media spending to ensure accurate measurement of return on investment.

Advertising management is coming under increased financial scrutiny by companies as the old days of using “reach and frequency” statistics to measure media effectiveness are long gone. “As budgets tighten in tough economic climates, marketing is often the first place the CEO and CFO look,” says Cindy Commander of Forrester Research. “Why? Because marketers have traditionally been slow to prove the value of their marketing investments and to provide data and measurement that supports their budgets.” The financial performance of each media channel, not just online media such as search, display, and social media, but also broadcast and traditional media such as TV, radio and print requires rigorous analysis on their financial performance. Sometimes a campaign’s media is spent and used before anyone realizes it missed the mark, failed to meet expectations, and/or cost too much.

This issue is the impetus for Covario’s expansion of its product portfolio. Covario has traditionally focused on search analytics; however, search performance is now viewed within the context of display advertising spend, broadcast spend, and social media performance. “We built Display Ad Insight, because it is well understood in advertising that online display programs have a strong link to search behavior and online traffic generation,” said Craig Macdonald, CMO for Covario. “Mastering search data has turned out to be a boon for Covario, since most organizations use search as the advertising medium by which brand and media effectiveness are evaluated. Today, Covario is working with some of the nation’s largest advertisers to help them consolidate the behavioral data on search and display programs much faster. This is the first step in building out a full CMO Dashboard that provides visibility to advertisers across all media types.”

In fact, online display advertising is an $8.3 billion market in the U.S., according to Forrester Research, and is expected to grow to $16.5 billion by 2015 – a 17% annualized growth rate. There is a tremendous amount of innovation taking place in display advertising now, specifically with the advent of ad exchanges, which offer improvements in behavioral targeting. Covario sees its Fortune 500 clients devoting a larger share of their overall marketing budget to interactive, which increases the display and paid search budgets at a rate higher than the market average. Specifically, spending on paid search is up 12% year- over-year for Covario clients, based on our Q4’09 Global Search Spend Analysis.

Covario is deploying Display Ad Insight technology with three major advertisers.

Source: Covario, Inc.