ClickZ Plans Site to Analyze Trial Ad Campaigns

ClickZ, a site that provides daily information and advice for Web advertisers, said it is planning to launch a companion site that will be focused on “the art of the buy, excellence in Internet ad execution.”

Andy Bourland, publisher of Andover, MA-based ClickZ, said the company recently bought Microscope at PScentral.com, one of the original sites on the Net focused on Internet advertising.

Microscope has been doing weekly banner reviews, but Bourland plans an upgrade to launch real trial ad campaigns, then report on the results.

“We’ll have a guest media buyer every week who will execute an actual ad campaign,” Bourland said. “We’ll tap their brains and find out how they make the decisions they do and see what kind of results come of it. Visitors to the site can then discuss their thoughts about how that campaign could or should have been conducted.”

“It’s one thing to judge a banner from a creative standpoint, and that’s useful to a certain extent,” he said in an article on ClickZ. “But I am more interested in the execution of a banner campaign. How can a media buyer take a set of creative and execute a campaign based on a particular set of objectives, whether that means branding, traffic building, sales, etc? How do they select sites, targeting and filtering criteria, etc? What is the decision-making process?”

Inaugural issue for the new Microscope is scheduled for Jan. 26.