I?m looking for detailed information about the average industry
standard Conversion Rate for content driven online advertisement (the
kind of text ads that you see at the bottom of a
CNN story) and to a lesser extent Search based advertisement (such as
the ads that you see when you run a search on Yahoo.

Provide AUTHORITATIVE support ffor this question and you will get a
$300.00 bonus. Read on for details.

I need documentation that says ?Conversion Rates for online
content based advertisements are X?.

This will of course need to be a much more detailed answer than this.
I will be looking for information as to what drives conversions rate,
specifically how conversion rates react when ads for relevant products
are placed along side relevant content. What happens as relevancy
falls? Do conversion rates fall? What are the best case scenarios and
worse case scenarios? Specific real life examples would be awesome.

Let me be clear on something though. I AM NOT LOOKING FOR DATA that
discusses Click Through Rates. I am specifically looking for
Conversion Rate data.

Here is an example of the difference of the two: 

Let?s say for discussion purposes that my company sells cat food. 

We currently run a collection of ads on Yahoo through their online
advertisement program. When somebody uses their search engine and
searches for ?Cat?s? or ?Cat Food? our ad appears. When they click on
the ad it then takes them to my site.

My Click Through Rate would be the percentage of users that Search for
Cats or Cat food and see my ad and then actually click on it.
Currently the actual daily click through rate for our ads for our real
product is about
2.8%. That means 2.8% of the people who see my ad actually click on
it.

My Conversion Rate would be the number of those people who wound up on
my site actually BUY Cat Food from me.  Our real life conversion rate
is about 1.5%. 1.5% of the people who wind up on our site buy our
product.

All of this however speaks to performance relative to Search based
advertisement or ads that peopel see when they are using a Search engine. 

What I am looking for is information on Content based
advertisements.

Content based ads are the type of ads that you see at the bottom of an
article in the New York Times Online (www.nytimes.com ) or CNN Online
(www.cnn.com ). The ads are syndicated by the major search engines
that offer online advertisement services such as Yahoo.

These ads are triggered by relevant content that surrounds them on the page.

For example Content driven ads would show ads for Home Loans when you
read an article on the New York Times about mortgage rates going up or
home sales slowing down or an ad for Cat Food when you read an article
about a lost cat.

Hopefully by this point you get the idea of what I am looking for.

The base fee will get paid for a detailed report, however I do not
think this is going to be that much work. There are lots of people
(supposed experts) in the industry that ?comment? on what they believe
 conversion rates are or should be.

It?s not that I am not interested in what qualified individuals have to say. I
am. If you can find real / accredited experts that talk about this
topic, I would love to have them be cited. In my mind a real expert
would be somebody like Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch or Andrew
Goodman of Page-Zero (www.Page-Zero.com )

The real trick however is going to be finding AUTHORITATIVE
documentation supporting all of this.

Thus I?m offering a $300.00 bonus for substantial AUTHORITATIVE
documentation on this topic.  An example of authoritative
documentation would be an organization such as the Interactive
Advertising Bureau (www.IAB.net ). I do not know of other applicable
organizations or I owuld list them. I am sure there are plenty though.

I do not believe IAB publishes this type of information but they are
the type of organization I would be looking for to provide this data
before I would pay out any bonus.

There are a collection of sites, mainly bulletin boards where you
could get started finding this information out.

My suggestions would be to take a look at these two sites to start.

Web Master World www.WebMasterWorld.com
Search Engine Watch www.SearchEngineWatch.com

Ok, that?s it. I don?t know that I can clarify this question any
further. Look forward to seeing a really great answer. It will be
money well spent.

Wow, a $300 bonus!

This I must see when the max tip on GA is only $100.

I did not know that a max tip was $100.00. I will change this if this is true.

Ok, now I've read the GA faq section and I can't find anything about a
max tip. So either thier is not a maximum tip that is allowed or it is
not published. Or, alternatively, you don't know what you are talking
about.

Either way, I am prepared to give up to $300.00 as a tip. If you do a
little research on my user name you will see that I have a history
with GA that substantiates my follow through on my tip offers.

I stand corrected. There is a max tip of $100.00 on GA. I  have not
seen my question published yet so I am going to repost it.