NEW YORK – OBSNews.com - Social networking is big news across America and the globe with companies like Facebook and MySpace gaining millions of users and significant media publicity. With the goal of helping users create community among their online peers, social network sites usually give free tools and resources to users to encourage them to spend more time on a given website.

Internet users have flocked to these sites to connect to and communicate with their network of friends and acquaintances. The business model for many of these social network sites is an advertising-supported model that banks on user eyeballs. But many web devotees suggest that free services alone may not be enough to get people to stay loyal to a network.

One company that is launching a greatly expanded version of its existing loyalty rewards program based on compensating users for interacting with the site, is the ‘meta’ search engine eZanga.com (http://www.eZanga.com). eZanga.com’s CEO, Rich Kahn, said his company has always rewarded registered users of its search engine with things like cash giveaways, free Wii and Xbox systems, and free iPods. Kahn’s company has given away an estimated “$100,000 in cash and prizes” over the past five years to users and indicated that his site is very popular with devotees of internet contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways.

Expansion into a social network that pays

eZanga has upgraded its platform to a complete social network and calls it HopOnThis.com (http://www.HopOnThis.com). The new social network highlights the company’s popular frog mascot theme. Members can interact with family and friends to share pictures and videos as well as meet new people. Active members are rewarded with points that can later be redeemed for upgrade features and free prizes.

Some ways users earn points include: referring friends to the network, creating and updating to a blog, and sending friends comments, pictures, videos, and the like.

Once a user has generated enough points they can go to the “Prize Closet” and redeem points for cash, free downloads, gift cards, and entries into monthly drawings. Companies seeking exposure for their products are encouraged to contact HopOnThis.com to provide prizes to the network in exchange for free advertising on the site.

SOURCE: OBSNews.com

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NEW YORK - OBSNews.com - Search engines have come to dominate how many of us use the internet, and Google and other search engines have generated billions of dollars in pay per click advertising revenues as a result. One phenomenon that has plagued the industry from its early days has many businesses worried about their bottom lines: click fraud.

Many businesses that choose to use a paid search strategy in their marketing efforts, also known as a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, on the major and niche search engines, are continuously looking for ways to prevent malicious clicks from competitors or other web-malcontents on their ads to protect their internet ad budgets, company profits, and, ultimately, shareholder value.

Search Engine eZanga.com Steps Up

One search engine, a ‘meta’ search engine, or one that aggregates the results of other search engines, eZanga (http://www.eZanga.com), has introduced proprietary technologies on their internal network that detect and protect against click fraud efforts in real time. Their solution is known as Traffic Advisors 4.0.

The company, headed by search engine marketing expert and CEO Richard Kahn, also provides web marketing consulting services that include click fraud detection and prevention tools for businesses interested in all aspects of search engine marketing (SEM) including the deployment of coordinated marketing campaigns on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

New Ways to Fight Click Fraud

“We’re spending a lot of money on resources to ensure that the click fraud that comes into our network is being eliminated before it hits our customers,” said Kahn. He also pointed to his company’s close relationship with Click Forensics, (http://www.ClickForensics.com), an industry leader in scoring, auditing, and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community.

Kahn added, “Click Forensics is setting the industry standard, as demonstrated by Yahoo’s adoption of their proprietary technologies.”

Steve O’Brien, VP of Marketing for Click Forensics, said, “eZanga is a case study in effective traffic quality management.”

SOURCE: OBSNews.com

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eZanga has been testing the software after its initial roll out, June 23, 2008, and has seen incredible results. In addition to the many improvements, they also partnered with Click Forensics, in order to have a third party validate its process. So far the results show that Traffic Advisors is matching Click Forensics data 98% of the time. In addition, eZanga is going an extra step further by looking into correcting the other 2%. “By partnering with Click Forensics we gain the credibility of a third-party to validate our efforts. We had been using our own internal system, Traffic Advisors, to improve traffic quality for several years. We’ll now be sharing our data and findings with the Click Forensics team to make continuous improvements in traffic quality for both companies,” Richard Kahn, eZanga CEO.

Traffic Advisors 4.0 conversion intelligence has taken fraud elimination to the next level. “We know that clean traffic is not necessarily converting traffic. For example, if you received a bunch of traffic from a children’s site such as CartoonNetwork.com or Neopets.com, it would all be real traffic. It would pass all fraud filters as it is real people; however, the conversion factor would tend to be low to non-existent since the demographics of these sites tend to be a younger audience. With Traffic Advisors 4.0, eZanga wanted to identify buyers versus non-buyers. By doing this, we would truly be able to increase the ROI of our customers.” Kahn says. The goal of the technology is to simply discard the non-converting traffic, isolate high quality traffic, and ultimately increase ROI.

Kahn continues, “In order to get more conversions from our publishers, we even instituted a smart pricing system in order to reward our publishers for sending in high converting traffic. In order to do this, we quality score every source of traffic every 15 minutes. This allows us to keep a close watch on every source of traffic that comes into our network.” eZanga also recognizes that the more data you have, the more accurate your decisions are in quality scoring traffic sources. Whenever there is less than enough data to accurately score a traffic source, they fill in the gaps with Click Forensics data. This gives eZanga a total picture of traffic quality and allows our system to accurately score each source.


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eZanga's contextual advertising technology uses geographic and demographic targeting, allowing advertisers to specify their target audiences based on their marketing goals. Using the system, advertisers are able to target text, graphics, rich media, pop under or interstitial ads with keywords, locations, time/day targets and channels of interest. Ad design and creation services are also available to advertisers. eZanga offers pay-per-click, pay-per-view and pay-per-visit models for eZanga Contextual customers.

Advertisers who sign up to use eZanga Contextual for their online advertising needs can track their campaign results through eZanga’s ROI tracking and detailed reporting system. The technology also allows eZanga clients to outbid for the most converted keywords, sites and channels while removing those that are ineffective to the campaign. Publishers can also sign up to be incorporated into the eZanga Contextual system.

“Successful marketing campaigns are never isolated,” said Richard K. Kahn, CEO of eZanga. “Instead, they are made up of efforts that work in unison with one another. Through eZanga Contextual, we are allowing our current and future clients to run more integrated online marketing campaigns that will be more impactful for their bottom line. In the future, we look to expand our service offerings further to build on our capabilities.”

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Through eZanga Display, advertisers can run online display ads across a network of popular Web sites, targeting specific audiences based on geographical location, demographics and interests. The service also has remarketing capabilities that retarget visitors through display ads. For example, if a user clicks on an advertiser’s Web site from a paid listing secured through an eZanga SEM campaign, and then they leave the site, display ads for it will appear when that user visits one of the many publishers affiliated with eZanga Display. The display ads increase the chance that the user will visit the site again.

eZanga provides its eZanga Display customers with reports that detail budget used, number of impressions the campaign has secured, cost per thousand impressions (CPMs), number of unique visitors, and the geographical, contextual and demographic distribution of visitors.

“Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone,” said Richard K. Kahn, CEO of eZanga. “We launched eZanga Display in order to capitalize on both of these key Internet marketing channels to help our clients reach their bottom lines faster and more efficiently.”

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