Not only the ads will show on google and the search result of their partner, but now the ads can be show on other websites also, such as HowStuffWorks, Weather Underground, and Blogger.
Yes, now we, sort of, know why Google buy Blogger.
What do you think? And have anybody see the ads in other websites? One topic in Google Adwords forum mentioned about the ads showing on Sourceforge.
Maybe this'll introduce a new verb, degoogle as in "Look how much easier this site is for a blind person now it's been degoogled".
How long until google is added to host files and other ad-blockers like other advertising providers?
If you would like Google to serve ads targeted to your content pages, please email content-channel@google.com.
So is anybody signing up for this one?
As i said before I emailed for more information about hosting ads too.
Scott
Anyway, I will take the free clicks for now :) and decide on the sydication options once we have some stats to play with.
It would also be nice if I could just drop content driven for particular adgroups instead of having to do the whole campaign. If I was setting up my adwords as new I could fix it so that the ads that I didn't think would work on content could be a one campaign and the rest in another but its too late for that now for me. I am not going through all the work of rearranging for this.
If my ROI drops too much, I will have to abandon the whole content driven thing.
It will be interesting to learn what kind of criteria they accept sites on - will it only be high quality/traffic sites? The blogs aspect implies they're going low quality, mass market, in which case they'll be pushing the ads everywhere.
It's also good news for the main Google site I think - if they can generate much of their income away from google.com and keep the core search unchanged I think that's big relief all round - far better than a home page more cluttered with My Google, Google Email, Google Web Hosting..
and I think a far better business model.
* I went to a few friends' blogs on blogspot and saw these new ads on 2 of the 3 blogs.
* I saw one of these text ads on Slashdot yesterday, in the place where Slashdot normally has banner ads. I reloaded Slashdot a few more times this morning and saw another one.
* http://pagead.googlesyndication.com/robots.txt blocks the URL ads are served from. This suggests that these ads will not affect rank on non-Google engines with pagerank-like algos.
* The new ads could have been designed to look like the familiar Adwords boxes from Google search, but instead each ad is two lines (one line for the link, one for all the ad text). The URL of the site is not displayed on the ads. Because the ads look significantly different from Adwords boxes, they don't have the visual pull that Adwords-like ads earned from the relevancy of Adwords ads. Maybe Google is reserving the Adwords-box look for search ads because those ads are better targeted. Or maybe I'm the only person whose eyes are immediately drawn to anything that looks like an Adwords ad.
* These ads suffer from the same javascript bug as Adwords boxes. Shift+clicking in IE or Phoenix (open link in new window), or Ctrl+clicking in Phoenix (open link in new tab), both loads the ad URL in a new window/tab and replaces the current page with the ad URL. This annoys me because I Ctrl+click links when I don't want to unload the current page. It probably also makes my click count as two clickthroughs. This could be fixed in the browsers (e.g. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151142 ), and I'm not sure whether to consider it a Google bug or an IE/Mozilla bug.
Questions:
* Will these links affect Google rank?
* When someone clicks one of these links to your site, what referrer to you see in your logs? Does the referrer start with pagead.googlesyndication.com?
* Will this affect clickthrough limits? If Adwords requires 0.5% clickthrough, I'm barely getting 0.5% on search ads, and my ads do more poorly when shown on blogspot than when shown on search pages, will Google continue showing my ads on search pages?
Are Premium Ads going to be left behind?
After all, I would bet that 5 small text ads in a neat column will get a LOT more clicks than one big ugly flashing GIF...
Depending on the revenue share and other criteria for partnership, it may even mean that any large site can do a MyWay.com and go "pure text" for its advertising...
Where's the relevancy? The quality? I know it's difficult to be judgemental, but if it's all or nothing, and you onlt really want AOL plus Google you may get a whole pile of other traffic on a CPC basis because of inflexibility in the system.
The hung jury is now 7:5 against.
Has anyone found these adwords in a place where they are really relevant?
-=KRIS=-
They dont have competitors as most of the related websites would be additional useful information for thier users.
Remember these are targetted conent ads, not targetted SEO padding ads! ;)
The more i think about it, the more i think this will we be a great development for the web. Content orientated websites will get revenue from non intrusive ads. Business websites will get advertising on relevant sites through targeted ads, advertising on the SERPs and advertising on Froogle.
All Google are doing is protecting their original business aim to offer quality search results.
They are doing it by giving SEOs and webmasters a cost effective way to legitimately market their sites (ie, and not spend all their time trying to second guess Google's algo).
Instead of battling spammers, they are offering a more effective source of revenue for them, thereby protecting the quality of their index.
Naturally some will still spam, but I would imagine a lot of multiple-keyword-stuffed-domain-hidden-text-mass-email-spammers will find targeting marketing much more cost effective and low risk (especially as Google are making it incredibily simple for them...). ;)
IMHO anyway
Scott
http://www.mySite.com/?dist=google if the click came from google
http://www.mySite.com/?dist=content if the click came from a content partner
2) Neither Google or Overture are first. Sprinks certainly has been doing content distribution for awhile. Sure they don't have no fancy algorithms to tell what the page is about and webmasters manually pick the query for a page, but they do have side-by-side comparison with search results.
With Sprinks content distribution has far lower ROI than search.
3) There is a huge difference between content distributors. Sites like Weather Underground generate mammoth numbers of short dwell pages. People come to the site every day to check their weather, know exactly where on the page to look, and only click ads if they are board.
Sites like HowStuffWorks that are content heavy have much longer dwell times and generate far more qualified clicks.
4) Hey how about letting us add little Ah-Ha or eSpotting style logos to content distribution?
5) Wonder who conducted Google's ROI study to determine the "on par" finding. Was it in-house or third party? What content sites generated the clicks? What products/services were sold that generated the revenue?
Obviously Google has strong incentives to find out these perform well, and I am weary of the findings. The study must have been pretty small and short in duration for it to fly beneath the radar. No way could it encompass an adequate range of websites or products.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust anyone to conduct such a study except for myself, and that would have to be during a sober period.
I don't disagree with you. I really like the concept that google is using here. But when I take into account the ads that I have seen so far (granted there haven't been that many) they are really not relevant to the pages that they are on.
So my question is, how does google choose what goes there. Why did so many of the pages I went to have ads for Greeting Cards (this is not an example... they actually had ads for greeting cards on them).
-=KRIS=-
Google identifies a page as being on a particular subject area > picks ads from that subject area.
Not too sure what's up with the greeting cards though? :) Perhaps they are placeholders that are being used until the ad programme takes off? Just there to bulk out the ad column?
Like the SERPs this venture is only going to take off if Google can place adverts that are relevant - both publishers and advertisers need to have this.
I would assume that the current state of play with adverts is still a bit buggy and is being ironed out - Beta testing, er, "try it for free" anyone? ;)
Given Google's history I don't think they would roll out a project like this if they weren't reasonably confident it would work well.
Scott
Early indications are that the conversion rate is a lot less on some of the headline campaigns we run for clients.
It's good that the impressions/CTR are not effecting the overall stuff during the trial period and it is very good we are getting it for nothing.
Have the issues with delays in reporting been permanently fixed? Surely all this extra processing power is going to add more strain to a system that has creaked a bit in the past few months under the burden.
I'm also less than comfortable with the concept of having ads appear on mom and pop web sites, but maybe it will jsut take a bit of time for it to slot in.
At least I've found out how to turn it off, so the trial can end if we don't like it and go back to things as we are now.
Everybody was speculating high and low about hyper advanced new relevancy coming from analyzing blogs, and they just wanted a new ads product?
Still though, they have a head count and directions to all the bloggers that participate. If there was an opportunity to exploit more relevancy out of this whole thing then they have the means to do it.
If this is the case it would remind me of "link exchange". Just that you are trading money instead of clicks...the result is the same though...more clicks.
Google = Content-Targeted Advertising
Overture = Contextual Advertising
Google = Implements first
Overture = Announces firt
##
(edited to add: thanks figment88 - i didn't catch your post before mine)
Actually, Sprinks introduced ContentSprinks & DirectSprinks months ago & has been using ContentSprinks on a network of decent distribution partners including: About.com (obviously), & the listings now run on (or will in the next week): iVillage, Earthlink, PlanetOut, c/net, Forbes, Marketwatch, Infobeat, etc.
Granted, Sprinks is far behind the capability & reach of Google/Overture, but let's at least give credit where credit is due for being first:)
In terms of ROI, agreed that you need to know a full list of distribution partners - and that's always been one of Sprinks issues, but there is some measurable ROI on many of the contentsprinks areas.
would be nice to see Google/Overture take the lead in accurately showing distribution.
[edited by: skiguide at 5:54 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2003]
Content orientated websites will get revenue from non intrusive ads. Business websites will get advertising on relevant sites through targeted ads, advertising on the SERPs and advertising on Froogle.
All Google are doing is protecting their original business aim to offer quality search results.
