Today Google is announcing the wider availability of Google Gadgets in ad format, something that has been in testing for months. Several advertisers are cited as happy beta partners, including Intel, Six Flags, and a fizzy beverage company. Labels: contextual ads
They're considered "non-traditional ad units with rich, interactive capabilities." Google further explains that you might want to think of these as "mini versions of your website" in any AdSense ad size.
At this early stage, I wonder if the poster examples - Pepsi, Intel, Six Flags - really make the most sense as "gadget oriented" or "widget oriented" players.
Also, positioning widgets/gadgets as paid ads puts a new spin on something that no doubt cropped up in the grassroots as a tactic for viral marketing. I come up with a widget that gives your website something unique & cool, like relevant content or a customizable toy of some sort... your users enjoy themselves... I get traffic and brand awareness in return.
The new math would be: I as a creator of said unit have to rely less on the compellingness of the widget/gadget to your user base, because now I'll be willing to actually pay you to put it there. Where does Google come in? Well, they have a content network, so they're facilitating the distribution of the ads, as usual.
Recall, flash and video ads were already part of the AdSense menu. So a gadget takes it up another level - offering custom functionality of some sort.
There are editorial policies governing Google Gadget Ads. These include "not exceeding 50% utilization of a user's computer" through things like "heavy animation sequences."
More to come on this.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Monday, July 30, 2007
Somewhat submerged in the news about Wikia acquiring Grub to move forward with an open-source-flavored search project to rival Google is the news that Google lost the contextual ad contract with Wikipedia powered sites to non-rival LookSmart, who now offers a contextual ad product. Labels: contextual ads, looksmart, wikia
Household name, publicly traded, with at least a few million dollars left to burn, and now with a toe in the door of a multibillion dollar business long chased by the top players. You might think: if a startup wanted a quick fast track towards further development of its upstart ad network, why not engineer a reverse takeover of LookSmart, change the name of the company, restructure, and let the good times roll? If nothing else, LOOK still has a sizeable database of advertisers. It probably has some handy buildings and lease agreements that figure to be underutilized unless someone figures something out soon.
Evidently, this kind of deal isn't imminent, as no one is making any suggestions of anything of the sort. Even with bubbling news, LOOK strains to trade 100,000 shares in a day. The company releases Q2 earnings later this week.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Monday, June 04, 2007
Today Yahoo! announced quality-based pricing for clicks coming from distribution partners in the sponsored search and content match programs. Similar in intent and implementation to Google's "Smart Pricing," it will automatically discount a publisher's click revenue (and the amount the advertiser pays for that click) by "a certain percentage" based on traffic quality as measured by conversion rates and other factors. Labels: content targeting, contextual ads, yahoo search marketing, ysm
This systematizes the same process that has taken place with interactive ads for years: advertisers run tests, find out which sites convert well, and reprice their offers when they re-order, lowballing the low quality publishers.
My take:
This is a much-needed initiative for Yahoo!. Although it will initially dampen revenue, it will put Yahoo's relationship with advertisers on a solid foundation, allowing for future growth. I've witnessed first hand the slow increase in the ROI graph on Google's content network, to the point where we now feel confident bidding on this inventory in almost every advertiser account (although still lower than we bid for search inventory, usually). Smart Pricing has been an important part of this picture, as blunt an instrument as it may seem to some publishers. It's worth noting that by taking away ill-gotten revenue from bad publishers, these networks can afford to pay out better to quality publishers.
This initiative will further cramp click arbitrageurs' style, though not all forms of arbitrage will be negatively impacted, because not all publishers are part of the same content network (did you know that?) so different rules might apply. That being said, these distribution partners that are classified as falling under "sponsored search" appear to be subject to the new quality-based pricing; however, nothing some select partners won't be whitelisted or made exempt from the policy.
One possible criticism of such policies (I called this an "actuarial" approach to content pricing when Google rolled it out 38 months ago) is that it's a way of blunting criticisms of fraud-prone distribution partners without actually offending the partner network by taking direct action. In other words, it's an abdication of past responsibility for click fraud in the network, while trying to quietly rectify the problem. A further indication of a gradual acceptance of responsibility for the quality of the partner network is in point 17 of the FAQ's: "Although we do not currently offer the ability for advertisers to opt-out of particular sources of traffic, this is a feature that we plan to begin offering later in 2007." Good thing, because for some partner traffic, as far as many advertisers are concerned, the only smart price is zero.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Monday, May 07, 2007
Google, you do realize you zoned and built this neighborhood, don't you? Labels: click arbitrage, contextual ads, google adsense
What you get when you search for "Google AdSense" -- (ok minus the spray paint):
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
A few weeks before the recent announcement that Google is buying DoubleClick, DoubleClick announced it'll be developing a "NASDAQ-like exchange" for the buying and selling of online advertising. Proof positive that the online ad space continues to heat up, rather than diving into an irrational "bust" as in 2000-2003. Labels: anand subramanian, content targeting, contextual ads, contextweb, doubleclick, google, jay sears
Wait a minute, though, you may be saying. Aren't ad networks and the way ads are bought and sold today somewhat "market-like"?
Not as much as you might think. Check out Google's current contextual offerings, for example. As a publisher, do you think you can signal to the advertiser using an "ask" price? Do you have much control at all if you join one of the various ad networks and let their system allocate inventory, as opposed to using your own inside sales force? Nope. And what about the ability to stand out as a quality publisher amidst the crowd of remnant type inventory? Again, tough to do. So, tough to monetize to your fullest potential. Because the current market maker is not facilitating a true market. In that sense, DoubleClick's new promised offering, and Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, could constitute a significant step forward in online advertising efficiency.
DoubleClick won't be the only one working on a great way of putting online ad buyers and sellers together. ContextWeb, quietly licensing its matching technology since 2000, and more recently, acting as a media middleman in its own right, is working on a new "name your price" functionality in a new, highly automated ad marketplace system. I had the chance to walk through a demo yesterday with CEO Anand Subramanian and VP of Business Development Jay Sears. While the release isn't slated for a couple of months, publishers are already being targeted for a beta signup. The hook, "Ready to Make More Money than AdSense?," is not new to publishers, admits Subramanian. "Typically a publisher will become dissatisfied with their AdSense earnings, will install code from a competing network, but that will be even worse, so it's right back to AdSense," he says. But that's because these competing networks don't present a credible alternative. They represent the old school of what ContextWeb calls "Yet Another Ad Network," with fewer features, not a true marketplace, and no critical mass of buyers and sellers.
The company won't yet disclose the full range of features of its new system. To me, it seems to address the combined needs of advertisers and publishers very well, leaving neither the "prime inventory" nor the "long tail" unaddressed. ContextWeb's quiet long-term presence in the space seems to have given the company a wealth of ideas. A decent revenue stream from its current agency relationships, plus venture funding from, among others, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has given them the long view needed to build a better platform.
If you're a publisher of quality content, here's hoping the days of "Yet Another Ad Network" will soon be a thing of a past in your balance sheet.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Friday, April 13, 2007
At Search Engine Strategies New York this week I had the opportunity to model a panel on the latest with buying contextual ads with particular focus on the top contextual programs through Google, Yahoo, IndustryBrains, and a couple of others. Labels: click arbitrage, content targeting, contextual ads, search engine strategies, ses new york
One of the most fascinating was by a major cable television network that uses low-cost, broadly-based terms to drive traffic keying on all kinds of current pop culture related content. It's an actively managed campaign that requires constant innovation to stay ahead of the curve. What's so interesting about it is how cost-effective this is as a way of generating buzz, if you get the tone right. It's basically using online media to deflect user attention back into the media vortex, in a subtle manner.
The two main economic benefits stated by the panelist were:
* Low-cost awareness-building for their flagship hit programs;
* Traffic arbitrage, sometimes breaking even or better on the ad inventory they show on their own sites.
Let me repeat that again. In a world where we've suddenly been conditioned to believe that PPC arbitrage is wrong, this marketing executive unabashedly admitting to doing it.
This paralleled my own presentation the same week, on how Google currently measures site and landing page quality. In short, I wanted to make clear that you could technically call a lot of the media companies advertising on Google "arbitragers," because they know the rough CPC's and effective CPM's on their ad campaign with Google, and they know the rough payback on an impression basis from their already sold inventory. So in fact the distinction is not a literal one, where you point a finger at someone making a profit on a media buy/sell and call it evil; rather, Google's quality scoring formula aims to disincentivize certain advertisers from offering deceptive or particularly annoying user experiences as defined by user input and user behavior. In an upcoming column I'll look more at the distinctions between "arbitrage," "nearbitrage," and "garbitrage."
In short, to have an exec admitting to arbitrage is not scandalous. If they have advertising on their site, and are buying ads to drive to that site, anyone could have figured it out anyway. That's what they're doing. As a bonus, they get cheap promotion for their TV lineup. And some publishers get paid too. Win-win-win.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Wednesday, April 11, 2007
You know you're doing something right when a speaker hanging out in the green room here at SES NYC unplugs his laptop and wanders over to show a fellow marketer a marketing campaign, as sort of a 15-second case study. This Coffee Fool appears to be a fairly heavy user of contextual advertising at the moment, showing up adjacent to GMail and such. (Not a really surprising semantic match given that you probably type a lot of messages like "meet for coffee?" in email.) Labels: coffee, content targeting, contextual ads, google adwords
I'm not sure what "coffee secrets" are really "exposed," but hey.
Disclaimer: I don't endorse or know much about their marketing methods. I don't know the company. I just noticed them.
Very important disclosure: I was not paid to post this!
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Monday, February 26, 2007
Seth Godin wonders whether media buyers are right to pull ads off Google's and Yahoo's contextual networks because of how loosey-goosey they are with their approach to placement -- they match ads to pages, rather than allowing the advertiser "channel control." Labels: content targeting, contextual ads, google, google adsense, long tail, quigo, seth godin, yahoo
While it's true that Y!&Goog would benefit from better sites joining their networks, I agree with Seth that being so afraid to show your ads on "Joe Schmo's Sports site" could be doing the client a disservice.
I thought we already had this debate. In the early going, lot of us were critical of the contextual ad programs for a number of reasons - mine was simply the poor performance, fraudulent or crapulent publisher partners, etc. Others in the biz, with more of an agency bent (and most likely to cheer for Quigo, Sprinks, etc.), demanded that Google's content targeting allow more direct control of what websites ads show up on, as opposed to forcing advertisers to accept the open-ended "smart matching" concept that used semantic technology to match ads with content.
So... first Google responded with site exclusion. Then, they released a site-targeted flavor of content targeting, in a parallel program. That as a direct response to these agency-style demands. Site targeting allows you to browse a menu of sites, add them to your list, and only show your ads on them.
I monitored ads running in both flavors for several months. A funny thing happened: the old "flawed" content targeting program got better, and my approach to managing those campaigns improved. The ROI came in line with search. Meanwhile, nothing on the "site targeting" side was converting. The performance was much worse.
At a couple of conference presentations I guessed that this is in part because computers do a lot better job of matching my ads against a million potential candidate pages than I possibly can in scanning down a list of 50 so-so potential publisher targets. You settle on 20 or so of these sites, then become obsessed with spending the full budget on just those. They convert poorly, so you've overspent on this handful of websites. That's a fairly typical scenario.
In short, because of computers aiding in the matching, classic content targeting offers more efficiency, as the systems get perfected.
Seth, both the intuition and the data point towards there being nothing inherently wrong with Google's approach to matching ads with content. No, the program isn't perfect, but placing high-CPM ads on big brand sites just because I want to appear respectable isn't exactly a challenge. It's more of the same: take too much of the client's money, and waste it, and claim the blue-chippiness of that approach as a benefit.
Both approaches -- the finicky put-me-only-here approach, and the "ROI-or-else" approach -- work in the marketplace. For very different reasons. Funnily enough, Google now offers two parallel programs to suit different ad buying constituencies, and are working on rolling out multiple ad products down the road, to keep everyone happy.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Search Engine Land has it. Expect more Google announcements re: click transparency in the near future. Labels: content targeting, contextual ads, google adsense, google adwords
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007
At least one panelist (David Szetela) on the Ad Program Strategies: Compare and Contrast panel here at SES London, argued that while he liked the control of Google's Site Targeted flavour of content targeting, he wasn't so fussy about the CPM-based pricing model. Labels: content targeting, contextual ads, cpm, google adwords, paid search
Coincidentally, today Google is announcing that they're beta testing a CPC-based version of Site Targeting, so advertisers who like the idea of paying by the click (that's pretty much anyone who is used to PPC as it's implemented in the rest of your account, and on YSM and MSN adCenter too) can do so.
Seems like advertisers just don't like switching to CPM-based thinking inside of a CPC-oriented platform.
Related Traffick posts:
Note, even if we go entirely over CPC's, it's always a snap to track the associated cost in CPM, if you're into apples to apples comparisons. In previous posts I had argued that even in traditional CPC-based content targeting, some of my favorite campaigns were successful precisely because of the price - which was effectively about $0.25 CPM.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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