Aug
24
Rainn Wilson (“Dwight” on The Office) Joins Reply.com at Fundraiser for Mona Foundation
Posted by Reply! Public Relations
Filed Under Press Releases, Reply! News | Leave a Comment
Reply.com extends its commitment to fight global poverty and the lack of education for underprivileged children
San Ramon, CA—August 24, 2009—
Emmy-nominated actor Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on NBC’s hit show The Office, headlined a fundraising gathering of more than 120 attendees Saturday night, August 15, at the home of Gouya and Payam Zamani, Founder & CEO of Reply.com. The event garnered contributions for the Mona Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports social and economic development projects focused on the education of underprivileged children. Reply.com committed $80,000—part of an overall donation of more than $100,000 raised at the event—to the Mona Foundation to aid the education of hundreds of children at two schools in towns ravaged by Hurricane Ike in Haiti over two years ago.
Rainn Wilson, himself an active advocate of the Mona Foundation, spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to support these projects. The foundation supports educational initiatives that raise the status of women and girls in the U.S. and abroad.
“We can all, as individuals and corporations, sacrifice a little more for the betterment of the world. A line item in our annual budgets that may represent an insignificant percentage of our profits can offer a chance for a better life to hundreds, if not thousands, of children,” said Payam Zamani. “Let our hearts and deeds be directed toward the welfare of humanity.”
The event and financial support extends Reply.com’s commitment to donating a consistent portion of its earnings to the cause on an ongoing basis. As part of an effort to further the Mona Foundation’s global initiatives, Payam and Gouya Zamani have already visited Ruaha Secondary School in Tanzania and will be visiting Zunuzi and New Horizon schools in Haiti this fall.
“We are thrilled that Reply.com has been able to mobilize support for the foundation and children in Haiti,” said Mahnaz Javid, one of the founders and the President of Mona Foundation. “These contributions will go a long way towards providing the necessary support that will allow these two schools to grow and expand their roles in the communities they serve.”
The Mona Foundation (www.monafoundation.org) is named after Mona Mahmoudnezhad, a 16-year-old Iranian girl who was hanged in 1983 for practicing the Bahá’í faith (www.bahai.org). Before her execution, Mona was known for her work with orphans and commitment to the education of children. Today, the non-religious foundation she inspired supports over 40 educational initiatives around the world.
To see pictures from the event, click here.
Aug
21
Why Did Reply! Launch A Marketplace?
Posted by Payam Zamani, Chairman & CEO
Filed Under Online Marketing | Leave a Comment

Reply.com started in lead generation. Why did you transition the business into an exchange and marketplace?
Until the summer of 2006, Reply.com was focused on lead generation for the real estate and automotive markets. During that quarter, many of our largest real estate buyers informed us they were going to stop buying leads due to the slowdown in the market.
We started discussing the tremendous innovation in paid search and display / traffic exchanges. However, lead generation had been around for over ten years and hadn’t evolved. The writing was on the wall: Lead Generation 1.0 was going to die and Lead Gen 2.0 would replace it. We had to rethink and revise our business model.
To give you some context, in a Lead Gen 1.0 model, a car dealer negotiates with a 3rd party lead provider for a fixed fee, price-per-lead, locked contract with no insight into lead quality. At the end of the month, some sources have a $300 cost of sale and some a $1,000, but lead quality at the time of purchase was unknown. If that dealership has too many cars on the lot, or is running a weekend special, there isn’t a way to segment and do more of what works and stop spending where it isn’t working. So more often than not, the dealership gets frustrated and quits the program.
We decided to protect our revenue base, but stopped growing it. Instead of continuing on an inefficient path, we went dark for 18 months. During that time, our engineering team built a lead exchange and marketplace. We formally launched in April of 2008; it has grown tremendously since.
In our marketplace, that same dealership in the Lead Gen 1.0 example now has access to Lead Gen 2.0 controls. We provide tight controls over price, quality, volume, radius, model, and auction-bidding. The dealership is now in control. As a result, we have found that our buyers are shifting offline dollars online because they can measure their return on investment, segment what works, and buy more of what is profitable.
Tell us a little about Enhanced Clicks™. What problem is Reply.com solving with this product?
After we launched the Lead Marketplace, we offered real estate buyers Lead Gen 2.0 controls. We heard that they weren’t buying leads, but they would consider buying clicks. Keep in mind, a click or lead customer is the same to Reply.com. One is just earlier in the conversion funnel.
One of our core competencies in online marketing is paid search. We immediately went back to our offices to discuss how to sell clicks. We researched the patent space and came up with the concept for Enhanced Clicks™.
An Enhanced Click™ (patent-pending) represents a consumer with intent to buy a product or service in a specific geography. Think of it as a “soft lead.”
We thought this was a revolutionary idea. Now the buyer doesn’t have to learn how to build a landing page with high quality score, become an expert in SEM, learn bid management, write text ads, decide keywords, or deliver banners. All they have to do is select a category, sub-category, define a location, and set a CPC. Then they will acquire ready-to-purchase consumers with perfect geo-targeting.
From our perspective, there are several problems with today’s paid search and display marketing solutions. They are not designed for locally-targeted advertising, and are too complicated, imprecise, and expensive.
By too complicated we mean that, to be effective with paid search or display, an advertiser needs a team of experts and a significant infrastructure investment. They need people on their team focused on creative optimization, bid management, keyword expansion, and landing page optimization.
By too imprecise, we mean that it is difficult to generate locally-targeted traffic in significant numbers. Most solutions today filter based on IP addresses. This solution results in significant waste, as IP addresses are right only about half the time.
By too expensive, we mean that existing platforms make local marketing almost cost-prohibitive because imprecise traffic drives up costs. Poorly-targeted local advertising offers no way to recover an investment.
Our solution is Reply.com’s Marketplace. It provides easy access to category-specific and locally-targeted Internet traffic. In five minutes, an advertiser can sign up, create a campaign for buying leads or Enhanced Clicks™, and start receiving traffic. Reply.com’s platform is designed to make gaining access to the local online consumer efficient and profitable.
Who are Reply!’s customers, and what are your core categories?
Sample customers using our marketplace are: Hearst Newspapers, Ford, RealEstate.com, GM, ServiceMagic.com, Market Leader, Kia, QualitySmith, Quinstreet, Cars.com, Vertrue, Audi, and ZipRealty.
Our core categories are:
- Autos: New, Used, Special Finance
- Real Estate: Buy a Home, Sell a Home, Foreclosure, Mortgage
- Home Improvement: all major trades (Additions, Remodels, Painting, Cabinets, Roofing, Siding, Flooring, Windows, etc)
- Insurance: Auto, Home, Health, Life
We are launching new categories quarterly.
Looking at your clients, what trends do you see today with respect to verticals, metrics, and conversion goals?
We are transacting more than 300,000 leads per month and more than 500,000 Enhanced Clicks™. We have more than 3 million leads and 8.5 million Enhanced Clicks™ available monthly. Buyers of our Enhanced Click™ report that our conversion rate is 50%-100% better than search or display. We attribute that success to inserting a second step in the consumer’s experience where they are asked to confirm intent and location. This allows the advertiser to dynamically generate a landing page more unique to the consumer’s interest. Not only do we significantly reduce abandonment, but we also eliminate issues with geo-targeting.
- Autos have been growing rapidly and the “Cash For Clunkers” program is helping create demand.
- In Real Estate, foreclosures are still hot and growing. As the market starts to recover, we are well positioned to help advertisers and sellers take advantage of the efficiencies offered in an exchange.
- We see the biggest growth in Home Improvement. The industry is highly fragmented, and the geo-restrictions are very high. We have signed up with most major buyers, and sells are quickly building liquidity.
How are lead exchanges playing out in your company’s strategy? Where do the publisher and advertiser have complete transparency into the transaction?
We have several thoughts on exchanges and how we define and participate in the exchange model. First, in most lead generation businesses, buyers establish a fixed radius around their business and try to only purchase leads closest to their business, as they feel they are the most serviceable and monetized. There are hundreds of thousands of quality leads that are unsold because there hasn’t been an exchange model. Furthermore, there are an equal number of undersold leads. Leads that can be sold three or more times are often sold only once.
The net result of this inefficiency is that lead sellers do not earn a premium for quality leads, have a limited incentive to improve quality, and have no reliable way to align lead generation efforts with lead demand. To the consumer, that means a high percentage of results to be contacted go unfulfilled.
Second, one of our core innovations is an exchange that delivers “margins for the advertiser,” not “yield for publishers.” The basic point is that search and display online marketing are not built for companies targeting local consumers. So we created an advertiser-side exchange where ad dollars can be recovered by selling poorly targeted, local advertising through the Reply! click exchange. In fact, Peter Burris, a Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research interviewed customers and called Reply!’s inventions “just plain smart.”
Lastly, transparency is overrated. To us, what matters is acquiring consumers who have intent to purchase in locations where you can service them and offering an opportunity to segment and bid based on propensity to convert.
As an example, we feel Google is one of the most opaque companies in online marketing. Ask anyone who invests in Google Paid Search these three questions, and see if you get consistent answers:
- What is keyword quality score and how do you improve it to lower your CPC’s?
- If you geo-target, how many clicks fall outside the requested geography?
- How much does cost increase and volume drop when you geo-target?
How important is display advertising to lead gen and Reply.com specifically?
Display is a critical part of our acquisition portfolio. In fact, we have recently launched an ad network where publishers can run HTML widgets to directly generate Enhanced Clicks™. The feedback from publishers has been great. They tell us we offer a superior monetization platform and a smarter way to maximize eCPM’s for remnant inventory.
What’s your view on display ad exchanges? Are they useful?
If you are a publisher, they offer a reliable way to increase eCPM’s. If you are an advertiser, it depends on your acquisition process. Banners, PPC, and email all have problems with accurate geo-targeting that our platform helps to resolve.
We find it interesting that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are not focused on the $100 billion+ spent by local advertisers. That’s the market we are after. Our platform acts as a catalyst in bringing these dollars online. Our platform makes these advertisers online marketing-ready.
Is automation helping creative in your business? Or are the best landing pages still built by people?
We automate as much as possible. We have direct API access in and out of search engines. We use Marin Software for PPC bid management, DART for display management, and Google Website Optimizer for A/B and multivariate testing. We never stop testing and improving our conversion funnels.
If you ran an offline company that targets local advertisers, what steps would you take to prepare for a digital future?
Never let a good crisis go to waste. The shaken credit markets have created an uncertain future for local advertising and a massive opportunity for advertisers. Many newspapers are near bankruptcy, CPC’s and CPM’s have dropped, and the Googles and craigslists of the world are poised to paralyze today’s incumbent local media channels.
Now is the time to invest and take control of locally-targeted advertising. Here are some important questions:
- Does branding matter or is profitable acquisition more important?
- While you may monetize banners and paid links, do you have a process to monetize leads?
- Running paid search is difficult and requires investments in personnel and technology. Do you have a self-service, easy-to-use platform to get local advertisers engaged in buying online clicks?
- Can you offer your advertisers a way to liquidate their poorly-targeted local advertising?
Reply.com offers the following solutions to help:
- A comprehensive, white-label cost-per-lead platform that can power a self-service solution across multiple vertical businesses
- An Enhanced Click™ self-service platform to bring more locally-targeted ad dollars online faster
- An advertiser-side exchange where ad dollars can be recovered by exchanging poorly-targeted, local advertising, which can encourage further investment in your other advertising platforms
- Syndication of Reply! widgets to maximize yield for remnant traffic
Aug
21
Google’s SEO Patent and Matt Cutts On Video
Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Online Marketing | Leave a Comment
Matt Cutts is one of Google’s SEO experts. Here is a very long (1 hour) but very interesting video with some tips and tricks on SEO. If you have the time, check it out.
Also – Google recently made public, March 31 2005, the contents of their filing of United States Patent Application 20050071741. In which many of the search giant’s secret ranking criteria is revealed and it makes very interesting reading. You must read this if you are serious about ranking well in Google. The days of Spamming Google are drawing to a close. With this patent they reveal just how hard they’re coming down on Spam sites. You Do Not want to get caught out. Click here to read more…
Aug
18
Writing Ad Copy For Contextual Advertising
Posted by Michael Villanueva, Senior Marketing Analyst, SEM
Filed Under Ad Networks, Online Marketing | Leave a Comment
Google and Yahoo! have made great strides over the past few years improving their contextual networks. If you tested their content networks a few years ago with undesirable results, it may be time to test it out again. Keep in mind this time around you will want to have separate campaigns for advertising on content and search. This will allow you to set different bids more easily and write different ad copy.
When you write ads for the content network, you will want to remember that viewers did not come from search. Writing ads for the search network usually includes having the search term in the headline, description, and display URL. This will not be the case when writing contextual ads.
The ads in the content network differ, because a viewer has not specified what they were searching for. When writing an ad for contextual advertising, you will want to write copy compelling enough to draw a viewer’s attention away from the website they are engaged in, while still being relevant to your landing page. Try testing out different ideas. Remember, sometimes the unconventional ad works out the best.
Aug
16
Reply! Takes Manhattan – Visit Us At LeadsCon
Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Reply! News, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment
Ever since the “Mad Men” of the early 1960s ruled Madison Avenue, New York City has been the hub of all advertising. Reply! heads to The Big Apple to make a pitch for our ROI-boosting Internet advertising expertise as a Gold Sponsor of LeadsCon East 2009. Look out, Sterling Cooper!
LeadsCon East happens August 17-18 at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. Serving as a “the pioneering conference and expo dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation industry,” LeadsCon brings together the top brass from the the online customer acquisition space.
Come visit us at LeadsCon East, booth #203, where we’ll show you why the Reply.com Marketplace is more precise and profitable than search engines and ad networks. Learn how to acquire more ready-to-purchase customers using Reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks™ program. Also, see how the Reply.com Leads program can help you control lead price, quality, and volume—all while optimizing results.
If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with Reply.com at LeadsCon, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.
Aug
14
The Lack of Innovation in Local Advertising Products
Posted by Tom Young, Manager, Director, Online Marketing & Product
Filed Under Click Marketplace, Lead Quality, Online Marketing, Research, Search, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment
While attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lack of innovation in online marketing products geared towards local advertisers. Buying local display inventory is next to impossible, and buying local traffic from search engines is sloppy and inefficient. Creating local SEO pages is helpful, but is still very difficult to do in a scalable and sustainable manner. I believe the future of online marketing is in delivering geo-targeted advertising products that level the playing field for marketers with budgets of all sizes. I’m still stunned I didn’t see a single vendor focusing on geo-targeted consumer acquisition for new product launches (besides Reply!).
What really confuses me is the direction in which the major search engines are going. They’ve placed their focus on allowing consumers to find local products and services, but there’s a significant lag in allowing advertisers to profitably acquire consumers who are conducting localized searches. Why is it so hard to find consumers who are searching for specific products or services in specific geographies? Solving this problem will not only help local advertisers, it will provide more value to consumers who want to find and compare local products and services.
I consider myself to be somewhat of an online marketing expert. I manage a marketing team and a large corporate advertising budget; we’re profitable and we find creative ways to grow revenue and profits each month. I say this to set up my next point, not to gloat. My father is an attorney, and I manage his website and small advertising budget in my free time. I’m failing when it comes to delivering local prospects at a reasonable cost. This isn’t because I’m an unsophisticated marketer; this is because the major search engines are failing local advertisers. The major search engines can’t deliver significant traffic in the areas I want and they make changing geo-targets a painful process.The inflated cost for going local is disturbingly high. Simply put, online marketing is geared towards national advertisers. Local advertisers are at a severe disadvantage.
Large ad budgets understandably influence product changes and innovation for companies offering online marketing solutions, but we’ve reached a point where advertisers with small budgets need to be heard. Their needs should be driving innovation. The next wave of growth in online marketing needs to come from providing valuable products to local advertisers. This growth will help shift $10 billion in ad spend from offline to online services. I would be willing to grow my father’s ad budget if I could find a way to do so profitably, but this just isn’t the case. This means the major search engines are leaving my (and millions of others’) unspent ad budget on the table. It also means the door is open for an innovative product to sweep through this virtually untapped market.
To learn how Reply! is solving the problems with local online advertising, you can read any of the following posts:
- Reply.com Launches World’s First Marketplace for Enhanced Clicks™
- Online Marketing is Painful for Local Advertisers
- Making Locally-Targeted Advertising Simple and Profitable
- Reply! Click Marketplace Coverage & Clarifications
Tom Young
Director, Online Marketing & Product
Reply! Inc.
Aug
10
Learn More About Reply!’s Marketplace at SES
Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Reply! News, Tradeshows | 2 Comments
Reply.com is an exhibitor at the Search Engine Strategies 2009 Conference and Expo (aka SES), a premier global conference featuring the industry’s top Search experts. SES takes place August 10-14, 2009, at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.
Come visit us at Booth #223, where we will spotlight Reply.com’s leading online marketplace for targeted advertising. We’ll show you why the Reply.com Marketplace is more precise and profitable than search engines and ad networks. Learn how to acquire more ready-to-purchase customers using Reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks™ program. Also see how the Reply.com Leads program can help you control lead price, quality, and volume, while optimizing results. See our conference web page for more information.
If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with Reply.com at SES, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.
Aug
7
Essential SEM & SEO Tools
Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under SEM - Paid Search | 3 Comments
We always get asked our opinion on cool / essential SEM & SEO tools. Well, here is our list.
Google website optimizer
What it does: Free multivariate and A/B testing tool, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates
Cost– Free
services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/
Google Analytics
What it does – Free analytics program
Cost – Free
www.google.com/analytics/
Google Base
What it does – Helps searchers find products you sell, allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline content which Google will make searchable.
Cost – Free
base.google.com/
WordTracker
What it does: Provides new keyword ideas
Cost – $299 a year
www.wordtracker.com
** Other Tools for keyword research:
* Microsoft’s adCenter Labs keyword forecast
* Trellian’s free search term suggestion tool
* Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool
* SpyFu – useful for tracking competitors
* Compete.com & SpyFu.com
Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool
What it does – Provides quick traffic estimates of keywords
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
Google Trends
What it does – Show trends in search popularity.
Cost – Free
www.google.com/trends
Google Sitemap Generator
What it does: Quickly spiders sites and creates XML sitemaps that adhere to the standards set forth at www.sitemaps.org
Cost – Free
www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php
SEOdigger.com
What it does: Competitive ranking report tool, shows ranking history in Google
Cost – Free
www.seodigger.com
TouchGraph
What it does: Provides visual link maps from Google “similar pages”
Cost – Free
www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
Yahoo! Site Explorer
What it does: Shows accurate picture of back links and indexed pages
Cost – Free
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
SEO Toolbar
What it does: Provides data on sites in one easy place through your Firefox browser. Turn images and CSS on/off, disable javascript, and many more.See full feature list at: tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Cost – Free
tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Trellian’s Keyword Discovery
What it does: Provides keyword ideas and aids in brainstorming and provides popularity numbers from multiple databases and shows seasonal trends
Cost – $69.95 monthly
www.keyworddiscovery.com
We Build Pages’ Toolset
What it does: Free Internet Marketing and SEO Tools, backlink and anchor text checker, Class C Backlink analyzer, keyword density analysis tool, spider viewer,
Cost – Free
www.webuildpages.com/tools/default.htm
Deep Link Ratio Checker
What it does: This tool was created to analyze how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines. We can use this tool to compare the DLRs for the best ranking sites for a search phrase.
Cost – Free
www.webuildpages.com
WebConfs.com KW Density Checker
What it does: Checks keyword frequency at the page level, Tag cloud
Cost – Free
webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php
VeriClix
What it does: Real-time pay per click reporting, auditing and fraud monitoring
Cost – Free
www.vericlix.com
Web Position 4
What it does: Checks natural search engines rankings
Cost – $149/5 domains; $389/unlimited domains
www.webposition.com
OptiLink
What it does: Checks natural search engines rankings, incoming link popularity, Link text (keyword ratio), Keyword density,
Google PageRank rating.
Cost – $149
www.optilinksoftware.com
Advanced Web Ranking
What it does: Search engine ranking software that emulates, manual search through each search engine to produce reliable and accurate website positioning reports.
Cost – $99-$399
www.advancedwebranking.com
Advanced Link Manager
What it does: Allows you to see how your website links evolve in time. You can compare the evolution of your site with the
evolution of your competitors using data from the most popular search engines.
Cost: – $59-$149
www.advancedlinkmanager.com
CombineWords.com
What it does: Keyword list expansion tool
Cost – Free
www.combinewords.com
SEO Quake
What it does: Extension for both Firefox and IE that provides a quick look at many SE parameters, including backlinks,
indexed pages, Alexa rank, quick DomainTools.com. Also allows for downloading of SERPS into Excel with many data points.
Cost – Free
www.seoquake.com/?sln=en
Quintura
What it does: Visual search engine navigation tool that extracts keywords from search results and builds a word cloud.
Cost – Free
www.quintura.com/
Archive.org
What it does: Historical web page archive
Cost – Free
www.archive.org
Other Cool Tools
# Twitscoop (trending on topics in real-time)
# Twitvolume – allows head-to-head comparisons
# SiteVolume – visually tracks how often word appears in social media sites (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, etc.)
# Twitbeep – like Google, alters for Twitter, updates hourly, sends you email
# Twhirl – allows you to track and monitor keywords
# Wikipedia tools
# Wikirank – shows popular trends on Wikipedia with trending topics
# 99Designs.com – connects clients needing design work such as logo designs, business cards, or web sites.
# ODesk.com & eLance.com – Simplify the process of finding, managing, and paying for resources like: web programming, writing and translation, admin support, sales and marketing, finance, legal, etc.
# Izea.com – Pay-per-post blogging. If you would like to use the power of bloggin and social media to drive in-bound links and awareness, consider using these guys… pretty cool.
Aug
5
Reply.com Exhibiting @ Inman’s Real Estate Connect, San Francisco
Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Online Marketing | 1 Comment
Reply.com is exhibiting at the Inman Real Estate Connect tradeshow today & tomorrow, and you can find us at booth #113. We will be demo’ing the Reply! Marketplace.
As a refresher, here are some presentations delivered at Inman’s Real Estate Connect in New York 2009.
- Jeff Turner: “25 Web Sites To Help You Find Customers and Save Money in Downturn” (2.1 MB). Very helpful sites that you should review.
- Ashley Rigg: “25 Real Estate Web Sites to Keep Your Eyes On” (1.4 MB)
- Robert Shiller: “Finding A Fix For the Housing Market” (3.9 MB)
If you are interesting in scheduling a meeting, please send an email to BizDev@Reply.com






