Net sites select which ad to display to users

By Adam Gifford

If you start noticing banners for New Zealand firms when you link to overseas Internet sites like Altavista or Dilbert, you're seeing the results of a service sold by Auckland-based Web site designer WebMasters.

The company has a licence to on-sell technology from DoubleClick, the largest agent for Internet advertising.

Paul Hashfield, chief executive of WebMasters Ad Network, said the technology allows New Zealand companies to use the Internet for targeted campaigns.

"We are looking at ways of driving traffic to Web sites, which is the only way get a return on investment," Mr Hashfield said.

Clear, IBM and Telecom Xtra were the first off the rank to use the service, which queries where a request is coming from and, if it detects a New Zealand Internet protocol (IP) address, sends back an appropriate banner ad with the page.

"It can even go so far as picking up, from the address, if someone is working for a particular company or organisation," Mr Hashfield said. "If I wanted to deliver an ad to the people from just one company, I can identify them when they visit the site."

He said 250 NZ organisations had so far been "mapped".

Organisation-specific advertising is becoming common in the United States, as it allows advertising to be visible to their most important customers every time those customers' employees go online to view sites in the Ad Network.

Internet advertising is sold on a per-page impression basis for less than 10 cents a page. The Altavista search engine site gets 960 million pages downloaded each month. Putting a banner ad on each page would be prohibitively expensive, but advertising on a large percentage of the 3.5 million pages called up from New Zealand may be possible.

Mr Hashfield said with as much as 90 per cent of New Zealand Internet traffic being to overseas sites, advertisers need to place ads outside the country.

The Ad Network currently has 350 sites where banners can be placed, including 10 in Australia. Several New Zealand sites will join soon, including specialist motor industry and medical sites.

"The click-throughs are much higher when advertising is targeted like this," Mr Hashfield said.

Most campaigns in New Zealand should be getting a 4 to 5 per cent click-through rate, depending on the editorial environment and whether there is a call for action in the banner."

He said Internet advertisers could now monitor the success of their banners almost in real time, allowing them to make changes quickly.

"If their campaign is a winner they know straight away, and can put more resource behind it. If it's not, it's much better for them to know immediately when they can still change things, rather than 45 days later when it's too late and the budget may have been wasted."

Mr Hashfield said the value of the Internet advertising market in New Zealand was about $3 million.

"If we did not have good client base and existing Web sites, it would be hard to start from scratch."