CHRIS: Absolutely. One of the really beneficial things about paid advertising is it's relatively immediate, whereas long-tail SEO, and SEO in general, is a mid- to long-term strategy. Paid advertising is constantly changing, but, depending on your particular category, this is going to be something like paid Google ads. It could be social media like Facebook or YouTube, it can be highly targeted. It could be in a B2B eCommerce advertising mechanism like LinkedIn. The list goes on. But the summary here is that we can mechanically take the content, in particular for auctions, and dynamically generate specific ads for those types of auctions.
This is really cool because, if you think about what folks are looking for, we can actually target those specific niche focus areas that they're looking for and dynamically generate ads. These can be category level, they can be seller or brand level, or they can be actual products. We can even do some really cool things with this, Ron, where we're showing the countdown timer, and there are some different studies on what works better and different markets. So we want to really pay attention to what's going to be the best for conversion rate optimization within your space.
The bottom line is that we have a lot of experience dealing with helping strategize on the advertising channel and then executing on the technical aspects of making this really hands off once you're at scale with your advertising.
RON: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And there are a couple of different facets to this. With the Google ads, there's the ability to create ads and put the ads out there into different marketplaces like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads, you mentioned those. There are display ads, there's different types of DSA ads, there's dynamic ads that we can build, but there's also the ability to sell advertising space on your custom auction website as well. We've done that with our eCommerce platform, we've done that forever. And even when I go on an online auction platform, or on like Amazon when I go to buy something, if I scroll down at the bottom, it says, “Hey, people buy this with these other two things all the time and they recommend a kit, right?” That's basically advertising.
Then you scroll down even further—matter of fact, I was on it yesterday and I went in and typed “classic rock vinyl.” because I'm a collector of '70s classic rock records. And I read down and it shows at the bottom of the page, there's paid ads right below it from sponsored ads where people are paying to make their auction or their product show up.
So not only do we have the ability to, as you mentioned, dynamically generate these ads that can be used and served up in either a paid and or a retarget. We haven't even visited retargeted ads yet, but we can serve that up. We can also allow people that are putting every type of auction up to pay additional money to have their auction featured on the home page or have their auction automatically be promoted for the final two weeks before a huge estate auction, they'd probably be willing to pay an extra whatever the number is, let's say a few hundred dollars or a grand. If it's $50,000 or $100,000 worth of stuff, do you think they'd be willing to pay an extra grand for us to market the heck out of it the last two weeks before the auction? Sure they would.
The ability to have advertising and sell advertising and additional promotional capabilities within the eAuction platform is where I also think there's a huge market and capability that we offer here.
CHRIS: I agree. And it's really interesting because, as you get into scaling an auction platform, you really want it to be able to compete with some of the bigger players that are out there. And that's where having this “synergistic feeding on itself” type of model, where we're able to dynamically generate ads, dynamically generate retargeting, be able to make it easy for you to manage and promote, make it easy for sellers to manage and promote.
And then—like you're talking about inside of the platform itself—we need to make it easy for sellers to be able to promote themselves. And there's some really interesting aspects of this. A lot of folks that are not familiar with paid advertising, they may not be aware that most paid advertising platforms nowadays, they have quality as a major aspect of their decision making. Just as you need high-end web design, you need high end ad design.
It's not just about how much you pay for an ad, it's a non-linear equation with how much you pay, because they're incorporating quality. So you actually have to pay exponentially more if you don't have high-quality advertising. This makes a lot of sense if you think about their objective, which is serving their users well in order to pay less and get better results, which every business owner wants to do, you have to have better quality.