January 18, 2007

PPC Back Fill Map or Who Is King Of Garbitrage

While this is not news - it really should be. Most of the small search engines are arbitraging one way or another. And the Big Three (clearly 3 since Ask back fills Google PPC) make their cuts on the front end.

A Bruce Clay map for all the PPC partnerships and the rules that govern them would be handy.

My rant here started when I noticed at Ask that we were not being served Ask ads but rather our Google ads. Spoke to one of the people over at Ask and was told that they back fill with Google when the CTR drops below their acceptable level.

Guess that is the level where Google would pay them more to put their ads in... so some of our $10 plus Google terms pay Ask more (rumors of what percentage vary but let's work with 60%) - they get $6 a click from Google when we advertise for say $3 on Ask.... so the CTR would have to be 200% to make them enough money to change....

They are not the only ones.... I see many of the small engines pushing their results out into even thinner search provider portals.... the search results may stay at the site but the results are feed straight from another engine... yet many of these engines also arbitrage their onsite inventory with one of the Big Three so they force their advertisers to bid up to at least what these other people are willing to pay.

Not making much sense - after a while people are going to realize they are just using variations on Google, Yahoo and MSN and just go there first.

I want to start a Back Fill Map - so everyone post what you know in the forum and I will develop something that we all can use.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:05 PM | Permalink

August 26, 2005

Transcripts from Conference on Search Ad Disclosure Now Available

In June, Danny blogged about a panel he was on at: Trust or Consequence: How Failure to Disclose Ad Relationships Threatens to Burst the Search Bubble, a conference sponsored by Consumer Reports/Consumer WebWatch. If you're interested in learning more about what was said at the conference the transcripts are now available.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:10 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Report Suggests Paid Search Disclosure Could Be Better

Last week, I participated in a panel at the Trust or Consequence: How Failure to Disclose Ad Relationships Threatens to Burst the Search Bubble conference backed by Consumer Reports' WebWatch. Wait a minute? Aren't ad clearly disclosed these days? Depends on what you consider clear.

Still In Search Of Disclosure (PDF file) is a new report Consumer Reports' WebWatch released at the event. It came away with these three key findings:

Disclosure headings are now more difficult to find
Two of three meta search engines examined have improved disclosure
Paid inclusion was not found satisfactorily disclosed

The report also has a chart detailing how major search engines were found to have improved, or not, since the last survey in 2004. Here's a look a the the most visited five sites:

Google found to be good, though if you wanted to get help about disclosure, it was hard to find.
Yahoo previously red highlighted disclosure labels changed to gray and hyperlinks to further information harder to find.
MSN found to have made paid listings easier to spot, paid inclusion noted as no longer running, but dinged for removing a page about disclosure.
AOL's previously red highlighted disclsoure labels changed to green and slightly harder to find the hyperlink to more disclosure information.
Ask disclosure headings harder to spot and hyperlinks to more information were removed.

Basically, the report's author Jørgen J. Wouters speaking at the show felt there was a sort of rollback. For example, did the "Sponsor Results" heading at Yahoo go from red to gray to make it less noticable? And apparently at the time of the report, clicking on those words didn't take you to this disclosure page (it does now, though you might not realize this since the words don't have an underline common to many hyperlinks).

Of course, Google's disclosure heading of "Sponsored Links" has been gray for as long as I can remember, so Yahoo can argue that if it was rolling back, it rolled back to what many might consider the industry standard. And unlike Yahoo, you can't click on those words to learn more about the roll sponsored listings play at Google. Similarly, if you look at Google's breakdown of a search results page, nothing about sponsored listings is noted.

That will probably change at Google shortly. The Google panelist there thought it was a good idea to make that change so that a hyperlink from Sponsored Links heading will lead to more info about. Google did recently make it clear in revised guidelines for webmasters that advertising has no role in affecting rankings. But getting that out in front of the help pages that ordinary searchers see would be good, as well.

In discussion, one person suggested that search engines might have something similar to the heart logos you sometimes see restaurant menus, to reflect healthy eating. Any paid link, paid inclusion or paid placement, could carry such a logo or icon so those who care would know.

I love experimenting with that type of idea. An industry standard to help searchers know what's paid and what's not could help ensure trust is maintained in the industry. They needn't even be of an "in your face" variety. I gave a "little blue dots" example when looking at paid inclusion last year as an example of something that didn't have to be blatant.

Trust remains an issue, of course. We also just had research out showing that just calling something paid causes people to trust it less. IE, take the "pure, free" results and call them sponsored, and suddenly people think they aren't as good. And don't label ads, and suddenly people think they might be a bit better.

The reality is there's plenty of bad stuff in the so called "pure" results, junk that gets in or listing that aren't necessarily as good as ad listings. The reverse is true, as well. Searchers need to be evaluating all the listings on a page. But there is a sensitivity to paid results, so for better or worse, I think the search engines are stuck with the fact they should be clearly disclosed in some way.

It was also touched on that "sponsored" might not say clearly enough what are ads. In the past, I've felt like the word sponsored was doing the job and somewhat hesitant to change what's become an industry standard.

But ponder this. When you see ads from Google's AdSense program on pages across the web, they don't say, "Sponsored Listings From Google." They're "Ads By Google." And now with Yahoo rolling out its own contextual ads, we've got Ads From Yahoo, as the JenSense blog explains. How come the word "ads" is OK elsewhere but not on the search results pages themselves? Maybe the paid listings really ought to be called "Ad Listings."

For some further coverage of the event, see:

Study: Search Engines Still Fail to Disclose Ads: From ClickZ, general round-up of the report and presentation at the conference.
Disclose, Already: Also from ClickZ, author Pamela Parker argues that advertisers have an interest in ensure there's clear disclosure. The Worst Idea in Search from MediaPost make similar comments.
Paid Listings Under Fire: From Kevin Ryan at iMediaConnect, this was written before the conference and takes aim at wondering if a revisit to disclosure is even necessary and poking at various surveys Consumer WebWatch has done in the past. Have to disagree with him, however. There's every reason to ensure consumers are being given good disclosure information. We can argue whether one survey or not is biased, but the discussion and continued monitoring is vital.
Paid Listings Threaten Search Credibility: From eWeek, this covers the report presentation and the panel discussion that followed.

Also see Search Engine Disclosure: Better, but Still Wanting for our coverage of the last survey by Consumer Reports' WebWatch, with plenty of further links to material about FTC guidelines and other surveys.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:02 PM | Permalink

June 9, 2005

New Study Reports Consumers are Suspicious of Paid Listings

New and very interesting research out of Penn St. University says that consumers have a strong bias against paid listings.

"Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). "By themselves, sponsored links appear not to be a viable business model and should be only one part of an online advertising campaign..."Prior research had noted a bias against sponsored links, but the question remaining was whether sponsored links were as good as organic links," Jansen said...The researchers found that on more than 80 percent of the searches, study participants went first to the results identified as "organic." Sponsored links were viewed first for only six percent of the time. "What our study shows is that even when the returned results are exactly the same, people still view what they thought of as the organic results as better. The quality of the sponsored links isn't the issue; it's the placement of the results, he added.

You can read more in this summary. The full text of the research is also available (PDF) here.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:03 AM | Permalink

May 13, 2005

Study On How Much Search Screen Real Estate Devoted To Paid Content

How Much of It is Real? Analysis of Paid Placement in Web Search Engine Results is a study now out that looks at what percentage of screen real estate is devoted to paid versus editorial content on search engines. On average, 60 percent of "first screen" results were paid, the figure dropping to 33 percent if the entire first page of results were reviewed.

Huh? The researchers looked at two different things. First, they assumed some searchers viewing results on an 800x600 screen resolution wouldn't scroll. Instead, they'd pick from only what they could see on the "first screen" of results.

In other parlance, this is often called the "above the fold" area, taking from newspaper jargon. Broadsheet newspapers are generally folded in half and often held that way by readers. This means stories shown "above the fold" get better play, better visibility to readers.

In the web world, the "fold" is content that you only see if you scroll. So while a first page of results at a search engine may show lots of information, only some of it is shown at one time.

How did individual search engines do? First the big qualification. The research, involving 384 queries, was done in Fall 2003. That's decades ago in search engine years. In that time, several of the services have had redesigns that would greatly impact the study, if it were repeated today.

But at that time, meta search engine Mamma was found to have the highest presentation of editorial results -- 83 percent for the first screen, 93 percent for the entire first page. Google followed, 82 percent and 88 percent, respectively. MSN followed at 47 percent and 73 percent, with Yahoo next at 40 percent and 86 percent. The report has a full breakdown of all search engines studied.

While the data is old, the main conclusion the study makes remains valid. Scroll! If you don't scroll through all the results, you may miss some of the editorial content you're looking for.

Even better, change your defaults. Every major search engine will let you view more than 10 results at a time. Change your options and see more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:16 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Consumer Reports Holding Forum On Search Ad Disclosure

Trust or Consequence: How Failure to Disclose Ad Relationships Threatens to Burst the Search Bubble is the name of free one day conference being backed by Consumer Reports WebWatch on June 9 in Berkeley, California. It aims to explore in an open forum format if better paid ad disclosures on search engines are needed to protect those seeking general and health-related information. There's an impressive list of invited and confirmed speakers, so it should be a good event. Wish I could have made it myself, but my schedule didn't allow for making the trip!

Postscript: I've moved things around and will participating in the event.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:30 PM | Permalink

November 24, 2004

November 23, 2004

Search Engine Disclosure Improving, says Consumer WebWatch

Back in 2001, consumer watchdog Commercial Alert filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against a number of prominent search engines over using paid listings "without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads." In response, the FTC issued a letter recommending disclosure practices that--over time--most of the major search engines have adopted.

Today's SearchDay article, Search Engine Disclosure: Better, but Still Wanting, covers a new report by Consumer WebWatch, which evaluated the current disclosure practices of 15 heavily trafficked search sites. While the report generally lauds the engines, it also finds a few problems, especially surrounding the disclosure of paid inclusion practices.

The report also takes a swipe at Google, which wasn't named in the original Commercial Alert complaint, for not providing the same degree of disclosure as other engines, such as those that use Google's AdWords as their own paid placement listings.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:24 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2004

New Report: Search Engine Disclosure of Advertising

How search engines disclosed paid advertising was quite the popular topic a couple of years ago when the Federal Trade Commission issued recommendations to the industry.

Today, Consumers Union (the publisher of Consumer Reports) released results of a six month study that looks at how engines disclose advertising to searchers.

The 82 page report: In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results, is available as PDF file. "Searching for Disclosure," WebWatch's third search-engines-related report, shows many of the Web's top search engines have made improvements in disclosure and transparency -- describing their business relationships with advertisers and how those relationships may or may not affect the objectivity of search content and results -- since the FTC two years ago warned several major search engines about problems with the practice. While this report was being researched, two of the Web's top five search engines announced they would terminate paid inclusion.

Compliance with FTC recommendations for disclosure varied widely, however, leaving ample room for improvement throughout the industry. Even the report's testers, information professionals by trade, found disclosure and transparency practices among many search engines confusing and confounding. That increases the likelihood consumers may have a difficult time distinguishing objective search results from paid advertising.

Access to reports published in 2002 and 2003 remain available online.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions

Privacy Policy
Affiliates

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>

Top Jobs

more Jobs