August 10, 2005

Yahoo Contextual Advertising Beta / How to Make A Million with AdSense

As previously blogged, Yahoo is to launch a rival to Google's Adsense contextual advertising program.

JenSense has a roam around the beta system for site owners here - Look inside my YPN beta account with control panel screenshots

She also has a chat with Jason Calacanis who wrote that he was on schedule to make a million dollars with Google AdSense over the next twelve months. Find out how he intends to do it.

Posted by duncan at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Contextual PPC - Useful Blog

Contextual advertising can be a completely separate beast from search-based PPC advertising.

If you want to stay up-to-date with the developments made in this area at Google, Yahoo etc. I suggest the JenSense blog. Her tagline says it all - "Making Sense of Contextual Advertising"

A recent post, for exmaple, explains the "Premium" AdSense program that is rarely talked about but has distinct advantages for website owners who have 20 million page views per month or 5 million searches. Read it here - Premium Publisher Perks from AdSense.

Posted by duncan at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2005

Yahoo (Overture) Contextual Ads and Mirago Ads

Ads by Y! - Yahoo's answer to Ads by Gooooooogle?.

And here's a sneak preview of the beta of Mirago's contextual ads.

Posted by duncan at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2005

Yahoo toolbar now autodetects RSS

Yahoo's toolbar now detects RSS feeds on a page - see the official blog entry.

And with Overture trialling PPC adverts in RSS feeds, you can see where Yahoo might be going with monetising their pushing of RSS...not to mention the attractive uniqueness of this feature currently.

Posted by duncan at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Yahoo's rival to AdSense on the way

There's been lots of speculation floating about on forums and blogs this week about that Overture (OK, Yahoo Search Marketing Services as it's going to be known) are launching a rival to Google's contextual advertising network AdSense.

There's a URL live at Yahoo.com that looks like the potential home of this - http://publisher.yahoo.com - you can fill in a form for more information. They ask for the number of page views of your site, but the form will submit OK if you enter "private" or "n/a".

It's no surprise that Yahoo will do this; Overture have some partners displaying contextual ads already (Like the Guardian newspaper in the UK) and are trialling contextual adverts in RSS feeds (details here). Overture product manager Ken Rudman has Overture ads on his blog. They look a lot like Adsense, surprisingly. I kinda hoped for something more original (although I have no idea what, exactly).

Yahoo already show contextual adverts next to some Geocities pages - like this one about holiday villas - and on content pages on the Yahoo site itself: for example this travel guide about London features Overture ads for London hotels.

Now add to this the likelyhood of Yahoo offering a blog tool alongside GeoCities webspace (they already offer one in Japan)

From these properties Yahoo already have a large, diverse network to show contextual adverts; so expanding this to 3rd parties won't be that hard (once the technology and capacity is in place).

In fact Yahoo might have an advantage over Google here; they have years of experience of running advertising across their own content in multiple territories unlike content-free Google; Google is gaining this experience via the AdSense network and GMail. So Google is playing catch up.

Add in the fact Overture has licensed Quigo's contextual advertising technology and they have all the pieces of the jigsaw.

Now they just need to win partners. Here they might have an advantage too; they can offer relevant, editorially-led adverts because they have human editors checking adverts (OK, they do make mistakes) before they go live, unlike Google. Adwords adverts can be irrelevant to the page in question at times; if Yahoo can provide a better solution, then it may be more attractive to website owners - especially those that hold themsleves to a high editorial standard.

Side point: Google are apparently trying to improve the relevancy of adverts by providing more control to publishers, for example providing more functionality to control which adverts are served on which pages.

Posted by duncan at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

Contextual ads: yes or no?

An overview of the pros/cons of contextual advertising from Clickz. Good to see Andrew Goodman in there - a man to listen to.

I covered contextual here a little while ago.

Posted by duncan at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2005

RSS and PPC: better contextual targetting?

The idea of putting PPC adverts into RSS feeds isn't new, but nobody is doing it on a large scale, yet.

Overture have looked at it (and there's been some uninformed hype about what Overture are doing - RSS search engine Feedster's blog corrects this). Overture and Feedburner are trailing PPC ads in some RSS feeds.

Now Kanoodle are launching (CNET coverage) a RSS PPC advert network (BrightAds RSS) in conjunction with Moreover. The challenges for Kanoodle and publishers are:

- making sure adverts are relevant to location of the reader (the country they are in)
- making sure the advert matches the content of the individual article (so an article on iPods should have an iPod advert, or a MP3 download service ad)
- making sure there is no unfortunate matching of adverts and articles that could cause offence, (like the unfortunate AdSense "body in a suitcase" incident

And of course the ads need to deliver ROI.

Some content sites are already putting PPC adverts into their RSS feeds including BoingBoing. Powered by Overture in the feeds - but Kanoodle on the HTML pages.

I'd like to hear hear from anybody who has seen their ads in RSS feeds or even better seen clicks from them in their tracking/log files. I suspect RSS conversion rates will mirror normal contextual advertising rates; lower than search, but sometimes profitable dependent on a) the advertiser's offering and b) the sites showing the ads.

Email duncanp at payperclickanalyst.com or leave a comment...

Posted by duncan at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

"Related Ads" link being trialled on AdSense

Google are trialling a new link beneath AdSense ads.

Beneath some ads, links to related adverts are appearing, e.g.:

Change to Ads About:
Beltone Hearing Aids
Hearing Loss
Siemens Hearing
Hearing Loop System
Hearing Software

This example is from a page about hearing aid complaints.

An interesting idea - but I wonder how many clicks this will actually get?

Of the percentage of people who visit a page and click on a contextual advert, how many readers will notice the links and then click on them? Not many, I suspect.

Posted by duncan at 08:22 PM | Comments (1)