Have you ever tried something once, failed, and ditched it entirely because of that bad experience? Few of us would ever learn to ride a bike or do much of anything else following that model. Yet, that’s exactly the approach many B2B marketers have taken with content networks. But ruling them out could be a mistake. Understanding the value It is understandable that B2B marketers might abandon a content network after their campaigns suffered from poor performance. However, when properly managed, content network campaigns can help B2B marketers address two of their most common challenges [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Search | Google: AdSense

Here's something useful for people who pay attention to search and advertising for a living: Ad News. Powered by Google News, it selectively delivers stories from news sites and blogs and is organized by topic: search, display, mobile advertising, traditional media, etc. It also contains links to selected Google blogs. One can also search Ad News, which takes users to a Google News page. For example, I searched "Yahoo" and was taken to this page: As an aside, what the heck is a "sexy local singles" ad doing on the right of a Google News search for "Yahoo." Another question I have [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: News

Google's mobile click-to-call ads program in search is apparently a big success. Although reluctant to share specific numbers, Google previously said that response rates were "5 to 30 percent better" than other AdWords CTRs in mobile. Even the URLs in these ads get more clicks, Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Mobile Ads, previously told me. Google also said that both users and advertisers really like these ads. Now Google is formally expanding the click-to-call program to its content network on mobile devices. This was previously announced at Google's developer conference in Ma [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: AdSense | Google: Mobile

Google announced that its AdSense for Mobile Apps program would start allowing publishers and developers to work with third party ad mediators. The significance of this is that ad mediators provide access to other mobile ad networks to optimize fill, performance and revenue. The other benefit is that it avoids having to work with SDKs from multiple ad networks to access their inventory. Third party ad mediators include AdWhirl (now owned by Google via AdMob), Nexage, AdMarvel (owned by Opera), among others. In doing this, Google gets to assert its "openness" even as it creates more gravi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: AdSense | Google: Mobile

Google has long touted how easy it is to create and manage AdWords campaigns. "All that's needed is five minutes and a credit card," says Google's business overview. And if you've actually run your own Google advertising program, you know these claims are true. But there's more to creating a successful search ad campaign than working with a straightforward interface. The Google AdWords platform itself offers a wealth of tools to help you fine-tune your ads for maximum impact and return, and the AdWords help system offers richly detailed information and resources. All good, but if you rea [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Book Reviews | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords

The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today. The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. The list ranks sites based on category, unique visitors, reach and page views. Not only has Google come out with this list, but they are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content ads to show on these top 1,000 sites. To activate this filter in AdWords, go to your AdWords account and select "non Ad Planner 1000" within the "category filter [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: Ad Planner | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Top News

Two months ago, Google confirmed an "alpha" test of new ads distributed on its AdSense network that featured tweets. Today, it appears more of these tweet-based ads are live an in the wild. Magne Uppman is part of that test and he has shared screen shots and examples of his Twitter Google AdSense ads in action. In fact, I personally see the ads live on an article at inpro.no. The ad is interactive in that you can click the right and left arrows to see previous tweets from that account. You can also click on the Twitter avatar and name, plus the "Follow me on Twitter" link to be taken [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: AdSense | Top News | Twitter

The Google AdSense blog announced the exact revenue share they give publishers for placing AdSense ads on their web site. In the upcoming months, Google promised to show the revenue share within the AdSense interface reports. Google broke down the revenue share in two categories so far: (1) 68% revenue share for content ads, the ads you see on web sites. Meaning, publishers keep 68% of the revenue earned, while Google takes the rest. (2) 51% revenue share for search ads, the search ads you see for using Google search on your web site. Publishers get 51% and Google takes the rest. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Top News

How much money does Google keep for itself from AdSense ads that publishers carry? Unless you're a big publisher, Google -- which preaches "data liberation" -- doesn't say. But thanks to an anti-trust investigation in Italy, Google may share how much it keeps. At least, that is, to Italian newspaper publishers. It's a simple enough thing to provide. Google brokers ads for web sites, keeping some of what an advertiser will spend for itself. Imagine that an advertiser agrees to pay $1 per click for an ad distributed through Google's AdSense network. Google might pay publishers carrying that a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: Business Issues | Google: Critics | Google: News | Top News

The Google AdSense Blog announced they have made the "biggest performance overhaul" to the AdSense link units in history. This update was a "full rewrite of the link unit matching system," which is pretty significant. Google tells us we can expect the link units to return better ads. The ad system uses a "more sophisticated topic ranking algorithms" and continues to improve the link units by "learning which topics have the most appeal to the visitors." Ultimately, Google hopes this leads to better quality ads, which drives more clicks and more money. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense

Google is trying to show the public how transparent they are, especially since the EU antitrust investigation. First, the Google European Public Policy blog had a post from Matt Cutts on Google's transparency. And now I see Google has made a landing page at google.com/howgoogleworks. The new landing page has three videos on how Google's search technology, search ads and Google Apps work. It also contains links to more information about Google. The first video is on how Google's search technology works and Google's Matt Cutts did a video, with hair, to demonstrate that. Here is how [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Google: Apps For Your Domain | Google: Business Issues | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Google: Web Search

Google announced that the almost two year old Google Ad Manager is ultimately going to be replaced by DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). Google explained: DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We'll be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we'll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Google: DoubleClick

The Google AdSense blog announced that they are now using a form of search history in the way they contextual match the ads you see on third-party web sites. AdSense used query data in the referrer URL to better match those ads. So if you came from Google or Bing, to a third party web site, often the referrer data would show query data in the path. Google would use that data to better target the ads on the web site. What is new here? Well, Google is now storing this query data for "few hours" in your Google cookie data. So if you searched for something and clicked through to a site w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense

BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis was part of a "private meeting" in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum with Google CEO Eric Shmidt and a handful of other top Google execs. Jarvis reports that Google sales boss Nikesh Arora said that Google "would consider giving more transparency about revenue splits in Adsense" (this is likely a paraphrase). Traffic acquisition costs (TAC) for AdSense partners are roughly 72% in the aggregate, meaning the overall partner payout for the Google content network. Transparency is one thing; getting a "fair share" of revenues that Google generates from AdSe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: Critics | Google: Web Search

According to Google's recent quarterly earnings report, the company earns about 34% of its revenue from AdSense, placing contextual ads on its content network partner websites. This proportion has stayed steady year over year. It certainly reflects overall growth, but some might be surprised at how conservative the pace is. One of the reasons for this is that Google has continued to implement measures for quality control in the network. This overall improvement in the offering available to advertisers is made up of four pillars: Continued proactive click fraud filtering Smart pri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdSense | Paid Search

If a single ad network could help you reach 80% of global Internet users—and target them based on geography, website and even context—you would probably invest a lot of time figuring out how to optimize your advertising dollars there. Yet, for many large advertisers, the opportunity of advertising on Google's AdSense content network hasn’t been fully realized. Advertisers often start with the wrong approach to the content network altogether. As a result, they find the return on their investment to be sub-par. The most typical mistake we see is when search marketers simply run [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: AdSense | Industrial Strength

Color me tired. I got a report of a site that reprinted one of our articles without permission. Checking it out, I discovered that miserable combination of someone making money off content they don't own, paying nothing to host that stolen content on Google's Blogger service and earning off that content through Google's AdSense ads. And reporting the infringement is oh so easy. Not. So here's the fun loving site: The most current article shown comes from Search Engine Land. It's reprinted in its entirety, without permission. There's even a credit line shoved in at the end: New [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Features: General | Google: AdSense | Google: Blogger

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google AdSense is displaying ads with weird characters in the titles and ad descriptions. The characters seem to be broken HTML entities of some sort, where the HTML is not escaping properly. Here are screen shots from the ads on this site and my personal blog: Google is aware of the issue and is working on fixing it. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense

This morning, I reported on and noticed yellow stars on Google AdSense ads -- these ads were named "featured ads." I honestly didn't believe it. I thought maybe this was some type of AdSense hack that placed gold stars on the ads. I just received confirmation from a Google representative that these ads are, indeed, real. Here is a picture of the ad: Google told me: "We are currently running a limited test in which a small number of users are seeing ads that are marked based on signals related to quality and relevance. This experiment is part of our ongoing efforts to help users f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Top News

Many publishers have complained repeatedly that Google and Google News (not the leading online news site) reduces their content to "commodity" status or otherwise adversely impacts their brands. Google's Fast Flip is a response to this in part. It offers a more "branded" and visual way to consume news and magazine content from major publishers. We wrote about Fast Flip originally when it launched in Google Labs. Now Steve Rubel has found a page that looks like Google is getting ready to integrate Fast Flip into News: It appears from the screen above that Fast Flip might replace some [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: News | Top News