Archive for the 'Contextual Advertising' Category

The single biggest reason Yahoo! had to gut their search efforts was that they offered a syndication network with tons of fraudulent search distribution, and never let you opt out of it until 2010. It killed their click value and simply made it impossible for them to create enough yield on their core search traffic.

Google has long allowed advertisers to opt out of the content network and many search partners, and that has made their core market healthy. And given their efforts to detect fraud (and how smart pricing works on content websites) they have de-incentivized fraud to some degree. But now that content mills are being built, that trend may soon swing in the other direction.

With Demand Studio’s new revenue-sharing project, they encourage writers to share content with their relatives:

The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it. … Your family and friends are probably curious about what you are writing anyway. Send them links and invite them to take a look!

Given that authors are paid on revenue share, what is the chance that say 5% or 10% of them will also ask family members to click on the ads while viewing the page?

How could Google catch it?

You could say I am cynical, but human nature is predictable and many of the kinds of people who work for the content mills will do anything to make a Dollar. Laws exist to catch the bad actors, but when the publishers are encouraging the creation of distribution amongst friends & family and the party responsible is concealed from Google, the incentives are aligned against the interest of advertisers.

As fraud seeps in slowly, eventually it will become expected…either you engage in it, or your become an economically inefficient piece of the web – a relic. And most advertisers won’t know why their profits have dropped with the increasing number of clicks. Some will filter, but most of them will just lower their bids on the content network (or simply turn it off, as many did with Yahoo!), which in the end harms the legitimate publishers who run AdSense ads.

On one front they are stealing your content, and on the next they are destroying the value of the ads you carry. Like it or not, if you are an online publisher who depends on ad revenues it will impact you.

The incentivized publishers are pushing into the big money categories. Jason Calacanis outrageously suggested investing in people asking big money questions:

If I was a smart person I would INVEST in asking questions of high CPM value (i.e. mortgage, drugs, products, etc) and give them a nice M$3 tip. If you do that 33 times I’m betting you would make the M$100 back.

The suggestion of the free virtual currency flowing back and forth really highlights the end goal of such efforts. How long will it take advertisers to notice?

Outside of Mahalo & eHow, what other sites are engaging in the incentivized publishing programs? What sort of ROI have you seen from them? And how do you expect that to change going forward?

With Adwords bid prices going through the roof, and competition more fierce than ever, is it time to revisit the Google Content Network?

Google’s Content Network distributes PPC text and graphic advertising publishers sites, in the form of Adsense.

The content network differs from search PPC in that you aren’t bidding on search terms, at least not directly. You’re bidding to appear on certain sites that Google relates to groups of keyword terms. It’s the banner ad model, with a few clever tweaks to ensure relevance.

Why should advertisers pay any attention to the content network in 2010? Isn’t it rife with click fraud and under-performance?

Last year, Google released a study [PDF] showing the difference in performance between the two networks.

Turns out the CPA performance is pretty close:

“In November 2008, the median advertiser running on both the Search and Content Networks had a Content Network CPA
within approximately 2% of their Search Network CPA, suggesting that these advertisers were able to drive Content Network
conversions that were as cost-effective as Search Network conversions.”

Of course, Google would say that

However, the important metric in web advertising campaigns is ROI. If you achieve a good return, then some level of click fraud, garbage traffic and reduced control may not matter, especially when compared to the difference in click price on Google Search.

If your ROI is positive, you win. ROI is one of the key metrics you need to pay close attention to on the content network.

Besides having lower click prices, the content network also has extensive reach, appearing on millions of websites. The majority of web activity, by far, occurs at the content level.

As for issues such as fraud and low performance, the content network has certainly matured from where it was a few of years ago. Google do appear to be ironing our issues, and with better reporting, conversion is easier to both measure and retain.

Let’s take a look at how to approach advertising on the content network.

The Content Network – A Different Way Of Thinking

The advertiser picks a visitor demographic by grouping Adwords themes, as opposed to appearing under a particular keyword term. When people see your ads, it’s not because they are hunting for something specific, as signaled by a keyword search, they tend to be engaged in reading or browsing.

This fundamental quality requires that you use a different approach that you use in your PPC campaigns.

So, the first step is to split your campaigns between the search network and the content network, so you have a basis for comparison. Whilst it can be more work setting it up, the split allows you to test different wording and approaches on both networks.

A Strategy For The Content Network

Placement on third-party sites can be a little hit and miss.

Google’s algorithms try to figure out where best to place your ad and do so by crunching numbers based around historical performance of ads similar to yours.

It is reasonable to assume that Google rewards the ads that are clicked on the most.

You can hand-select sites, which is also a legitimate approach. However, you might end up making worse guesses than Google, who at least have some content network data to crunch.

With this in mind, one effective strategy is to cast a wide net, then refine your campaign once you have some data to work with. Let Google decide placement, no matter how weird and wonderful, monitor your data, then cut the losers and run with the winners.

Step One:

Download Google’s Adwords Editor, if you don’t have it already. You can also use your Google Adwords web-based account, but I find it easier to manage these campaigns with the desktop version.

Step Two:

Setup conversion tracking. Google Analytics is free to use, and there are various third-party tools available.

Step Three:

Open the Adwords Editor and import an existing Adwords campaign.

Step Four:

Change search network to “none”

Step Five:

Change content network to “anywhere on the network”

Step Six:

Set your daily budget. A good rule of thumb at this point is to slash your bidding by 50%.

You now have a basis for comparison of the content network vs your PPC campaign on the search network. It’s a good idea to separate the two different networks out, as you likely find your advertising needs tweaking in order to work well on the content network. We’ll look closer at this aspect shortly.

Step Seven:

Get rid of negative keywords, keyword bids and any other variable used to hone and optimize your Adwords PPC campaigns as these may affect your placement on the content network. You may end up having to replace some of the specific negative keywords with broader irrelevant keyword modifiers and themes.

One important aspect of placement on the content network is keyword themes. More on this shortly.

In this exploration phase, you want to cast a wide net as possible, as you may find good traffic in places you never considered, or knew existed. It matters little if that a site Google places you on doesn’t appear to be appropriate. That site may have the target demographic you’re looking for, and that target demographic may exist on a sub-page of that site that isn’t immediately obvious at first glance. Once you’ve had a chance to evaluate performance, you can then go through and optimize by removing sites.

Some people do it the opposite way, of course. They have certain sites in mind, and only target those sites. Both methods are legitimate. The advantage is that you retain tight control from the outset. The disadvantage, as noted above, is that you may miss lucrative traffic streams from sites you don’t know about.

Once you’ve got some data, you can run a third campaign on only the content sites that convert well. The bids for this campaign can be set higher.

Use Google’s Placement Algorithms To Your Advantage

Like with any Google algorithm, there is a lot of conjecture about exactly how Google decides where to place your ads.

Essentially, the same factors as Adwords apply, such as bid pricing and the relevance of ad text, with the addition of theme matching.

Google matches the theme of your adgroup to the theme of the content page on which it appears.

What this means in practice is that your should ensure your ad groups are tightly focused around a thematic idea. One way of doing this is to pay close attention to the terms Google associates with your keyword research in Google Keyword Tool and the ~ command i.e. place a ~ before your keyword search in Google to find associated terms.

For example, “Ford Mustang, Mustang, Used Mustang, Classic Mustangs” is an example of a tightly focused thematic group. “Cars, Sports Cars, American Cars”, less so. Google may place you on sites related to cars, but not specific cars, which may lower every positive metric relating to ad relevance.

Bidding occurs at the ad group level. Be sure to adjust your bids down on the content network – 50% is a rough guide – as content clicks tend to be worth less than search clicks, especially in the experimental phase.

Google’s content pricing is per click, however you will be charged different rates per click, depending on the site your ad appears on. Google attempts to work out where
in the buy cycle a visitor might be, based on the type of content a page displays, and the closer that person is to buying, the higher the price charged. However, the conversion rate is likely to be higher from such a page, than from a vaguely related page not related to strong buyer intent.

Think carefully about the context of your ads. Ads aren’t appearing as a result of a specific keyword search. Someone will be reading a page, perhaps on a site they are very familiar with, and they probably aren’t in hunting mode. It’s more a form of discovery, of stumbling across something.

Experiment with your ad text, as what works on the search network may not translate to the content network. Bear this in mind when creating your ads.

Google offers placement reports. These can be found under Report Type section, select Placement Performance.

These reports show you where your ad is shown, number of impressions, and other data you’d normally expect to see in you Adwords reports. You can determine which sites offer you the best bang for you buck, and which sites are not converting. You can block the low converting sites with the Site Exclusion tool. Even if a site which is getting you a lot of ad impressions is not yielding many clicks it can still pull down the overall quality of your campaign. Each layer of inefficiency that you block makes your remaining account that much more potent because your clickthrough rate and ad quality are improved.

Branding & Image Ads

A final note about branding. You tend to get a lot of impressions on the content network, which can help drive brand awareness. If branding is important to you, then consider placing image ads, or writing your text ads with this aim in mind. You may rack up a lot of exposure and awareness before having to pay much in the form of click-thrus! In many cases image ads will require higher bidding since you are blocking out competing ads.

Here are a few popular image ad strategies

• the well branded image which aims to not only drive traffic directly, but also aims to create awareness to fuel online or offline conversions. many of these types of ads contain an interesting offer like some interactive quiz or goal
• the coupon ad which aims to drive direct conversions
• the affiliate “1 secret” ads where they have a cartoon character which makes it seem like anyone can do _____ (by over-promising and under-delivering)

No matter what ad strategy you use it helps to test multiple variations. Right now JillianMichaels.com is using at least 3 different ad formats to help keep them fresh. Image ads may need to be refreshed every few weeks to every few months to prevent a nosedive in CTR. What was once a successful strategy become less effective as people see the same ad over and over again, and as other advertisers copy a particular strategy it may become less appealing (this is especially true in the fast moving affiliate market).

And if a specific site performs well for you then you might want to create an ad just for it…though sometimes one can go too far with the blending…the goal should not be to anger the publishers!

Adwords content advertisers might be left wondering where all their impressions disappeared to today.  That impression vacuum?  It’s Google bogarting a large portion of their content network with Nexus One display ads.

This morning, Adsense publishers were reporting a dramatic drop in Adsense clicks and revenue.

Sadly, many of the sites brandishing Nexus ads weren’t exactly tech-related…

Have a cooking site?  Google thinks the Nexus One ads are a perfect fit for your visitors.  Soccer fan site?  Here’s some Nexus One for you too.

But if you’re a content advertiser looking to advertise pots and pans on cooking sites?  Sorry, no impressions left…

Obviously, search impressions are Google’s to do with what they please, but publisher inventory is a bit different.

Given Google’s big push towards making advertisers provide a more “magazine content-style landing experience”, it’s with keen interest that we examine Google’s Nexus One landing page:

10/10 Quality Score?  As we can see here, the user experience is nicely augmented here by the volumes of valuable ‘magazine-style’ content.

To be fair, Google has a nice little click-to-learn-more interface on the phone and a 3D tour to boot.  Hopefully they were just kidding about the amount of content and navigation they’ve been asking advertisers to incorporate on their landing pages at the expense of conversions.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Chrome ads are also around, but not in anywhere near the volume of the Nexus One units.

Some have also noted the mantra of the ‘clean Google search page’ has undergone some adjustment:

At least Adsense pubs can take solace in knowing that the ads are good enough for Google.com, so they should be good enough for them.

Hopefully this is just a one or two day push and when they’re done perhaps Google’s advertisers can have the content network back.

The Wonder Wheel is a great little free tool by Google.

You can use the Wonder Wheel to quickly build keyword lists and Adwords groups in a visual way. With this tool, Google shows you the terms that relate most closely to your chosen keyword terms.

What Is The Google Wonder Wheel?

The Google Wonder Wheel is an interactive graphical application that shows related keywords.

The wheel starts with your keyword in the center, and shows terms related to that keyword in the “spokes” surrounding your keyword “hub”. If you click on a related term, the wheel creates a new hub, revealing more related terms.

Here’s how to find it:

1. Search on a keyword term.

2. Select “More Options…”

3. Click “Wonder Wheel”

Let’s say your main keyword area is “culinary schools”. The Google wheel suggests related keyword terms such as “culinary arts”, “pastry schools”, “le cordon bleu”, “top 10 culinary schools”, and so on.

These keywords become your Adwords groups. Next, click on each of those terms, and you get further terms that will make up each group.

Easy, huh.

You get Adwords groups built around related keywords, which come together to form a theme.

Themes And The Content Network

The theme is particularly powerful when it comes to the Google Content Network.

The Content Network is Google’s syndicated advertising network. You can choose to have your ad appear not just on Google search results, but also on sites across the Google’s Adsense partner network. This option is turned on by default whenever you create an Adwords campaign.

Traditionally, many Adwords advertisers have turned off the content network because of perceived abuse and junk traffic. However, attitudes are changing as the network matures and the bid prices on Google’s search engine head into the stratosphere. The ROI from the content network starts to look more appealing.

It all comes down to ROI. If it’s positive, run with it.

In Google’s whitepaper entitled “CPA Perfomance Trends on the Google Content Network“, Google found that:

…..half of the advertisers had a Content Network CPA at least 2.6% lower
than their average Search Network CPA. In total, 51.6% of advertisers analyzed had an average Content Network CPA equal to or better than their Search Network CPA

It has taken a while, but it looks like Google and advertisers may have got Google’s content network figured out. As the report suggests, it is important that the advertiser pay close attention to landing page optimization and site exclusion.

How does this all relate to the Wonder Wheel?

When Google looks to place your ad across the network, it does so based on themes.

If you use terms that are defined as being related in the Wonder Wheel throughout your text, particularly in your ad groups, you’re more likely to show up on relevant sites across the network.

Google describe this affect on their Adwords Agency blog:

One particularly useful application of the tool is to identify new ad group themes for content campaigns. Since your ads are matched to publisher pages at the ad group level, creating different ad group themes helps you target your ads more precisely on the Google content network…..

You can then use the Google keyword tool, and your other favorite research tools, to flesh these groups out further.

As the blog notes, this is no guarantee of better performance, however the Wonder Wheel is a great – and fun – place to start.

Other attempts at keyword clustering can also be useful for campaign creation. Such features are offered via search suggestions on major search services, via synonym search (using ~) on major search engines, and as keyword clusters on many meta search engines. Specialty search services like the Quintura keyword map, Microsoft Search Funnels, Google Sets, and Google Squared can further help you come up with relevant keyword ideas.

Search monetizes so well because there is so much implied intent in a search. But some have claimed slowing search volume and lowering ad costs.

The search box is perhaps the most profitable ad unit because consumers feel some level of control as they request ads about whatever topic they search for.

To offset slowing online adverting, Google is looking to “create” more search volume by using AdSense ad units to suggest consumers search for expensive keywords – like credit cards.

In the past Google has ran ads asking the consumer to “search for ads about ______” but this is the first Google ad unit that takes searchers directly off the publisher site and directly onto a Google search result with organic search results. It is one thing if Google asks for you to search for ads because they don’t understand the theme of a page, but it is quite another for them to have pre-made ads to siphon off the visitor to a Google search result without guaranteeing publisher payments (or is the first click paid, but at a heavily discounted rate?).

How much does Google pay AdSense publishers for this ad unit, when conversion happens after 2 clicks rather than 1? What percent of the end ad spend goes to the publisher when Google arbitrages the click through Google.com? How does smart pricing come into play when Google discounts the original click and then marks up the second one?

This sort of advertising allows Google to water down their search traffic slightly, but without advertisers knowing how it got watered down, or why their conversion rates lowered slightly.

Should Circuit City bid on their own brand? How much does Google estimate that daily cost at?

That estimate may be high, but even if it is off by a factor of 10 Circuit City would be spending a quarter million dollars a month on brand equity they already built up! Given the amount of organic exposure CircuitCity.com currently enjoys for that specific query they should be able to get their ad messaging in the organic search results without paying Google.

Exclusively focusing on ROI has advertisers bidding on their own brands and giving Google a large sum of money for the brand equity and user demand that the brand has already established. But they should be able to get that ROI without paying Google a cent. If the above area in the organic search results is not enough space for Circuit City’s brand related search ad strategy, they could always use subdomains and/or launch CircuitCity.org or CircuitCity.net.

Look at how some of the web only retail and marketplace comanies like Amazon.com, Yahoo! Shopping, and eBay dominate brand searches on Google through the use of subdomains. Buying brand related searches is only a must if

• your brand is generic (Shopping.com, Credit Cards.com, PPC Blog, SEO Book, etc.)
• you let your affiliates bid on your brand related phrases
• Google puts competing ads above the fold for your brand

Google has long pushed the value of tracking the direct ROI of ads as a way of driving their AdWords search ad marketplace, while simultaneously giving advertisers a good deal on content ads (by lowering the perceived value of content ads).

The Wall Street Journal published Rallying Cry for Display Ads, an article which makes the case that the value of display advertising is not being adequately measured and search is getting too much credit. The article promises that next week Microsoft will offer evidence “that it says proves display ads are actually better than searches at triggering consumers.”

The major conclusion of this research: By the time consumers search for a product or service, they’ve often already made up their minds to buy it. And display ads are often an important factor in their reaching that conclusion.

Even if the research is true, will Microsoft be able to use it to persuade advertisers to spend more on content ads that they have become accustomed to getting for next to nothing?

The Google content has had multiple forms of content targeting available for years.

• Keyword Targeting: this uses contextual matching algorithms that align your ad exposure with keyword themes inside your ad group.
• Placement Targeting: formerly called site targeting, this allows you to target particular websites and subdomains.

We have generally been more of a fan of keyword targeting than content targeting because it does not require you to buy the backfill inventory and irrelevant inventory that you often buy when doing site targeting.

Today Google announced the launch of a third type of ad targeting – a hybrid of site targeting and keyword targeting blended together. Google’s blog post on the topic mentioned 2 ways advertisers can use this to refine their ad campaigns

• setting custom bids on specific sites: useful for sites that have good inventory, but have an intrinsic value much higher or lower than other sites in the Google Network
• creating hypertargeted ads: if much of your exposure on a site comes from content about a specific attribute you can create ads that are specifically targeted to people interested in that feature or attribute

Here are the two examples Google gave…

• Set custom bids for specific placements. Let’s say you’re selling laptops, and you’re using the content network to advertise on pages relevant to the keywords ‘laptops,’ ‘laptop computers,’ and ‘laptop accessories.’ After checking your Placement Performance report, you see that you’re getting sales at a great ROI from three technology review sites. You also see a few sites where you’re getting sales, but your costs are too high to advertise effectively on them.If you currently have a $1.00 bid for the content network as a whole in this ad group, you can now add the high- and low-performing sites as placements into your ad group with custom bids. For example, you might set a $2.00 Max CPC for the three high-performing sites, and a $0.50 Max CPC for the low-performing ones. Meanwhile, you’re still using the keywords in your ad group to target relevant pages across the content network, but now you’ve adjusting bids for the sites in the network that perform better or worse than average.
• Show your ad only when both keywords and placements match. Suppose you check your Placement Performance report again and see that your laptop ads are showing often on sites that discuss how to make laptops more energy efficient. You know that you sell some of the most energy efficient laptops available, and you’d like to write an ad that highlights the power-saving benefits of your products. But you don’t want to show this ad on pages whose readers aren’t as concerned about energy conservation.Now you can create an ad group containing the same ‘laptop’ keywords you’ve been using and add each of the energy efficiency sites as placements. Next, change your campaign settings so that your ads show only on the sites you’ve added, and only when their pages are relevant to your keywords. This gives you the freedom to write an ad highlighting the energy-saving benefits of your laptops to this unique audience, since you know that your ad will appear only on relevant pages on the placements you’ve selected.

In the next few weeks, I will try, test and collect data from this new hybrid platform. I guess this indicates how Google is trying to attract advertisers to its network. Search is synonymous to Google and that itself is a huge marketing accomplishment. However, us advertisers know that they want so much more.

When you buy ads direct from a publisher they usually charge a premium rate above what that ad inventory would sell for if it was sold through an automated ad auction. When Google launched site targeted AdSense ads years ago it was a cheap way for advertisers to buy specific audiences. Perfect for brand advertisers, but not as good for direct marketers. Why?

Advertising in Deep Dark Corners

It turns out that when you buy site targeted ads you typically first get exposure on the least valuable pages and least valuable ad units within a site. It makes sense that if all you want to do is advertise on a particular site then of course Google is going to sell you the inventory they struggled to monetize with their traditional keyword targeted PPC ads. So if the site has an offbeat category, or an AdSense ad block that is below the fold in the right column, those are the ad positions you are buying first.

Overpaying for Premium Exposure

You can buy your way into the more premium positions on the best pages too, but in order to do so you must bid high, which means you end up bidding at premium rates on the best pages, and you end up bidding too high for the backfill / remnant ad inventory on the least valuable pages. Not only are you losing money buying that off targeted backfill inventory, but you are competing against the most targeted ads on the most valuable pages, so it is hard to make money from buying site targeted ads unless they have a small niche site or are in a category where the ad market is exceptionally inefficient.

How to Buy Site Targeted Ads

There are some hacks around the issue of wasting money on site targeting though. The easiest of which is to look for footprints (URL, footer text, author name, etc.) on a site or the section of the site you want to advertise on and bid on those related keywords. If there is a section of the site that is irrelevant you can look for related footprints that are specific to those pages and use them as negative keywords.