November 23, 2009

Google to Acquire Display Ad Optimization Startup, Teracent

Google has announced a new agreement to acquire Teracent, a San Mateo display advertising optimization startup. Teracent uses technology that chooses from thousands of elements and machine-learning algorithms to serve up ads in real-time.

Elements include tweaking colors, images, messaging, and products. Then the ads are targeted even more according to location, language, time of day, etc.

The acquisition is expected to be complete sometime this quarter. After that, Google plans to implement Teracent's technology to the Google Content Network and DoubleClick.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google to Acquire Display Ad Optimization Startup, Teracent

Elements include tweaking colors, images, messaging, and products. Then the ads are targeted even more according to location, language, time of day, etc.

The acquisition is expected to be complete sometime this quarter. After that, Google plans to implement Teracent's technology to the Google Content Network and DoubleClick.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 13, 2009

Google Adds AdSense for Feeds, Feedburner Data to Analytics

If you use AdSense for Feeds or Google Feedburner to manage RSS feeds on your site - and you use Google Analytics - then you'll be glad to know Google is connecting the two. You'll be able to iew click data for your feeds services in Google Analytics.

Analytics will tag the Source as "Feedburner" and the Medium as either "feed" or "email" depending on how the feed item was sent out. Content will show the endpoint (i.e. Google Reader, Yahoo! Mail). Check for the data under "All Traffic Sources" and "Campaigns" views in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics gathers this data when item clicking is turned on in Feedburner. So you'll need to have that enabled for this to work - or not if you don't.

Advanced analytics users can also configure their Analytics tracking within their Feedburner settings.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

November 5, 2009

Google AdSense Launches New Interface Into Beta

Google AdSense has launched a new interface that is currently in beta testing. But they're giving a glimpse of it over on the Inside AdSense blog.

Here's what to expect:

More detailed performance reports
View daily stats as graphs
New metrics including amount you've earned from various ad, targeting and bid types
Enhanced Ad Review Center
Streamlining common tasks. For example, changing several ad units simultaneously

Here's a screenshot, per the AdSense blog:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 4, 2009

Google Updates Friend Connect to Match Up Content, Ads with Uses Interests

Google has released updates to Friend Connect that will help the tool be more, um, friendly to both web developers and their site visitors. They're using the interests that users note in their profiles to help deliver a more personalized experience.

Custom newsletters - Friend Connect now offers newsletters. You can select to send them to your entire Friend Connect audience - or send newsletters according to interest.

Google Ads - If you have AdSense on your site, Google Friend Connect will now use the interests of a Friend Connect visitor to help serve up more relevant ads.

Personalized Content Gadget - Google will use, once again, user interests to show content throughout your site that's relevant to those interests.

What do you think of these Google Friend Connect updates? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 30, 2009

Google Crawls RSS Feeds to Discover New Web Pages; AdSense for Feeds Now Available in Blogger

Google recently launched a new feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds to discover new web pages. This helps Google index new webpages faster than traditional methods.

As a result, you'll want to make sure that your robots.txt file allows Googlebot to crawl your feeds. To learn more about robots.txt from Google's standpoint, click here.

In other feed news related to Google, AdSense for Feeds is now available directly in Blogger. You can find the integration under the "Monetize" tab in the Blogger dashboard.

AdSense for Feeds allows bloggers to make money from advertisements that are included in RSS feeds. This is important because not all RSS readers click through to visit a site, where bloggers can make money off of display ads.

Blogger is a blogging platform that was acquired by Google in 2003.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

October 5, 2009

AdSense Now Available for Full HTML Mobile Sites

Many mobile devices are now featuring a full HTML web browsing experience. As a result, web developers have often created mobile sites that offer a richer experience than a page full of text links.

Google AdSense is now allowing publishers and web developers to use bigger ads than the typical tiny mobile display ads.

The AdSense team has developed a snippet of Javascript that's easy to embed on your mobile site that gives you more control over the ads displayed on your mobile site. If you're targeting all mobile devices or, for whatever reason, are unable to change your website, AdSense will detect the full HTML mobile browsers and serve up bigger ads for you.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 2, 2009

AdSense Gets YouTube Promoted Videos and View-Through Conversion Reporting

There are a couple of Google AdSense updates you'll want to know about. First up, AdSense is getting Promoted Videos from YouTube. These video ad units will contain a thumbnail image plus three lines of text. They're available in the following formats:

300x250 Medium Rectangle
336x280 Large Rectangle
728x90 Leaderboard
250x250 Square
200x200 Small Square

Next up, AdSense is launching View-through conversion reporting. The feature shows conversions for ads that were seen but not clicked on in a 30-day window. For example, if a visitor sees your display ad but doesn't click - but then goes to your site and performs one of your conversion actions (purchase, signup, etc) within 30 days, that will show up on the report.

View-through reporting is tracked through the AdSense cookies and is only for display ads - not search or text ads. AdSense Conversion Tracking must be installed in order to use View-through reporting.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 18, 2009

Google Officially Launches DoubleClick Ad Exchange

A week ago, ClickZ's Zachary Rodgers broke the news that Google would soon launch its new online advertising exchange. That news is now official.

Google is boasting that its DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be a time-efficient way for publishers and advertisers to get their respective jobs done with regards to online display advertising. Publishers will make available unsold inventory and advertisers will bid in real-time. Google handles all the billing and payments.

Google says it has three primary objectives with the ad exchange:

1. Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads. 2. Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure. 3. Open up the ecosystem

That last one could be a source of contention since it looks like advertisers will be forced to use DoubleClick's ad buying platform.

Additionally, Google's not the first ad exchange out there. Their main competition will be Yahoo!'s Right Media Exchange. So, while Google is launching this thing by saying it will help both publishers and advertisers get a bigger piece of the pie, this mostly seems like it will give Google a bigger piece of the display ad pie.

Still, there's a reason why everything Google touches seems to turn to gold, and there's no reason to think the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be anything different.

As a result, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some antitrust scrutiny down the line if they do indeed end up with a big chunk of the aforementioned proverbial pie. But for the meantime, publishers and advertisers have a new option in the ad exchange market.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bulk Listing Verification Now Available for Google Maps Local Business Listings

Business owners have been able to bulk upload their local listings to Google Maps but have had to verify them individually. Until now. Google is now providing the opportunity to bulk verify bulk uploads.

Said bulk uploads must meet the following criteria:

Accurate and up-to-date data
Minimum of 10 bulk uploaded listings already in business owners' Local Business Center account
Full compliance with our Local Business Center Quality Guidelines
Submitted by the owner of all businesses listed
All businesses have only been submitted by a single user

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 2, 2009

Google Cash Scam Artists vs. White Knight SEO Campaign

During SES San Jose 2009, I heard about plans to launch a White Knight SEO campaign to fight the legion of Google Cash Scam artists. If you want some background on the effort, read Jonah Stein's post "Using SEO for Good - Introducting White Knight SEO."

As Stein explains, the group aims to protect users from spam blogs (splogs), Made for AdSense (MFA) sites, and other Google Cash Scam artists by "dominating organic search results with consumer protection information. We hope that we can place advisory content to take over the top 10 results in Google for searches related to common scams and online fraud with a particular focus on areas which are using adwords & adsense to snare victims."

The White Knight SEO campaign's first target is "Google Cash" and related terms. And it has already started generating posts.

One of the earliest that I've found is "Alert - Google Cash Scam," which was posted August 19, 2009, by David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates. Rodnitsky says, "Move over flogs, now there's something meatier! Introducing, um, fnews - fake news! I got a full-screen pop up today from the 'Los Angeles Tribunes' with the headline 'Breaking: Google is Hiring at Home Workers. Pay $373 Dollars a Day (or more).'"

On August 21, Jonathan Hochman, the founder of Hochman Consultants, joined the White Knight SEO campaign when he posted, "Google Turns Blind Eye to Scam Ads." According to Hochman, "Unless you live under a rock, you've no doubt seen those 'Google Cash business opportunity' ads from entities like Google Money Tree and Google Treasure Chest. They seem to be everywhere."

And earlier today, Stein re-doubled his efforts by posting "Google's Cash Cow - Scam Advertising & Profits." Stein writes, "By now, you have gotten at least one email inviting you to make easy money by placing links on Google. These scams go by names like 'The Google Cash System' or 'Easy Google Cash'. The bottom line is pretty simple, these offers are scams and they are designed to take advantage of the most vulnerable people in our society, the unemployed, the opportunity seekers and the naive."

It's still early days, but it will be worth watching the White Knight SEO campaign against the Google Cash Scam artists. If you search for "Google cash" in Google, the #1 organic listing is the question in Google's Web Search Help, "Is Google Cash a legitimate service?"

But the eye goes to the #4 organic listing, which is a YouTube video entitled "Google Cash Scam." You can also watch the 4-minute, 12-second video by Sean Kells of the ReviewAroo.com blog below.

Who knows, maybe there are already enough warning signs around for even the most naive searcher. On the other hand, it never hurts to ensure that the warnings are even more explicit. Stay tuned. This story has legs.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

August 18, 2009

Google Plans to Update Font Faces in AdSense

Google AdSense has been testing different fonts and has found that various fonts fare better than others depending factors such as size and character width. As a result, they are planning a font face update. Here's what to expect:

Arial: 728x90, 336x280, 120x600, 120x240 Verdana: 300x250, 160x600, 468x60, 250x250, 234x60, 125x125, 180x150 Times New Roman: 200x200

The changes only affect ad units in Latin-based characters and only ads that have been set to "AdSense default" for the font face. The AdSense team recommends conducting your own testing once the changes are in place, in order to get the best performance for your site.

What do you think of the font face changes in AdSense? Tell us in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 25, 2009

Google Launches AdSense for Mobile Applications into Beta

If you have a mobile phone where you can download apps, then you may have noticed that some of the apps have ads on them. Mobile application developers use them to make money. Sometimes developers make two versions of an app - a paid version with no ads or a free version with ads.

There are a handful of mobile app advertising providers (such as Admob), and now Google is getting into the game. They've launched AdSense for Mobile Applications into beta. Backgrounds, Sega, Shazam, and Urbanspoon were among those who tested the offering in the trial phase.

In the video below, Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon talks about their mobile app and choosing to work with AdSense:

What do you think about AdSense for Mobile Applications? Are you a developer who will be checking it out? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 19, 2009

7 Google Updates Including Flash Indexing, Custom Search, and AdSense

Another week, another slew of Google Updates. Chew on these new features while you watch the US Open this weekend:

Google Flash Indexing - The googlebot will now index external content sources used in SWF files.

Google Webmaster Central - Reconsideration requests now come with notifications so you'll know where you're at in the process.

Custom Search Automatic Transilteration - You can type in one language but see results in another.

Google AdSense - Change the font size for your ad display units.

Google Maps and Transit - 7 new agencies have been added including

Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, TX
VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, TX
Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT
Metro St. Louis, St Louis, MO
Foothill Transit, San Gabriel Valley, CA
Riverside Transit, Riverside, CA
Charlotte Area Transit System, Charlotte, NC
Pinella Suncoast Transit Authority, St. Petersburg, FL

Google Book Search - Got a makeover, including embedded links, book search within each book, thumbnail view, content drop-down menu, plain text mode, page turn button and animation, and an updated book overview page.

A microblogging search engine may be coming soon to Google, according to the unofficial Google Operating System blog. This would compete with Twitter search as well as Facebook's new search tests.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 16, 2009

Google AdSense Adds 9 Currencies, Map Overlay for Feeds

Google AdSense has a couple of updates you'll want to know about. First, 9 currencies are now available for reporting. Publishers in the following countries can now view their earnings in their local currency:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Finland
Greece
Portugal
South Africa
Switzerland
UK

Prior to enabling a local currency, Google recommends backing up past reports in U.S. dollars.

The second update has to do with AdSense in Feedburner feeds. You can now view feed traffic by geographic location via Map Overlay (a feature used in Google Analytics).

To access, log into your AdSense account, click on Manage Ads, select View Ad Stats and then choose Map Overlay.

What do you think of these updates? Let us know in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 27, 2009

Google Adds Display Ads to AdSense Link Unit Pages

When online publishers use AdSense, they have an option to utilize link units. These ads feature a list of links that are contextually based on the content of the page they're featured on.

When the links are clicked on, it takes the user to a page of sponsored links. That page is now getting a display ad at the bottom. Google says the conversion rates are better for pages with the image ad. The display ads are also contextually targeted.

If there are no relevant image ads for the content, no image ad will be shown. It will not be replaced with a public service announcement or blank space.

Advertisers may bid on these display ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) and cost-per-click (CPC) basis.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 6, 2009

AdSense for Feeds Update Offers New Features

Recently, AdSense underwent a slight makeover where the ads being served up changed their root URL to doubleclick.net. Google is now making the same change for AdSense for Feeds.

Google the change allows advertisers to more easily create ad campaigns that span the Google Content Network (sites, feeds, mobile). The change will soon enable advertisers to use Interest-Based Advertising in their feeds, as well.

Are you using AdSense for Feeds? What do you think about the new features? Let us know in the comments section below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 4, 2009

AdSense and Analytics Accounts Can Now Be Linked

Google has finally allowed AdSense and Analytics accounts to be linked together. Simply log into AdSense, go to Reports > Overview, and then click on the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics."

Here's which reports the Google Analytics team says are available:

The Top AdSense Content report - View more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance.
The Top AdSense Referrers report - View how different incoming traffic sources contribute to revenue.
The AdSense Trending report - Analyze how revenue is generated during different times and days

Here's a video demo:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 29, 2009

Google Updates AdSense Program Policies Page

Google has made some clarifications to its AdSense Program Policies. Straight from the horses mouth (aka the Inside AdSense blog), here they are:

Google brand violations: This policy has always existed in our Terms and Conditions, but we've now brought it directly to the 'Ad Placement' section of the program policies page so that it's easier to find. According to this policy, we don't allow ads or search boxes to be placed on pages which misuse Google logos, trademarks, or other brand features in the page content or URL, and which could mislead users into thinking the page is associated with Google.

Deceptive implementations: We've clarified this policy a bit in the 'Encouraging Clicks' section of the program policies - ads may not be formatted in a way that makes them indistinguishable from other content on the page where they appear.

Ad placement in emails and email programs: This updated policy clarifies that Google ads , search boxes, and search results may not be placed in emails, as well as alongside emails.

Other Google products' policies: With this new policy, publishers aren't permitted to place ads, search boxes, or search results on, within, or alongside other Google products in a way that violates the policies of that other product or service. For instance, this would include placing ads on sites which allow users to download YouTube videos, which isn't permitted by the YouTube Terms of Service.

What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comments section below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 30, 2009

Google AdSense Says Goodbye to YouTube Video Feature

Google will no longer be offering YouTube video ads in AdSense. Apparently, the feature hasn't performed as well as AdSense had hoped. Publishers may still get video ads if they accept image ads on their sites or if the produce video content and use AdSense for video.

Meanwhile, if publishers still want to feature YouTube videos, they can, of course, embed videos directly on their site. They can also create playlists to feature multiple videos.

What do you think of Google killing YouTube video ads? Let us know in the comments. Related Reading: Google AdSense Releases News Widget AdSense Publisher Sues Google - And Wins Google AdSense Allows Feed Ad Review

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

March 10, 2009

Google AdSense Releases News Widget

Google AdSense recently released a new widget that allows sites to place news on their site. It looks like your basic AdSense box, but with "powered by Google News" in the tab at the bottom instead. Take a look:

Users can select the type of news they wish to appear on the widget for their site. Also customizable are size of the frame, the topics, and the number of articles.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 5, 2009

Google AdSense Allows Feed Ad Review

Google AdSense launched a feed ad program last August. Now, they're enabling users to review their ads before they appear in the posts.

The feature is called the Ad Review Center. Users can approve or disapprove of ads before they go into the feeds.

To do so, login to your AdSense account. Then look for the Ad Review Center in the 'Competitive Ad Filter' section under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Choose the Client-ID starting with ca-feed-pub.

You'll have to put your ads on hold for 24 hours before you can filter through them. During that time, no ads will be served to your feeds, but afterwards you can go through the ad approval process.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google AdSense Offers Expandable, Rich Media Ads

Google AdSense is introducing expandable ads to their ad offering. Expandable ads are ones that increase when an action is taken. With some networks, ads increase in size when a user mouses over or scrolls a page. But AdSense's expandable ads will increase only when clicked on.

The AdSense expandable ads will only increase up to double the width or height of the original display. Users can click to close the ad at any time. The ads can include rich media such as video and images.

Advertisers will pay based on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. CPC ads will only cost the advertiser when users click through to the landing page.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

February 11, 2009

Google Unveils Adsense for Mobile Search

Google has launched AdSense for Mobile Search. This enables mobile website developers to place a Google search box on their sites. The search box can be co-branded with a site's brand and logo. They can generate revenue through the text link ads included in the search results.

The program is available in a private beta-test only. If you're interested in becoming a beta-tester, click here to apply.

Google launched Adsense for mobile content in September of 2007. Last December, Google began offering mobile AdWords offerings for the iPhone and G1.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 15, 2008

Google Now Offers AdSense for Feeds

Google is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network.

No official announcement has been made, but many publishers are able to access the feature in their AdSense accounts. I was able to do so with mine. Below is a screenshot of the process for signing up a feed:

via Google Operating System

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 14, 2008

Google AdSense Video Units Add 3 Languages, 4 Countries

Google AdSense has expanded the availability of its Video Units to include support for 3 more languages and 4 more countries.

The languages are:

French
German
Spanish

The countries are:

Brazil
Germany
India
Mexico

Previously, video units were available in English and Japanese to users in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Google Talks Ranking and Basic SEO Again, This Time on Adsense Blog

Recently, Google's Matt Cutts gave USA Today readers 5 SEO Tips, which many of our readers found quite basic (albeit good). Then, last week, Google gave an overview of its ranking system. Both come in the midst of Google's latest push to inform about its privacy policy. Now, Google has taken to the AdSense blog to inform publishers of basic SEO tips.

Here's what Ambroise Fensterbank, Search Quality Evaluator, recommends:

Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
Use tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about.

Fensterbank also recommends updating your site with fresh content, which may help the Googlebot crawl your pages more regularly. Also, it may attract links.

And what would a good instructional post be without a video? Hit play below to learn more.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 1, 2008

Google Nixes AdSense Referrals, AdWords PPA; Rebrands DoubleClick Performics

Google has a slew of announcements about its advertising products, including AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick.

First up, AdSense is no longer accepting referrals. They're advising users to remove the code from their sites, but to save the data collected through the referrals. Meanwhile, AdWords is phasing out the AdWords Pay-Per-Action program. Both programs have the last week of August as the expiration date.

Users of AdSense Referrals and AdWords PPA are being pointed to the Google Affiliate Network, formerly known as DoubleClick Performics. Performics was previously both an affiliate network and a search marketing company. Google divested itself of the Performics search marketing business for the obvious conflict of interest. The affiliate portion of the business is what is being rebranded.

Advertisers will be able to set CPAs for campaigns or design custom payments to affiliates. Publishers must apply and be accepted to the program, similar to the application for Adsense.

Finally, while the three remain separate programs for now, an integration could be in the future. Trevor Claiborne, writing on the Inside AdWords blog, "The Inside Adwords blog The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense." (emphasis mine) That sounds like a hint of things to come, don't you think?

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 30, 2008

Google Adsense Video Units Now Available in 8 More Countries

When Google announced the addition of video units to Adsense, it only rolled out the program only to U.S. Adsense users. A month later, the program was expanded to the UK, Ireland and Canada. Now, the program includes 8 additional countries, and here they are:

France Italy Spain Australia Netherlands Poland New Zealand Japan

Hat tip to Australian SEW reader David Webb, who noticed the change.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 6, 2008

Google's Adsense for Search Integrates Custom Search

It's a match made in heaven, or at least Mountain View, California. Adsense for search is now integrating Custom Search. Now you can control those search results users conduct on your site and make moolah at the same time. Here's what you can look forward to:

Site Search: Choosing this option will keep users on your site only.
Improved indexing of your pages: Google hopes its recent indexing updates will prove to benefit your Site Search users by providing better Adsense for Search results.
Tuning search results and ads with keywords:Control search results by setting a context. If your site is about cats, then enter "cats" and "cat food" as keywords and when someone searches for bowl, then results for cat food bowl will come up instead of other types of bowls or the sport of bowling.
Selecting ad location: Choose where ads will be placed in relation to the the search results on your site.
Quick and easy updates: You can now use the ad management feature in Adsense to control the settings for your custom search engine ads.

Here's a video from the Googleplex explaining the update:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:21 AM | Permalink

May 5, 2008

Is Google Dropping AdSense Sites Using AdWords?

A discussion over at WebmasterWorld suggests Google may be dropping AdSense accounts from sites that buy traffic from AdWords.

Funny how this may have been the way to stop arbitrage way back before all the other methods were used and the experimentation cost regular advertisers lots of money through all the minimum bid increases.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:59 PM | Permalink

April 22, 2008

Google Sued for Ad Fraud; Another Class Action Settlement?

Today Google was slapped with a an advertising fraud lawsuit that will be fascinating – and important – for AdWords advertisers to watch.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed by the firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner, on behalf of David Almeida, a Massachusetts-based private investigator. The lawsuit claims that Google defrauds advertisers by obscuring the fact that new AdWords campaigns are set by default to display ads on both Google's search results pages (and like pages served by partners like AOL) and pages owned by site publishers who display AdWords ads via Google's Adsense programs.

Readers of my weekly SEW Content Advertising column are familiar with this phenomenon, and my suggested best practice of creating separate search and content campaigns.

At the risk of making life harder for my friends at Google, I need to point out that the suit seems to get one important fact wrong. Reports today in CNET, Yahoo! Finance, Wired and other outlets imply that advertisers are presented with the ability to “opt out” of displaying ads on the content network during campaign creation. Here's the way Yahoo puts it:

“During this process, users encounter two adjacent boxes. Into the first, customers enter the amount they wish to pay per "click" of an ad displayed on Google.com. The second box is marked "optional." Into this box, a user can enter the amount they would be willing to pay per "click" of an ad appearing on a third party web page. But leaving the box blank does not prevent ads from appearing on third-party sites.”

The truth is, advertisers don't see this option during campaign creation. The only way for them to opt out of displaying ads on the content network is for advertisers to explicitly edit the settings of their campaign after creating it, and un-check the box labeled “Content Network” – which is checked by default. Some would reason this makes Google even more exposed to fraud charges.

Another irony: some of the reporting claims the content network is inherently flawed in some way. Here's how Yahoo! puts it:

“Ads on third-party sites are widely-acknowledged to be far less effective (and therefore less valuable to the advertiser) than ads on Google.com.”

Readers of my column know that the content network is not “less effective;” savvy advertisers realize that great, profitable results can be obtained by advertising on content sites. The rules and best practices for creating effective content campaigns are, however, much different than for search campaigns. To Google's credit, they've been trying to make these differences more clear.

I'll dig into this subject more deeply in the next installment of my column. Meanwhile, my predictions, no matter which way the lawsuit is decided:

1. Google will finally make opting out of the content network much more straightforward, with clear instructions during campaign creation.

2. Google's advertiser education efforts, via their tutorials and help files, will much more explicitly teach the differences search and content ad campaign best practices.

Posted by David Szetela at 7:53 PM | Permalink

March 17, 2008

SEW Experts: Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Google has launched an important new tool that prevents your Content Ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool. In today's Content Advertising column, "Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool," David Szetela shares some best practices for using the tool to exclude whole swaths of site types that are not likely to convert for your site. Share your thoughts on this new tool for AdWords in the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 26, 2008

Many See AdSense Income Dropping

I have been hearing and reading a lot of reports about decreased income from AdSense. A recent detailed post on the topic was done over at WebMasterWorld.

Barry Schwartz and the SERoundtable crew polled publishers at the beginning of the month and found that 63% have noted a drop in their AdSense income.

Add to that the changes in the T&Cs where sites that don't meet impression and click numbers will be terminated from the AdSense program and you have some serious changes to the AdSense landscape.

Has Google finally gotten to the point where they feel they can cut back their publishers? Have they started to thin the herd by making the pay outs lower? Or have the bigger publishers started to take all of the higher paying ads, leaving the rest of the publishers a much lower paying pool of ads to run?

Other possibilities are Google is pushing their newer ad styles such as video - with drops in text maybe publishers will feel more inclined to run the other options....

Is Google not getting enough people embracing the new ad types?

Have the little publishers served their purpose now that Google has many of the once suspicious large publishers?

Has policing small sites become too much work?

The future direction of AdSense seems to be changing. Where it now plans to go is something they should be sharing with the people who helped get them to where they are today.

I would love some input.... losing AdSense income, tried the newer ad formats, have an opinion? Post comments here.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:03 PM | Permalink

February 25, 2008

SEW Experts: Google AdWords Contextual Advertising Mystery Solved

Readers have tried running placement-targeted campaigns, and found many AdSense publisher sites don't seem to be available to them. In today's Content Advertising column, "Google AdWords Contextual Advertising Mystery Solved," David Szetela shares a way to work around issues with the tool Google offers to discover new sites to advertise on.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2008

Google to Offer AdSense Video Units

Google today opened up its 9-month-old pilot program to allow qualified publishers to put video ad units on their sites. The AdSense for video beta will use the InVideo ad units which Google uses on YouTube. Unique to the AdSense for video ads will be a text overlay element, a text ad contextually targeted to signals in your videos and on the page where the video lives.

AdSense for video is now available to U.S. publishers with English language sites who serve at least one million video streams a month. In the near future, Google plans to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:58 AM | Permalink

February 4, 2008

SEW Experts: How to Target Sites in AdSense

Last year, Google took another pioneering step and rolled out an AdWords feature that let advertisers place ads on specific sites. In today's Content Advertising column, "Contextual Advertising: How to Target Sites in AdSense," David Szetela shares tips for creating placement-targeted campaigns (originally called site-targeted campaigns).

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2008

AdSense Adds Help in Hebrew

Just received this from the AdSense crew so no doubt it is in the official blog.

"We're all about numbers and international launches this week, so we're excited to tell you that we've recently launched our (sweet) 16th AdSense Help Forum, this time in Hebrew. If you're a Hebrew-speaking publisher, visit the new forum to ask your questions about the AdSense program or share your advice with other publishers. You may also see occasional posts from a Google representative nicknamed AdSensePro.

With the ever-growing number of forums in a wide variety of languages, now's a great time to join the AdSense community in your language! Our forums are also available in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish."

Posted by Frank Watson at 6:01 PM | Permalink

January 2, 2008

AdSense Adds Newbie Central

In their ongoing efforts to help educate their users the Google AdSense team has added Newbie Central - "the complete resource center for newly approved AdSense publishers," their blog announced today.

The introductory page supplies links to what AdSense must know are the most Frequently Asked Questions. It is a great idea - centralizing these questions.

Earning expectations, ad formats, how to filter ads etc. are all the things new users want to know.

Now if you could just increase the payouts I would really be happy!!!

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:39 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2007

Free Google Flip Video Camcorder --No purchase necessary

OK, strike "no purchase necessary." Free Flip video camcorder: "big purchase necessary?"

Google gave big-time advertisers and SEMs (whose clients spend big) a Flip Video Ultra Series camcorder with recording time up to 30 min. and 1GB internal memory.

Search marketer Shimon Sandler recorded an Oscar-worthy short film (YouTubed) of his Google Video Ultra gift being unwrapped. You'll watch the film again and again, if only to get into the Xmas spirit of green envy that children of all ages feel during the Holiday Season.

Google Flip flopped with all the SEMs who only received Google 2GB USB memory cards instead of the Google Flip (with MSRP of $149.99!). The 2GoogleByte USB card was described by our friends at SERoundtable as more or less a lump of coal -- way inferior to last year's Google gift gadget: a sweet digital picture frame.

It would seem only the FTC approves of Google acquisitions these days.

Here at Search Engine Watch, we'll be providing the P.O. Box for Google Customer Returns and the address of the secret Google Gift Exchange location.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:46 PM | Permalink

December 16, 2007

AdSense Ad Review: Good for Advertisers?

A few days ago Frank Watson blogged here about a new AdSense feature that lets site publishers exclude AdWords ads they feel may be inappropriate for their sites.

AdSense publishers will be able to view ads that advertisers have directed to their sites via Placement Targeting, and choose to block ads they don't feel are "relevant" to their site visitors.

This will certainly be used by AdSense publishers to (attempt to) maximize AdSense revenues - - publishers will block ads that they deem "low-revenue" in favor of ads that visitors will click on more frequently.

But is it good for advertisers? Well, yes and no...

Most AdWords advertisers who create Placement Targeted campaigns have done time-consuming research to identify sites that have proven (or are expected) to be relevant, in terms of producing valuable clicks and conversions. Knowing their ads can be blocked at the whim of an AdSense publisher might make advertisers more reluctant to spend the time necessary to target their advertising.

AdWords advertisers will be able to see the reason an ad was blocked - if the AdSense publisher chooses to provide it. Google says "This feedback gives advertisers more insight on how to increase coverage by adjusting ad quality, content, and relevance. We also use this information internally to help improve products."

Nice theory -- but will AdSense publishers really provide (optional) constructive feedback?

As I've pointed out in my SEW Experts column, Content advertising requires significant work and diligence -- arguably more than for Search advertising. Dealing with blocked ads -- understanding why an ad was blocked, and possibly even corresponding directly with a site owner to appeal the decision -- could just add unnecessarily to the advertiser's workload.

Hopefully this won't happen often - and the system will work to each side's satisfaction and benefit.

But let's keep an eye on it.

Posted by David Szetela at 11:31 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2007

AdSense Introduces Ad Review Center

Google has added the ability to preview the ads that will run on a publisher's site and to block those they don't want to appear, the AdSense blog announced today.

This effort at improving transparency could help publishers and avoid sites advertising on a publisher's site that they do not feel are a good fit.

"In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we've developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we'll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site's users," the blog stated.

With growing compliance issues in some industries, this will help Google by allowing publishers to exclude sites that may violate their regulations and thus encourage them to add Google AdSense.

Google asks that you give feedback on why you exclude a site - a good idea and one that may start them looking at their content advertisers as well as the real needs of their publishers who helped make them a big chunk of their revenue.

The feature will be rolled out over the next few months, Google said.

"When it has been enabled for your account, you'll see a green notification box at the top of your 'Competitive Ad Filter' page, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the 'update settings' link in the Ad Review Center. You'll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad," the blog explained.

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:59 AM | Permalink

November 19, 2007

AdSense Video Units To Launch In UK, Ireland and Canada

The AdSense blog announced it is adding video units to AdSense users in Canada, Ireland and the UK.

"With this new launch, publishers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to show videos from our YouTube content partners and choose those videos by category, individual YouTube partner, or have video automatically targeted to their site. Based on publisher feedback, we've also just added a feature which lets you choose individual videos to be displayed in your video units" the press release stated.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:23 PM | Permalink

November 16, 2007

Clickable Areas on AdSense Redefined

Google announced today on the Inside AdSense blog that it has redefined the clickable area of its text ads to make only the ad's title and URL clickable, instead of the whole block of text.

The move is intended to prevent advertisers from paying for accidental clicks on an ad: "By allowing users to click only on the ad title and URL, we aim to decrease accidental clicks, better aligning visitor behavior with their intent," writes Katie Mandel, AdSense product marketing. "Overall, the decrease in accidental clicks will keep users on your website, interacting your content, until they intend to click on an ad."

The changes began rolling out earlier this week, as noted at Search Engine Roundtable. Google warns advertisers on the Inside AdWords blog that they should not be surprised if they see a decrease in both the number of clicks and the clickthrough rate (CTR) in content network campaigns. It's expected that advertisers will also see an increase in the average return on investment (ROI) of content network traffic.

Early forum conversations finds the impact is not huge, though many publishers are seeing a drop in CTR.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:24 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2007

AdSense Reporting Problems

A number of forums have noted that Google's AdSense reporting is having problems. Yesterday webmasters were noticing discrepancies in basic impression numbers between AdSense and their log files.

The problems appear to be tied to the Custom Channels statistics, according to most comments.

A comment in Google Groups by a Google employee indicated it had nothing to do with the announced changes to AdSense yesterday. "Our engineers and product team are aware of this aggregate vs. channels reporting discrepancy. They're working as quickly as they can to fix the issue, and I'll let you know as soon as I find out more.

FYI - This is unrelated to the announced product change from the blog yesterday (that feature hasn't launched yet)".

Anyone seeing the same thing in their accounts can discuss it here.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:13 PM | Permalink

October 23, 2007

AdSense To Launch Ability To Change Displayed Ads From Interface

Today's Inside AdSense blog announces the ability to make changes from the interface that will impact ads already coded on your pages. No more make the changes at the interface and then change the code on the pages.

While some elements can be done if you know the code without using the AdSense interface, you still need to make the on page changes which can at times be more difficult.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:45 PM | Permalink

September 18, 2007

Google AdSense for Mobile

Recently I wrote that Google Mobile was starting to run AdWords ads. This initiative has been expanded to now include Google Adsense(TM) for mobile. This program contextually targets ads to mobile website content.

The program is targeted at people who have created websites targeted at mobile browsers, allowing them to make money on contextual advertising using the same model used by Google on the traditional web. The program is available in the following countries: US, Australia, China, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and will soon also be available in Japan.

For AdWords advertisers that currently do contetual advertising with Google, this will expand the reach of that advertising further onto the mobile platform.

A word of caution is in order for all Google AdWords advertisers. Participation in this program defaults to opt-in. If your content is not appropriate for a mobile environment, you need to go into your AdWords account and manually opt-out.

I have heard some criticism of this policy, as many AdWords account holders will not know that they need to do this, and their ads will be running in a mobile environment, even if that is not what they want. This will result in added expenditure that they will not have anticipated.

The Google FAQ page for the AdWords for Google Mobile initiative states that the procedure to opt out is:

You can opt out your eligible search ads from running on Google Mobile Search pages at any time. On the Campaign Summary page, select the link that says 'View performance data for these ads' from within the alert message or below the table that contains your campaigns. On the bottom of the page that reads "Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile Search," click on the link that says 'Yes, opt me out' to stop running your search ads.

It appears that the procedure is a bit different than that. I went into an AdWords account this morning, and could not find the link Google refers to on the Campaign Summary tab. After about 10 minutes, I finally found the following text: "There are 61 days left before we will begin charging for search ads on Google Mobile Search. View details". The View details text was a link to a page where I could opt out of the program.

For the client whose account I was using to research this, my opinion was that the mobile platform was not a fit, so I opted out of the service. Note that Google does say that they try to algorithmically determine the fit of content and landing pages for the mobile platform, but my opinions is that it's better to be safe than sorry.

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink

August 19, 2007

AdSense Randomly Testing Ads On Publishers' Sites?

I have seen two conversations about random uncoded AdSense ads appearing on people's sites. Webmaster World is discussing new ads that appear to be adding a "more ads link" and some random text link ads to people's AdSense ads.

A thread here at SEW has found ads being randomly added to a travel blog.

I hope to find out from Google what is happening.... will ask tonight or tomorrow when I am at SES San Jose.

Posted by Frank Watson at 9:28 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2007

AdSense Offers Help For Forum Marketing

Inside AdSense, the Google blog dedicated to information about their publishing advertising product, posted an article "Getting your forum site to perform well with AdSense" today.

Though it offers only three suggestions (four counting the bonus tip), it is a great start. The three areas covered are the Welcome box ad, the forum post ad and blending colors and borders. While the bonus is about improving ad relevance through sectioning.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:56 PM | Permalink

July 16, 2007

Google Confirms Mobile AdSense Beta

Word of a new version of AdSense for mobile users began spreading last week, and a Google spokesperson has confirmed that it is running a limited beta of the product, according to ClickZ.

"Google is committed to finding new and better ways to get users the information they need while on the go, and to opening up new revenue opportunities for our partners," the spokesperson said. "We are currently conducting a limited beta to test AdSense for mobile, a monetization product for mobile publishers. We will continue to evaluate the beta and will refine the product based on feedback from our users, publishers, and advertisers."

Google has been seen testing mobile search ads in the U.S. and U.K. in September 2006, and in more of Europe, Asia, and Australia in November. This is the first time Google ads have been placed on third-party mobile publisher sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:22 AM | Permalink

AdSense Adds CPA Ads With CPC, CMP Ads

A thread over at WebMasterWorld is discussing the integration of Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) ads into the AdSense mix. CPA had been offered as a beta to a number of advertisers but it seems a bunch more are seeing this on their sites.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:47 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2007

AdSense Rolls Out Referrals 2.0

Beyond the text and image ads AdSense offers - the release of Referrals 2.0 now incorporates products that you can sell on your site. The product that had been in beta previously is now being launched globally - well I did see instances in French, German and Italian.

Like the text ads, the Referral product looks at the content on your page to determine a good product fit.

The press release issued today is below.

This past March, we launched a referrals beta to test the feature and iron out some wrinkles. Now that we've finished our testing, we're pleased to announce that referrals 2.0 will soon be available to all AdSense publishers.While some of you may already be familiar with referrals for Google products, this launch will greatly expand the inventory and functionality of referrals for AdSense publishers. Below we've highlighted a few of the key benefits of referrals 2.0:

- Expanded product inventory: While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren't able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.

- Category and keyword targeting: With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That's why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.

- Ad unit optimization: It can be tricky picking the best ads for your site, so we've included ad unit optimization for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. We'll then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads we expect to perform best on your site.

- Better targeting for pages with multiple themes: With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique "keywords" for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.

- Greater compensation for high-quality traffic: Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.

- Add your seal of approval: Unlike AdSense for content ads, our program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

To get started with referrals, click the AdSense Setup tab in your account, then click Referrals. If you don't see referrals 2.0 right away, please check back in a few days, as the feature will gradually become available in all accounts over the next few weeks. Please also keep in mind that for some languages, advertisers are just getting started so ad inventory may be limited at this time. We encourage you to check back frequently to see new offers.If you have any questions about how to add a new referral unit to your site, be sure to check out the updated referrals section of the Help Center.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:37 PM | Permalink

June 5, 2007

Google to Require Publishers to Meet Quality Guidelines

As of today, Google will require AdSense publishers to meet the same page quality guidelines it holds its AdWords advertisers to with their landing pages. According to the Inside AdSense blog, the guidelines are meant to "encourage publishers to, among other things, create sites with simple navigation and substantial, useful content."

The requirement has been added to the Site and Ad Behavior section of the AdSense Program Policies: Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google's Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.

Google recently began cracking down on so-called "made for AdSense" sites, and reportedly terminated several publisher accounts as of June 1.

In addition, publishers are now allowed to place up to three link units on a page, instead of the previous limit of one per page.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:47 PM | Permalink

May 23, 2007

Google Testing AdSense for Video

Google has announced a pilot with a small group of publishers to test streaming video ads. Writing on the Inside AdSense blog, product marketing manager Christina Lee said, "Just as AdSense adds value to the text content on your website and is useful for your users, we think these in-stream ads in video will add value to publishers' video content and help to deepen engagement with users watching the videos."

In this pilot, the selected publishers, with their own video content, will be able to control which videos get ads, and when the ads play in those videos.

This is different than the standalone click-to-play video ads Google offers to publishers in its content network. It's also different from the video distribution tests Google did with Warner Music and Sony BMG in January, and with MTV last August, both of which paired video content from those providers with video ads from Google advertisers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:47 AM | Permalink

May 21, 2007

Google Cracking Down on AdSense Arbitrage

Several AdSense publishers have received notice that their sites, which are mainly of the AdSense arbitrage/made for AdSense (MFA) variety, are being kicked out of the AdSense program as of June 1. According to Jennifer Slegg, the letter explains that the site involved has an "unsuitable business model," and most of the targeted publishers are earning significant amounts of money from AdSense. (Though how much of that money is being pumped back into AdWords to drive traffic to the site is not known, of course). Google will pay the publishers through the end of May.

Slegg notes that this could be good news for advertisers, since it should help clean up the content network: From a business perspective, it does make perfect sense for Google to make this move, since so many Google AdWords advertisers refuse to advertise on the content network because there are so many "Made for AdSense" style sites as well as those doing arbitrage. So in the long run, it could mean more money for publishers if/as advertisers return to the content network.

In the short-term, this could affect publishers not engaging in MFA sites, since these large-scale arbitrageurs will take their ads out of the program. These publishers could see at least a temporary drop in earnings, but a better-quality content network could bring in more advertisers in the long run, Slegg said.

The discussion is ongoing at Webmaster World and Search Engine Roundtable.

UPDATE: According to a Google spokesperson, this is part of an ongoing quality initiative on its content network: "At Google, we are always focused on how we can make the user experience as positive as possible while still providing value to our publishers and advertisers. As part of this effort, we continually conduct automated and manual reviews of publishers and sites that violate our policies. In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from the AdSense program."

It's not clear how many sites were affected in this batch of reviews.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:06 AM | Permalink

April 17, 2007

AdSense Adds Greek and Romanian

Just received the annoucement that AdSense is now being offered in Greek and Romanian.

We're happy to announce that we've just expanded our product offerings for two long-awaited languages: Greek and Romanian. Starting today, Greek and Romanian publishers can monetize their content by displaying targeted AdSense for content ads on their pages. As an added bonus, Romanian publishers can now implement AdSense for search as well.If you're ready to get started with these languages, just log in to your AdSense account and follow the wizard located under the AdSense Setup tab. You can also contact the Greek team at adsense-el@google.com and the Romanian team at adsense-ro@google.com with additional questions.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:11 PM | Permalink

April 11, 2007

Miva Usurps Google in the Publishing Industry

Here at SES New York, I had the chance to sit down with Alex Vlasto, head of global communications for Miva. The company recently won a contextual ad deal (against Google) with Conde Nast. It is now positioned to be the exclusive contextual ad provider across the publisher's network of magazine websites.

Miva's focus on certain verticals and web publishers allows it to make better contextual matches, which was a big selling point for Conde Nast. This is compared to more broadly applied publisher networks. Specifically its contextual placement works well with dynamic content, such as magazines, because it has rules and filters in place that are integrated with rotating content.

“There is contextual advertising and there is content advertising,” clarified Vlasto, characterizing the latter as the more considered ad placement around magazine and newspaper content.

So what did Miva do to win Conde Nast? It took screenshots of the AdSense placements across the publisher's websites over the course of a few weeks in order to demonstrate where contextual placements weren't as contextual as it might hope. The Vanity Fair website, for example, had contextual ads for brands that were of a “lower class” than those the magazine wished to associate with. This comes down to a difference in a contextual match and a cultural match. Contextual advertising can accommodate the latter to the degree that rules and filters are applied.

On the advertiser side, Miva's Precision Network will reflect this approach by being more attuned to certain verticals that advertisers can buy into. This brings more relevant traffic to vertical websites, according to Vlasto – a concept given more weigh in the online advertising space lately, as echoed in yesterday's social networking session. In Miva's case, this is also an attempt to provide a different price point that's a higher margin, lower volume spend than more widely distributed contextual ad networks, which it also provides.

This strategy isn't anything new though. Marchex has been working this angle for some time and has brought in a who's who list of publisher partners including Business Week, USA Today and Forbes. Marchex's Mark Peterson points out that this is in fact a strategy that was born at Industry Brains, a contextual ad outfit the company acquired in 2005.

Miva's Precision network, taking this strategy to heart, will continue to take a vertical approach to winning publisher partners, while pursuing in parallel its sweet spot of dynamic content. More appropriate than magazines, in this sense, are newspapers. Though newspapers are traditionally slow to develop online models (and form partnerships in order to do so), their dynamic content make them appropriate subjects for more considered contextual ad placement.

“If there is a newspaper story about a train crash, you don't want to have contextual ads for train tickets,” said Vlasto, "And this type of thing happens more than most publishers realize."

Posted by Mike Boland at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 5, 2007

New Look for AdSense Ads

A new, streamlined look for Google's AdSense ads, which have been spotted in tests recently, have now been widely released, according to the Google AdSense Blog.

The new formats remove the heavy top border with "Ads by Google," moving that text to a tab on the bottom corner. Borders between ads in a unit are also gone. A publisher's previously selected customized fonts and colors should not be affected, according to Google.

Early responses to the ads at Digital Point Forums is positive, though many publishers are reserving judgment until the effect the new ads have on CTR are evident.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:03 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2007

MySpace Making $30 Million Per Month From Advertising

Guess the monster AdSense partner for Google is MySpace. According to a report just released, they are making over $30 million a month in ad revenue - 30-40% of which should be AdSense. Even Jeremy Shoemaker would be impressed by those numbers!

Loren Baker over at SearchEngineJournal has done a really thorough job analysing MySpace's use of Google ads.

Well worth the read. Nice effort Loren!

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:46 PM | Permalink

March 23, 2007

Google's New Text Link Ads -- Hotornot?

As I was putting together the latest Search Engine Forums Spotlight, I came across some threads on various search marketing forums discussing Google's new pay-per-action ads. Along with the expected discussions (like one at Webmaster World) of whether it would be good or bad for advertisers and publishers, I also found some people continued to worry that a new ad format included in the program had crossed a line.

I thought Barry Schwartz did a good job of putting the argument to bed in a post at Search Engine Roundtable earlier this week, but it seems that lots of people are up in arms about this new format.

In a discussion on our own Search Engine Watch Forums (among other places), advertisers worried that the new in-line text links, which Google delivers via Javascript, were somehow sneaky.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington says "They've crossed a hazy ethical line here." Techdirt calls in-line text ads "fairly controversial and often irritating to users."

I personally don't see a problem with these ad units. They are clearly marked as ads when a user mouses over them. They are generated by Javascript, so there's no "selling PageRank " going on, which Google's Matt Cutts has often frowned upon. There is a chance that bloggers will go out of their way to blog about something just to sell it via the referral link, but that goes on every day with affiliate ads as well, and as I said, the ads are clearly marked as ads, so the blogger's intentions are clear.

Time will tell whether this ad unit sticks or not. At this point, it will only be shown on publisher sites in the beta test for PPA ads, which for now is a tiny group. If they are rejected by readers, then chances are most people will never even get a chance to see them before they are discontinued.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:15 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2007

Google to Test Pay-per-Action Ads

Watch out Commission Junction. Here comes Google.

Google today announced a limited beta test of pay-per-action advertising, a new pricing model for certain AdSense ads on its content network that pits the company squarely against affiliate programs.

Under the new pricing model, advertisers will decide what kind of action they are willing to pay for, such as a sale, newsletter sign-up, or other conversion. The advertiser can set a value for that action that publishers will be paid. Google will monitor the conversions through conversion tracking codes on the advertiser's site.

Although a pay-per-action model shifts more risk to publishers, since they don't get paid unless a visitor clicks and completes the pre-defined conversion, the payoff will usually be higher than CPC commissions, said Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google's ad products.

"It does shift the burden of conversion to the publisher, but it's a higher value ad unit," he said. In addition, publishers have more flexibility in encouraging users to take advantage of the offer being presented, by recommending or describing the advertiser's service, he said.

Google has been testing various forms of these pay-per-action ads since June. Advertisers and publishers in the U.S. can sign up now to participate, and Google will begin inviting them to test the program over the next few weeks.

AdSense publishers can select individual ads, a "shopping cart" of ads, or search for ads by keyword. The new ad units are separate from the CPC and ads Google offers, and must be selected and placed separately. Publishers can review the details of the offer from the advertiser before agreeing to show the ad on their sites.

Advertisers can create text or image ads, or use Google's new text link ad format to create brief text descriptions that appear in the style of a publisher's page.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:00 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2007

AdSense Launches Ad Placement

The AdSense Team sent an email earlier today detailling changes that were started last night.

Apparently now you can allow advertisers to select channels inside your site and get more specific in their selection of pages etc.

The Inside Adsense Team released this information: As you may know, custom channels are a great way to track the performance of individual ad units on your pages. Starting this week, with just a few extra steps you can make your site more attractive to advertisers by allowing them to target these channels as ad placements. Creating ad placements for more visible and desirable ad locations on your site increases their value to advertisers using site targeting and encourages those advertisers to bid more.Thanks to the feedback of publishers who helped us test out this feature early on, here are some answers to a few commonly asked questions that you may also have about ad placements:How are ad placements different from custom channels?Think of ad placements as 'enhanced' custom channels. To create an ad placement, you create and implement a custom channel just as you normally would. The only change is the additional step of providing attributes and an accurate description for your ad placement. On the 'Channels' page in your account, click the appropriate 'edit settings' link on the right. As you can see below, there will be a box labeled 'Targeting' on the next page which, once checked, will show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement. From there, you'll just need to provide some details on where the ad unit appears on your site:Advertisers will see the 'External name' and 'Description' along with the domain on which that placement appears, so a meaningful name and detailed description clarifying where the ads will show can make your placement more appealing. Be sure to highlight your most valuable and best-performing ad units as placements. For example, try a description like 'Ads will appear in a 300x250 rectangle embedded within articles on the Travel section' or 'Ads will appear only in the leaderboard ad unit directly above any page on the site.'If nobody bids on my placement, does that mean I won't get any money?Ads that are targeted through ad placements compete in the same auction against all other ads that are eligible to appear in that space, so you'll still be able to generate earnings. For example, suppose you created a 'Homepage, Top center' placement. When we see an impression from this placement, we round up advertisers who match the content of your homepage, as well as those targeting your site and this placement and include them in an auction. We'll then display the ad which our system has determined will earn you the most money, regardless of how it was targeted.What kind of placements should I create?Remember that advertisers will rely on your ad placement descriptions in order to decide whether to target their ads to your site. That said, here are a few tips to get started: - If you have multiple ad units on a page, let advertisers target the high visibility ones separately - If you have a wide range of topics on your site and you think certain topics will appeal to different types of advertisers, then break them out accordingly - Break out high visibility pages such as your homepage and any above-the-fold spotsFor more on ad placements, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:46 PM | Permalink

January 23, 2007

Google Tests Video for AdSense

Google announced last night on the Inside AdSense blog that it will begin testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers over the next few weeks.

Video content from Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment will be paired with ads from Google advertisers. The test will determine how scalable this method of video distribution and advertising can be, according to ClickZ. A similar approach was taken in August, when Google tested video ads with content from MTV.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 3:01 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

Google Updates AdSense Policies

Google updated its policies for publishers in the AdSense program last night. Jennifer Slegg has a very thorough breakdown of the changes, with special attention to the competitive ad policy.

According to Slegg, the changes will cause some problems for publishers rotating ads from both AdSense and a competitive network, such as Yahoo Publisher Network. "If you are running YPN and AdSense on a 50/50 ad rotation using the same or very similar color palettes, you would now be in violation of AdSense policies. Likewise, if you are running AdSense on one part of your site, and YPN on another part, you would now also be in violation of the policies if you are using the same or similar color palettes," she writes. The rules also apply to ad units that mimic AdSense, yet are not contextual based, she adds.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:05 AM | Permalink

December 26, 2006

Google Adsense the New Gator?

Rebecca Lieb writes over at ClickZ that Adsense may be in danger of going the route of Gator/Claria, as contextual advertising bloopers happen to good merchant sites.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 11:47 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

Google AdSense Outlaws Pics By Ads

The Google AdSense team sent out a letter today detailling their new position on using images to draw attention to the ads on a publishers page.

"We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers," the email stated.

The information can also be found at the Inside Adsense blog.

Details and examples are given so people cannot mistake what is being discussed.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:21 PM | Permalink

November 28, 2006

Advertiser Details On Google Audio Ads

Donna Bogatin over at Digital Micro-Markets has posted what look to be PowerPoint slides designed to explain how Google Audio Ads will work for advertisers. The PowerPoint slides show how Google plans to bridge the advertisers with the consumers, how they deliver the ads to the radio and how many people Google thinks they can reach with the ads. As we reported earlier, we are expecting Google Audio Ads To Be Tested By End Of Year.

How does Google deliver radio ads?

Step 1) Station inventory management system and studio log.

Step 2) Google links electronically with stations to search for inventory that fits advertiser criteria.

Step 3) Inventory is paired with advertiser requests.

Step 4) Google delivers automated order to radio station and reserves inventory.

Google Audio's Current Footprint: * 800+ stations * 4200 stations targeted * Coverage in 19 of the top 25 markets

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:34 AM | Permalink

November 24, 2006

Google Sending Out AdSense Holiday Gifts

It is that time of the year again. We have our first report of a Google Adsense holiday gift from WebmasterWorld. The gift appears to be a 3.6 inch TFT digital photo frame. No pictures of the frame yet, but I hope someone emails one to me.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2006

AdWords Advertisers Can Site Target Specific AdSense Publisher Channels

As an advertiser, there are often times when you want to site target a particular site running AdSense, but your particular product or service is really only relevant to a specific portion of the site. Or you might only want your ads running in a specific ad unit, such as the one running above the fold front and center. Google has released a new custom channel targeting feature that will allow advertisers to do that.

Publishers will need to turn the feature on for each relevant custom channel in their account, or set up brand new custom channels, breaking down the site or ad units in ways they feel advertisers will want to target them. Then advertisers can access the channel information for specific publishers in order to pick and chose what to target on the site.

Since the feature has just been launched across all publisher sites (although it was available previously as a beta test) it will likely take some time before many publishers adopt this new feature. Publishers need to specifically turn on the feature for each channel they would like to use before they will be available for advertisers to target.

There is more detail on JenSense but Google has not released much information on it yet for either advertisers or publishers.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 10:11 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Google Audio Ads To Be Tested By End Of Year

Google positioning for move into U.S. radio from Reuters has Google saying that Google Audio Ads will begin testing by the end of the year. Google says over time, up to 1,000 Googlers might be involved. The article, as does Google to Boost Scope Of Radio-Ad Sales Business from the Wall Street Journal , touches on the idea that a deal involving a radio player like Clear Channel might kick start things. But rumors of talks remain that, rumors. Meanwhile, I still find myself amazed that Google is doing absolutely nothing in terms of podcasts. Online video, it can't do enough about, in hopes of grabbing ad money. But online audio it seems content to ignore, instead heading off into offline audio with radio. Setting up Google Audio feels like a missed opportunity.

Postscript: Donna Bogatin over at Digital Micro-Markets dropped me an email to say she wrote about this yesterday, before the Reuters story came out. >" underneath the image.

Publishers are unable to control if or when these ad unit styles appear on their sites. The unbranded ad unit does not seem to be used very often at all, however the image within the ad unit style is showing up frequently on many publisher sites.

It is always interesting to see what AdSense is testing, and what eventually makes its way to being a regular part of the program instead of limited testing.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 12:27 PM | Permalink

July 28, 2006

Google Testing Radio Ad Sales In Detroit

Google rides the radio waves, from News.com looks at how Google AdSense for radio is now being tested in Detroit, before a planned rollout of the program to all Google advertisers.

Technically, Google's been running radio ads ever since it acquired dMarc Broadcasting in January. It's not like dMarc stopped doing what it was already doing when Google bought it. The real change is that Google is integrating the ability for any existing advertiser to make radio ad purchases on a bid basis.

For more on Google's radio plans, see Googleplex Irvine & "AdSense Audio" For Radio Ads and Speculation: Google To Begin Selling Radio Ads Through AdWords Soon.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:36 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2006

The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices

Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and thus, potentially -- impossible to prevent some types of fraud through purely automated means.

The report is long, a 47 page PDF file. Anyone interested in click fraud issues should give it a thorough read. But given how everyone's always busy, I thought I'd highlight below a number of sections that stood out in my review of the document.

The report is by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University. To prepare it, he says in the Executive Summary at the beginning (page 1):

I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google?s campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google?s employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google?s invalid click detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information narrated to me by Google?s employees, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this point.

Immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is that he makes no mention of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if he's only talking with Google, of course he's likely to come away with the idea that Google is doing everything just fine.

When you read the report, it's clear this isn't the case. Google does come under criticism. It's also important to realize Tuzhilin was not employed by Google to create this report. He's an independent expert appointed to my knowledge by the court. Exactly how he was selected is unclear, and I do think it would be a better report if advertiser data had been involved. But there's still plenty of good stuff here to digest.

Page 2 covers his background and materials reviewed from Google to prepare the report.

Page 3 and some of page 4 covers those he talked with at Google. Interesting details are that Google's click quality team consists of about 36 people, one-third engineers looking to design detection systems and the remaining two-thirds dedicated to doing manual investigations of suspected fraud.

Pages 4 through 6 cover the history of the internet, search engines and Google, most of which isn't that necessary for most experienced search marketers. Page 7 talks about three main ways of purchasing advertising:

CPM - cost per impression
CPC - cost per click
CPA - cost per action

Again, basic stuff. But it's worth touching on because of some of the current debate that Google and other search engines will be forced to go to CPA pricing to fully eliminate fraud.

On page 8, Tuzhilin lends some support of this, or at least the problems that others have raised with CPC:

Although currently popular, the CPC/PPC model has two fundamental problems:

Although correlated, good click-through rates (CTRs) are still not indicative of good conversion rates, since it is still not clear if a visitor would buy an advertised product once he or she clicked on the ad. In this respect, the CPA-based models provide better solutions for the advertisers (but not necessarily for the search engines), since they are more indicative that their ads are ?working.?
It does not offer any ?built-in? fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general, as will be explained in Section 8 (it can be done relatively easily in some special cases, but not in general). For this reason, major search engines launched extensive invalid click detection programs and still face problems combating click fraud.

In response to these two problems and for various other business reasons, Google is currently testing a CPA payment model, according to some reports in the media. Some analysts believe that the conversion-based CPA model is more robust for the advertisers and also less prone to click fraud. Therefore, they believe that the future of the online advertising payments lies with the CPA model. Although this is only a belief that is not supported by strong evidence yet, Google is getting ready for the next stage of the online advertising ?marathon.?

What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? over at Publishing 2.0 from Scott Karp is a good roundup and debate on some of the issues of CPA perhaps as the solution to CPC issues.

I've posted lots of comments in Karp's post, but my personal view is this. Currently, Google is offering all three major payment systems: CPC, CPM and CPA. It is offering all three not just because of fraud issues but because advertisers have different goals with advertising, where different payment models may be required.

Building brand? You want impressions perhaps more than clickthrough, and suddenly CPM makes sense. Really savvy with conversion tracking? CPA might make more sense for you, as a way for you to feel less likely to be exposed to fraud and more likely to really be paying only for key traffic. Fairly rudimentary with conversion tracking? Doing low-cost CPC ads might make a lot of sense, for your situation. And beyond the three big ones, I'm sure we'll see other options emerge. The unifying goal around all of them, from Google's perspective, will be figuring out a way to help advertisers track that the ads are working according to some type of metrics that the advertisers want.

Skipping down past background on how AdWords works and the AdSense program (AdSense For Domains doesn't get mentioned, though it's a major program), page 13 starts in on what Google can tell about clicking activities.

Google is apparently making use of conversion data that advertisers provide to determine if fraudulent clicks are happening. My understanding was that conversion data was supposed to be ringfenced and not used by Google for anything, not even in the aggregate. But perhaps the policy has changed or perhaps I misunderstood this. I'll check on that (and also note that confusingly, the report says on page 34 that "None of the filters uses the conversion information that Google collects"). Certainly Google made no such restrictions when it launched Google Checkout. But even with conversion data, the report notes using this info isn't perfect.

Google collects various types of information about querying and clicking activities, including certain types of ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website where the visitor is taken following the click. All this data accumulated by Google is extracted from various sources and contains comprehensive information about visitor?s activities on the Google Network.

As stated before, the conversion data ? the ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website ? constitutes an important piece of this collected data. In particular, if the advertiser formally agrees to provide this information, Google collects data on whether or not the user visited certain designated pages on the advertised website that the advertiser marked as ?conversion? pages, such as the checkout page and certain form filling pages. This conversion data is limited to what the advertiser decided to provide to Google and is not as rich as the clickstream data collected by advertisers themselves on their websites. Also, many advertisers decide to opt out from providing this conversion data. In this case, Google does not have any conversion information and therefore does not know what happened after a visitor clicked on the ad. Nevertheless, this post-clicking conversion data is important for Google even in its limited form because it conveys some intentions of the visitors on the advertised website and provides good insights into whether or not the visitor is seriously considering purchasing the advertised product or service....

This ?raw? clicking data described above is subsequently cleaned, preprocessed and stored in various internal logs by Google for different types of subsequent analysis conducted on this data.

One inherent weakness of Google?s (or any other search engine) data collection effort that is important for detecting invalid clicks, is inability to get full access to all the clicking activities of the visitors of the advertised website. In other words, the conversion data that Google collects provides only a partial picture of all the post-clicking activities of the visitor on the advertised website. This data is important for detecting invalid clicks since better invalid click detection methods can be developed using this data. Unfortunately, Google (and other search engines) does not have full access to this data, unless the advertised website decides to provide its clickstream data to Google, which many websites are reluctant to do. However, this is not Google?s fault ? this is an inherent limitation of the types of data available to Google.

While it might not be perfect, the report also notes at the end of this section that no one has the perfect collection of information:

However, this lack of full conversion data available to Google is compensated by various types of querying and clicking data that Google can collect, whereas advertisers and third-party vendors cannot. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between the types of data relevant for detecting invalid clicks that is available to Google, advertisers and the thirdparty vendors. None of these three groups have the most comprehensive set of data pertinent to detecting invalid clicks, and each of them needs to settle for the invalid click detection methods possible only with the data that they have.

On page 14, the report addresses the frustration advertisers feel over the relatively non-granular nature of Google's reporting versus Google's need to keep some things carefully protected:

The smallest unit of analysis is one day. For example, the number of invalid clicks on an ad detected by Google (or any other related statistic) can only be reported on a daily basis (although there are certain alternative methods of obtaining aggregation granularity that is smaller than a day). In other words, advertisers cannot know if a particular click on a particular ad was marked as valid or invalid by Google, and Google refuses to provide this information to advertisers.

This is a source of contention and dispute between Google and the advertisers, and one can understand both parties in this dispute. On one hand, the advertiser has the right to know why a particular click was marked as valid by Google (when the advertiser thinks that it is invalid) because the advertiser pays for this click. On the other hand, if Google discloses this information, it opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work. This means that unethical users will immediately take advantage of this information to conduct more sophisticated fraudulent activities undetectable by Google?s methods.

This conflicting dilemma between advertisers? right to know and Google?s inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC advertising model to be discussed in the next section. More recently, Google tried to bridge this gap between Google and the advertisers.

Page 15 spends time looking at various definitions of click fraud, bringing us to page 16 which raises the bigger issue that it is impossible to know the intent of ALL clicks, which is crucial to understand what chunk of them might be fraudulent:

Unfortunately, in several cases it is hard or even impossible to determine the true intent of a click using any technological means. For example, a person might have clicked on an ad, looked at it, went somewhere else but then decided to have another look at the ad shortly thereafter to make sure that he/she got all the necessary information from the ad. Is this second click invalid? To make things even more complicated, the second click may not be strictly necessary since the person remembers the content of the ad reasonably well (hence there is no real need for the second click). However, the person may not really like or care about the advertiser and decides to make this second click anyway (to make sure that he/she did not miss anything in the ad and his/her information is indeed correct) without any concerns that the advertiser may end up paying for this second click (since the person really does not care about the advertiser and his/her own interests of not missing anything in the ad overweigh the concerns of hurting the advertiser). Therefore, in some cases the true intent of a click can be identified only after examining deep psychological processes, subtle nuances of human behavior and other considerations in the mind of the clicking person.

Soon after this, on page 17, comes the first real bombshell to me. As said above, you can't detect the intent of all clicks. Given this, there's no reasonable way to be certain that technological fixes for click fraud detection are working:

In summary, between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks, lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.

What? Didn't the report find Google was acting reasonably? Yes, and I think this is is because as the report goes on, it's because Google's not relying solely on automated means to stop click fraud, which might allow some clicks to get through, if that were only the case.

Page 18 picks of the issue even more strongly, and I've bolded this section because it deserves special attention. Note that the italics were originally included:

The last statement has one important implication: given a particular click in a log file, it is impossible to say with certainty if this click is valid or not in all the cases. This means that

It is impossible to measure the true rates of invalid clicking activities, and all the reports published in the business press are only guesstimates at best.
The invalid click detection methods need to be developed without a proper operationalizable conceptual definition of invalid clicks.

The important word above is all the cases since in some cases it can be stated with certainty if a particular click is valid or not. For example, it is easy to detect a doubleclick using relatively simple technological means, assuming that the doubleclick is invalid.

Again, it seems to be a case that automation can catch some, perhaps lots of click fraud, but it can't catch all of it because the intent problem. Also crucial in the above is the stressing that rates we've been given from various sources are simply guesses, since the intent of clicks aren't know to some of these other sources.

Indeed, in the case of the recent Outsell report, you don't even have to worry about figuring out the intent of particular clicks. Click fraud stats from that report come from half the panel entirely guessing about what click fraud rates they might have -- guessing, because that half does not auditing of clicks at all.

Page 19 deals with ways of identifying invalid clicks, at least according to operational approaches -- IE, automated criteria. Do the clicks show some type of:

Anomaly from past clicking patterns for a site or ad?
Violate certain predefined rules?
Fall into certain classes of behavior that make them deemed invalid?

Page 20 explains that Google primarily depends on the first two approaches -- looking for anomalies and using rules -- but then gets into what it stresses as the "Fundamental Problem" of fraudulent clicks:

We conclude that there is a fundamental problem associated with the definition of invalid clicks for the Pay-per-Click model. This problem can be summarized as follows:

There is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized in the sense defined above.
An operational definition cannot be fully disclosed to the general public because of the concerns that unethical users will take advantage of it, which may lead to a massive click fraud. However, if it is not disclosed, advertisers cannot verify or even dispute why they have been charged for certain clicks.

This problem lies at the heart of the click fraud debate and constitutes the main problem of the CPC model: it is inherently vulnerable to click fraud.

Page 21 poses solutions to the problem:

The ?trust us? approach of the search engines. The search engines can assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to protect them against the click fraud. This is not easy because of the inherent conflict of interest between the two parties: the money from invalid clicks directly contribute to the bottom lines of the search engines. Nevertheless, it may be possible for the search engines to solve this trust problem by developing lasting relationships with the advertisers. However, the discussion of how this can be done lies outside of the scope of this report.
Third-party auditors. Independent third-party vendors, who have no financial conflicts of interest, can work with advertisers and audit their clickstream files to detect invalid clicks.

These two approaches would still constitute only a partial solution to the Fundamental Problem because there is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized.

Page 21 continues on looking at how Google does click fraud detection, covering a range of general preventative measure and more active things done when clicks actually happen.

On page 23, a look at filtering systems begins, ending with this summary that's positive for Google, at the moment. It also stresses that filtering will always come under new challenges:

The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic ?tuning? and ?maintenance? rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network. It also demonstrates that various recent efforts of the Click Quality team to improve performance of their filters produce only incremental improvements. Thus, the Click Quality team currently reached a stability point since additional efforts to enhance filters produce only marginal improvements.

Having said this, the Click Quality team also realizes that this is only a local stability point in the sense that major future modifications in clicking patterns of online users and new types of fraudulent attacks against Google can lead to radically new types of invalid clicks that the current set of filters can miss. Therefore, the Click Quality team is working on the next generation of more powerful filters that will monitor a broader set of signals and more complex monitoring conditions. These new filters will require a more powerful computing infrastructure than is currently available, and the Click Quality team also participates in developing this infrastructure. Their overall goal is to make click spam hard and unrewarding for the unethical users thus making it uneconomical for them and turning many of them away from Google and the Google Network.

At page 28, the expert notes that Google's filters are relatively simple in nature, yet they work:

The structure of most of Google?s filters, with a few exceptions, is surprisingly simple. I was initially puzzled and thought that Google did not do a reasonable job in developing better and more sophisticated filters. I was initially certain that these simple filters should miss many types of more complicated attacks. However, the evidence reported in the previous two sections indicates that these simple filters perform reasonably well.

Why? A variety of reasons, such unsophisticated attacks:

Although some of the coordinated attacks can be quite sophisticated, the majority of the invalid clicks usually come from relatively simple sources and less experienced perpetrators....Still, there are certain types of attacks that Google filters will miss; but these attacks should be quite sophisticated and would require significant ingenuity to launch. Therefore, there cannot be too many of these, unless perpetrators become much more imaginative....

The Long Tail / Search Tail even gets a mention, with the idea being that -- if I understand correctly -- most activity focuses around the same type of things that the filters work well to detect. IE, the filters do well at cutting off the head of click fraud -- and if tail activity gets through, it's relatively little in comparison:

Despite its current reasonable performance, this situation may change significantly in the future if new attacks will shift towards the Long Tail of the Zipf distribution by becoming more sophisticated and diverse.

At the bottom of page 29, the report starts examining whether Google is letting stuff slide to earn more money:

Since Google does not charge advertisers for invalid clicks, this means that it loses money by filtering out these clicks. Thus, there is a financial incentive for Google not to forgo some of these revenues and simply be ?easy? Long Tail Left Part Frequency Rank 30 on filtering out invalid clicks. Therefore, it is important to know if any business considerations entered into the filter specification process or is it entirely determined by Google?s engineers in an objective manner with a single purpose to protect the advertiser base. This is one of the important issues that I investigated as a part of my studies of how Google manages detection of invalid clicks....

The conclusion is that Google isn't trying to favor itself:

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to understand who sets these threshold parameters, how, and what are the procedures and processes for setting them. In particular, I tried to understand if it is an entirely engineering decision that tries to protect the advertisers from invalid clicks or any of the business groups at Google are involved in this decision process with the purpose of influencing it towards generating extra revenues for Google.

As a result of these investigations, I realized that it constitutes exclusively an engineering decision with no inputs from the finance department or the business units, except the following two cases:

The first one was a special case when one particular IP address was disabled because of inappropriate clicking activities, and a business unit requested the Click Quality team to conduct an additional investigation since it was an important customer associated with that IP address, and restore it if the investigation results were negative. When I was explained what had happened, I felt that Google?s actions were reasonable in this particular situation.
The change in the doubleclick policy that was considered in Winter 2005 and implemented in March 2005. It turned out that the change in the doubleclick policy (i.e., not to charge advertisers for the immediate second click in a doubleclick) had non-trivial financial implications for Google. Being a publicly traded company at that time, this change would have had a noticeable effect on Google?s total revenues with corresponding implications for the financial performance of the company. Therefore, this policy change had legitimate concerns for Google?s management, and these financial implications have been discussed in the company. Still, despite its noticeable negative effects on its financial performance, Google decided to abandon the old doubleclick policy and not to charge advertisers for the second click, which was an appropriate action to take.

In conclusion, with the exception of the doubleclick, I found Google?s processes for specifying filters and setting parameters in these filters driven exclusively by the consideration to protect the advertiser base, and, therefore, being reasonable.

Doubleclick constitutes a special case. For me, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid, as I argued in Section 8, and the advertisers should not be charged for it. It is not clear to me why it took Google so long to revise the policy of charging for doubleclicks. Nevertheless, this policy was revised in March 2005 despite the fact that the company lost ?noticeable? revenues by taking this action.

I find the conclusion that Google wasn't trying to benefit itself doesn't mesh well with the expert's own concern/confusion/uncertainty about why Google took so long to change its policy on doubleclicks. Moreover, that entire policy isn't well explained. Way back up on page 20, there's this very brief mention:

It turns out that Google had a history associated with the definition of a doubleclick: at some point doubleclick was considered to be a valid click and advertisers were charged for it, while subsequently Google reconsidered and treated doubleclick as invalid.

And that's it until the section later in the report, where Google's effectively accused of footdragging on changing its policy, where business discussions about the change were made, but Google then seems to be given the all clear because eventually it did the right thing.

The entire matter is something that feels like it should have been explored more, but page 31 sheds light as to why this might have been difficult. Google's apparently had a complete staff change in relation to click fraud detection since it began charging by the click:

In this subsection, I will describe the history of development of Google filters. First of all, I would like to point out that most of the descriptions in this subsection are not based on documents provided to me by Google but rather on the verbal descriptions by the members of the Click Quality team based on their recollections of the past events and on the ?folklore? evidence since none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.

The section continues with detection divided into these groupings -- and I've bolded a key part:

The Early Days (February 2002 ? Summer 2003). These were the early days of the PPC model and of the click fraud characterized by extensive learning about the problem and determining ways to deal with it.
The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003, formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003, launch of new filters and the intent to take the invalid click detection efforts to the ?next level.? It ended with the development of the whole infrastructure for combating invalid clicks and the consolidation of Google?s invalid click detection efforts. This stage was characterized by significant progress in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes for accomplishing this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.
The Consolidation Stage (Fall 2005 ? present). By this time, Google had enough filters and perfected them to the level when they would detect most of the invalid clicking activities in the Left Part of the Zipf distribution (see Figure 1) and some of the attacks in the Long Tail. They would still miss more sophisticated attacks 32 in the Long Tail, and the Click Quality team continued working on the neverending process of improving their filters to detect and prevent new attacks. The Click Quality team has also been working on enhancing their infrastructure and improving their processes....

What? Click fraud wasn't under control until the end of 2005, yet Google is said to have acted reasonably by the report? How does this make sense? The best explanation seems to be that as the report goes on, the author feels click fraud was an evolving problem, and that Google was reasonably reacting to prevent it even though it wasn't "under control" until the end of last year. In contrast, had Google been doing nothing, then it might have been deemed not to have been taking reasonable steps to gain control.

Page 32 looks at the early days and notes that for a year and a half, no new filters were added other than the three original ones that CPC-based AdWords started with. Why? Maybe click fraud was less understood at that time since it was so new (though Search Engine Watch was citing articles on the problem like this one from Wired as far back as 2001). That's one suggestion, along with Google having fewer resources, lacking the right infrastructure or click fraud being on a smaller scale. But these are all guesses, since as the author notes (again, I've bolded a key part):

Not a single person on the Click Quality team was either around or involved in the click fraud detection back in 2002. The only person from this era who is still at Google is on an extended leave and was not available for comments during my visits to Google.

It is hard to judge reasonableness of Google?s invalid click detection efforts between 2002 and summer 2003 because there is simply not enough information available for this time period for me to form an informed judgment about this matter. One exception is the doubleclick policy that I have described before. As I have already stated, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid in my opinion, and Google should have identified it as such well before March 2005 (however, the detection and filtering out the third, fourth and other subsequent clicks was there since the introduction of the PPC model, and advertisers were not charged for these extra clicks).

Again, I get confused by the report declaring that Google operated reasonably when it also states that it can't judge if it indeed acted reasonably for part of the claim period.

The middle period finds progress with far more confidence, as covered on page 33:

The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003 and the formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003 (the first person was hired in April 2003 with the mandate to form the Click Quality team; several people joined the team during the summer of 2003, and the initial ?core? team consisting of Operations and Engineering groups was consolidated by Fall 2003).

During this time period, two new filters were introduced in Summer 2003 and one more in January 2004. These three new filters remedied several problems that existed since the launch of the first three filters and significantly advanced Google?s invalid click detection efforts. Besides the development of new and better filters, there was a separate effort launched to develop the whole infrastructure for doing the offline analysis of invalid clicks and managing customer inquiries about invalid clicks and billing charges.

Despite all these efforts, the new filters and the offline analysis methods still failed to detect some of the more sophisticated attacks (presumably from the Long Tail of the Figure 1) launched against the Google Network in 2004 and the first half of 2005. In response to these activities and as a part of the overall invalid click detection effort, Google engineers introduced some additional filters around Winter and Spring 2005, including the filter identifying the second immediate click in a doubleclick as invalid.

As a result of all of these efforts by the Click Quality team, a significant progress has been made in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes to accomplish this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.

And overall filtering is given this conclusion at the top of page 35:

Google put much effort in developing infrastructure, methods and processes for detecting invalid clicks since the Click Quality team was established in 2003. These efforts were not perfect since Google missed certain amounts of invalid clicks over these years and it adhered to the doubleclicking policy for too long in my opinion. However, click fraud is a very difficult problem to solve, Google put a significant effort to solve it, and I find their efforts to filter out invalid clicks as being reasonable, especially after the doubleclick policy was reversed in March 2005.

Page 35 then begins looking at "offline" or non-automated ways to find click fraud that's gotten past filters. By page 37, it gets into systems applied to review what happens on some AdSense sites:

Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the AdSense publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms and Conditions of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various publishers and either immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are engaged in the activities that the system finds to be inappropriate.

Interestingly, the system is still relatively new, only about a year old, as explained on page 38:

The first prototype of the auto-termination system was built in the early 2005 and the system was launched in the summer 2005. Recently, Google has developed major enhancements to the current version of the auto-termination system deploying an alternative set of technologies.

Page 38 also starts a look at the manual review that the click fraud team does, with this positive summary coming on page 40:

I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google?s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.

However, using humans also poses a bottleneck, as covered on page 41:

My only concern with these manual inspections is about scalability of the inspection process. Since the number of inquiries grows rapidly, so does the number of inspections required to investigate these inquiries. As stated before, Google tries to automate this process by letting software systems do a sizable number of inspections. Still, the number of manual inspections keeps growing significantly over time, based on the numbers that I have seen. This means that Google has a challenging task of expanding and properly training its team of inspectors to assure rapid high-quality inspections of inquiries in the future.

Page 41 also revisits the tug-of-war between advertisers wanting more transparency and Google trying to protect against click fraud by giving too much information away:

One of the complaints about Google?s investigation system that I keep hearing is that Google is quite secretive and does not provide meaningful explanations of the inspection results neither to the advertisers nor to the publishers. After examining how their inspection systems work, I can understand this secrecy. If Google provides such explanations, then the unethical users can gain additional insights into how Google invalid click detection methods work and would be able to ?game? their detection methods much better, thus creating a possibility of massive click fraud. To avoid these problems, Google prefers to be secretive rather than to risk compromising their detection systems and the advertiser base.

And this interesting tidbit on how when someone gets kicked out of AdSense, advertisers apparently get refunds:

Finally, I would like to point out that when Google terminates an AdSense publisher, all the clicks generated at that publisher?s site over a certain time period (valid and invalid) are credited to the advertisers whose ads were clicked on that site....

How well are things going? That begins to be addressed at the bottom of page 41, and here's a key statement from page 42:

The number of inquiries about invalid clicks for the Click Quality team increased drastically since late 2004. However, the number of refunds for invalid clicks provided by Google did not change significantly over the same time period. Therefore, the number of refunds per inquiry decreased drastically since late 2004. Since each inquiry about invalid clicks leads to an investigation, this means that significantly fewer investigations result in refunds. This statistic can be interpreted in several ways. First, it can be an indication that Google?s invalid click detection methods have significantly improved over this time period and that reactive investigations do not find any problems when searching for invalid clicks. Second, this statistic can mean that Google tightened its refund policies and is less generous with its refunds than it used to be. Third, this statistic can mean that more advertisers are looking more carefully into their logs and are more suspicious about invalid clicks since this problem received wide attention in the media and the public discourse in general. Therefore, they may request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities even if nothing really happened. I examined investigative activities of the Google Click Quality team and can attest that it consists of a group of highly professional employees who do their investigations carefully and professionally. Therefore, I do not believe in the second reason stated above. The third reason is quite possible since advertisers are indeed concerned about invalid clicks and request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities more frequently than before. However, the number of inquiries increased so significantly that I would expect that the number of refunds would also increase somewhat. Since this did not happen, I attribute this effect to the fact that Google?s invalid click detection methods work reasonably well by now.

I've bolded the most important parts to me. The expert is saying that more advertisers are raising inquiries, probably because of increased concerns (which we know is the case from various surveys over the past two years) but that Google isn't refunding more. Nor is that Google just protecting itself, the expert says. To him, it's a case that the concerns aren't matching the reality. Click fraud -- bad clicks getting past Google -- do not appear to be on the rise.

Nor is click fraud getting past filters a major problem compared to the amount Google is proactively catching, the expert says:

The total amount of reactive refunds that Google provides to advertisers as a result of their inquiries is miniscule in comparison to the potential revenues that Google foregoes due to the removal of invalid clicks (and not charging advertisers for them).

Another interesting part is how Google is comparing traffic across its network to that from within Google.com, which is said to be a "gold standard" of a pure site. The network is said to compare well:

Another indirect piece of evidence provided to me by Google is that Conversions-Per- Dollar (CPD) rates on various partner sites of Google Network are not significantly lower than on their ?flagship? Google.com site. CPD is the statistic determining the number of conversions that occurred divided by the dollar amount spent on advertising. This statistic shows how effective advertising campaigns are for the advertisers. Since Google spent much effort over the past 4.5 years to make sure that Google?s AdWords program works reasonably well, it now serves as the ?golden standard? against which other programs are compared at Google. Since CPD numbers for other parts of the Google Network approach that of at Google.com, this is an indication that other advertising programs work as well as AdWords works on Google.com. Since other parts of the Google Network are affected by invalid clicking activities significantly more than Google.com, this is an indication to the Click Quality team that their efforts to combat fraud on other parts of the Google Network are as effective as on Google.com.

At the bottom of page 43 is an overall conclusion about that Google's doing a reasonable job with detection, as best as this scientist can tell. It also takes some slams at general reports of click fraud being widespread in the press as not being proven true or false yet. I've bolded the key paragraph for all this below:

As a scientist, I am accustomed to seeing more direct, objective and conclusive evidence that certain methods and approaches ?work.? Having said this, I fully understand the difficulties of obtaining such measures for invalid clicks by Google, as previously discussed in this report. Moreover, one can challenge most of the reports pertaining to invalid clicking rates published in the business press by questioning their methodologies and assumptions used for calculating these rates. Most of these reports would not stand hard scientific scrutiny.

Still, as a scientist, it is hard for me to arrive at any definitive conclusions beyond any reasonable doubt based on Points (1) ? (6) above that Google?s invalid click detection methods ?work well? and remove ?most? of the invalid clicks ? the provided evidence is simply not hard enough for me, and I am used to dealing with much more conclusive evidence in my scientific work.

Having said this, the indirect evidence (1) ? (6) specified above, nevertheless, provides a sufficient degree of comfort for me to conclude that these filters work reasonably well. Finally, this statement should not be interpreted as if I find Google?s effort to detect invalid clicks (a) unreasonable, or (b) not working reasonably well. It only states that Google did not provide a compelling amount of conclusive evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of their approach that would satisfy me as a scientist.

Finally, the measures (1) ? (6) above are only statistical measures providing some evidence that Google?s filters work reasonably well. This does not mean, however, that any particular advertiser cannot be hurt badly by fraudulent attacks, given the evidence that Google filters ?work.? Since Google has a very large number of advertisers, one particular bad incident will be lost in the overall statistics. Good performance measures indicative that filters work well only mean that there will be ?relatively few? such bad cases. Therefore, any reports published in the business press about particular advertisers being hurt by particular fraudulent attacks do not mean that the phenomenon is widespread. One simply should not generalize such incidents to other cases and draw premature conclusions ? we simply do not have evidence for or against this.

Page 44 has a section that restates conclusions in terms of economic aspects -- IE, any economic motivation for Google to hide or ignore click fraud:

First of all, most of the revenue that Google foregoes due to discarding invalid clicks comes from the filters since they identify most of the invalid clicks. The second source of the forgone revenues comes from the terminated AdSense publishers (as stated before, all the clicks made on the terminated publisher?s website generated over a certain time period are credited back to the advertisers regardless of whether they are valid or invalid). However, this second type of revenue is relatively small in comparison to the foregone revenues due to filters. The third source of the foregone revenues comes from the AdWords credits. However, these AdWord credits are miniscule in comparison to the other sources of foregone revenues. In summary, the most significant source of foregone revenues, by far, are Google filters. Hence their performance is the most crucial factor for the whole invalid click detection program (note that this observation does not mean that Google focuses mainly on this part of the invalid click detection program since other parts are also important)....

It makes no business sense for Google to go after these extra revenues and that the best long-term business policy for Google is to protect advertisers against invalid clicks. Policy reversal on the doubleclick is a good example of this. By not charging advertisers for the doubleclick since March 2005, Google lost a ?noticeable? amount of revenues. However, the revenues lost as a result of this action are insignificant in comparison to the revenues that Google risks to lose if it loses trust of the advertisers. Therefore, reversing the doubleclick policy makes sense not only from the legal, ethical and public relations point of view, but it is also a sound economic decision.

Finally, the beginning of page 46 gives this overall conclusion:

Google has built the following four ?lines of defense? against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

Since its establishment in the Spring and Summer of 2003 the Click Quality team has been developing an infrastructure for detecting and removing invalid clicks and implementing various methods in the four detection stages described above. Currently, they reached a consolidation phase in their efforts, when their methods work reasonably well, the invalid click detection problem is ?under control,? and the Click Quality team is fine-tuning these methods. There is no hard data that can actually prove this statement. However, indirect evidence provided in this report supports this conclusion with a moderate degree of certainty. The Click Quality team also realizes that battling click fraud is an arms race, and it wants to stay ?ahead of the curve? and get ready for more advanced forms of click fraud by developing the next generation of online filters.

In summary, I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:58 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

GoDaddy Launches Private Label Domain Park Program

GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters to sign up for a paid monthly subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the profits made from all clicks on the parked domain.

The unique aspect of GoDaddy's program is that they are giving the domain parking service to those who may only have a small number of domains in their portfolios, while Google normally only accepts those into the program with domain portfolios numbering hundreds of thousands of page views per month.

GoDaddy's domain parking program is serviced by Google's AdSense for Domains program (formerly known as Domain Park), with ads being displayed with the Google AdWords program. And example of the GoDaddy landing page can be found at fishinginia.com

For more analysis on the CashParking program, please see JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 2:44 AM | Permalink

July 21, 2006

Site Diagnostics Tab Added to Google AdSense Console

Google has added a new tab, a tab they have been beta testing for a couple months, named Site Diagnostics. What this tool does is show you which pages the AdSense crawler is having problems getting to. Why would they crawler have a problem getting to those pages? The several possible reasons include a robots.txt file blocking then, password protected pages, server down or slow and other reasons explained in the AdSense help pages.

I have posted screen captures at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:37 AM | Permalink

July 17, 2006

AdWords Adds Category Site Selection Feature

The Inside AdWords blog announced that you can now tell them what category of sites you want your ads to be displayed on. For example, if you run a karate site that sells Samurai swords, then you can tell AdWords to display your ads on sites that talk about the sport of karate. Now, I did not look if karate is a category under "sports" but if it is, then you can choose it. More details on how to use this feature at the AdWords support page.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:00 AM | Permalink

July 13, 2006

Speculation: Google To Begin Selling Radio Ads Through AdWords Soon

TechToolBlog said he received a survey from Google specifically asking questions about radio ads. Most of the questions in the survey are related to radio ads, see the screen captures here or the close ups Donna Bogatin has done here. He said that last time Google sent out a survey, it was about print ads, and then they ran print ads soon after. Keep in mind, DMarc Broadcasting, currently sells radio ads, but this seems like Google may begin pushing AdWords advertisers into the radio ad game.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

AdSense Consulting Group Fed Up With Google AdSense

Wired has a story on AdSense, not Google AdSense, but AdSense Consulting, the company who registered AdSense.com back in 1996.

If you visit adsense.com, you will notice Google does not own the site, and they do not provide Google AdSense services.

In fact, they have a message on the site that reads, "If you think you can get rich quick placing other people's ads on your site or blog, please contact Google who has taken and used our business name without permission or compensation."

I find it funny that Google AdSense, which is a contextual ad program, developed to provide relevant sales leads, has done the exact opposite for AdSense Consulting.

AdSense Consulting apparently gets hundreds of irrelevant phone calls and emails to answer Google AdSense customer support related questions, something nothing to do with their business. Sounds incredibly frustrating to me.

The article notes the company has now sold the domain to another company, which has not yet been named. Google declined to purchase it from her, apparently. Google also decided her site didn't qualify to carry AdSense ads, either.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:32 AM | Permalink

July 11, 2006

New Search Patent Applications: July 11, 2006 - Google Patent Filings by the Dozen

Twelve Google patent applications where published this past week, including seven that focus upon geographical information and local search.

(1) How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like Adsense. (2) A process for improving the targeting of ads. (3) Real time transportation data for travelers. (4) An exploration of ad layouts. (5) An automated advertising approval process. (6) Reasons for location-based businesses to use local area advertising, including an improved pay-per-call process.

(7) How the most authoritative local search results are identified. (8) The use of visual gap segmentation to separate information on different parts of pages, with implications beyond local search. (9) Ties business locations with regional areas. (10) A method for reducing ambiguity in geographic location. (11) Deciding whether regular or local results might be shown when at least one query term might be geographical in nature. (12) Assigning confidence scores between business identity and location information on a page.

Microsoft adds two more, on the validity of links, and on the validity of anchor text in links. They have very similar names, and cover topics that are related, but the processes involved are very different.

Google

This first patent filing discusses some of the factors that the search engine may look at to determine whether or not an ad served on a page a good match for that page and possibly the category that page may be within, including some user behavior information such as whether or not ads are selected, how long a viewer remains on a page, and if a conversion is made.

Associating features with entities, such as categories of web page documents, and/or weighting such features Inventors: Ross Koningstein, Stephen Lawrence, and Valentin Spitkovsky US Patent Application 20060149710 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Features that may be used to represent relevance information (e.g., properties, characteristics, etc.) of an entity, such as a document or concept for example, may be associated with the document by accepting an identifier that identifies a document; obtaining search query information (and/or other serving parameter information) related to the document using the document identifier, determining features using the obtained query information (and/or other serving parameter information), and associating the features determined with the document. Weights of such features may be similarly determined. The weights may be determined using scores. The scores may be a function of one or more of whether the document was selected, a user dwell time on a selected document, whether or not a conversion occurred with respect to the document, etc. The document may be a Web page. The features may be n-grams. The relevance information of the document may be used to target the serving of advertisements with the document.

The process detailed in the next patent application aims at improving the relevancy of ads, and helping in suggesting targeted terms by allowing an advertiser to submit broad targeting information. While serving ads using that information, the search engine would log and collect search query terms, and possibly concepts and concept keywords, associated with the serving of the ad, and suggest candidate targeting keywords or phrases to the advertiser from those logs.

Suggesting and/or providing targeting information for advertisements Inventors: Ross Koningstein US Patent Application 20060149625 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

The relevancy of ads may be increased, and opportunities to serve an ad that might otherwise be missed may be exploited by (i) accepting broad targeting information, to be used for serving an ad, from an advertiser, (ii) serving the ad using the broad targeting information, (iii) logging search query terms (or some other information, such as concepts, concept keywords, etc.) associated with the serving of the ad, and (iv) generating one or more candidate targeting keywords or phrases for the ad using the logged search query terms. At least one of the candidate targeting keywords or phrases may be provided as targeting information for the ad. Alternatively, at least one of the candidate targeting keywords or phrases may be presented to the advertiser. Advertiser input with respect to the candidate targeting keyword(s) or phrase(s) presented may then be accepted. Zero or more of the candidate targeting keyword(s) or phrase(s) may be provided as targeting information for the ad, in accordance with the accepted advertiser input. Cost information (e.g., average cost per selection, average cost per conversion, total costs, etc.) may be presented in association with the candidate targeting information.

Traffic assistance similar to that provided by Google acquisition Zipdash is the focus of the next document, and Zipdash is named as a service that would use this process. Some integration of local search and advertising is hinted at in the filing.

Transportation routing Inventors: Henry Rowley, and Shumeet Baluja US Patent Application 20060149461 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 31, 2004

Abstract

A computer-implemented method of providing personalized route information involves gathering a plurality of past location indicators over time for a wireless client device, determining a future driving objective using the plurality of previously-gathered location indicators, obtaining real-time traffic data for an area proximate to the determined driving objective, and generating a suggested route for the driving objective using the near real-time traffic data.

How are the layouts of ads best optimized? What size fonts are used, and how many ads are displayed on pages? Google explores some of those concepts, and notes that the presentation ideas for ads in the following document also may be used to present news items on search results pages.

Ad rendering parameters, such as size, style, and/or layout, of online ads Inventors: Shumeet Baluja, Vibhu Mittal, and Mehran Sahami US Patent Application 20060149622 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Ad rendering parameters for a set of two or more ads may be determined by (a) accepting, for a set of two or more ads, ad information which includes at least one ad feature having a value that depends on ad rendering parameters, and (b) determining ad rendering parameters for at least one ad from the set of two or more ads using the accepted ad information. The act of determining ad rendering parameters may use accepted ad rendering constraints. The ad rendering constraints may include space available for rendering the ads, a footprint available for rendering the ads, and/or a maximum number of ads permitted to be rendered. The act of determining ad rendering parameters may include maximizing a value associated with serving at least one ad from the set of two or more ads with ad rendering parameters subject to the ad rendering constraints. The ad rendering parameters may include sizes of the served ads, and/or a layout of the served ads.

Automating the approval process for paid ads could benefit Google and advertisers. What would such an approval process entail? The next document identifies a number of issues involved in approving an ad, and in followups on advertisements. It also describes a whitelist for exceptions to some of the policies that may keep ads from being approved.

Advertisement approval Inventors: Gregory Joseph Badros, Robert J. Stets, and Lucy Zhang US Patent Application 20060149623 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

An advertisement for use with an online ad serving system may be automatically checked for compliance with one or more policies of the online ad serving system. If the advertisement is approved, then it is allowed by be served by the ad serving system. Follow up checks of the advertisement may be scheduled. One follow up check may be to test a landing page of the advertisement for compliance with policies. If the advertisement is not approved, hints for making the ad comply with one or more violated policies may be provided to an advertiser associated with the ad, and/or an ad serving system customer service representative. Determining whether or not to approve the advertisement may include determining violations of one or more policies by the advertisement, and, for each of the violations, determining whether or not to exempt the violation.

Google Local Patent Applications

The following patent applications primarily look at local search, though some of the processes described within them may have broader reaching implications, such as the one on visual segmentation of information on pages.

Businesses associated with a specific location often don't use paid search as part of their advertising strategy. This first patent application thoughtfully goes into some of the reasons why, and explores ways to make it a more attractive medium, including expanded pay-per-call functionality, as well as providing information such as business hours and types of payment accepted.

Generating and/or serving local area advertisements, such as advertisements for devices with call functionality Inventors: Shumeet Baluja and Henry A. Rowley US Patent Application 20060149624 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Sets of local, (e.g., online) ads may be generated by obtaining sets of information about (e.g., local) establishments, each set including a business address information and/or a telephone number, (b) determining, for each of the sets, a location using at least one of at least a portion of the business address information and at least a portion of the telephone number, and (c) generating, for each of the sets, an ad that includes targeting information that targets the serving of the ad to queries related to the determined location. A query, including information about a location of a client device, may be accepted and at least one of the generated ads that includes targeting information that targets the location of the client device may be determined.

How does a local search determine which document is the most relevant and authoritative one to return at the top of a local search list? A number of factors are considered in this next set of described processes.

Authoritative document identification Inventors: Daniel Egnor and Geeta Chaudhry US Patent Application 20060149800 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A system determines documents that are associated with a location, identifies a group of signals associated with each of the documents, and determines authoritativeness of the documents for the location based on the signals.

If you are familiar with Microsoft's research on VIPS: a VIsion based Page Segmentation Algorithm, some of the ideas in the next document may sound a little familiar. Imagine a page that includes restaurant reviews for a number of restaurants in a city neighborhood. Might the information from that page be segmented, so that reviews for each of the restaurants can be included in results for the right restaurants in a local search? This visual gap approach might be helpful in that endeavor.

The document also notes that this process might be helpful in determining what an image is about, and in indexing them. It also mentions that it could help the search engine understand what the different parts of a page are, and how much value they have (for instance, distinqusihing between content and navigation.)

Document segmentation based on visual gaps Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149775 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A document may be segmented based on a visual model of the document. The visual model is determined according to an amount of visual white space or gaps that are in the document. In one implementation, the visual model is used to identify a hierarchical structure of the document, which may then be used to segment the document.

While a search engine may be able to determine where a business related to a page is located, it may want to associate that location with a geographical region. Something like a Hierarchical Triangular Mesh may be used to help in making that association.

Indexing documents according to geographical relevance Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149774 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A local search engine efficiently indexes documents relevant to a geographical area by indexing, for each document, multiple location identifiers that collectively define an aggregate geographic region. When creating the index, the search engine may determine a set of geographical areas surrounding a geographical area relevant to a document and associate references to the set of geographical areas with the document index.

It's not always clear what the geographic location of a webpage is, based upon information presented on individual pages, though sometimes that type of information exists on the pages. The process displayed in this next filing tries to take information that may be spread out on a page, and tie it together to identify a location.

Classification of ambiguous geographic references Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149742 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A location classifier generates location information based on textual strings in input text. The location information defines potential geographical relevance of the input text. In determining the location information, the location classifier may receive at least one geo-relevance profile associated with at least one string in the input text, obtain a combined geo-relevance profile for the document from the at least one geo-relevance profile, and determine geographical relevance of the input text based on the combined geo-relevance profile.

Imagine if a search engine could serve either regular web search results or local results. Some search queries could be ambiguous, and may make it difficult to determine whether to serve local search information or general web search results. The inventors of the next document provide some ideas that may reduce some of that ambiguity a little.

Location extraction Inventors: Daniel Egnor and Lawrence Elias Greenfield US Patent Application 20060149734 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A system receives a search query that includes a set of search terms, determines whether at least one of the search terms corresponds to the name of a geographic area, and determines whether the geographic area corresponds to an unambiguous geographic area when at least one of the search terms corresponds to the name of the geographic area. The system performs a local search, based on one or more of the search terms, to identify documents associated with the geographic area when the geographic area corresponds to an unambiguous geographic area.

The title of this patent application, and the previous one are so similar, that I was concerned they might be duplicates when I uncovered them. The one above attempts to "extract" location information from a query. This next one attempts to "extract" location information from pages being indexed, with confidence scores indicating how likely it is that business information on a page is associated with an address on the same page.

Local item extraction Inventors: Michael Dennis Riley US Patent Application 20060149565 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

A system identifies a document that includes an address and locates business information in the document. The system assigns a confidence score to the business information, where the confidence score relates to a probability that the business information is associated with the address. The system determines whether to associate the business information with the address based on the assigned confidence score.

Microsoft

The titles of two Microsoft patent applications are very similar, but the processes described aren't. The first one looks at anchor text in links, and the titles to pages those links point to, to see if the anchor text is accurate. The second one looks at links on pages, using the Document Object Model, and tries to determine if they are valid links while simulating the experience of a user of the page viewing it with a browser. This may help a search engine understand dynamic html menus, and view links that may otherwise be unavailable to a search engine crawler.

Methods and apparatus for the evaluation of aspects of a web page Inventors: Michael A. Starbird Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060150076 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Methods and apparatus are provided for evaluating the extent to which link text, representing a hypertext link on a web page, corresponds to a web page referenced by the link. In one embodiment, the link text may be compared to the title of a web page referenced by the link, such as by parsing the link text and page title into individual tokens and comparing the tokens. The extent to which the link text and the page title correspond may be expressed as a percentage of tokens which match. A graphical user interface (GUI) may be provided which presents a visual indication when a minimum percentage of tokens do not match.

Methods and apparatus for evaluating aspects of a web page Inventors: Ryan Farber Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060150111 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

An automated method is provided for evaluating the validity of links included in a web page. The web page may contain commands, such as dynamic HTML or other embedded commands, which are configured for execution upon the occurrence of an event, such as a provision of input by a user. According to one embodiment, the method includes causing the links to be generated by simulating the occurrence of the event. Upon the generation of the links, their validity may be determined, and a report may be produced which indicates whether the links are valid.

My usual reminder about patents: Some of the processes and technology described in patents are created in house, and some are developed with the assistance of contractors and partners. A percentage are never developed in a tangible manner, but may serve as a way to attempt to exclude others from using the technology, or even to possibly mislead competitors into exploring an area that they might not have an interest in (sometimes skepticism is good.)

There are times when a Google or Yahoo acquires a company to gain access to the intellectual property of that company, or the intellectual prowess and expertise of that company's employees. And sometimes patents are just purchased.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 8:55 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

New Landing Page Quality Score Announced for Google AdWords Advertisers

The Google AdWords blog has announced new changes that will be seen next week that will result in some advertisers faced with higher minimum bids to keep their campaigns running on AdWords, as a result in changes being made to the landing page quality score algorithm. While a small number of advertisers will be affected, AdWords is targeting those landing pages that offer a poor user experience to those who click the ads.

It is suspected that those doing click arbitrage will likely be amongst the first to be affected, as many offer landing pages with nothing or little else other than Google or Yahoo ads. Click arbitrage involves buying inexpensive pay per click traffic, such as from Google AdWords. The advertiser then hopes that each visitor will hit the landing page and then click a higher-paying ad (often Google AdSense or Yahoo ContentMatch) to leave the page. As a result, many click arbitragers have either no content on the page other than the ads or just enough content to influence the AdSense ads.

Next week, the new algo for the landing page quality score will be released, and affected advertisers will see their minimum bid prices changed in the AdWords account. Google stresses only a small number of advertisers will be affected, and offers assistance for those advertisers who feel they have been wrongly impacted by the new changes. All advertisers can access the landing page quality guidelines here.

For a more detailed look at how these changes to the scoring will affect both publishers and those doing click arbitrage, see New landing page quality score could affect click aribtrage publishers at JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 11:25 PM | Permalink

July 3, 2006

Google Page Creator Now Supporting AdSense

Google Page Creator, which I recently reported did not support AdSense, now does. Garett Rogers has invitations sent out to Google Page Creator accounts from Google, notifying them that they now accept AdSense. Honestly, when I read this, it made me sad. Why? One word, "MFAs". Below is a copy of that email invitation.

Hi,

We're happy to let you know that Google Page Creator is now compatible with AdSense. Please feel free to add the AdSense code to your Page Creator web pages. If you don't know how to implement the AdSense code with Google Page Creator, please follow the instructions below:

1. Log into your AdSense account at www.google.com/adsense 2. From the AdSense Setup tab, customize and generate your AdSense code 3. Copy the generated code from the 'Your AdSense code' box 4. Log into your Google Page Creator account 5. Select the web page you'd like to display AdSense ads 6. Select the field where you'd like the ads to appear 7. Click 'Edit HTML' 8. Paste the AdSense code in the HTML source code of the page 9. Save your updated web page 10. Publish your web page

After taking the steps above, your ads should appear shortly. If you have trouble implementing the Ad Sense code onto your web page, please feel free to respond to this email.

Good luck,

The Google AdSense Team

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:27 AM | Permalink

June 29, 2006

Vertical Images From AdSense Include Images in Ad Units

Vertical Images is the latest international beta test being run by Google AdSense. Vertical images displays a related generic image within the ad unit, which then links to a results page similar to the results page seen when clicking on an Ad Links keyword.

This test could potentially be seen on all publisher sites utilizing specific ad units. While the test initially launched earlier this week in only skyscrapers, they are now being seen in leaderboards, meaning the initial testing is likely successful. However, they are still only being displayed on a limited number of page views.

I have more details, including a screenshot of an example ad unit, at JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 8:45 PM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Google Mixes Up Referrals Buttons

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has mixed up the referral buttons with the Google AdSense referral program. For example, I have inserted the code to display the Google Pack referral button on this page but instead it is displaying the graphics and materials for the Google Firefox referrals.

This was first reported at WebmasterWorld yesterday at 11:50am (EST). It continues to be a problem to this minute.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:46 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Google Testing Ad Supported Premium Video

Google is running a test offering about 2,000 premium videos available for free streaming viewing, inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming. The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business product manager, Google Video.

Currently, premium content on Google Video is available via a pay-to-own model that allows users to download and replay ad-free programming at any time. These videos usually cost between $0.99 and $14.99, but you own them once you pay for them. The test program only allows users to stream the content in real-time, and you can't save videos once viewed.

For this test, Google has allowed advertisers to choose the content that their ads are sponsoring. Likewise, content owners have the option to vet an advertiser to make sure the ad is appropriate for the content. Over time, Chane expects that this human-intensive process will become much more automated.

Google intends to run many similar tests over the course of the coming year. The goal is to find ways to expand the amount of premium content available on Google Video and see if free, ad-spondored content attracts certain types of viewing audiences, said Chane.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:41 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Google AdSense Tests CPA Ads, Commission Based Ads

Philipp Lenssen reports that some AdSense publishers were invited to partake in AdSense ads that pay based on action, like an affiliate network. These CPA (cost per action) invites were first detailed at SeekingAlpha.com and the ads do not compete with the contextual network, they run on a separate network named the Content Referral network. Jennifer may have more details later on this news, but in the meantime you can read my coverage from the forum buzz.

Update from Jennifer Slegg: This beta test is on an invite-only basis, and is implemented through a separate ad unit. However, stats are not available real-time and must be emailed to participating publishers, meaning it will be difficult for publishers to gauge how effectively Content Referral ads are performing.

Google also confirmed the beta test: "We're always looking for new ways to provide effective and useful features to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of these efforts we are currently testing a cost per action pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to earn revenue through AdSense. We're pleased with how the test is progressing and will continue to gather feedback from advertisers and publishers."

For a much more detailed look into this new program, JenSense dives into all the particulars of Content Referrals.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:34 PM | Permalink

June 16, 2006

Schmidt Talks On Staying In China, GBuy & More

Conde Nast Portfolio, a new business magazine out next year, landed a nice coup of having Eric Schmidt speak yesterday at its launch party (Schmidt's also apparently set to be one of the first profiles in the new magazine). The video of the interview is online here, covering mostly stuff you've already heard Schmidt say before in other interviews (the LA Times had one last week) over the past years. But here are some things worth highlighting to me.

What would be the one do over for him? He says if Google had done any one particular thing three months earlier, it would have been better.

China was an example of this. In hindsight, he wishes Google had gotten a Chinese government approved version going sooner. "I don't think we would have changed the decision, but I think earlier, the better." He didn't say exactly why. My assumption would be that Google would be stronger in China compared to Baidu, but also that he would say they would have been serving people in China better for a longer period.

Was Google cofounder really suggesting last week that Google was having second thoughts when he said:

"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.

No -- it was either a nuanced comment, a misquoted one and there was also a whole part of what he said missing, Schmidt said. The missing part Sergey had said was, he explained, was that Google had decided to go ahead with what it considered the lesser of two evils, serving people even though it had to do censorship.

There's more of the how Google operates stuff, the 20 percent time (for engineers -- still not others, apparently), the 70-20-10 time allocation of work time, and the idea of not trying to tell people what to do, for fear of stifling creativity. Instead, Google suggests what are company priorities and hopes employees agree because they, too, want to work on what's important for the company.

He talks about Google doing ads on cell phones in Japan and says they'll come to Europe this summer and to the US within the next 12 months.

GBuy? That's the press name, not Google's name, and "It's not like PayPal at all." He says its designed to help advertisers have their customers buy things more quickly than through other mechanisms. We'll see. If PayPal means sending money between two people, it probably won't be. If PayPal means an alternative to buying with a credit card (or having a credit card account as a merchant), then I think GBuy will be very much like PayPal. And it operates this way already on Google Base. For more, see Google GBuy Launch Later This Month To Challenge PayPal?. And hang in there. Schmidt said it's coming soon.

Will Google do its own hardware? "It's much better to have a partner," and "It's much better to be in the software business," he said. The economics are better, he explained.

Biggest competition? Yahoo and Microsoft are both strong and good competitors, but Yahoo is the "primary competitor."

Is Google too powerful, especially given statements he made years ago relating to Microsoft that could be applied to Google today. There are a number of other choices consumers could go to, he said -- "and we know this."

In other words, Google knows that it could potentially lose customers at any time, so it will self-police itself. Same thing he told me back in 2002 in my Google: Can The Marcia Brady Of Search Stay Sweet? article:

"We have very poor lock in. Microsoft has very high lock in," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when we spoke at Google's offices last month. "The switchover cost for you to move to one of our competitors is none. As long as the switchover costs are so low, we run scared. Everyday I wonder if there are very smart people at Berkeley coming up with a new algorithm," Schmidt adds -- but in a way that clearly suggests that he wants Google to run scared, in order to keep the company smart and honest.

Although to update things, Google has much better lock-in these days, given Google's many portal features. People are storing email, web analytics data, photos and spreadsheets to name only few things they may not wish to abandon, not to mention kicking the Google Habit can be hard and people aren't likely to do it unless Google gets really bad, as I've written.

As for having knocked Microsoft when he was at Sun for releasing weak products and using customers as guinea pigs, how does he respond to accusations that Google does the same? He says they have a two to three month product cycle now. To be fair, the endless betas Google used to do have gotten better.

During Q&A, Chris Anderson of Wired asks about the impact AdSense has on fueling spam across the web -- search spam, comment spam, trackback spam and so on. Schmidt responds to say Google looks had at preventing click fraud, not really answering the question.

ClickZ also has coverage of his talk in Google's Schmidt at Conde Nast Lunch Today and Reuters looks at the GBuy comments in Google tests Web buying system, says unlike PayPal.

Need more on Schmidt talking Google? See our Google , Google: Employees and Google: Revenues categories of Search Topics for archived articles going back for years, if you are a Search Engine Watch member.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:57 AM | Permalink

Google Adds Support For Greek & Bulgarian To AdSense For Search

The Inside AdSense blog announced that they have added support for Greek and Bulgarian languages in AdSense for search. So if you have a site in those languages, you can add the Google search box from your AdSense control panel and earn some euros or some Bulgarian lev. More details at Greek AdSense and Bulgarian AdSense.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:04 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

How Google Is Killing The Internet

Seth Jayson has written an interesting piece "How Google is killing the internet" over at The Motley Fool. It's a lengthy analysis which takes in part its premise that web authors are so desperate to get visitors to click on their Adsense links that they're creating pages of junk without any useful content. As a result the content that is returned as the result of a search (not just on Google but on its competitors websites as well) is valueless. I'm rather ambivalent about this but the implications for search are interesting to say the least.

In common with Jayson I've run searches that return very little useful content, or almost as irritatingly, have visited a page with good data, but that which has been spread over 4 or 5 pages to maximise the number of adverts I have to look at. Despite SEO claims that the best way to get a good ranking in Google is to have really good content, some pages that rank highly in the results have got there due to dubious methods such as cloaking or link farms. The argument runs that although Google should stamp down on activities such as this there is little incentive for them to do so because Adsense brings in so much of their revenue.

Well, yes and no. Obviously Google wants to make money, but equally the only way that they will achieve this is if people continue to use their resources. If the average searcher becomes disenchanted with Google, they do have other options available to them, with Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask already trying to get rather more than a foot into the door. Although Google is constantly releasing new utilities in order to get people to use their entire raft of products, their key focus is, according to Marissa Mayer still all about search.

As a searcher what I (and everyone else) wants from a search is an authoritative answer from a trustworthy source. What any search engine needs to do is give me a good reason to visit any particular website that is returned in the results. While I trust Google to do that, the key is not to trust it too much. If the searcher can retain a skeptical viewpoint with respect to the information that is returned to them they're not going to go too far wrong. Searchers need a blended approach, combining robot powered solutions but also resources created by human beings; indexes, virtual libraries, gateways and swickis for example.

So I don't think that Google is killing the internet; that really is a statement too far. If Jayson is correct and that search results are getting clogged up at Google, it is going to have the opposite effect - the more that people are disatisfied with the results they get, the more likely they are to explore other alternative methods of getting the information that they need. Indeed, as Jayson does actually point out towards the end of his article, other search engines are constantly striving to surpass Google and there are plenty of examples where this is already happening. The limitations of Google as reflected in poor results gives greater scope for other search engines and other search solutions, which has to be a healthy situation.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 9:23 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

Google Paper Explains Listening To Your TV Can Help It Put Ads & Info On Your Computer

There are many people discussing a recent patent Google was awarded for picking up on ambient audio from your TV and pairing those sounds to your computer to serve up ads based on what you are watching (or something like that). Google Research Scientists, Michele Covell & Shumeet Baluja, described the technology as;

We showed how to sample the ambient sound emitted from a TV and automatically determine what is being watched from a small signature of the sound -- all with complete privacy and minuscule effort. The system could keep up with users while they channel surf, presenting them with a real-time forum about a live political debate one minute and an ad-hoc chat room for a sporting event in the next. And, all of this would be done without users ever having to type or to even know the name of the program or channel being viewed. Taking this further, we could collect snippets from the web describing the actors appearing in a movie or present maps of locales within the movie as it takes place (no matter if users are watching it as a live broadcast or as a recoded broadcast).

There are two additional articles that have good coverage of this, that I am aware of. The first is at Small Biz Pipeline and the second is at TechCrunch. I particularly like how TechCrunch pulled out the four main points of the paper, as such;

+ Personalized information layers Here?s what Tom Cruise is wearing in the show you are watching and here's where you can buy the same clothes in your zip code. + Ad hoc social peer communities If you would like to chat about this show, ten of your college friends are watching it right now as well. + Real-time popularity ratings Nielsen requires hardware and the results aren't available in real-time. You might want to know if there is a spike in viewers watching the show on channel 9 right now. Advertisers might want to know that too. + TV- based bookmarks Click to save a show or clip into your video library and there will be more than just a few shows available for watching later.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:43 AM | Permalink

June 2, 2006

Add The AdSense Calendar To Your Google Calendar

If you're an AdSense publisher, then you have a Google Account with access to Google Calendar and other services. As announced on the Google AdSense blog, you can now populate your Google Calendar with events from the AdSense team. Instructions for doing so are in the blog entry. It enables you to view and keep track of system maintenance, blog entries, scheduled monthly payments, upcoming events and more

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 9:09 AM | Permalink

June 1, 2006

AdSense API Launched for Developers

Developers with 100,000+ daily page views and users contributing content will now be able to offer a "one stop shop" for their content creators to sign up for AdSense while allowing developers to integrate and optimize their AdSense ads for them. And while doing so, developers could be eligible to earn not only a $100 referral bounty, but also a 15% revenue share which would be paid directly by Google.

For more details, see the AdSense Blog, AdSense API home, or JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 6:33 AM | Permalink

May 29, 2006

Free New AdWords Alerts Service

A free alert service kicks off with two alerts related to Google AdWords and AdSense. You can get daily email alerts with the costs of the expensive AdWords both by bid and by cost per day (not necessarily the most expensive, since Google doesn't report that. Instead, you get terms checked and found to be fairly pricey). There's also an alert by keyword service that emails you when new advertisers appear for a keyword you supply. Assuming you don't mind a flurry of email when tracking popular categories, this can be handy.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 1:11 PM | Permalink

May 23, 2006

AdSense Video Ads Out of Rich Media Beta Test

AdWords advertisers will be able to display video ads across the AdSense content network. The video ads, in a click-to-play video format so not to be too obtrustive to the user experience, will be available as both site targeted ads as well as on a keyword basis. However, it does not seem to be an ad format that publishers will be able to opt-out of.

For more details, see both the AdWords Blog & JenSense.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread AdSense Gets Click-To-Play Video Ads

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 3:57 AM | Permalink

May 15, 2006

Google Ad Tools, For Newbies

We tend to assume our SEW audience is made up of fairly sophisticated search marketers, but from time-to-time we get requests for pointers from people just starting out with SEM. For those of you who are new to search marketing, I've reviewed a book in today's SearchDay article, Learning Google's Advertising Tools, that offers a solid introduction to getting started with Google's AdSense and AdWords programs.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:26 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2006

New Product Additions for AdSense Referrals & Buttons Get a Makeover

Google AdSense has launched a couple new products to their AdSense referral program, adding Google Pack and Picasso to the list of products that publishers can refer new users to. They have also updated the styling of the old buttons and added a few new color schemes to the mix as well.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 1:01 AM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

AdWords Advertisements Not Censored in Google China

Google China has censored their search results to remove certain sites and listings that are deemed by the Chinese government. However, an advertiser has discovered a loophole in the censoring system that results in these censored sites showing up in google.cn search results via the Google AdWords sponsored listings program.

The blog Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE) ran an experiment using the site Human Rights Watch which does not appear in Google China search results. However, it was discovered that the URL filtering does not seem to apply to AdWords listings, as an AdWords ad with hrw.org as the display and destination URL of the ad showed up for keyword and site searches.

Although ICE recommends this as a way to circumvent the censorship of Google.cn, I would suspect that this loophole will be quickly closed for censored URLs as well as for specific keyword searches.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 2:03 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2006

More On Amazon Dumping Google & Missing Paid Listings

Barry noted yesterday that Amazon's A9 was no longer carrying Google results. More important, this means that Amazon itself no longer carries Google's search results -- and in particular, Google's paid listings.

Google and Amazon partnered back in 2003 for Amazon to offer Google searches on the Amazon site. Google ads also were displayed there. I'm pretty sure at one point, the Google logo was on Amazon's home page, along with a search box. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive simply serves up pages from 2000 no matter what links I try from the years 2003 through 2005 to check on this.

Anyway, these days, there's a small A9 Web Search box in the upper right-hand corner of the Amazon site. Until last week, that box brought back A9 results that were powered by Google. Now they are powered by Microsoft's Windows Live Search.

Few people use A9 -- but many more use Amazon. How many did web searches at Amazon is unclear, but in either place, they are no longer seeing the paid listings that Google also used to provide.

In addition, I'm also pretty certain that an ordinary Amazon search (which lots and lots of people do) used to bring up Google paid listings as part of Amazon search results. Today, I don't see these at all. Over at Threadwatch, others report not seeing these either.

MSN syndicates Search to Amazon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more on the new Amazon-Microsoft agreement. The issue of who is providing paid listings isn't covered, but since the Amazon-Google agreement wasn't renewed, I'd assume these are to come from Microsoft.

Amazon Search Finds Microsoft from the Washington Post also has some details on the move, including the inspiring answer to whether Amazon felt Microsoft was providing better search results: "It will be up to users to try that out." So more a business move than a relevancy issue, fair to say :)

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:15 AM | Permalink

April 24, 2006

AdSense Launches Text Ad Referrals, Site-Flavored Search and New Image Ad Sizes

The Google AdSense team has made some new additions to the program over the past few days. The first is a new text link referral program to go along with their image referral ad program. This is a surprising addition because many thought AdSense would never allow text link referrals, but it is worth noting that publishers cannot customize the text in the links, and it is generated by an AdSense script, not a simple html link as with most referral programs.

They also launched a new site-flavored AdSense for Search option that allows AdSense to learn and then "flavor" results to tailor to the specific site. This would help AdSense know whether someone is likely to be searching for mouse the animal or mouse the computer mouse, for example, and then tailor the search results for that.

Lastly, they have included image ads in two new ad unit sizes, including the Large Rectangle, the most popular ad unit with publishers, as well as the Square.

For more detail on all these, JenSense has more here, here, and here.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 9:28 AM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Provides More Information On Google's Crawl Caching Proxy

In response to the new caching techniques Jennifer reported last week, Matt Cutts posted a more detailed explanation of what is called "crawl caching proxy." In short, Google may use all of its spiders, GoogleBot (Web search spider), AdSense spider, News spider, blog search spider and so on for caching purpose. So when all of these spiders crawl your pages, they are stored in what is called a "crawl caching proxy." The "crawl caching proxy" is then used for retrieving a page's cache. My understanding is that when you conduct a search at Google.com, you may see a cache retrieved by the AdSense bot, from within the "crawl caching proxy."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:26 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2006

Google's Matt Cutts Confirms AdSense Bot Helping Googlebot With Indexing

Matt Cutts, who is speaking at this week's PubCon, confirmed that the AdSense mediapartners bot is doing double duty by not only targeting ads for AdSense but also indexing for the regular Google search database, in a bandwidth saving move.

Matt also noted that there is no advantage to being indexed by one bot or the other, however, those cloaking content and serving different pages to each bot could run into problems in the search index. More details on JenSense.

Postscript From Danny: Matt adds more about this on his blog, and it's a super-important clarification:

Pages with AdSense will not be indexed more frequently. It's literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same page, we?d retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there's no boost at all in rankings if you're in AdSense or Google News. You don?t get any more pages crawled either.

In other words, there are two big issues with the AdSense crawler helping Googlebot:

Since the AdSense crawler swoops in fast, it could be a way for people to effectively get fast inclusion of their pages. Just add AdSense, wait for the AdSense bot to fly in, and you're set.
Is having the AdSense crawler likely to get you a RANKING boost, in addition to getting INDEXED faster. I've capitalized both words to stress them, as a reminder that being in the index isn't the same as ranking well for a query.

Matt's saying that no to both cases. There is no ranking boost. As for fast indexing, no to that as well. The AdSense bot is simply refreshing the cached copy of your page -- but the copy in the index, what people are searching on, won't be updated.

That brings up an entirely new point. It means that Google is now potentially presenting its results as fresher than they are.

What you search on is in the index, not the cache, as I've explained. So if a page changes and the index isn't updated -- only the cache -- then Google won't know about those changes to help with searching.

For searchers, the date on the cache is a useful way to know if Google's index is updated. Now, you can't tell. For site owners, the cache has been a useful way to know that Google has indeed updated your pages. Now it no longer serves that function.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 9:47 AM | Permalink

April 17, 2006

Google's Cache Being Helped By The AdSense Mediapartners Bot

Publishers running AdSense on their pages may find that the Mediapartners-Google bot - the special Google bot used by AdSense to determine ad targeting on a publisher page - is actually sharing the results of those crawls with the main Google search database.

Greg Boser spotted it when pages being served strictly to AdSense began showing up in the main search database. And cache dates and times are matching exactly with when the Mediapartners-Google bot visited the page for ad targeting purposes.

How significant is this? At this point, it is uncertain, although Google clearly states that being an AdSense publisher does not help with search engine rankings. And it seems that the Mediapartners-Google bot is not adding new pages to the search index, but rather updating pages currently in the index.

For a more detailed look, visit both WebGuerrilla and JenSense.

Postscript: Matt Cutts has confirmed that the AdSense mediapartners bot is indexing for the main search index.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 2:06 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

Da Vinci Code Promotion Puts Ad On Personalized Google Home Page

Is it true? Has the Google home page gotten its first ad? Steve Rubel points at a new Da Vinci Code promotion that puts a puzzle on the Google home page through cooperation between Google and Columbia. Sort of, but you've got to roll out the qualifications. Let's go:

Google Says Don't Worry, AOL Won't Change Us - But There's Wiggle Room from last December covers how Google has used its home page to promote its own products before, even using graphical units to do this.
Revisiting The "No Banners On Google" Declaration also from last December is the follow-up to my article above, covering how when Google said no banners on the Google home page, it didn't rule out putting other graphic units on the Google Personalized Home Page service that many people have. And if ads were to come, they'd be more like a modular unit to match other Google Personalized Home Page units, Google said.
Ad or Promo? Google Pitching CSI, NBA Video On Google Home Page from January covers how Google did a textual promotion of Google Video that also gave some partners nice play -- and nice play on the regular Google home page, not the personalized one. Some might say this was the first non-Google specific home page ad.
NBC Scores Graphical Ads/Promos On Google is about the Google home page but worth mentioning, covering how the Google search results pages got video clips to help NBC promote its coverage of the Winter Olympics.

So what about today's news? Google's Da Vinci Code Quest from Google Blogoscoped has a nice rundown on how the promotion works. In short, it puts a little puzzle on your Google personalized home page, at least beginning on April 17. Until then, you effectively have a big ad for the movie. Marketers wanting to do the same, clearly the door is open, if you've got the right contacts at Google.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:56 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2006

AdWords Referral Program Available for AdSense Publishers

Google has launched a new AdWords referral program for AdSense publishers where publishers can earn $20 when they refer a new advertiser to Google. While Google had a very limited referral program for AdWords last year, they launched a revamped program from within the AdSense control panel several weeks ago for a small list of select publisher countries before making it widely available to all publishers.

The full rundown and all the details can be found at JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 8:03 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2006

Google AdSense Launched German Language Support Blog

The Google AdSense blog informed us of the launch of the Inside AdSense German blog. I hear that German is an incredibly popular language for the AdSense product, and this will allow AdSense better support the German market.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:39 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2006

AdsBlackList Offers AdSense Filter URL List

Nathan Weinberg reports on a service named AdsBlackList.com. The service provides a list of predefined MFAs (Made for AdSense sites) that generate low quality click throughs and low CPCs. I have discussed at SER how adding URLs to the AdSense filter URL list can help increase your daily income with AdSense. That is the whole premise behind a central location for publishers to go and fetch a list of URLs to block. AdsBlackList.com is just that list and it hopes to become a community effort.

The deal is, that the creators of AdsBlackList.com has some negative past history.

(1) The original URL of this service was at http://www.adsenseblacklist.com/ and that URL was banned from AdSense, reportedly because of using the AdSense trademark in the URL. (2) The owners of this site, themselves ran MFAs. (3) The owners of this site, ran sites with content that goes against Google's TOS.

To be fair, they have posted a full explanation and apology at http://www.adsenseblacklist.com/. Plus I have some more details at the Search Engine Roundtable with forum discussion from the owner at DigitalPoint Forums.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:32 AM | Permalink

March 23, 2006

AdSense Launches "AdSense Help" Google Group

The Inside AdSense blog announces the launch of a new Google Group started by AdSense named AdSense Help. The group is currently up to 199 members, and growing quickly. You must, however, register to post in the group, but prior to registering, they ask you to read the charter. Also, posts made by "AdSensePro" are officially by a Google representative.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:54 AM | Permalink

February 9, 2006

Google Cold Calls Battelle On AdSense; Fails To Do Homework

Vignette: Google's Sales Call and the (New?) Fifty Percent Rule is a nice chuckle from John Battelle, where he gets a cold call from a member of Google's AdSense sales force trying to get him to carry Google ads. He's got a loose transcript that's very amusing. But it's also pretty serious. It makes good sense that your sales team should do some homework about those they are approaching. Clearly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

How difficult is it to Google the person you're about to have a talk with? John thinks that would be wise, I agree. It's basic homework you should do for anyone you'd want to approach. At the very least, you might learn something to help you with the pitch.

Had that been done with John, what would the sales person have learned? Let's scan the Google results for john battelle:

In 0.22 seconds (that's the time Google reported taking to generate these results), you'd see at a glance that this "john battelle" character you're about to pitch AdSense to sounds very similar to some "john battelle" guy that talked with Googlers like yourself. And he was on the official Google Video Blog? Alarm bells should be ringing, by now.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:43 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

Google Buys Radio Ad Firm; AdWords Headed To Radio Distribution

Wow. Google is to acquire dMarc Broadcasting, a company that puts ads into radio stations, paying up to $1.1 billion for it. Google plans to distribute AdWords via radio this way. Says Google VP of advertising sales Tim Armstrong in the press release (and here at Google):

"Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media," said Tim Armstrong, vice president of Advertising Sales, Google. "We anticipate that this acquisition will bring new ad dollars and accountability to radio by combining Google's expansive network of advertisers with dMarc's talented team and innovative radio advertising technology. We look forward to working together to continue to grow and improve the ecosystem of the radio industry."

Google is to pay $102 million up front as part of the deal, with a maximum amount of $1.136 billion possibly paid over the next three years. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006.

Guess anyone still entertaining the notion of Google as a technology company versus a media company can put that to bed. Putting ads on radio isn't really a technology business. Nor is it central to that mission of organizing the world's information. Neither is putting ads into print or slapping them up all over the web, either

I wrote earlier that Google's philosophy page needed some changes to keep up with the times. In particular, that famous mission that currently reads:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Really ought to say:

Google's mission is to fund and organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Because the ads to little to organize anything. At best, they can be argued to help fund information (along with a lot of crud -- I just saw an AdSense ad promising "AdSense Ready Content: Over 300 premade websites ready. Immediate download! 1000's of pages."

Postscript from Gary: Here are a few facts about dMarc that I've learned from perusing their web site:

Although I wouldn't doubt that Google goes out one of these days a purchases radio stations, dMarc doesn't own any radio stations they provide the advertising and programming software.
They also have their own advertising network that you can learn about their network here. This page explains how the dMarc tech can be used to target an audience.
dMarc has more than 4600 radio stations using it's "digital trafficking" (ad scheduling) and "studio automation" software.
dMarc used to be in the online ad business. From their web site, "In 1998, dMarc management launched an online advertising sales and media group, 2CAN Media, which became the 3rd largest ad network on the Internet, which represented marquee clients such as Better Homes and Gardens, MotorTrend, and Jacor Communications (later acquired by Clear Channel Communications). 2Can Media was later sold to CMGi, managed under Engage Media."
Learn more about dMarc software here.

Postscript 2 from Gary: In a report to clients, Benjamin A. Schachter from UBS Investment Research writes, The key takeaway from this transaction is that it highlights GOOG's intention to export its advertising solutions across all forms of media. We think The Street too often looks at GOOG's product pipeline as a means to diversify revenue, when it is really a means to increase distribution of ads. Increasingly, these ads will be positioned on non-PC devices, through radio, video, mobile, etc...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:32 AM | Permalink

January 16, 2006

New York Times On AdSense Earnings & Revenue share

New York Times published a piece on AdSense today, featuring Shawn Hogan of Digital Point discussing his AdSense earnings (roughly $10k per month) and how he shares his revenue with the members of his forum.

Also noteworthy is the fact that New York Times quotes a very specific revenue share figure, something that Google has always kept very quiet, stating that publishers such as Digital Point earn roughly 78.5 cents on every dollar. There are more details over on JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 12:29 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2006

Search Engines Making Millions Off Type-In Traffic From Domains

Masters of their Domains is a great article from Business 2.0 that WebmasterRadio's Monte Cahn of the Domain Masters show turned me onto before the New Year. It goes into great depth about the sheer amount of money that "type in" traffic is generating for those who own hot domain names. That money is coming from players like Yahoo and Google -- who you might recall got some fire from me for not allowing advertiser to opt-out of domain-generated traffic.

For the record, I do have follow up calls being set up with Yahoo and Google to talk more about that situation, so I'll come back to it in more depth with their views. Google AdSense For Domains Program Overdue For Reform -- And Yahoo & Microsoft Should Also Take Note is my past article on the topic.

Monte sent me the article, but I only finally got to reading it today in the post-holiday digout after Barry pointed out a WebmasterWorld debate spurred by it. Some folks are upset over the sheer amount of money "domainers" are making, especially when it seems some may not be following the various ad program rules and advertisers themselves can't opt out.

AdSense For Domains Garbage Traffic is our own, earlier Search Engine Watch Forums thread where people are getting just as heated. It also covers that while officially you can't automatically opt-out of domain-driven traffic if you buy search-targeted traffic, some have managed to gain exceptions.

One of the most gripping aspects of the Business 2.0 story comes at the end:

In the meantime, Google and Yahoo are trying to keep the type-in business coming--and execs from both companies are using the Delray Beach conference to court the folks who control it. As the party at Delux winds down, 14 Yahoo executives pile into a stretch Hummer with a few of the domainers, including Schilling, who has an exclusive contract in which Yahoo serves all the ads for his sites. The limo heads 35 miles south on Interstate 95 to Scarlett's Gentlemen's Club. The men kick back in the VIP section, outfitted with plush booths and red velvet curtains.

When the woman in charge of the area comes by and mentions the cost of the booths, the Yahoo crew gets nervous. And in the end, no one wants to submit the $1,000 tab to the expense department back at headquarters. Finally, Schilling pulls out a roll of cash and pays up. Not a big deal for a guy who owns a share of a jet. But considering that Schilling's traffic generated more than 1 percent of Yahoo's $3.6 billion in revenues last year, you'd think one of those guys could have stood up and taken one for the team.

That all happened at the Traffic domain conference last year, an invite only event. Next one happens at the end of this month in Silicon Valley.

Elsewhere in the story, one Yahoo exec is cited as saying type in traffic may make up 15 percent of search revenue. It's no wonder both Google and Yahoo haven't made it easier for people to opt-out, given the amount of money at stake.

Nevertheless, it's something they should do. It's not that domain traffic is necessarily bad nor that domainers are necessarily doing anything wrong. But there's a difference between the person who did a keyword search as opposed to someone who did a navigational guess (a type in) versus someone who sees ads placed contextually on pages. Advertisers deserve the transparency of doing these as separate buys.

After three years, Google finally got it through their heads that contextual needed to be a different marketplace than search targeted traffic. Actually, I feel like they dragged this out so long precisely because they didn't want to risk losing money that contextual pulls in. Excuses like not wanting to allow site targeting or separate buys made three years ago so as not to "confuse" advertisers always sounded lame.

At least Yahoo understood that contextual needed to be separate from the start, or sort of. That's sort of because what's classed as "search" by Yahoo might not be considered "search" to an advertiser.

In both cases, neither player is putting domain traffic into its own box, and that needs to be done -- so advertisers themselves have a better choice.

I'll leave with something I put in our own forum discussion. A big change that would help is if Google dumped the idea that "AdWords" is a program for buying ads while "AdSense" is a program for carrying ads. It's incredibly confusing.

Consider this. Through AdWords, you want to buy ads that show up in search results. Many think that's what AdWords is. It's not. AdWords just lets you buy AdSense For Search, which also includes AdSense For Domains. Then there's AdSense For Content that you might also purchase through AdWords. All clear? And if you carry AdSense, chances are you really mean you only carry AdSense For Content.

Honestly, let's shift to this:

AdWords = Ads that show up when someone does a keywords search, currently called AdSense For Search
AdSense = Ads placed contextually, currently called AdSense For Content
DomainSense or DomainPark = Ads placed on parked domains, currently called AdSense For Domains

Do that, and things are much, much clearer. Want to buy search targeted ads? Buy AdWords. Want to carry those ads? Sign-up to carry AdWords. The same word will mean the same thing to two major parties that are involved. And want to opt out of a particular program? Easily done, or it should be.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, AdSense For Domains Garbage Traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:00 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

Malware Alters Google AdSense Links

Via JenSense, Trojan Horse program that targets Google Adsense ads has been detected by an Indian Web publisher at TechShout looks at covers malware that replaces Google AdSense links with ads for other sites.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

December 29, 2005

Malik Looks at Issues for Google AdSense and Other Ad Programs in 2006

Om Malik has compliled and written an excellent post that discusses what might be some big issues for AdSense and other programs in 2006. Om writes:

From scraper sites, to click fraud to trojan horses, looks like the most profitable money making mechanism, aka AdSense might be facing some tough times.

Malik's post includes links to articles from:

+ Paul Kedrosky Kedroksy predicts that click fraud will go "mainstream" in 2006.

Kedroksy writes: With some estimating that in certain categories click-fraud accounts for as much as 20% of fees, this is a stock-schwacking issue, one that threatens the core of Google's advertising business.

+ Charles Mann's new three page article in Wired titled: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

and a very interesting report from TechShout that's title says it all: A Trojan Horse program that targets Google ads has been detected by an Indian Web publisher.

Om adds that: TechShout folks say that Google AdSense team confirmed the existence of these problems.

As the 80's group Asia tells us, "only time will tell."

Posted by Gary Price at 3:15 PM | Permalink

December 28, 2005

Google Knocked For Allowing Off Topic Ford Explorer Ads

Ford Explorer Teaches Me to Ignore Google AdWords Ads from Aaron over at SEO Book looks at Ford Explorer ads delivered via Google AdSense that appeared recently to be all over the web to him and others. His main issue is why Google allowed off-topic delivery. The ads were apparently showing up on pages that seemed to have nothing to do with cars, trucks, SUV what motorized transport.

Google prides itself on targeted ads, as you can find on the AdSense overview page:

You want to make more money from advertising, but you don't want to serve untargeted ads to your users. Google AdSense? solves this problem by automatically delivering text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content?ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

Ford Explorer Google AdWords AdSense Campaign at Search Engine Journal has Loren having the same frustration as Aaron, but not just from a web surfers view. He also comes at it from the publisher angle. Loren points out how on his own site, which is about search engines, he was finding Ford Explorer text ads and skyscraper image ads.

Hmm -- maybe the ads were targeting anything about engines :)

Want to comment or discuss? Please visit our Search Engine Watch Forums!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:46 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Sharing The Search Wealth At A9, MSN & The Drawbacks

In my post-Christmas mailbox was a message from A9 reminding me of its A9 Instant Rewards program that effectively pays me a bit to search with them. That was a perfect hook to revisit the entire "pay to search" idea that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates kicked off earlier this month.

Let's dive in on Microsoft first. Microsoft May Give Consumers A Share in Advertising Revenue from the Wall Street Journal covers how Gates suggested the idea that it might share ad revenues with searchers as part of a presentation he gave in India. Said Gates:

The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn't get if they didn't use that search engine.

The story recounts how similar ideas have been tried like this before. iWon gets mentioned for the giveaway model it pioneered, though as a long-term strategy, that hasn't kept the searchers at the service. To date, semi-copycat Blingo also shows that lightning does not strike twice.

Overture -- now part of Yahoo -- was another pioneer in building traffic through payment. In Overture's case, it paid publishers $0.03 cents per query they delivered. Others soon followed, though these programs later died off. They did get a boost when Google jumped in with its Google AdSense For WebSearch program last year.

That brings us to A9. It was also last year, in September, that the service started giving a 1.5 percent discount off Amazon purchases to those using A9. Well, 1.57 percent, which is pi divided by two, a joke on sharing the "pie" with searchers.

Over a year later, the program pretty much seems to have done nil to massively boost A9's popularity. But maybe the email sent out yesterday will reawaken folks. It said:

Dear A9.com user, As a regular user of A9.com, you get many benefits from the advanced search solutions and the personalization features we offer. In addition, you can receive 1.57%* off virtually everything you buy on Amazon.com. To take advantage of this benefit, join the A9 Instant Reward program and search on A9.com a few days per week. It's easy and it's free: go to http://a9.com/-/search/joinInstantReward.jsp and join with one click.

A9.com offers you results from over 300 sources with a single search including Web, images, blogs, and many more categories. You get the results all on one page that you can personalize for your needs. A9.com also shows you which sites you've already visited. With the A9 Toolbar you can access your bookmarks from any computer and even add your personal notes to every site you visit. Your search history is also available on the toolbar together with informative statistics on every Web site.

For more information on the A9 Instant Reward program, go to http://a9.com/-/company/instantRewards.jsp.

Thank you for using A9.com.

The A9.com Team

* Why 1.57%? Remember pi = 3.1415926535... from mathematics? With our pi/2% instant reward, we are sharing with you some of the revenue from the site. We're sharing the pi(e).

The downside to any pay-for-search plan are some of those other programs like this that long-time search marketers will remember, where those being paid to search were doing it for the money, rather than a side benefit. That was a negative to advertisers footing the bill. They want qualified leads, not work-from-home searchers.

Marketing Execs Lukewarm On Plan To Pay Searchers from MediaPost has two of search marketers sounding less than thrilled over any MSN plans to do pay-per-search because of these reasons.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:14 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

New Resource Pages About Google's Content Network Now Available, Includes Optimization Tool

A note on the Inside AdWords blog points to this new page with a bunch of information about the Google Content Network.

You'll find info about: + Contextual Targeting + Site Targeting + Ad Formats + Pricing + Tools + Partner Sites

Along with this new resource, Google has released a tool with six tips to help optimize your content for the network.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:19 PM | Permalink

Google AdSense For Domains Program Overdue For Reform -- And Yahoo & Microsoft Should Also Take Note

MS Research: Typo-Squatters Are Gaming Google from eWeek covers Microsoft researchers discovering Google's long-standing DomainPark program (AKA AdSense For Domains), where if you have a popular domain name with lots of traffic but no content, Google will kindly hand you some AdSense ads to turn it into an earner. While it is long-standing, I'd say it's also generally little known and definitely upsetting to people who come across it for various reasons.

In Google AdSense For Domains Program Overdue For Reform -- And Yahoo & Microsoft Should Also Take Note for Search Engine Watch members, I do a detailed look at the history of Google's program plus issues it and Yahoo's similar program raise for the search industry in general. Below is a summary for everyone.

Google Buys Applied Semantics from Search Engine Watch covers how Google inherited the lucrative DomainPark program when it purchased Applied Semantics back in 2003. Google later changed the name of DomainPark to Google AdSense For Domains.
Tapping into typo traffic was happening even back then. The IRS.org site (as opposed to IRS.govo) I wrote about as an example in 2003 still runs with paid links today.
Complaint On Yahoo PPC On Placeholder Sites and NonConverting Traffic Coming From Google's DomainPark Program are forum threads that show how advertisers question how relevant traffic can be from sites that someone never intended to go to in the first place.
Far from being gamed, as the eWeek article suggests, anyone in the Google domain program should have been reviewed or approved by Google itself.
Antivirus vendor F-Secure gives a good example on its blog today of how typo traffic helps tap into those probably trying to reach F-Secure. It goes further and shows how this also costs F-Secure money in that Google puts F-Secure's own ads on the typo site.
Advertisers who opt out of contextual are NOT opted out of Google AdSense For Domains, as Strange Log Referrer - Advice Please? explains.
From first hand experience, Google doesn't seem to worry that typo domains violates its own rules against trademark violations, since when I queried why serachenginewatch .com, a misspelling of our own searchenginewatch.com domain, was allowed to carry ads, Google flagged no issues with it.
Google's in the mixed message situation of saying that contextual ads can't be on parked domains yet completely allowing the minute someone's accepted into the domain program.

Overall, I don't have an issue with non-typo domains being in these type of programs, since it's hard to say they really harm another site or the surfer coming to them.

In contrast, for the person who is running a misspelling of our searchenginewatch.com site -- or the same for the person doing the misspelling of the F-Secure site, there's little doubt they're hoping to benefit off the brand traffic these two sites have helped.

Navigation is a big part of search, and you'd think the search engines would want to ensure people were navigating to the right site. Instead, Google and Yahoo both seem happy to benefit by making money off these misspellings. That should change. Forget whether there's a trademark violation. Just outright ban the use of domains where it's obvious the site owner is hoping to tap into typo traffic.

At the very least, Google should make AdSense For Domains a program that really is independent of AdSense For Search and allow people to opt-out. It certainly should be pondering the mixed message of telling AdSense For Content people that they can't put ads on parked domains on the one hand yet running a massive program that does exactly that on the other.

And lest the Microsoft researchers feel to happy, they'd better understand that Microsoft fully intends to have its own contextual program in the future. That program almost certainly will face a decision on whether to provide paid links to parked domains. If Microsoft's not careful, its own researchers might end up reporting on typo domains that make Microsoft money.

FYI, I am following up with Google and Yahoo on the issues raised in the story and will post a follow up article in the near future.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, AdSense For Domains Garbage Traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:35 PM | Permalink

December 17, 2005

Special Holiday Goodies, Pages, and Info from a Few of the Major Engines

Several of the large web engines are offering special holiday goodies from smart answers to holiday questions to logos to holiday borders around ads.

Let's review: + Ask Jeeves offers up Smart Answers with info about and links about: Christmas ||| Hanukkah ||| Kwanzza. + Google places special festive borders around AdWords on web results pages for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzza, and some related holiday words. + A festive snowman visits the logo on the Yahoo home page and provides a direct link to Yahoo Holiday Guide. + AOL Search offers "snapshots" atop of results pages with links and info about the three widely celebrated December holidays: C ||| H ||| K.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:22 PM | Permalink

December 16, 2005

Sorry Bill and Steve, WSJ Reports Google Near $1 Billion Deal With AOL

If Gates and Ballmer wanted a deal with AOL (Time Warner) as a Christmas gift, it appears that they're not going to get it. The MSFT vs. GOOG game of the "Price is Right" appears to be ending according to this just posted story from the Wall Street Journal: AOL Nears Deal With Google (sub req).

Here are a few key facts and passages from the article by Julia Angwin, Kevin J. Delaney and Dennis K. Berman:

+ AOL and Google are now in "exclusive negotiations." Microsoft has been "shut out" of the negotiations at this point.

+ Google will pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL.

+ "AOL would be able to sell advertising among the search results provided by Google on AOL Web properties." At the moment, sponsored links come from Google...AOL's sales staff would also sell display ads across Google's network of Web publishers."

+ "Google will promote AOL's Web properties among the sponsored links in its search results, and will include AOL's collection of online videos among its search results. Google's arrangement to provide search technology for AOL, which was set to expire at the end of next year, would be extended for five years."

+ Don't look for a deal and/or an announcement until next week after a Time-Warner board meeting.

With multimedia search being one of the hot topics of 2005, I find it interesting that AOL Video, which we've been talking about a lot this year both in terms of content and UI, will be visible in Google results in one form or another. It's obvious that video and video search have been a high priority to the company over the past year and they've done some impressive work. AOL has easy access to lots of video content from Time-Warner, deals with other providers, and also its own multimedia crawler with SingingFish. It will be interesting to see (no pun) if any exclusive video that Google has would/will begin appearing on AOL? Also would future deals that both companies make for video content be made so the material would be accessible on both services? Will the AOL Video database of crawled video content continue to use SingingFish technology or will Google begin to using the SingingFish crawler?

Btw, don't forget that AOL is currently testing (it works great for me) the delivery of high-quality videos while your computer is quiet.

I'm also wondering about future issues with Google and AOL in the instant messaging space. AOL is the leader. Will Google Talk become interoperable with AIM, so the two systems and their users can chat or talk to each other? Earlier this year, MSN and Yahoo announced a deal that will allow users of either service to chat with each other. Would the AIM and Google Talk tech be merged? I could go on with VoIP, broadband, wi-fi, cable tv, and all sorts of other stuff but let's not get way ahead of ourselves.

From the SEW Archives: + Overture & Inktomi Out, Google In At AOL (May 1, 2002) + AOL Moves Fully To Google (August 5, 2002) + AOL Renews With Google (October 8, 2003)

Want to discuss? Check this thread in the SEW Forums.

Postscript: Reuters has now published a story on the still yet to be announced deal. The Google-AOL talks would expand on a relationship which analysts estimate account for 2 percent to 4 percent of Google's revenue on a net basis. AOL uses Google's search engine

Postscript 2: Perhaps the most interesting part of all of this is found (via Searchblog ) in this coverage from the NY Times that says that Google will give AOL preferred placement on the Google site.

Here's the passage: Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

Does this mean "favored placement" of ads or of organic results? I think before starting to speculate we need to know more on just what Google is thinking here. If Google would start giving "favored placement" for organic results then it would sure be a "wow" moment/change of direction in Google's history. From an advertising standpoint it would be interesting to see how the SEM community would respond. Battelle uses the expression "jump the shark" to describe the NYT passage in his post but adds that it also just might be a "trial balloon."

Of course, it's very unlikely we hear anything official about any of this until next week.

Postscript 3 (Saturday): David Vise's article from the Washington Post on the possible deal. From the article: + AOL also will get the exclusive right to sell online banner ads for Google. AOL will keep about 20 percent of the proceeds from those ad sales, while Google will get about 80 percent.

+ "AOL is a valued partner," Google spokeswoman Lynn Fox said yesterday. "We look forward to continuing to work with them."

+ AOL has provided Google with more than $400 million in ad revenue so far this year, according to public filings.

+ The existing arrangement -- under which Google provides text-based ads and free search results on AOL -- will continue, with AOL keeping 80 percent of those ad proceeds and Google taking 20 percent.

+ One source said AOL will also have the right to buy graphic ads that appear alongside the text-based ads Google traditionally has displayed to the right of its free search results.

+ Google's search results, based on equations that rank them according to relevancy, will not be changed as a result of the new partnership with AOL, sources said.

Postscript 4: See AOL's Choice of Google Leaves Microsoft as the Outsider has more details on AOL having concerns over MSN's new ad network and arguing that its own ad serving software was beter.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:44 PM | Permalink

December 4, 2005

The Fear of Google Continues as a Hot Topic and Popular News Story

What might this holidays season's most popular item and topic be for grown-ups be? A satellite radio? A new car with GPS? A trip to St. Barts? Nope, it just might be the fear of Google and what to do about it. I guess a company that does "no evil" and fear of that same "no evil" company are not the same thing. (-;

Reuters (via News.com) has a lengthy look at how another group, in this case Madison Avenue advertisers, fear Google in the aritcle: Madison Avenue faces Google fears.

We're reading article like this on a very regular basis these days. Last week, we posted: + Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone from Wired. + News.com's: Google--what you get for $400, a share that offered a chart of who Google competes with in various areas. + About a month ago, we blogged: NYT On Google As Threat To Other Businesses

Today's Reuters article includes the following takeaways:

On Google Analytics: "There is an inherent conflict of interest there," said Brian McAndrews, chief executive of aQuantive, a company that is both a big buyer and reseller of Google advertising but also a rival supplier of ad measurement tools. "Am I going to use Google to measure my search results on Microsoft and Yahoo? Am I going to use Google to measure my advertising results on ESPN?" McAndrews asked rhetorically during the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit on Thursday.

Lauren Rich Fine from Merrill Lynch recently told clients. "However, Google is starting to attract negative publicity (tied to) its foray into other mediums but from a consumer perspective it's still "all good."

Btw, Battelle recently had an excellent post (with lots of comments) on what he called Google's "tipping point."

In my most recent round of conference presentations to search consumers, I've started to notice more interest in what other search companies are doing and how to use these tools. That said, Google is still number one.

On Charging Marketing Firms [David] Verklin, [chief executive of Carat America] (owners of IProspect) complains Google has begun charging marketing firms like his own $50,000 a month to use Google's ad buying system. He adds, ""We're going to try and convince (Google) we think that's a bad idea," Verklin said. "I don't want to have to use one tool to manage Google and my own tool to manage Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and everyone else," he said of conflicts between ad systems."

What does Google have to say? "There's this notion that Google has a grand master devious plan" to put ad agencies and publishers out of business, [Marc] Leibowitz [Google's director of strategic partnerships] said. "Nothing could be further from the truth. We see ourselves in a symbiotic relationship with them."

Posted by Gary Price at 5:55 PM | Permalink

November 30, 2005

Advertisers Offer Google Kudos for Allowing Separate Bidding

Christine Blank's article: Agencies Like Bidding Separately for Google Content, offers kudos from advertisers to Google for giving them more flexibility and options in bidding for keywords, "on content sites separately from bids for ads that run on search sites on Google's network."

Yahoo has offered this option for some time.

We can bid down on poor performing groups,? said Ben Perry, manager of paid search at search marketing firm iProspect, Watertown, MA.

It also opens the door for new search advertisers to try contextual advertising on Google, said Danielle Leitch, vice president of marketing and analytics at search marketing and optimization agency MoreVisibility, Boca Raton, FL.

More about this new option that Danny called "long overdue" in this post from last week

Posted by Gary Price at 5:53 PM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

Google Separates Bids For Search & Contextual Ads

Separate bidding on content network introduced by AdWords from Jen over at JenSense looks at how Google is now allowing advertisers to finally bid on contextual ads independently of their search campaigns. Long overdue, and it's sad that it took advertisers having to beg, plead and drag Google kicking into this.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:45 AM | Permalink

November 18, 2005

Google Adds Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up to AdSense

In an extension of the site-targeted advertising programs Google rolled out for AdSense advertisers earlier this year, publishers can now sign up interested advertisers directly from their own web pages. A new "Advertise on this site" link displayed on a publisher's Google ad unit lets advertisers create an AdWords ad exclusively targeting that publisher's site. More information about Onsite Advertiser Sign-up can be found at google.com/services/oasu/.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:46 PM | Permalink

November 11, 2005

Murder, Love Gone Awry, Google Searches & Bogus Clicks

Google Blogoscoped and Andy Beal both point to a story about an accused murderer searching for "neck," "snap," "break" and "hold" on Google, evidence prosecutors say that the man murdered his wife. Meanwhile, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread where someone reports a jaded girlfriend clicking on his AdSense links and getting his account suspended.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:44 AM | Permalink

November 4, 2005

Google Offers AdSense Referral Fees

Google has introduced a new program that allows AdSense publishers to garner fees for referring users to Google. Publishers add a referral button to their site that directs users to sign up for AdSense or download the Firefox browser with the Google Toolbar. If a referral signs up for AdSense and earns US $100, Google will credit publishers with a US $100 referral fee. If a referral downloads and runs Firefox, publishers receive up to $1.

More information on the new program can be found here.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:12 PM | Permalink

September 30, 2005

Google Promotes Site-Targeted Advertising With Landing Page Test

Pam Parker's: Google Tests 'Advertise' Link, Landing Page, reports on another test at Google. This time, viewers of Google advertising on "select" Google Network sites will see the text link, "Advertise on this site" next to the AdSense ads.

If a user clicks the link, they're taken to a Google hosted landing page where they can learn about purchasing site-targeted advertising on that specific site. Another link on the landing page takes the user to an AdWords sign-up page. More about the test along with the usual "we're always testing things" comment from Google in this Clickz article and this page from Google that explains the "advertise on this site" page.

Postscript: AskDaveTaylor has more including a screen cap of the landing page.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:38 PM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

Google House Ads In AdSense On Non-Google Sites

I wrote earlier of issues some have with Google running house ads for its own products in Google search results. Selling Their Own Dog Food from Andrew Goodman looks at the flipside, Google house ads running in AdSense ads on sites outside of Google. "I wonder if publishers get paid for these clicks?," he asks. Good question -- I'll see if I can find out. It seems like they should.

Postscript: Chris Ridings writes to say, nope, Google doesn't pay for those ads. See section 11 of the AdSense terms:

Google shall not be liable for any payment based on....(d) Google advertisements for its own products and/or services;

Postscript 2: Jen Slegg emailed me and also posts on her blog that publishers ARE PAID for these ads, according to what Google tells her. Andrew's also posted a follow-up saying he's been told the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:33 AM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Google Enhances AdSense Tools for Blogger Users

Via Search Engine Roundtable, a JenSense post about Google releasing enhancements that makes it easy, very easy according to SER's Barry Schwartz, to add AdSense to a Blogger templates. You'll also read how Blogger users can create customized color palettes for AdSense.

Want to Discuss? Visit this discussion in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:23 AM | Permalink

August 18, 2005

Track Your AdSense Earnings in Firefox Status Bar

Here's one for AdSense customer who uses Firefox. Google Blogoscoped points to the Adsense Notifier extension that allows you to track your AdSense earnings in the Firefox status bar.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:08 PM | Permalink

August 16, 2005

Google Unveils AdSense Blog

A post on Search Engine Roundtable and JenSense points out that Google's Inside AdSense blog is now online. It joins "Inside AdWords" blog as resources where you can find news, tips, and advice about each service by members of the AdSense and AdWord teams.

From the blog: You can look forward to posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff. We hope you'll visit often.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:44 PM | Permalink

August 9, 2005

Yahoo Prepares LinkSpots Launch; Google May Expand AdSense Site Exclusions & Testing More "Signals" From Advertisers

DMNews.com has two stories each with comments from Google and Yahoo about new contextual ad services either coming soon or in testing.

Article 1: Search Engines Target Contextual Ads

Key Passages: Yahoo Yahoo soon will roll out LinkSpots, which it began testing in 2003, to provide more relevant ads or links next to content on parts of its site. For example, Yahoo users who receive their daily horoscope might see an ad for a related service, such as Personal ads. Google ...Google may expand its site exclusion program in the future to let advertisers better target contextual ads. "Site exclusion today is limited at 25 sites. There are many more ways to offer more controls in the future," said Brian Axe, senior product manager at Google.

Article 2: Google Tests New AdSense, AdWords Formats AdSense is testing a program with a few publishers, letting them send more "signals" about their Web site, to better tailor ads. Though AdSense already uses signals based on the content of Web sites, such as headlines and font sizes, to generate ads, this would let advertisers tailor ads based on their users' demographics and other signals, which are yet to be determined.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:16 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2005

Google Seeks Patent On RSS Ads: Filed In Dec. 2003

Google's Advertisements in RSS Patent App in our SEW Forums covers how Google has applied for a patent on putting ads into RSS and feeds. You can discuss in that forum thread, plus Threadwatch has some talk.

Postscript (from Gary): It's important to realize that this patent app was filed with the US Patent and Trademark office in December 2003. In other words Google has been thinking about and developing methods to place paid advertising into RSS feeds for at least 18 months but likely much longer. However, it has only been in the past few months that Google started to test this type of service.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:14 AM | Permalink

July 21, 2005

Do Or Die Domain Name Registration Soars

Kevin Murphy's Computer Business Review article Pay-per-click speculation market soaring takes a look at numbers from VeriSign that show hundreds of thousands of domain names are being registered each week, "purely to publish pay-per-click advertising links from the likes of Google Inc and Yahoo."

There are close to a quarter of a million domain names a week being registered for just a few days, while people "test" the traffic potential of those names before discarding them, chief executive Stratton Sclavos told analysts yesterday... "Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers," Sclavos said. "The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period." These speculators basically put up collections of Google Adsense or Yahoo Overture text advertising links that are more or less relevant to the topic indicated by the URL. Whenever someone comes across the site and clicks a link, the owner gets paid.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:44 PM | Permalink

July 14, 2005

Google to Advertisers: We Hear You

Google has taken a lot of flak over some of its policies for AdWords, such as putting ads that didn't meet certain criteria into a progressive penalty box, in some cases disabling the ad campaign altogether. Needless to say, advertisers grumbled over this treatment, especially when bidding on "long tail" terms that missed targets simply because clickthrough rates weren't adequate.

Google says it has listened to advertiser concerns, and is making changes to its AdWords program. Among the changes: Allowing advertisers to display ads that previously have been disabled due to the policies of the program. Ads will now be classified as having just two states: active or inactive. And good news for many: Advertisers willing to bid enough can override the former relevancy requirements that caused ads to get disabled in the first place.

Tomorrow's SearchDay article (available to SEW blog readers now), Google Simplifies & Loosens Requirements for AdWords, has the scoop.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:02 PM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Reporting AdSense Spam Sites & Click Fraud

Report AdSense Spam & Click Fraud from Search Engine Roundtable has a nice, easy to understand illustration on how to report to Google if you come across a spam site that is funded by carrying AdSense ads. It picks up from the Matt Cutts announces new AdSense spam report feature and Reporting publisher click fraud to Google just got easier posts at JenSense, which provide more details on how Google is encouraging people to report suspected click fraud or spam relating to AdSense. But, Google could make things a lot easier.

Basically, the instructions are to click on the "Ads By Google" or "Ads by Goooooogle" links you see shown as part of ads. That brings up a page asking for feedback. You then have to make sure you include either the term "spamreport" or "invalid clicks" as part of the comments you send. It would be better if these were options associated with the form. Rather than having to remember what code word to employ, just give us a drop-down box or check boxes that list the problems we might have with the ads.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:07 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

Edelman Reports on Google's Role as "Advertising Intermediary"

Harvard researcher and adware/spyware expert, Benjamin Edelman, has posted a new report that asks the question, "Are ad intermediaries responsible when their ads are shown by software installed improperly?" Advertising intermediaries are the companies that supply the ads to those unwanted pop-ups that begin appearing when spyware/adware and other programs install themselves onto your computer.

From the Media Post article: Adware Maven Investigates Google's Role In Distribution.

Edelman stated that he had analyzed 88,388 current 180solutions pop-up ads and found that 4,678--or around 5 percent--of those ads included Google's AdSense ads. That is, for that 5 percent, the pages that popped up on users' screens contained pay-per-click ads served by Google...Although adware isn't in itself unlawful, Google prohibits AdSense participants from sending pop-ups that contain Google ads. A Google spokesman said that Google and 180solutions have no business relationship, and that the company is investigating whether its AdSense publishers violated the no pop-ups.

The full text of Edelman's report including the case study about 180solutions is accessible here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:10 PM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

Wall Street Journal On Search-Funded Spam

I've written before on the ironic situation of Google AdSense funding some of the spam Google has to eliminate from its indexed. Syndic8 Gets Outed for Spamming and WordPress Caught Spamming After Enlisting To Fight Spam are two close up examples, as well. Spotted via John Battelle, Web sites that exist only to sell advertising has Wall Street Journal writer Lee Gomes earlier this month feeling fed up with the situation as well. It's not an in-depth look but more a personal commentary -- and a sign that the issue is becoming more noticeable.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:10 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Google's AdSense For RSS Released in Public Beta

Embedding contextually relevant ads into RSS (ATOM too!) feeds today took a big step forward today when Google announced that AdSense for Feeds (beta) is now publicly available. Google had been testing the program at a few sites. At the same time, Google released a list of best practices for publishers who want to use AdSense for feeds (beta).

These practice includes: + Syndicate the full text of your articles + Don?t include more than one ad unit per article + Place the ad unit at the end of articles. It will be interesting to see if publishers decide to listen to Google's suggestions on how to provides feeds.

Here's the url to sign-up for the RSS for Feeds public beta.

It will also be worth noticing to see if the widespread introduction of advertising into RSS feeds causes a slowdown in the adoption of the technology by the masses. P.L. also touches on this point when he writes:

It?s interesting to note that many people I?ve heard talking about what they like best about RSS is that it contains no ads. If RSS advertisement would ever become popular, this bonus would of course diminish ? and possibly, attack the substance of RSS.

I'm also wondering how long (if it isn't already available) for someone to develop a program to remove or hide ads from RSS feeds. For more about AdSense for RSS, this Clickz article by Pamela Parker and Rebecca Lieb. Findory's Greg Linden also shares a few comments.

Putting ads in RSS feeds is hardly a new idea. Companies including Kanoodle, AdBrite, RSSAds, and others have been offering these types of services for some time.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:38 PM | Permalink

May 11, 2005

AOL Launching Free Email But Not "Creepy" AdSense Ads

AOL is to offer free web-based email, initially to users of its AIM instant messaging client, then later to anyone. The move is designed to help it keep up with competitors Yahoo and MSN, which have long offered web-based email as a key portal feature. Even stealth portal Google has offered its own Gmail email service for over a year.

While AOL uses both Google's search-targeted and contextually-targeted ads, contextually-targeted ads won't be coming to email in the way that they do in Google's own Gmail. "That's creepy," said an AOL executive, about the planned move.

More in America Online to unveil free e-mail service from Reuters. Some more details about the service and how to sign-up are covered in AOL Launches Web-Based AIM Mail Beta Today from InformationWeek.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:32 PM | Permalink

April 28, 2005

Google Testing Ads In RSS Feeds

Google's testing ads in RSS or feed-distributed content. Google Puts RSS Advertising to the Test from eWeek has details, plus see AdSense in RSS - Explained from LonghornBlogs.com on how it is working for them.

Google AdSense for RSS running at Weblogs, Inc. from Jason Calacanis at Weblog has details on how and why his company is also using them. Google Tests RSS Ad Inserts at PaidContent.org has a nice recap of others commenting on the move.

Dave Winer gives a poke at the move because Google doesn't support RSS, other than it as a means to carry ads. Rex Hammock touches on this a bit more.

Frankly, the end user doesn't care whether Google backs Atom or RSS -- and the DVD/Laserdisc analogy Hammock uses isn't really fair. Any tool I've seen is able to read either flavor of how feed content is provided, whether it be Atom or RSS. In other words, the laserdisc that Google backs are quite merrily read by your DVD player.

I'd agree with Dave that there's a lot more Google could be doing in providing feeds themselves beyond the Orkut Media feeds I mentioned earlier (which are in Dave's favored RSS 2.0 format, no less). But to suggest that Google is harming RSS by doing this ad move? I don't buy in.

Nothing I've seen so far said that AdSense ads will only work in Atom formatted feeds. Heck, Calacanis is putting out RSS 2.0 for his blogs. So if anything, Google's going to be helping a lot of people who do use RSS already.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:11 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2005

That Was Fast: Google Announces New Image Ad Size Option

Just a day after launching their new AdWords advertising program, Google has already has already announced a new image ad size option. We've just noticed that Google will also offer a "Wide Skyscraper" sized ad (160x600). This ad size was not listed on the Google AdWords guidelines page yesterday. For more on Google's new program, see Danny's post from Monday.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:27 AM | Permalink

April 18, 2005

Overture Becomes Yahoo Search Marketing & Comparing Listing Products At Yahoo To Google

The rebranding promised in March has happened. Overture has officially become Yahoo Search Marketing, marked by the launch of a new Yahoo Search Marketing site that lists all of Yahoo's search-related listing products.

It's a good change that ought to help new advertisers. Rather than having to explain that they need to buy "Overture" to be on Yahoo, Yahoo can now direct them to a site that retains its branding.

But with rebranding can come confusion, so I thought it would be helpful to look at all the products listed at the new site and also compare them to Google products. In particular, an email I got from a reader prompted the idea:

I am trying to find the "comparable" Yahoo program to Google AdWords. Since their rebranding of Overture last week, I'm still looking unsuccessfully for something like Precision Match, but it looks as if the program has been axed?

We've been using Google AdWords since it launched and are very happy with the format and back office (most of all the results). Is Yahoo offering a similar program? Honestly, I've read about their "Sponsored Search" and it's simply not obvious.

Meanwhile at our Search Engine Watch forums, a thread on the rebranding shows similar confusion:

I thought Overture was being renamed to Yahoo Search Marketing, but this page boasts a range of products, including Shopping, Travel, Directory, PPI & Overture (sponsored search).

The chart below gives you a side-by-side look at all the products listed on the new Yahoo site, along with some other listings areas that I thought made sense to add. If you're a Search Engine Watch member, see this extended post that provides commentary and additional advice and information about each listing area.

Listing Type Yahoo Google Web Search Listings Yahoo Submit Your Site Add Your URL To Google Web Search Paid Inclusion Search Submit Express & Search Submit Pro n/a (but advertisers can get listing support) Search Ads (Paid Placement) Sponsored Search AdWords (search targeted) Contextual Ads Content Match AdWords (content-targeted; AdSense is name for PUBLISHER program) Shopping Listings Product Submit Froogle Feed (free) Travel Listings Travel Submit n/a Directory Listings Directory Submit ODP Submit Local Search Ads Local Sponsored Search AdWords Regional & Local Targeting Local Search Listings Local Enhanced Listings & Local Listings (free) Google Local Business Center News Listings Yahoo News Submissions Google News Source Suggestion

Want to discuss the change from Overture to Yahoo? Visit our forum thread, Yahoo! Search Marketing is Released. Also check out Yahoo To Buy Overture for background on Yahoo buying Overture back in 2003, GoTo Makes Overture To New Name for the last rebranding Overture went through, that of losing it original name of GoTo back in 2001 and GoTo Sells Positions, about GoTo's launch in 1998.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:48 AM | Permalink

March 16, 2005

The Second Rule Of AdSense Is That You Can Now Talk About Earnings

Back in 2003, Google took a lot of flak for banning its AdSense affiliates from criticizing the service and if I recall correctly, discussing how much they earn. Kottke's The first rule of Google AdSense is, don't talk about Google is a nice review, from that time. Now the terms appear to have changed again, with Boing Boing noting its now OK to disclose "gross earnings" from the program.

That might be a helpful change given that it's widely expect that Google soon will be competing more strongly to retain publishers due to the expected Yahoo contextual ad expansion. In other words, if you want to keep your publishers, it's helpful to have them talking to the press about all the thousands they are earning. In addition, they were already doing before the terms were changed, as in this recent USA Today story. What are you going to do -- ban the same people that make your program sound great?

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable does a roundup of forum reaction to the changes in AdSense Adds Ad Links, Payment Options & Updates TOS. He picks up on the bigger change that excites AdSense maven Jennifer Slegg. As she covers in her AdSense offers direct deposit and payment in different currencies post, you can get direct deposit of earnings in many countries and payment in your "home" currency.

She also kicks off this Webmaster World thread, The Complete AdSense Terms & New Features Update, which as the name says covers all the changes. I mean seriously, an awesome line-by-line rundown on all that's new, changed or removed.

Note that you can't "engage in any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google's reputation or goodwill." As Jen points out, does that mean its OK to tell a newspaper how much you love the program and earn off of it but you're not allowed to express any worries over it?

Happy reading.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:59 AM | Permalink

March 11, 2005

USA Today Profile On Google AdSense; I Riff On It Still Not Being Search

USA Today looks at how Google's AdSense program has grown to help publishers make money: Google's AdSense a bonanza for some Web sites. I get to be one of the voices not seeing things as so rosy.

For one, I note that AdSense is an area where Google goes off its core mission of organizing the world's information. In other words, AdSense doesn't help you in your search quest. That's nothing new to my readers. I said the same thing when the program launched in 2003.

Google's response in the story isn't convincing. If I do a search for the New York Times and see an ad offering a discount, that's not because of AdSense for Content -- that's AdSense for Search.

Huh? If you missed the whole AdWords changes into AdSense metamorphosis last year, my More On Mixing Contextual & Search Spending post explains that more. When I say AdSense, I still mean the AdSense contextual ads -- as do most people I talk with, including Google's own advertisers and publishers.

Chris Pirillo's quote does a better job of explaining the traditional Google argument of how AdSense helps search. But funding publishers, they can make better content. That increases the odds that if we look for things, we'll find what we need.

To me, it's a stretch. By that argument, Google ought to be giving away free web hosting, paying people directly to write content and other things. OK, so Google's Blogger is a form of free web hosting and Google Answers does pay people to write content. I stay steadfast that AdSense still isn't part of the core mission of organizing information. It's about extending the ad reach Google has, so it can earn a lot of money given that there's not enough search inventory to go around.

That's not a bad thing -- it's just is the biggest thing you can point at if you want to say Google isn't all about search, for a company that as I wrote back in 2003, painted itself into that particular corner.

Meanwhile, AdSense turned Google into usurping Amazon from having the web's largest affiliate program. Before AdSense, blogs and other content sites mentioned in the story would have depended often on Amazon links for a paltry pay-out for the work they do. Now Google is the major moneybags -- which brings along another major problem, spam.

The irony is deep. Google, by paying publishers, fuels an incredible amount of search spam -- pages that are simply created with no other purpose other than to get search traffic, show AdSense ads and make the site owners money. The story addresses this, and Google responds that it does try to stamp it out, but the problem remains.

Somewhere between existing sites and spam is something like Michael Buffington's asbestos blog experiment. He decided to build a blog around asbestos because of the large amount of money advertisers after mesothelioma victims are willing to pay.

I don't know the area, and maybe it will evolve into a useful new resource. But was it driven out of a need for searchers or out of a desire to make money? Buffington's honest:

The second part of this big experiment is to see if I can capture some of that click through revenue while still providing a somewhat valid service to people who might arrive by search results.

So thank you AdSense and Google. You've directly inspired the creation of content that maybe we didn't really need but which wants to earn off your search results. In some cases, that will be good. Believe me, as someone who started as a self-publisher, I love that AdSense is out there to help others. But in some other cases -- I suspect a lot of them -- the content isn't going to be that great.

Meanwhile, I've written earlier that Yahoo wants to compete with Google in the space more heavily. More fuel to those rumors (more like confirmed open secret) from News.com: Yahoo seeks to expand in Google territory.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:40 PM | Permalink

March 9, 2005

Yahoo Readying Contextual Ad Expansion?

We had plenty of rumors running around SES NY last week that Yahoo might expand its contextual ad offerings in the manner of Google's self-serve AdSense ones. Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang suggested in my keynote talk with him that this was pretty likely as well. Yahoo! Mulls Expansion Of Contextual Program from MediaPost today looks briefly at further fuel after Yahoo contextual ads showed up on the blog of Yahoo product manager Ken Rudman. More from Andy Baio and Olivier Duffez. How big for Yahoo? As noted in the article, Google doesn't reveal how much its own self-serve AdSense ads generate. But I suspect it's serious money. More on why is explained in my article about the Google IPO from last year: Google IPO To Happen, Files For Public Offering.

Postscript: News.com has a new story on the rumors, Yahoo seeks to expand in Google territory. Also see ClickZ's Marketers React to Yahoo! AdSense Alternative.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:59 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2005

VNU Chooses AdSense

Word in a Reuters story that Google has landed another large client for AdSense. VNU Business Media (Billboard, AdWeek, The Hollywood Reporter, and many trade publications) will now use AdSense on their web sites. A bit more info in the news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:44 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

Google Pitches Blogger On AdSense; Blogger Not Amused

Spotted via Anil Dash, Google's AdSense spam from Overstated documents how Google's trying to enlist Blogdex and other popular blog sites to carry its AdSense listings.

You do have to chuckle, though:

They've been pushing really hard for me to put AdSense on Blogdex, presumedly because it has high PageRank.

No, they want the site because they think it's popular among people visiting it. PageRank is just how popular the site is in terms of links pointing at it. If they only wanted high PageRank sites, Google would just go out and make whatever sites they want to have high PageRank scores. That wouldn't mean people are visiting them, though.

There's also some confusion between a pitch to carry Google AdSense ads -- ads that actually appear on the site -- and the new Google Referral program that pays for leads to others who are willing to carry the ads.

Anyway, some fun reading of the actual letters Google is sending out, along with a marketing PowerPoint presentation that's heavy on the "we want bloggers" pitch.

You gotta feel a little sorry for Google. As Anil points out, first Google took flak for not letting bloggers into AdSense. Now they get flak for going after them.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:08 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2005

Related Searches Return To AdSense -- But In A Good Way

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has a nice item on Google testing a new system letting those who see its AdSense contextual ads change them on the fly to related topics: Google Beta Tests New AdSense Ads.

Pretty slick -- Barry's post also linked to this example site you can play with the "Change To Ads" feature.

Two years ago, Google rolled out a somewhat similar Related Searches feature for AdSense ads that it pulled within a day. Why? The implementation of that feature drove people off an advertiser's site and back to Google. This new implementation doesn't and so should be far more acceptable.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:59 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2005

Yahoo Doesn't Need Six Apart Or Blog Ownership For Ad Purposes

It's kind of obvious that Yahoo will gain some type of blogging solution in the future. It's the only major portal not to offer this, as I've written before: MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

David Jackson has a write-up in Yahoo to acquire Six Apart? on why he thinks Yahoo will gain blogging capabilities by acquiring the makers of the popular Movable Type platform.

MovableType's great -- we use it ourselves -- and so would be of interest to anyone who wants to own blogging technology. But the idea Jackson has that Yahoo needs blogs to fuel its pay-per-click growth? Nah.

Google bought Blogger because it was cheap and it figured it could make money but putting its contextual ads out on many of the Blogger sites. But Google later pulled those ads and make them optional. That's wise, because you aren't going to make friends by forcing anyone to carry your ads. So much for needing to own the platform to build ad revenue.

In addition, blogs can be hard to target with ads, given that they often have different types of content mixed onto the same page. MediaPost just had an article looking at this: Blog Ads Hit Rough Patches.

Google's real success with AdSense hasn't been in owning the blogging platform. First, it has signed partnerships with major publishers. Second, it offers an easy-to-use self-serve system that anyone can tap into. Google rolled that out last year, and now you all but stumble over its AdSense placements.

If Yahoo really wanted to turn the web into its billboards, in the way Google does, it would make more sense to have a similar type of paid listings program that any publisher could use.

The downside is that in doing so, advertisers have less control over the targeting of their ads. Kraft wasn't happy to find itself showing up on a pro-white web site recently: Kraft Supports Pro-White Groups? Lack Of Search Ad Targeting Makes It So. Open the flood-gates of self-serve, and problems like this for Google could hit Yahoo as well.

Cory Kleinschmidt over at Traffick takes another swing at the targeting problem in his recent AdSense Faces Extinction -- Unless Google Shakes Things Up post. In it, he points out how uneven targeting is an issue that threatens AdSense. He also notes there are other programs out there to tempt bloggers and other publishers -- which means again, owning the platform doesn't guarantee you the billboard space.

There are good reasons for Yahoo to own a blogging platform, and maybe it will be Six Apart. But the assumption that paid ad placement as a key reason to do so isn't a major factor, from where I sit.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:45 AM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

Shopping Search, Contextual Ads & General Search Blogs Offered

I met up with Sean O'Rourke at our SES Chicago show who's heavily into shopping search and threatened to launch a blog on the topic. Now he's done it. The Organized Shopping Blog looks promising, so if you're a retailer interested in the important area of shopping search, you may want to tune in.

I've also been meaning to mention JenSense. That's a blog launched several weeks ago by Jennifer Slegg, more commonly known to many as Jenstar, moderator of WebmasterWorld's Google AdSense forum. Aside from being one of the nicest people you could meet, those I know into generating money from AdSense tell me she's one of the sharpest people you can talk to.

We don't cover much about contextual here, because as I've written before, it's not search. But it IS important to online advertisers and publishers, so check out Jen's blog.

To close things out, search marketing firm Reprise Media's just started its new blog SearchViews that's taking a look at search as a whole.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:42 AM | Permalink

December 28, 2004

Christmas Lights, Hoaxes, and Google Ads

For your, "it's always something" and your "it's easy to create a hoax" on the Internet file...

According to an AP article: Designer: Christmas Lights on Web a Hoax, Google is looking into a site that turned out to be a hoax. Why Google? The web site contained Google ads and at least one advertiser is unhappy.

It turns out that the web site, which was supposed to allow web visitors to control the Christmas lights in front of Alek Komarnitsky's Colorado home, was a scam. The story was picked up by the AP, linked from the Slashdot site and NYTimes.com, and by many other news outlets. In fact, several Colorado TV stations sent helicopters to fly over the home.

The AP picked up the story from a local newspaper and checked out the Web site but never visited the house. Oops.

Yesterday, after the site received more than four million visitors during December, Mr. Komarnitsky confessed to the Wall Street Journal that it was all a hoax.

Komarnitsky said he only made "pennies" from the Google ads but was unable to say precisely how much he earned due to an NDA with Google. Paul McLellan, general manager of Minneapolis-based ServiceLighting.com, which had an ad on the site, said Komarnitsky's actions were unethical.

A spokesman for Google declined comment until officials could look into the matter further.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:33 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

Google Plans to Expand Image Ad Program and Other AdSense News

I just noticed a few new items on the Google AdSense site.

First, Google will be expanding it's image ad program. We'll be accepting animated GIFs from a small test group of advertisers, and you'll be able to display these ads on your pages! The new ads will still adhere to the 50KB size limit...

Second, AdSense now supports more languages. Users can now search in 21 languages, including Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, Russian, and traditional Chinese.

Third, the introduction of URL channels. URL channels allow you to track the performance of individual pages, or groups of pages, without having to update your ad code.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:45 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2004

Google Sues AdSense Affiliate Over Clickfraud

Google has apparently filed suit against one of its AdSense affiliates, alleging clickfraud. More from xBiz (note, this is an industry site for porn/adult content, but the link with information has no such content in it). Thanks for the tip from InsideGoogle & Abakus.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:31 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2004

Small Change to AdSense Terms and Conditions

I just noticed that Google has made a change to the payments section of the AdSense Terms and Conditions page.

What's changed?

A note on the AdSense "What's New" page summarizes the change by stating,

As a result of publisher feedback, we will not be paying out all accounts at the end of the year. We'll continue to pay publishers on a regular schedule, and will send payments to qualifying publishers with earnings balances over $100. In addition, cancelled accounts will only be paid out if their account has earned a minimum of $10.

You can still view the the previous version of the TOS via the Google cache.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

More On Mixing Contextual & Search Spending

Niki Scevak saw my Google's Revenue Is Not All Search-Derived post yesterday decrying the mixture of contextual and search revenues and points out that Jupiter Research's own paid search estimates appropriately don't mix the two: The Myths of Contextual Advertising.

He goes on to discuss how AdSense doesn't just mean contextual at Google any more. Instead, it's an umbrella term they now use to represent both "AdSense for search" and AdSense for content."

This came up on our forums earlier this month: AdSense for search? As I explained there, Google shifted to using the umbrella term internally a few months ago. You really saw it make its public debut in the Google IPO filing, when AdSense was used throughout those documents to represent any type of ads placed outside of Google.

Advertisers, of course, tend to think of two different things: AdWords (meaning ads that show up in response to keyword searches) and AdSense (meaning to advertisers the ads that show up contextually placed and which are considered by many of them as an option they can choose for their AdWords campaigns).

From Google's point of view, AdWords is simply the program that lets advertisers place ads into the AdSense program -- which means both AdSense for search and AdSense for content.

Niki goes on to outline that contextual ads are in his view a dismal earner for Google but one it can afford because they represent incremental income for the service, rather than its bread-and-butter. Don't forget, the deals also have the impact of denying Google competitors from gaining partnerships, denying them cash). He also notes Google is stepping back from some "vanity" deals which may have even cost it money.

Meanwhile, Kevin Ryan takes another look at those IAB search projection figures I blogged about earlier, the ones where contextual doesn't appear to be broken out. In his Why Search is Slowing, Ryan gathers a few comments about the fears of a slowdown in search, despite still incredible rises. In short, some leveling off was in order.

He also notes that keyword search emerged as an ad format in 2002. To be correct, the ad format was there well before this. It was just that no one bothered to track it.

Spending on paid search ads began with Overture back in 1998. It happened even earlier than that, if you want to count keyword-linked banners. Google started carrying paid ads at the end of 1999.

All this spending could have been tracked back then. It wasn't. It took the rosy public financials of Overture to wake up Wall Street, research firms and even advertising organizations to something advertisers were already doing: spending on search in droves. My Search Engine Marketing Finally Getting Respect article from 2001 looks at this more.

Meanwhile, tracking of spending on "free" or "organic" or "natural" search seems non-existent. That's something that research by SEMPO may help correct. It's long overdue. Not having these figures is like trying to predict the state of any type of marketing solely on ad buys but not public relations efforts.

Postscript: The IAB figures do apparently track spending on search engine optimization as well as advertising.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 28, 2004

Google's Revenue Is Not All Search-Derived (AKA Gmail Isn't Search)

So Gmail ads might be bigger than search ads for Google, we learn in this New York Post story: You Got Mail (& Ads). How about an important correction? Almost all of Google's revenue does NOT come from placement on its search engine.

Go back to my write-up on the Google IPO filing: Google IPO To Happen, Files For Public Offering. See the chart on ad revenue sources about mid-way down. In 2003 and 2004, the share of revenue earned off the Google site itself rose dramatically. As the article explains, this was almost certainly due to growth in AdSense contextual revenue.

In short, rather than search placement making up nearly all of Google's revenue, it seems closer to making up about three-quarters of it. And AdSense is nearly two years old now -- so the quote about Google realizing they need to do more than search overlooks entirely the fact that contextual ads ARE NOT SEARCH.

Gmail ads, by the way, are simply contextual ads. It is new that Google now has an entirely new distribution area for these ads through Gmail, and in a place where it needn't share revenue. But Gmail placement is simply an extension of Google turning the entire web into billboards for its non-search advertising that began in 2003.

In some related tangents, nice comments on John's blog about how one SEM firm finds AdSense contextual placement not performing as well as AdWords but is positive on contextual offerings from other players: Fathoming Context: Much More to Come.

And, a nice catch by Andy Beal, a CNN article with the first Google comment I've seen about the entire browser issue (No plans to "reinvent the wheel," which certainly doesn't rule the idea out).

The article suggests that when some firms begin coverage of Google today, that -- along with the need to report third quarter earnings next month -- will make Google more open about plans and activities. Article here: Google's veil of secrecy.

Perhaps. Even if so, will Google break out search revenues from contextual or continue to play the game of mixing the two together, which confuses everyone. Nor are they alone in this, as this recent blog entry from me explains: Search Spending Continues To Rise -- But Is Contextual Lumped In?.

Want to discuss? Join our forum thread: Will emails ads be bigger than search ads?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 22, 2004

Gmail Paid Listings Go Below

Google Moves Gmail Ads Source: DMnews

>From the article, "Gmail, which is still in testing, now carries an ad unit with advertiser links underneath messages instead of on the right side. The sent-message page now contains ads, too. Previously, Gmail showed ad links only on the side of incoming e-mail messages. The ads and related pages are now displayed in a light-blue shaded box, while previously they were carried against a white background."

Posted by Gary Price at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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