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Content Targeted Advertising

In the heady days of the dot.com boom webmasters could generate a reasonable revenue stream from banner adverts. These are images placed along the top of web pages. CPM rates (cost per 1000 views) of $50 were not unheard of. Banner adverts frequently advertised other websites and were paid for with money from venture capital or the IPO. With the collapse of the dot.coms advertising dried to a trickle and rates plummeted.

Many surfers also developed a condition dubbed 'banner blindness'. The more in-the-face banners became the more users were able to mentally screen them out. Response or click through rates were abysmal. With a return to reality many advertisers preferred to develop partnerships with websites using affiliate services such as Commission Junction and paying commissions on leads or sales.

In a search for a revenue stream some search engines started offering sponsored links. These links were related to the search query and where they were clearly differentiated from the results they could be valuable to both searcher and advertiser alike. Pricing was still problematic. eBay had shown the way with online auctions and Overture obtained a patent (reference?) for the process of running a keyword auction. In this advertisers bid for search queries and the highest bids have their links placed next to the results pages.

In 2000 Google launched its Adwords system based on a similar idea. Google added the twist of ranking advertisements according to their popularity. If more people click on an advertisement further down the list it will be moved up even if other advertisers are bidding more for the query.

In the autumn of 2003 Google extended this system to third party websites calling the new program AdSense. Webmasters could include some Javascript code on their page and Google in turn would display adverts relevant to the content of the page. AdSense does this by indexing a page using its own robot called Mediabot. The User Agent string is:

Mediapartners-Google/2.1

When a user visits an AdSense enabled page that has not yet been indexed the AdSense code causes the page to be added to a queue. Mediabot then visits shortly afterwards. Using a separate robot ensures 'chinese walls' are maintained between search and advertising and ensure the robot is tailored towards the needs of content targeted advertising (CTA). The key to AdSense adverts are that they are unobtrusive and relevant to the content. Google uses technology called CIRCA acquired from Applied Semantics to help them understand the content of pages although adverts can be based on a single element, say the page title. Click through rates are monitored to control the quality of the adverts served.

The AdSense system gives webmasters a great deal of control over the look and feel of their adverts. A Web based control panel offers a set of layout formats: banner, skyscraper etc. with some predefined color schemes. The latter can be customized further by skilled webmasters to fit in with the design of the site. For each advert that a user clicks a percentage of the fee is passed to the website. Earnings vary for different keywords or even from day to day depending on what advertisers are bidding. Google does not allow members of the AdSense program to discuss their earnings but each click earns in the region of 20 to 40 cents with click through rates ranging from 2.5% to over 4%. Using the lower figures a site with a million page views per month would earn $5000. Unlike the Overture advertising program Google will accept sites with very low numbers of monthly page view, the only proviso is that a payout is made once earnings reach $100. AdSense generated a lot of excitement when it was launched in 2003 and has enabled many webmasters to at least cover expenses. More expert SEOers have been able to earn a living from AdSense alone.

AdSense and similar programs have had an impact on search engine optimization and the design of websites. To increase content targeted advertising revenues websites have a number of options:

Increase the number of page views
Increase the click through rate
Target higher value keywords

The number of page views can be increased by increasing the number of visitors to a site. A site that has undergone no serious optimization should be able to significantly increase its AdSense revenues by applying just some of what is described in these pages. Page views can be increased by adding more content and by splitting larger pages. This last point can have an effect on site ranking. Smaller pages can be more focussed. This means that more effective search engine optimization tactics can be applied and that the adverts should be more relevant to the content. Ideally each page should be about a page of text covering a single subject. That way adverts will remain on the screen while the content is read.

Webmasters should also experiment with different ad formats, color schemes and page positioning. Google permits multiple AdSense blocks on a page. So a single image banner advert could be mixed with text adverts on the right margin of the page or adverts could be placed directly within the content at various points.

Advertisers can create or optimize pages for higher value keywords. Obviously some analysis will need to be made against how often searchers query for those keywords. An AdWords account will show what is being bid for keywords.

AdSense adverts are separate from Google search. That means that surfers arriving from Yahoo! MSN Search and other channels will also see the adverts so it can be worthwhile to put some effort into optimizing the pages for those search engines.

There are problems. Some advertisers have noticed a drop off in click-through rates (CTR) over time. This may be related to the number of advertisers bidding for keywords relevant to the site. A small advertiser pool will mean that the same adverts will be recycled. If the site has a high number of repeat visitors they will quickly develop 'AdSense blindness'. Sudden traffic surges, perhaps due to some article capturing the interest of a wider audience, do not seem to transfer to higher revenues. Perhaps these visitors are more focussed on the web page content than a random cross-section of visitors. Adsense also requires visitors to have Javascript enabled on their browsers. Some firms do not allow this on their employees' desktops for security reasons. Google is sometimes unable to serve relevant adverts for a page. This is the case for new pages not yet visited by Mediabot. Mediabot also seems to be amnesiac and forgets about pages that it has not visited for a while. Google serves so called 'public service' adverts when it is unable to find anything relevant. These do not earn money for the site and will only be related to the site's content by chance. Google permits the website to serve alternative adverts in this case. These can be from an affiliate scheme or from another CTA programme.

Scams

Now readers may be wondering what prevents them signing up for an advertising programme and clicking on the adverts themselves. In theory nothing at all and this idea hasn't escaped a number of scammers. Stories abound of armies of Indians and Chinese sitting in cybercafes busily clicking on adverts and paid a commission by unscrupulous webmasters. CTA programs monitor clicks. A series of accesses from the same computer over a short time frame to diverse ad programs would be sure to arouse suspicion. Some programmes bar access to users in China or India or those accessing the Web from certain proxy machines. Websites attracting unusually high click through rates or other activity may be investigated and barred. Some sites that have been booted out of Google's AdSense programme have complained bitterly about what the see as the arbitrary nature of such bans with little chance of appeal. Still the problem of fraudulent clicks is serious for advertisers. One user of Overture estimates that around 20% of their clicks are fraudulent - that is clicks from the same IP address or business that don't go beyond the entry page. Most programs allow specific addresses to be blocked but this is only a partial solution

Closer to home, Michael Anthony Bradley a 32 year old American hacker who went by the handle of CountScoobula touted a program called Google Clique. He claimed that this could generate revenue of around $30,000 per month by automatically clicking on Adsense links. Bradley offered his program to the world after a fruitless attempt to sell his knowledge directly to Google. He described a meeting with Google engineers in March 2004. The Google guys were apparently very friendly, they asked him lots of questions but Bradley was surprised that they seemed to have little programming knowledge. During the meeting he is said to have joked that his approach looked like 'blackmail'.

A week later Bradley was arrested and charged by Federal Agents for attempting to extort $100,000 from Google. Bradley had a lot of knowledge about Adsense. His program kept the overall click-thru rate at around 1.2% and used complex tunnelling technology to randomize IP addresses.

Content Targeted Advertising

Scams

See Also