Contextual Ads Archives

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads.

While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field of online advertising enables Charter to provide you with an enhanced online experience that is more customized to your interests and activities. As a result of this service, the advertising you typically see online will better reflect the interests you express through your web-surfing activity. You will not see more ads – just ads that are more relevant to you.

While Charter is probably the first ISP to do this, it's already being contested as a heavy invasion of privacy as well as something heavily questionable since any ISP can swap out AdSense IDs for their own and monetize off their members' clicks.

Will anything be done? That's the question. Will Charter get away with it? Perhaps websites will need to block Charter Communications from overriding their own ads (and consequently "defacing a third party website") -- by not letting Charter in at all.

Legally, this can be a problem as well. It may be copyright infringement if they're taking a website served by another company and just replacing ads.

But this may also cause another problem for publishers: if this gains traction, more users will start using ad-blocking solutions that may not necessarily bode well for those who are trying to make a buck off of their hard-earned work. As a statement to Charter, they may install some software to circumvent the ads, but other people will end up suffering as a result.

Overall, the forum members are appalled and think that it won't pass in a court of law. I'm not a Charter Communications user (thankfully), but I'd hope they don't get away with this myself.

Forum discussion continues (and it's long and more informative than this post!) at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that what was once an advertising deal between AOL and Quigo is now turning into a $300 investment, as Brett Tabke shares a report about this acquisition.

The purchase is designed to help the Time Warner unit better compete against the stepped up online ad initiatives from Google and Yahoo. Quigo's two main ad serving products include AdSonar, which is similar to AdSense in terms of providing targeted placements on websites and through searches, and FeedPoint, a search engine marketing tool.

This is a great direction for AOL and Quigo, as forum members report.

Congrats to the hard working folks at Quigo. AOL is living up to its stated goal of becoming one of the major players in online advertising going forward.

Hopefully this will also make Quigo a bigger player in the advertising sphere.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member saying he has been beta testing the Microsoft alternative to Google's AdSense program, named ContentAds.

He gave the new contextual ad program, from a publisher's perspective, a great review.

To be honest is was actually pretty sweet. I am not going to talk about any specifics until is goes open beta but I feel it is a huge improvement in certain aspects. I am just waiting until I can take it for a spin on some of my websites to really get a feel for it. I wish MS would just give me a job so I can help them step it up some more. For any platform for content publishers you really need to focus on the filtering and reports. Those are the two area I use the most so the most attention should be paid attention to them. A close third of course is the ad creation process. Watch out for MS, they are not going down without a fight.

But as far as I know, ContentAds is only open to very large and trusted publishers and there is no program for smaller publishers. Back in February 2006, I reported that MSN to Release Contextual Ad Program, ContentAds in 2006. That did happen in October 2006 with Microsoft Begins Testing Content Ads Beta, but it was only open to large publishers and to a limited set of adCenter advertisers to opt in. Microsoft continually expanded the ContentAds availability for advertisers but never really expanded the publisher side of things.

In fact, there was a lot of controversy over adCenter advertisers being forced into the contextual program without requesting their ads to show up on the content network. Next time adCenter was upfront about this change, and last week they announced it again.

So is this just a rumor? I am not sure. I sent out emails to my Microsoft contacts in this area, so we will see. I will update you if I find out more information.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft sent me a response that they are currently still only running ContentAds on their own network. They do not have a release date for a public release of ContentAds just yet.

The Amazon.co.uk blog made an announcement earlier this month that it has launched Context Links, a new contextual ad system. It appears that they've been thinking about launching contextual ads for quite some time.

By adding a snippet of code to a website, Amazon will highlight phrases with associated products in their marketplace and let users navigate to the Amazon website to purchase the item. This appears to be available in both the US and the UK, and for now, it is in beta.

This is what it looks like:

What do you think of these ads?

Hat tip to gabs.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I was prepped two days ago for a Search Engine Land post that announced Ask.com To Launch Contextual Advertising Product. In short, Ask.com's Search Listings division is launching a contextual product to compete with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and Microsoft contentAds. Ask.com's program is named ASL Contextual Advertising and will go live the week of May 21st on IAC's properties.

I honestly have no idea when individual publishers will be able to apply to join the Ask.com Contextual program, but as soon as I know, I will let you know.

The Ask.com blog posted a couple screen captures showing off a sample ad. Here is one of those ads:

How is this product different from our competitors, you ask? Three important reasons, each one a paradigm shift:

* It gives publishers more control over yield and relevancy
* It gives publishers more creative ad unit opportunities
* It allows both advertisers and publishers more control over where and what ads are displayed

DigitalPoint Forums has a pretty long thread on this announcement. They are extremely excited for a competitor to enter the market, outside of Yahoo and Google. Time will tell when they launch it to these publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A High Rankings thread discusses a recent marketing study that showed that users are inclined to prefer contextual ads over advertisements that stand out from the native content of any website.

Many users are not surprised and are happy with the findings:

The more it blends into your site, the better...

Not everyone feels that way. One even considered this a deceptive practice:

This seems disturbingly close to misdirection, if you ask me.

Basically, my understanding is that the more you disguise the ad so that it looks like the content that the readers trust, the more likely they are to click on it.

I see that as a violation of trust, not smart marketing, sorry. Ad Cloaking, if you will.

If I went to a site that I thought was trustworthy and began to find myself on ads (and being redirected off the site in the process) I'd stop going back.

While the information proved useful, there are still missing pieces of the puzzle:

Do the same people click the ads in both case, i.e. is it all the same people + more, or different people? Which group converted better?

and

1)What was the conversion rate after the click? If you've just been tricked there, I suspect it's low. 2)Did the visitor return to the site again after clicking on the ad, and if so, did their behaviour change afterward? 3)What is the visitors perceived trust of the site before and after the advertsment click? I doubt it changes much for visible ads, I'd like to see the data on camoflaged ones.

I think that the missing data would be pretty important for the clearest picture. Regardless, the information is useful when planning an ad campaign. What do you think?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings.

Note: Ben wrote about this the other day under the title Banner Blindness Becoming Worse: Users Getting More Savvy Identifying Ads In Content.

A recent study being discussed on Highranking Forums discusses the effect ads and calls to action become more flashy users are becoming better able to identify those ads and ignore them. Basically, things that look like ads aren't clicked nearly as often as things that look like part of the page. Users are responding appropriately that they don't like ads that smack them in the face. This is something we have understood for sometime but not to the extent at which it happens. Experts weigh in on the results of the study and there experience with placing contextual ads on websites.

Scottie discusses that the "second part of the study that showed higher clickthrough rates on a text link vs an image button were really interesting"

Despite the results of the study, Ian McAnerin chimes in and says:

Basically, my understanding is that the more you disguise the ad so that it looks like the content that the readers trust, the more likely they are to click on it.

I see that as a violation of trust, not smart marketing, sorry. Ad Cloaking, if you will.

He makes some good points, but what is a marketer to do?

Jbrookin makes some great observations

At no point was any ad created to be deceptive. We just simply removed the flashiness, or rather designed the ad with the advertising site in mind. What we determined is that users seem to automatically ignore anything that appears out of place, so by removing that barrier, we got a greater amount of consideration.

Continued discussion at HighRankings Forum - Users Don't Like Ads In Their Face

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that notifications are being sent to advertisers that on January 25, 2007, they will be automatically included in the Microsoft content network. Other members confirmed the email, but I do not have a copy myself.

One member said:

The email stated that my current settings will be changed and I will HAVE to start using the new Content Beta. With NO option to opt out, just stating that it is going to happen on 1/25/07.

I suspect there must be a way to opt out, but maybe it is not clear. He said he called adCenter support, but they "tried to show [him] how to opt out, but had no clue themselves."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So if you are getting 65% of your traffic organically from Google for free, should you pay for the other 35%? This is one of the questions posed by a member on High Rankings Forum about whether they should continue to pay for PPC ads for the keyword they already rank #1 for. I don't see why you wouldn't want to pay for it, but there are plenty of good reasons for not paying. Sometime the costs these days are so high in the top position not including other barriers to entry that it doesn't make sense for the average webmaster.

Some of the members have some excellent thoughts on why it would be benefical to keep paying for that extra paid traffic:

There is one theory that having top results in both organic and PPC listings can help build the credibility of the site (Customer: "Hey, these guys are all over this page! They must be the industry leader" or something along those lines.).

Also:

Studies have shown that multiple exposures increases CTR. I've even seen a study that asserted that while banner ads may not provide direct benefit in many cases, customers were more likely to buy when exposed to a company's brand in multiple places.

I tend to agree with what they are saying. High rankings in those position will not always warrant high click throughs. Its best to cover your bases. Sometime paying for PPC is not an option, as its too cost prohibitive or not in the original marketing plan for the business. Other times the PPC ad itself can be more successful than the organic listing. Whatever the case, if you are a small business or in a very niche area, branding can be very impactful to your customers and users to see your dominate the area for your search terms. This adds credibility and trust to name and product which can lead to bigger profits or better business oppourtunities.

Discussion at High Rankings

A small case study, very small case study, posted at DigitalPoint Forums shows how a person who has Google AdSense on three different sites, has the highest click through rate on his ads on the site that is most tailored to women and girls.

(1) Woman tailored site has 40% CTR with 200 uniques a day.
(2) Cell phone site has 1% CTR with 500-600 uniques a day.
(3) Unknown site has 2% CTR with 1200 unique visitors a day.

He concludes that women are more likely to click on contextual ads.

Well, that is a hard conclusion to make. Of course, the target user is a huge factor in one's earnings. But there are a ton of variables on any single page that can encourage and influence a person (male or female) to click or not to click.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion about the rational that triggers people to click on a Google AdSense ad. There are many possible answers to the question listed in the thread, here they are summarized.

1. "Compelling on topic or relevant supplemental information"
2. "They don't know it's an ad (well "blended")"
3. "They know it's an ad but want to get the hell out (MFA)"
4. "Just boredom"
5. "because they are basically stoopid!"
6. "they want to buy something the ad represents"
7. " If they get something for FREE"
8. "If they find the caption of the ad attractive"
9. "If they trust your site they feel the ads are also genuine."
10. "Plain old laziness"
11. By "mistake"

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

eBay launched eBay AdContext a while back and ShoeMoney is currently running those ads on his blog. When I went to his site yesterday, I notice that one of the ads (aka listings) had a racy image of a woman in a bikini (or at leas that is what the ad implied). You can see a screen capture of the ad here.

The ad was contextually relevant, in terms of the service selling web site submission services on a site mostly SEO related. But the image the eBay seller uploaded with his listing, was not contextually related to the ad, nor the site audience.

Should eBay allow merchants to control those images? I think they have no choice in that matter.

Should eBay display those images in the contextual ads? I think they are taking a huge risk by doing so.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if I have a page on strawberries, how do I get ads for "cream"? People tend to like eating strawberries with cream and the same deal with any product/service that is complimentary to an other.

The best advice I see in the thread is given in detail by ronburk.

He basically says that you should create a new landing page for the cream ad, target cream type of keywords, and link to that landing page via the strawberry page. Why does this work? He lists several reasons:

a) the user who is interested has to perform an extra click
b) you quite likely get payed a better CPC due to the prequalification that extra click represents and the effect it has on SmartPricing
c) you get an entire page (instead of little or no text on your strawberries page) to provide useful info that matches qualified visitors with the product(s) being advertiserd there
d) you get another chance to keep visitors on-site who were thinking about cream, but weren't really going to click on any ad for cream
e) you get more detailed stats about how many customers are interested in cream, but not really enough to click on and ad
f) you get 100% control over the "ad" that appears on page X (no Google T&C applies here!) without ever having to worry about MFAs or PSAs appearing there and, well, if you didn't get it by now, it ain't ever gonna happen :-).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread discusses how Yahoo! Network Publishers are noticing that the earnings with Yahoo!'s answer to Google AdSense is becoming more on par with Google. In our non-scientific AdSense Compared to YPN the advantage went to YPN. Yahoo! earned way more money then did Google at the time. As one would have assumed, that gap seems to be closing.

One DP member said;

I used to make double or triple per click compared with adsense, now it's closer to even.

An other reported;

For me YPN was 10x RPC compared to AdSense a few months ago. Now it is only 5x. Still kicking AdSense butt, for now anyway.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A CNN Money article reports that eBay is launching a contextual ad program this week named eBay AdContext.

eBay's system differs from existing pay-per-click advertising systems offered by Google and rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. by linking only to eBay auctions rather than serving as a generic advertising network.

Advertisers don't seem to get paid on a per click basis, and also not on a CPM basis. It looks like the only way to make money is to actually have your click lead to a sale. You can earn between 35% and 60% in commissions per sale based on volumes sold.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread asks if the prices of search ads rise with the price of gas prices. Some reason that Google AdSense (or YPN) publisher's costs are going up, so the ad prices must go up. Others reason that Google AdWords (or YSM) advertiser's costs are going up, so they have less disposal income to spend on ads, because it is all going to gas, so the ad prices will go down.

But as more new advertisers get into the PPC advertising game, costs tend to go up. It is the nature of the auction based pricing mechasinim.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

WebmasterWorld Admin, trillianjedi, posted a thread in the supporters forum (paid subscription required) named Referrer based delivery for contextual advertising. That is right, he has a theory that Yahoo! searchers are more likely to click on a contextual ad that says "Ads by Yahoo!" as compared to clicking on an ad that says "Ads by Goooooogle." Same applies to a Google searcher, where a Google searcher may be more likely to click on an ad that says "Ads by Goooooogle" as compared to clicking on an ad that says "Ads by Yahoo!"

That being said, and if this theory is right, would you cloak the ads based on referrer? You currently have to deploy some sort of cloaking for ads when on the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Specifically, blocking international users from viewing YPN ads, so you won't get your site banned for quality reasons.

I suspect the results of the theory may be posted in the WebmasterWorld Supporters forum at a later date.

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums had an interesting title, Are you click-o-phobic? I never really thought about this. Publishers are so trained not to click on their own ads, it becomes second nature to look at the ads, but never ever click on them. This constant wrist slapping training has possibly caused some to subconsciously never click on any contextual advertisement from Google or Yahoo and the others. Honestly, if you are a publisher, do you feel a weird sense of gratification or accomplishment after clicking on a contextual ad, on any site? I believe that I have a weird feeling after clicking on one of those ads.

Click-O-Phobia is the proper term for such a condition.

Do you have click-o-phobia? Are you click-o-phobic? Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

AdSense became a popular Internet Marketing platform through its two-pronged model of selling keyword based ads and paying outside websites (known as publishers) to host them. Since publishers have found out this is a proven way to generate income, many sites have been developed solely for the purpose of hosting AdSense or Yahoo Publisher network ads. Publishers have discovered that by paying to drive traffic to the site, often through AdWords and AdSense accounts of their own, they can turn a profit when visitors click on the hosted advertisements.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums clearly identifies and discusses a perceived growing problem of websites solely created for the purpose of hosting ads. The member (by proxy) gets straight to the point about such sites and the links to them:

If you click on them, you will find almost no content, and AdWords ads disguised as menus and content to fool non suspecting users into clicking them and thus making money. It is just spam and outright abuse.

When Moderator Frank “Aussiewebmaster” is asked if the system of arbitrage really works, he paints a compelling picture for starting a site that produces additional search results:

.... they pay me say 65% of the click value.... so I take searchers for 10 cent words and send them to a page of results of $2 words in that space... any click is worth $1.30 to me so all I need is one click from every 13 clickers and I break even - two and I make $1.30 etc.

This conversation is going strong at Search Engine Watch Forums. Topical threads at Webmasterworld and DigitalPoint Forums. (and many more: search at any SEO forum)

Some future issues associated with search arbitrage were nicely predicted in 2003 by Kevin Lee.

Yes, it is possible for you to advertise on your own Web site, to drive traffic to that same Web site. If you both are a publisher and an advertiser in a contextual ad program like Yahoo Publisher Network / Yahoo Search Marketing or Google AdSense / Google AdWords, you can run your own ads on your own site. That is the topic of a thread at WebmasterWorld. But don't fret it, you can block yourself from showing your own ads on your own sites. This is important to keep in mind, when running both the publisher side and advertiser side of things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As part of the SES Advertising Track, this session covers the considerations for running your PPC ads in a contextual environment. Andrew Goodman moderates and presents. Other speakers include: Brady Byrd of NewGate Internet and Peter Hershberg of Reprise Media.

Andrew Goodman starts out with a description of contextual ads and a poll: How many are running contextual ads and makes up over 20% of spend. Over 30? About 10-20% of the audience raised their hands.

First up is Peter Hershberg of Reprise Media. He starts by explaining what contextual advertising is. Shows contextual ad exmaples from the New York Times.

Benefits of contextual advertising:

Search engines benefit as contextual ads have been a significant revenue generator. Contextual ads allow search engines to monetize 85% of pages on the internet.

Publishers benefit from a new revenue stream, accessing thousands of advertisers they may have not otherwise had access to.

Advertisers benefit from the additional sources of traffic.

Search engines serve as a point of contact to a huge universe of advertising opportunities. Contextual started in 2003 and are dominated by Google. With the "monopoly" over the contextual advertising market, Google made few changes until 2005 when Yahoo launched the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Major revisions in Google's program followed shortly. Was it a cooincidence?

Changes in the Google program include the ability to place separate bids per ad group, being able to track separate ads at the AdGroup level, being able to choose sites to run your ads on and being able to pay a CPM and build your own network.

Contextual advertising still has a ways to go. Gives example of CNN where ads are displayed from Yahoo (YPN) where some are relevant, some are not. Shows another example where all YPN ads are irrrelevant. Explains this will happen as Yahoo develops the number of advertisers in their program.

Competitors in the space include Amazon that is beta-testing a contextual ad network and affiliates. Also MSN ContentAds with a planned beta launch sometime in 2006. It will be interesting to see what MSN rolls out.

There's been progress, but there's a lot more opportunity with contextual advertising. Contextual is an opportunity to expand beyond search. You can now go online with Google and bid on print ads. Google's acquisition of dMark will enable advertisers the opportunity to bid on ads via radio.

Advertisers would do well to understand the market and where it's going for a competitive advantage.

What's next? Distribution through additional media, targeting enabling better results for advertisers and a better user experience for users. Also specialisation, where search marketers today may become the advertising agencies of the future.

Next up is Andrew Goodman who did a short presentation covering the contextual ad landscape. Only a small number of advertisers are tracking contextual well enough to understand how well it's performing for them.

Gives example of a client that was not tracking well and putting a lot of energy into regular PPC ads, but most of their conversions were coming from contextual ads. Shows another example of how Flickr tested using tags to display contextual ads.

Another area place where contextual ads appear are with direct navigation and parked domains. Growth in direct navigation revenue averages at $170 per domain and is a significant market.

Shows example of client case study where contextual ads were a better match for going after long tail keywords.

Yet another case study showed what not to do. Client ran short term campaigns and not ongoing. No tracking and the content ad bids were the same as search. Much too high. Lesson was to separate content bidding from search bidding.

CPM model: Site targeting with Google. Has been more of a challenge than anticipated.

Content targeting is successful in very specific situations, but not all. It's obvious that it takes some testing and consideration to learn the ins and outs of contextual advertising.

Next up is Brad Berg of NewGate Internet who presents on optimization techniques for Google AdSense. They've found that non-retail does better than retail with contextual ads. He explains that a puchase is more of a commitment for the user than filling out a lead form or downloading something.

Overviews how AdSense works.

Be sure to separate content and search campaigns. Basics of campaign creation. Google AdWords offers more tools to make this easier. When you separate campaigns, don't make them duplicates of each other. It's important to focus on themes and bundle the keyword concepts together in to smaller ad groups. The keywords and the ad creative work together to create the theme.

It's imporant to track content campaigns uniquely. Give a unique tracking url for each keyword in the AdGroup. Use a default and unique url for each AdGroup.

With Google AdWords, use "Fast Track" to create tags for all your URLs and it will enable you to learn more about the traffic you get including: search/content clicks, which creative was used and which website generated the click. You would then need to create an application to extract the additional information for use in campaign analysis.

On Google AdWords reporting, AdGroup reports do not report on content clickthroughs by individual keywords. AdSense does send clickthroughs to specific URLs via the destination URL you can assign to a keyword. The URL report does not report sending traffic to specific URLs, but to the campaign default URL.

Use the matching options in AdWords with your contextual campaigns as you would with search. Also consider using unique creative for your content campaigns. Avoid using dynamic keyword inclusion for content creative.

Barry Chu from Yahoo and Emily White from Google answered questions from the audience.

SES NYC Tag: sesny2006

Chris Beasley, an old author here, has written up a very recently cited blog entry at SitePoint he named Amazon-Sense? In that entry, he explains that Amazon has contact him and other potential publishers to place Amazon contextual ads on their sites. They are reportedly offering $100 bonuses to those willing to try them out. Chris explains;

Consequently I do not know if they’re having much luck finding beta testers. For obvious reasons you cannot co-serve their ads with those from Adsense, so for testing you really need to find a high traffic site that is willing to forgo Adsense revenue. Originally their deadline for signing up for the beta was the 31st of January, then they called me last night, past the deadline, and asked me to join still (but I again turned them down because Adsense is just too profitable for me, and with Adsense’s exclusivity requirements I’d have to forgo using them to be in this test). They also previously offered a $50 bonus for everyone who signs up, and that bonus is now $100.

What is interesting, is that I was unable to find threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch. So I started one yesterday at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Marcia posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Plagiarism, Splogs and Search Engine Spam where she quoted a blog entry at Plagiarism Today named Why Sploggers Splog The snippet Marcia selected was ironic, to say the least.

One of the interesting things that came out of my discussion with the reformed splogger is that Google is not the target of splogs. As odd as it may seem, Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google and is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain. Thus, even though the service is wholly owned by Google itself, Yahoo is the first to snatch up links contained with it....

The desired end result is that Yahoo searchers will be directed to the junk domains where they will then click on the Google Adsense ads. This arrangement is not only very profitable for the splogger, since they get a sizeable chunk of the revenue from each ad click, but is very beneficial to Google as they are getting money directly from Yahoo’s visitors.

Now I am not sure if there is a study done that shows that:
(1) "Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google", I hear that not to be true. That Google is quicker, but there has never been a wide study done on this. I am basing that on forum chatter for the past four years or so.
(2) [Yahoo] "is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain." Again, not sure where this is from but I won't argue.

But if those two statements above are true, which I do not think they are a 100% true, then it is funny.

Yahoo! ranks blogspot splogs high, Yahoo users click through, yahoo users are more likely to click on an AdSense ad, Google makes money, sploggers make money.

Of course this can be applied to any search engine, even Google. And it can be applied to any advertising program that is easy to sign up with and pays on a cpc basis, even Yahoo!.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I have been thinking some about contextual ads and why some ads show and why some ads do not show. Google shows very relevant ads in its AdSense program. But Yahoo! tends to often show less relevant ads. The thing is, people are very happy with the price per click they are getting from YPN over AdSense. So people think that this is Yahoo!'s strategy, to show higher CPC ads, no matter if they are irrelevant to the page's content. Whereas Google AdSense shows the most relevant ad to the page content, hoping for a higher number of clicks.

I thought this question would make for a good discussion. So I decided to post this question as the first question to be placed in our Contextual Ad forum. I named the thread Should CPC Be Considered in Contextual Ad Placement?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

One person starts a thread named MSN Adsense? at WebmasterWorld and before you know it, you have ten replies.

I have no heard of any MSN AdSense program. Of course we have the new MSN adCenter Pilot Program but any word of a contextual ad program like AdSense or YPN? Not that I heard of.

I am sure they are thinking about working on it or actually working on a contextual advertising program. But right now, nothing that I know of.

Update: JenSense has some info on this from a while back, MSN jumps in with talk about their new contextual ad program.

Last month we met the Yahoo! Publisher Network team at the SEW Forums Live conference (thanks for the reception party guys!). There we had a nice talk about adding some of our Spanish websites, more specifically one that has about 50 million pageviews per month. So we thought YPN would love this, right? Well, yes... they would love to, that is, but they can't. We just got word from them and they said, "... we are not able to serve Spanish contextual ads at this time... I don’t have an ETA on supporting Spanish yet." My guess is that it's probably the same case with other languages, but I can't confirm that.

So there you have it amigos, no contextual ads in Spanish from YPN at this time. Too bad, Google Adsense is paying a lot of money!

Recently I was able to delivery both YPN & AdSense ads here on 50/50 rotation. In the past I used word of mouth to report on Google AdSense Versus Yahoo! Publisher Network performance. I did promised you to share some results, on a generic level, of the two programs compared side by side. So here we go...

Date Range: 09/09/2005 - 09/19/2005

Network	YPN	AdSense	Advantage
Impressions	Bit More	Bit Less	Slightly YPN
Clicks	Bit More	Bit Less	Slightly YPN
CTR	Equal	Equal	None
CPM	Much Higher	Much Lower	YPN 81% Higher
Earnings	Much Higher	Much Lower	YPN 82% Higher

So the reports seem to match much of what I reported here. Except for the fact that YPN had less click throughs. Let me tell you the ads matched 100% (excluding one saying Ads by Yahoo! and the other saying Ads by Google). I think its ok if I report these numbers in such a generic fashion.

The Queen of Contextual Ads has spotted the First sighting of Yahoo Publisher Network RSS ads. On May 17, 2005 Google Began Offering AdSense for RSS Feeds, I was approved for the beta literally three and a half hours later, they looked like this but didn't always work too well.

My main concern is how Google and Yahoo! will fight with each other over a recent rss ads patent application filed by Google. I am crossing my fingers, but I hope to be able to test out YPN RSS ads on this site soon!

I posted a thread at the contextual forum, DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday I wrote an entry named Google AdSense Versus Yahoo! Publisher Network but I was not able to provide my own data in the comparison. But today, I am happy to announce that we are dynamically delivering AdSense and YPN ads. Most of you know that it is against the terms of service to have YPN & AdSense showing on the same page. The only legal way to test both AdSense & YPN against each other is to have them show randomly but not overlap each other. Through several forum posts, I heard this can be easily done using PHPAdsNew, which I currently use on this site anyway. So that means you can now take advantage of the site targeting option by Google AdSense to get your ads on this site.

How to Guide on Setting up PHPAdsNew to deliver YPN & AdSense Ads dynamically:
You do not need to follow these exact steps, but this is how I personally set it up.

(1) Download, Install & Configure PHPAdsNew.
(2) Login to the Admin Panel
(3) Click on "Inventory" section
(4) Ad a new advertiser (I named it "Contextual Ads")
(5) Under that new advertiser, "Add new campaign" (I set up two, one for homepage and one for the inner pages)
(6) Create a new "Linked Zone" for this campaign
-- a Zone type "Banner, Button or Rectangle"
-- b Size (match your size that you set up for your AdSense and YPN ads)
-- c Linked Banners should associated to the Contextual Campaign you set up earlier
(7) Go Back to the Campaign You Were Working on
(8) Click on "Banner overview" and "Add new banner"
-- a Select "HTML banner" from "Banner properties"
-- b Copy and Paste AdSense or YPN Code into the box
-- c Uncheck "Alter HTML to enable tracking of AdClicks"
-- d In the "Size" enter in the size of the ads
-- e In the "Description" describe if its AdSense or YPN ads
-- f Then make sure the proper "Linked zones" is checked off
(9) Go back to Banner overview and repeat step 8 for the other ad (if you set up Google AdSense first, then you will need to add the YPN banner Ad)
(10) Go back to the "Linked zones" for that campaign
(11) Click on the linked zone you set up
(12) Ensure the "Linked banners" in that zone are checked off
(13) Set the "Probability" to 50/50 or whatever you want for each banner
(14) Click on "Invocationcode" and Choose from the drop down, "Remote invocation for Javascript"
(15) Copy and paste that code into your Web pages, in place of the current contextual ads.

There you go. I'll share the results I can, when I have enough data for you.

I have been wanting to bug my guys here to make it so that the YPN ads interchange with AdSense ads. But they are busy and I don't want to bug them with my little games. So instead, I found a thread with someone who actually did it himself. Message number nine, in this WebmasterWorld thread says;

I run Adsense and YPN on the homepage of my main site interchangeably to test which is better (equal pageviews at the end of the day, same weights). Both ad networks are both on target, although Adsense ads show more "less sophisticated" adverts (no brand name, mostly mom and pop operations); while YPN shows brand names. Google's Adsense gives me double digit CTR, while YPN only gives me 1/10 of Adsense's CTR. At the end of the day, even if YPN gives me higher earnings per click, Google gives me better revenues. It seems that G's targeting is designed to show what ads fit the page AND what ads are most likely to get click (probably due to some historical data of my target audience or whatnot). On the other hand, YPN only shows what ads can possibly be targeted to the content, but not really designed to generate high click thrus.

And to be honest, that was my thinking from day one. The CPC seems high on YPN but the CTR seems lower, due to the relevancy issues with YPN. I find the post I quoted above, to be very helpful and I hope to find more.

A recent change to the DigitalPoint Co-Op Network is making the product more Google AdSense like. The Co-op network is a free way to exchange banner ads (image ads) and text ads with other sites within the network.

The new enhancements give the publishers more control over which ads are shown on the site. Technically, it allows publishers to define the level of static links versus rotating links displayed. Shawn at DigitalPoint said;

But I have been watching other advertising systems (notably AdSense) and how more ads have been static (CPM ads in this forum for example). That coupled with the fact that I have a few sites that I think non-rotating ads would look better cosmetically.

It's 100% for the cosmetics of your site and gives webmasters more control over how they want other people's ads to display on their site. It has zero bearing on how YOUR ads are displayed on other people's sites. You could run 100% static ads for example, and it doesn't make your ads any more (or less) static on other people's sites.

Shawn says he is currently working on a solution to target theme based ads, so the ads can be even more relevant to the Web site. They will not be fully contextual as of yet, but its getting there slowly. Shawn explains; "but it's a MAJOR, MAJOR undertaking with redesigning the weighting system to take that into account. One of these days I will just turn everything off (phone, email, etc.) and bang it out one day."

About a month ago, a thread popped up at Search Engine Watch Forums named Experience with IntelliTXT? I did not know how to reply or what to say, so I sat back and watched it develop (which is really didn't. Then I noticed that on August 11th, Threadwatch Tests IntelliTXT, which caused bit of a revolt over there. A week later, Threadwatch Drops IntelliTXT due to "Poor CTR, Poor Earnings, User Complaints."

IntelliTXT is a "in-Text advertising" technology, basically, if a word matched an advertisement it would turn green. If you hovered-over the link, it would pop open a small contextually relevant ad (more info).

Nick reported at ThreadWatch that "In 7 days, i've earnt the grand total of $10.92 with a CTR of 1.25%." So he obviously wasn't too happy with those results. I tried to string up some WebmasterWorld threads on intellitext and intellitxt and found some more information. In a thread at WebmasterWorld on March 15, 2005 which reported that it made "ok" money but payment is slow. An older thread on April 22, 2005 reports that "It did not work out for me, as most of my sites are around a niche topic, which does not seem to do well for contextual marketing." But most the threads at WebmasterWorld discuss if you can use both AdSense and IntelliTXT together without violating TOS. Message # 33 in this post seems to be the most recent thread discussing it. I am still not sure if it is OK, I'll try to find out, but it seems like it would be ok to run both on the same page.