CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING: Introducing Google’s Ghost Ads

Contextual Advertising

Contextual Advertising is a relatively new form of advertising on the web that will consider the context of the site, a page or a search query, to display ads from advertisers that correspond to the topic. Its usual form is text-based, using regular hyperlinks, sometimes small graphics and brief descriptions to attract users that may be interested. It is usually highly targetted and is better accepted by users because it is less obstrusive, less bandwith hungry and more relevant than the classic graphical banners. For example, a web page about photography will automatically draw advertisers selling cameras and other photo related accessories. It also has the benefits of making the job of a web publisher easier to find sponsors, as the contextual advertising company acts as an automatic middle man between publishers and advertisers, who bid for specific keywords using an auction system. The same can be said for advertisers, since they now have access to thousands of possible web sites to automatically advertise on. It usually works as Pay per Click, meaning the publisher only generate revenues when a user actively click on an ad, as opposed to Pay per Impressions, an older system that generates revenue based on the number of time the ad is displayed.

Google was on the forefront of this innovation when they created Google Adsense, the first major contextual advertising program. In the beginning, these new ads appeared with their search engine, but they soon expanded it to include webmasters and their web sites, which they named their "Content Network". Using a few ligns of Javascript code, publishers could insert Adsense on their web pages and it would then automatically serve relevant ads using Google's search algorithm. Google also considers other factors such as the geographical location of visitors and their languages, so ads can actually be different for each visitor. Other companies followed with similar programs, but they lacked the sophistication of Adsense since they demanded specific keywords from webmasters instead of detecting them on their pages. Other big players on the web are now slowly embracing this terrific new marketing technology, such as the Yahoo! Publisher Network and MSN adCenter. Contextual Advertising is making it now possible for smaller webmasters and publishers who own small hobby sites to monetize their efforts without spending all their time dealing with appropriate sponsors that may not necessarly be interested with smaller sites when taken on an individual level.

Contextual advertising programs and Google Adsense Alternatives

Here we list companies that offer this marketing solution to webmasters. Google Adsense is often considered the prime choice, but they do have restrictions and some people may be refused to their program.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Introducing Google’s Ghost Ads

For anyone with a large Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign, you may have gone to a lot of time and effort to split out and break down your ad groups as much as possible. Having just one common keyword theme in your ad group (for example, used books, cheap used books, used books UK, used books online, buy used books etc) and bespoke ad text that is unique to the ad group is strongly recommended by Google and one of the fundamental ways to make PPC advertising successful. It goes without saying that if someone is searching Google for ‘used books’ they don’t want to see a sponsored links ad for ‘new books’.

This is why what I now call ‘Google Ghost Ads’ are so annoying. Ghost ads are ad text that freely move between ad groups no matter how well segregated your ad groups are. It doesn’t matter if your used books ad belongs to the used books ad group, they will break free of ad group barriers and appear for other unrelated searches, such as ‘new books.’

Why do they do this? The answer is Google’s closely guarded, much vaunted Quality Score algorithm. If one ad has a higher Quality Score rating than another, then it can wander between searches and appear for any keyword in your campaign. Negatives on an ad group level can help, but unless you conduct searches for every keyword in your account, you never know what is appearing for what in Google’s search results. Furthermore, this considerable task must be carried out frequently because Quality Score ratings are always changing and never static.

The fact that you can have God knows what ad appear for God knows what keyword search is very worrying. The sooner Google takes action to stop ghost ads floating out of their ad group jail cells and into other searches that have nothing to do with them, the better!