We recently had the chance to catch up with Tom McGovern, CEO of Snap.com. Snap is like search for the right-brained, featuring visual search results next to the traditional listed text. Snap’s visual display data, aka “fast browsing”, helps users find what they’re looking for with greater accuracy than text-only pages. Check out their site to find out more about “why snap is better.”
Snap has gotten a lot of press thanks to a hefty round of VC funding in 2005 — including a feature in Time Magazine’s “50 Coolest Websites of 2006″. But, regardless of rave reviews, Snap is a tiny engine in a very competitive market. To differentiate themselves beyond visual results, Snap has also adopted an advertiser-friendly paid search model, incorporated behavioral data into search results, taken extra pains to perfect site usability, and launched a huge user-generated/viral marketing campaign.
Tom McGovern filled us in on the details…
RM: Google, Yahoo and MSN account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. How does Snap plan to carve a niche for itself in such a competitive market?
TM: Snap competes on the basis of a differentiated product – both for users as well as advertisers. For users, Snap offers a totally different search experience: fast visual results and a user interface that is very easy to use. This appeals to a segment of the market which is not satisfied with the status quo and wants a richer, more visually oriented experience. We also offer a radically different advertiser experience with risk-free Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing model combined with a very powerful advertising environment. For advertisers who appreciate the pay-for-performance philosophy, we offer a great alternative.
RM: One of Snap’s key features is its behavioral ranking algorithm and customized search through User Contributed Ratings. Such a degree of functionality requires extensive data collection and user profiling. In the past year, Google, Yahoo and MSN have each been involved in a number of court cases that requested access to their user data. Google, most notably, has denied all requests to date, citing the privacy rights of their users. As a search engine that will presumably hold large amounts of user information, do you have a policy on data sharing, or for addressing privacy concerns?
TM: First, I think they would have to lock me up before I turned over our users’ data to the Government. Second, with respect to inadvertent leaks I want to make it clear that we too highly regard our users’ privacy and have measures and processes to protect from that occurring. All of the user click-stream data is managed in a secure environment with all the individually identifiable data removed – meaning there are no names or personally specific data attached to the behavioral data we use. The data is then processed to aggregate the information and distilled which allows us to separate the web ham from the web spam and used in our ranking algorithms. As a result of this processing, there would be no way for this data to be useful to outside sources.
RM: Snap offers advertisers a less traditional, but perhaps more forward-thinking, ‘cost-per-action’ payment model. Could you tell us a little more about how placement works, your incentives for adopting this model, and how it compares to more traditional pricing?
TM: Our Cost-Per-Action model allows advertisers to pay only for the desired action (for example, an action could be a sale, a lead, a subscription, a download, etc.) they select. If you’re a mortgage broker, for example, you may want to generate a qualified lead and are willing to pay $X for that lead. For a magazine, it might be a subscription. In each case, the advertiser determines what the desired action is; to pay either a fixed amount of a variable percentage; and what the landing page/creative will be. There are many advantages to this approach for advertisers:
- You don’t have to pay for what you don’t get. No matter how many impressions you get, or how many clicks you get, with Snap you only pay if you receive the desired outcome;
- Our CPA pricing model greatly reduces the click fraud currently associated with traditional CPC advertising; and
- our visual display of search results creates a very powerful selling environment for advertisers as well because each of their landing pages is viewed irrespective of whether a user takes an action. This means that we reward advertisers who develop persuasive landing pages.
RM: Speaking of advertising, you ran a user-generated promo campaign awhile back in which you appealed to the general public for viral marketing ideas. Did you implement any of the ideas, and if so, were they successful?
TM: Our “Other way to Launch Contest” was both fun and successful. During the contest, there was quite a bit of dialog amongst the Blogosphere about the contest and Snap. More than 1100 blogs linked to us and more than 30,000 people visited our blog alone. As you can imagine, we received a wide range of ideas from the grand to the granular. We were really, really impressed with how much time and effort entrants put into their ideas. We used variations of several of the submitted ideas. For example, one entrant developed a very comprehensive plan on how to embrace the MySpace community, as it’s a burgeoning group of search users. So in the last month we actually hired him to implement his plan and launched a Snap profile on MySpace.
RM: You have a pretty cool shopping beta set up with Smarter.com. Are you planning any more beta search tools with any of your other sponsors (Snap/SimplyHired job search perhaps)? If not, what plans do you have for the future?
TM: We are always open to new and interesting Search Mashups so to speak. We do have a number of enhancements to the current Snap product in the works and are very excited about releasing them in the near future. One of which is our new Firefox2 search plug-in which also works with Flock (a Firefox variant that we really like). We think the user community (and social networks) add a great deal of value to any one persons search experience and will be working with some of these services and communities in the future to enhance the Snap search experience.
Thanks for having me…
