I recently had a long conversation with Google (including the content PM) about the content network.

Here are a few suggestions from Google about the content network (most of these should not surprise anyone):

• Only the first 50 words in an AdGroup are used to determine its theme
• When an AdGroup has a large keyword list, Google’s matching isn’t as good and can get confused
• If an AdGroup is only shown on content, then it can be very useful to use more general words
• All keywords are treated as broadmatch when matching the AdGroup’s theme for content matching
• The Google recommended content bid is usually 75% of the search bid
• The typical content CPA (which I’m not sure if I can share so no numbers) is not significantly different (less than 10%) from search and content
• Of course, this is significantly impacted by bidding content and search differently
• It can be very useful to use site targeting with CPC bidding for ensuring your ads are shown on the highest converting content match websites

Content match resources:

• Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately
• How to optimize a contextual search advertising campaign
• Block low quality traffic
• Peak behind the curtain to see to learn what AdSense sites are doing for you
• About smart pricing

On a side note, I finally responded to the comments about quality score and exact match impressions.

My latest article: Combat Click Fraud By Blocking Low Quality Traffic was published at Search Engine Land today.

Learn:

• How to block your ads from showing in certain countries
• How to block competitors from clicking on your ads
• See which content network sites are sending you traffic
• How to keep yourself from showing for keyword searches
• How to block content network sites
• Determine how many clicks you did not pay for
• Next steps…

It’s a bit of a follow-up to Content Network Optimization; but instead of focusing on how to optimize for the content network - it’s more about how to block low quality traffic (search and contextual) from the search engines.

enjoy.

My latest article on Search Engine Land is now out that goes into depth about contextual optimization:

The major pay per click engines, such as Google and Yahoo, include two different types of distribution: On their own search engine result pages, and on content pages elsewhere on the web. These two types of advertising, while often lumped together under the pay-per-click (PPC) label, are very different. Advertiser’s ability to control these networks and consumer’s interaction with these networks are completely different. Hence, they should be treated as completely separate types of distribution.

Often contextual advertising gets a (sometimes undeserved) bad rap. There are techniques that you can use to have a very effective contextual ad campaign.

Enjoy the entire article on SEL.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have bots that belong to their contextual ad programs.

These bots spider web pages to understand what the page is about so they can match appropriate advertising.

If any publishers are blocking these bots they will keep themselves from having the proper (or in some cases, any) ads show on their website.

Block these bots (if you’re showing contextual ads on your site) and you will lose money.

The useragents not to block:

Mediapartners-Google
MSNPTC
YahooYSMcm

Microsoft plans to launch their own contextual program this fall. It will be a US only invite pilot, however, one can request to be invited. What’s going to be interesting to see is how many features they plan on porting into contextual. For instance, they plan on supporting demographic targeting.
Continue Reading »
Microsoft adCenter to Launch Contextual Program This Fall

One of the largest problems with AdSense is often the ads are irrelevant to your content.

This is especially true of blogs where the ads might be about blogging, or the rest of your navigation, and not about the specific topic on that page.

The more relevant an ad is to that exact topic, the higher the relevancy to your reader. The higher the relevancy to your reader - the higher the CTR (click through rate).

Alternately, the worse the targeting is, the lower –>

Aaron has a post about tracking AdSense click throughs with Google’s Urchin Analytics.

I haven’t tested it yet, it’s on the list of things todo. If someone gets a chance to see exactly how it works, and if it’s hackable to tracking other types of exit clicks (banners, YPN, etc), please let me know.

Digital point is also working on one, but doesn’t seem to work with Mozilla.

The Google AdSense blog just published the new details on the AdSense referral program.

Users who sign up for AdSense through your referral button will learn about a great product, and you’ll have a new way to generate revenue - $100 when each user you refer first earns $100.

There are a large number of banners that can be added to a website, including some that are not the usual AdSense size blocks.

Pretty simple information, and it was very much expected.

The part I didn’t expect was that Google is also paying $1 for every Firefox user who installs the Google Firefox toolbar.

Again, quite a few different banner sizes, some as small as buttons.

No text links for either program - only images, which seems out of character with Google’s fascination with everything text, and slow adoption of images overall.

The real question though is: Why is Google giving away this money?

• Are they recommending firefox?
• Are firefox users finding better plug-ins and not using the toolbar?
• Are firefox users not giving Google all the data it collects through the toolbar, and they need a higher firefox penetration?

It’s interesting to see Google not only push a browser and toolbar, but to pay for referrals.

If you’re willing to pay for something, you usually get something in return.

• Is it uses?
• Or data collection?

Personally, I uninstalled every Google product after both the GMail notifier and the last Google Toolbar updated itself on my machines without my permission. I consider this a security breach, and someone else trying to control my software.

It will be interesting to see what else Google starts paying for in the future. How about AdWords account referrals?

There’s only one place to read about AdSense TOS updates, and that’s at JenSense - Full Update Info Here.

I like Jen’s Blog, it makes it so I can keep up with the entire AdSense program from one location - quite a time saver.

She has a very interesting post today which highlights some of the smart pricing issues:

Here is what that team member disclosed, as well as other tidbits already known about smart pricing.

• Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.
• One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one.
• Smart pricing is evaluated each week. So removing ads from sites you suspect are converting poorly could result in seeing an adjustment to a higher smart pricing percent in as little as a week.
• Smart pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so you could be rewarded for new conversions that saw the initial click from your site up to 29 days earlier.
• Image ads are also affected by smart pricing.
• With smart pricing, an advertiser could end up paying less than their minimum bid, which would theoretically include the minimum bid price available, meaning publishers earn less for even the minimum valued clicks.
• Conversions for smart pricing publisher accounts are tracked by those advertisers who have opted into AdWords Conversion Tracking

As an advertiser, when I read this list, I like all the points quite a bit.

I found the point about the cookie quite interesting. I knew Google was coordinating some pricing data with conversion tracking.

However, this point makes me wonder if it would be cheaper for some advertisers who do a lot of contextual volume to use Google’s conversion tracking.

I suppose the experiment would be to take a site that has discontinued using contextual advertising due to horrible conversion rates and turn on the conversion tracking option. If the pricing went down, the conversions went up, or some combination in the middle, it would tell us a lot about how Google is leveraging conversion data to actually help advertisers pay appropriate amounts for contextual ads while possibly increasing the quality of the contextual network (if nothing converts, then the AdSense publisher gets paid less).

If anyone wants to conduct, or is in the middle of conducting an experiment like this, please let me know. I’d be interested in the results, and will help anyone set this up so the experiment is conducted properly (you might even get some free consulting out of the deal).