Fastclick has been serving google ads to my site, Sailing Texas, for the past few days. A lot. Income has gone up 20-30%, which I like. They are paying $.65 CPM and clicks do not register in your fastclick statistics.
They are EXTREMELY well targeted, at least on my site, with ads relating to websites about sailing, boating or travel. A couple of comments on another board inferred that humor sites are not getting many ads. I'm getting a lot so far.
They are all just text with links to other sites, on a white background. What an idea, stands out like a sore thumb! Anybody know how to find out what the CTR is for these ads?
When clicked on they do not spawn a new window, they take the window your site is using.
So far I like them, they seem informative and relevant. They load fast and are not annoying. And they pay well, what more could you want? (is there a catch?)
When can we here from some advertisers using them? Are they working well?
Is Google on the stock market?
The addition of the FastClick alert might be something new based on posts there.
Boy-oh-boy dynamic URLs on AOL suddenly get fixed after I gripe here, now adwords on FastClick get changed. I think I'm going to have to invoice Google for Product Management Consulting and pay WebMasterWorld a finder's fee.
They are EXTREMELY well targeted
The ads I've seen seem to be targeted on a page-by-page basis. My site is devoted to cooking and recipes, and I have seen ads that are related to the ingredients on a particular page (hot chile peppers, coconut milk, etc.)
I wonder if it's necessary to be well indexed by Google in order to get the Google/Fastclick ads on your site. How else would Google know what the page is about. Interesting, and smart!, use of their index.
Brian here from Awesome Chef, yes I too have the ads running. Also very targeted with links to cooking and chef related products and sites. This looks nice as it will increase my cpm income as you mentioned. Looks good ;-)
Brian
It is almost like having an automatic google search on the page. I wonder if all the links they use are to paid advertisers? Will the sites that are just on the net and not paying google also be shown?
Will the sites that are just on the net and not paying google also be shown?
Maybe . . . when pigs fly? I seriously doubt it, the point seems to make money for Google (and webmasters showing the ads on their site). Like Seinfeld would say: not that there's anything wrong with that!
Traditional banner network FastClick has begun running Google text ads through it's network.
actually,
Traditional banner network FastClick has begun running Google text ads through its network.
The other threads above examined things from an advertiser/webmaster perspective, so I'm glad to see site owners talking about this. The program is already really good, and expect the ads to get even more relevant over time. I don't think anyone but Google has the technology to pull this off--I'm glad that the ads are working well for you!
Maybe you can charge enough for this to return us to $5 CPM!
I'm still curious whether or not sites that do not pay Google are ever included? If they were, it would make the results even more relevant and helpful. And more believeable.
Would this explain the Mediapartners-Google/2.1 spider hits?
As an advertiser, someone else pointed out on the other thread that content ads are worth only about 40% of search ads. I think that's a pretty good rule-of-thumb. I'd probably even add that I wouldn't want to pay anymore than a certain amount per click (approx $0.25) for even my highest margin terms. There is just too much accidental clicks (esp. with skyscrapers), curiosity clicks, webmaster clicks, etc.
As a site owner, there might be some isolated cases like the recipe guy, but for the most part why would I want "relevent" ads? Most of these are competitors. What I really want are complimentary ads. For example, I run a site on bond investing maybe I want ads for stock investing sites, but certainly not for other bond investing sites.
For the site I'm showing google ads via fastclick, I also have category chaser links from searchfeed. For the category chasers, I get to choose the category, make them look like the rest of my site with css, get paid per click, and evaluate bid levels before putting them on my site. I get $0.65/cpm from google and ~$0.08/click from search feed with a ~4% ctr which comes to ~$3.20/cpm.
To sum, google pays me 1/5 the amount to display ugly ads for my competitors.
In addition to being an advertiser and site owner, I also work as webmaster for a few sites. I'll save that viewpoint for later.
Surfers who knew might then be even MORE likely to click on a link, knowing that just maybe that site didn't pay a thing to be there. Only because Google knew it was just SO relevant it just HAD to put it there.
Eventually, Google will be able to tell which website we will want to go next, and place a link to that website on the page before we know we want to go there!
Who am I kidding, "eventually?", looks like it's happening right now.
Aside from that, no other complaints about the service.
I think it would be a great idea to add non paid adds as well but as long as there is an option to integrate this and have an on/off switch to be able to choose if you would like free or paid adds or both to appear.
Also, is there a way to integrate this into the Google toolbar?
Also, why not be able to have an option for advertising where one could insert an add at random for a certain charge per month? This would be cheaper than a regular subscription of sorts but maybe a way to (what I call convert) tempt a searcher searching for boats to see sites about random primary root directory type adds such as the outdoors/nature? or even web-design services
I will check this out, I manage a large add campaign for a head-hunter firm and have not seen any data on the add-words page showing click through data for this new service, did this start today? I thought it was going to be free for a while and then be charged after March 12 or so?
I'm a bit confused as I do not see these adds (clicks) on the page-views data on add-words. At least not since a check last night?
~Hollywood
As for the bots not caching, I've seen the bot:
Mediapartners-Google/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
come back as many as 16 times for the same URL.
Also seeing cases where it spiders the same URL from two different IP addresses at the same exact time (two hits in one second).
Have also seen the same URL hit twice at the same instant by the same IP.
Have also seen 4 or 5 IPs each with a different URL all come in at the exact same time.
I think that bot needs some tuning.
Googleguy, Applied Semantics also offers the similar technology which seems to work quite well with Overture results. And btw, there is another player I've been following with yet better technology still low profile, the kick is one server can support internet scale contextual insertions as good or better than google relevancy, light years ahead of google in terms of efficiency.
That ought to get them thinking, interesting post, maybe you can share more about this. I am very interested as well.
Can you talk about this a bit more? I am curious as to how Google could have some comp. on this.
~Hollywood.
Now Google needs to get to work on some sort of Micropayment scheme for webmasters. Everyone searches at google so imagine if in addition to adworks and regular free listings that listings also return paid sites that receive micropayments from google for each page view. These things could be listed under a separate section as well.
If people could deposit $5 and visit quality paid sites for 1 to 10 cents a page I think a new revenue method could emerge for everyone.
Ad networks aren't doing it and only the adult industry really has this sort of thing at the moment.
Hi tjcali,
Well, my site is Sailing Texas.
When I first saw the ads I thought, "geeze, this is going to draw people away from my site!". Since they don't spawn a new window my visitor would be GONE! But this has not happened, my traffic has actually gone up a bit since the google ads started. I'm glad I'm here during this developement, we'll see how much effect it has on the web.
Why is it when I look at the site, I am not sure I see the adds? Am I taking the wrong approach? Anyone?
I did a search on google for sailing texas, then saw the results and clicked on the link... nothing I can see?
~Hollywood
