Published rating agencies of contextual advertising from CMS Magazine

Hi, Habr! Usually we do not write about the rating products of our colleagues, but then we decided to make an exception. Analytical portal CMS Magazine has just published a new rating of contextual advertising agencies .

There are two reasons why we decided to write about it in our blog on Habré. First, despite the huge variety of ratings on the digital market (the full list can be viewed on our Ruvard ), the contextual advertising segment was ignored for a long time - it clearly lacked a sensible rating product. The second - a rather original methodology was chosen to build the charts - companies and their employees are certified in the two most popular systems: Direct and Google Adwords.

So, the top ten agencies of the chart:
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1. Blonde.ru
2. Icontext
3. ArrowMedia
4. iMedia
5. World of Advertising
6. ADLABS
7. MediaGuru
8. Webcom media
9. Demis group
10. NIKA

A complete list of agencies can be found on the official website . And we will try to give some of our own comments on the results:

Advantages of the technique:

• The presence of certificates at the company itself and a large number of certified employees have an obvious correlation with the level of quality of services provided to the customer. Of course, a specialist with a certificate is not necessarily better than a specialist without him - but on average this statement is true. Binding to quality, and not to PR activities or turnovers, provides great practical value for the end customer.
  
  
• The technique showed quite a representative result - the majority of large and significant players got into the ranking at high places. Thus, the “semantic” verification of post-factum suggests that such an approach is quite acceptable.

The disadvantages of the technique:

• If comparing and linking to quality at the level (there are many certificates - there are no certificates at all) are quite obvious, then a more subtle distribution of places looks less logical.
  
  If the goal of the rating is to show the quality of services, then a company of 10 people with 10 certificates should be higher than a company of 100 people with 15 certificates. Therefore, it would be interesting to analyze the proportion of certificates according to the number of companies. Well, in general, the thesis that 26 certificates are better than 25 for large numbers smoothly stops working.
  
  If the goal of the rating is to show the size and scale of the business, then the “certification” metric is not very relevant in principle.
  
  
• The methodology is quite at risk of cheating in the future. It's no secret that agencies are able to make remarkable efforts to have a good place in the popular rating. Setting a goal to get as many per capita certificates as possible in a year is not so difficult (and even useful in some places).

As often happens with ratings - there are pros and cons - and there is always a reason for a holivor. But a rather important point is the fact of the appearance of such a product in the contextual advertising segment. In any case, this increases the transparency of the market, initiates discussions about “how to” - and ultimately brings significant benefits.