Conduit's Focus: Getting Your Visitors to Come Back

"It takes a huge effort to build an online presence, and another huge effort to get people to find your site," notes Adam Boyden, President of Conduit. "But the real problem is how do you get them to come back to your site of their own free will?"

That's where, according to Boyden, Conduit comes in.

Since its launch in 2005, the company says its free, customizable toolbar has been adopted by some 200,000 publishers worldwide who collectively reach an estimated 60 million users. The publishers range from giants like Univision and MLB.com, to women's networks like iVillage and the Army Wife Network, to tiny Mom and Pop operations operating in virtually every corner of the planet (except East Asia -- more on that in a minute).

"The variance among publishers continues to amaze me," says Boyden. "You'd never imagine most of the sites even existed. The fragmentation of the market into micro-segments is frankly stunning. And this has enormous implications for marketers."

Earlier this year, the company launched Conduit Open, which enables its publishers to access each other's content and traffic via a Conduit Marketplace.

"We are in the process of tying all of these publishers, the vast majority of which are quite small, together," Boyden explains. "With a button they can now submit or access content in the marketplace...It is very popular; so far, 40 percent of all the publishers who have joined Conduit since we launched Conduit Open have signed up for it. We are seeing much faster adoption than I was expecting, frankly..."

This concept of a dynamic toolbar, with frequently updating content and functionality is a far cry from the static toolbar model of even a few years ago.

"It is a dynamic marketing tool. You can change your content frequently at the control panel on the publisher's page at Conduit."

The company has had a harder time getting its existing users to upgrade their toolbars, however. "We're trying to educate our existing publishers," says Boyden. "Under the old model, you just created a toolbar and then you were done. Now, clever publishers are realizing updating content and functionality increases the chance that customers will return to your site and do the things you want them to do there."

The Conduit platform is free -- both to publishers and end users -- but Boyden says that his privately held company is profitable due to one little monetizable piece of real estate embedded in every toolbar -- the Google Search box. "That's how we make money, off of search."

Which brings us back to the three major countries where Conduit doesn't have much penetration -- Japan, China, and Korea -- places where "Google is comparatively weak," as Boyden notes.