• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 11, 2016

Oren Netzer, who founded DoubleVerify in 2008, believes he can bring programmatic targeting capabilities to paid-search advertising -- allowing marketers to measure, analyze and target campaigns using hundreds of new data points to target potentially new customers.

More than two years ago, he began a journey to bring precise targeting technology into search advertising and organic optimization through a startup called cClearly, and recently signed on Elite SEM to allow the agency's clients to use the platform.

The idea came to Netzer after Google introduced secure search, where the engine began encrypting search results and removing data from the equation. "Originally we thought it would focus on organic search, but realized it could make a huge impact in paid search," Netzer says. "The panel of 50 million consumers we built allows us to see past secure search and can see the search terms before they get encrypted."

cClearly's technology targets potential new customers in search queries using data and predictive analytics, along with a priority panel of about 50 million search terms, whereas retargeting platforms focus on targeting consumers who previously visited the brand's or the retailer's Web site.

Methods like Customer Match and retargeting can reach people who are in market for a specific item, but they are limited to consumers who are already known to the brand.

Netzer says the ad-tech industry copied the automated buying and targeting practices of search for video, display and other media, but leapfrogged the capabilities. Now he's bringing those learnings back to search by building two new ways to target consumers through keywords and audience segments. The technology integrates with Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads, and can also work with bid management systems from companies like Kenshoo, or Marin Software.

Predictive technology analyzes the searches and suggests the best-performing keywords or audiences. It also considers contextual words used in queries such as "open" and "best," and determines the words that should appear in campaigns based on where competitors' keywords ranks in organic results.

Targeting can become more precise by analyzing conversational phrases and using automation and data, he says. Search queries continue to become longer, especially with the rise of voice search. Netzer says 80% of search volume and conversions comes from long tail search queries, but less than 20% of the marketer’s attention and time is spent on the conversational terms.

The audience segment can measure the types that perform best to target paid-search advertising campaigns accordingly.

The technology geo-codes hundreds of audience data points to the ZIP-code level such as demographics, financial, location, behavior, lifestyle. Then the platform scores each past performance to see what types of audiences perform best. The technology can recommend new targeting or bid modification by ZIP code.