Everything You Wanted to Know about Black Holes
On launching the latest phase of its Google Adwords advertising service, Google allowed that its new "content targeted advertising" might generate "slightly lower" clickthrough rates than search keyword advertising. Slightly? Holy guacamole, that might just win the next Search Engine Watch Award for Biggest Understatement of 2003.
In more than a few cases, the CTR's for content targeted ads are so abysmally low as to be scarcely measurable. I just peeked in on a friend's long-running ad group that had a modest, but respectable, CTR of 0.8%, and which therefore generated a healthy number of daily clicks (around 60 per day at about 0.18 per click). The content targeted ads for the same group had a CTR of 0.0125%. That is, one in 8,000 viewers of the ad clicked on it. In all, three people clicked on the content-targeted ad today, generating a total of 0.15 in revenue for Google. Whoa, back up the dumptruck.
Did Google fail to take adequate account of the very different dynamic of content-targeted advertising when they ran a limited pilot program last fall? Could it be... could it be!?!!?... that small text-based ads work well when people are in search mode, but very poorly in skyscraper creative next to content, to the extent that those AWFUL, INTRUSIVE, BLINKING ANNOYING GIANT CREATIVES we love to hate are actually more effective than Google's inobtrusive little text ads (the ones my clients know and love because search engine users actually click on them about 1% of the time, on average)?
Hey, Google, these things are showing up on someone else's web site, not yours. Why not make the ads flash and stuff? Or generate some nice popunders? What's it to you if they lose a few readers? Just kidding, I know you'd never do this. Next thing they know people would be calling you a "media company." Bad enough that you already stand accused of being a portal.
I'd expect Google to make quiet, restrained efforts to paper over these embarrassing stats by expanding the content targeting program to places where higher CTR's may be expected, such as, perhaps, email newsletters. Time will tell. If worst comes to worst, they can indoctrinate all of the users of the free version of Blogger into a new "product placement" scheme where they work Adwords ads "naturally" into their posts.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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