Google Site Targeted AdSense Ads

This page was linked to from various site targeted AdSense ads to explain a bit about how the technology works. There are a couple links at the end of this post which also point to a few ways to creatively use Ads by Goooooogle.

Easy to Set Up:
I just set up my first site targeted AdWords ad account. Setting up a campaign was fairly easy.

This post is my intro to the site targeted ads, if you are interested with my thoughts of it click on and read with your bad self. hehehe Overpriced Impressions:
While there is lots of active discussion on them, I tried to avoid CPM advertising on most of the major SEO forums because I know that its not uncommon for me to generate 50 to 500 page views myself in a day when I am in the posting mood.

The $2 minimum CPM for forums is probably a bit rich for my business model, especially when I can participate in the threads and be seen as part of the activity instead of part of the ads. I might advertise on them soon, but am not yet.

Business Model / Quality of Business / Why to be Social:
I spent a couple hours picking out sites to advertise on, but some people have far more profitable business models than I do. Shortly it will likely get to where site targeting is not a viable option for my current business model, but I might as well try it out while its new.

A good link broker (hi Patrick) or an SEO firm can make far more money than my business model because my business model currently lacks recurring fees.

One major benefit my business model has over most others is that I spend most all day reading and playing on blogs & forums, and thus know many people who are hip and help market my stuff for me. Another benefit I have is that I have low living costs and limited infistructure, so I could change quickly.

Keywords & Site Targeting?
Some people have recently told me that the site targeting also allows you to target keywords on those sites, but I did not see that feature. Likely it will eventually be added. Yet another reason why primarily designing a site about a niche is huge: making efficient ad sales easy to target, automate, and buy.

When you pick your initial content sites to advertise on it allows you to add a number of keywords with the seed set of sites you entered to help refine the concepts you are interested in and offer other similar sites you may want to advertise on. Some of the suggestions were a far miss, but a large portion of them were dead on.

Another useful feature would be allowing you to specify filepaths. Currently it looks as though they only allow site and subdomain targeting, which can make it hard to reach other parts of sites with huge forums.

Context Without Search:
In the past you could not buy contextual ads without also buying in on Google.com search ads as well. With the new CPM program you can buy text ads, graphic ads, or annimations. When you place your bid it is a max bid. Google does a bunch of math to convert your CPM max bid to a CPC to compare it to the AdSense contextual ads for pricing purposes.

By picking what sites to advertise on, and shifting the ads from CPC to CPM, you lower your clickfraud risk profile.

A Low Noise Hello:
One of the best deals with the new CPM program is that you can make sure certain site owners know you exist for a low price. With blogs sometimes you can do that with a comment or a trackback, but it is not possible with many sites. A site targeted ad might be a good way to say hello.

If you randomly start seeing a bunch of ads from my site on your site then I probably targeted your site.

Other Cool Things:

  • Whenever there is breaking news you can quickly add that site to your account to make sure you advertise where large active streams of new traffic are.

  • In the same way that Google makes irrelevant ads pay a premium for having a low clickthrough rate on Google, this program also uses community feedback (in this case peer pricing pressures) to help ensure the ads stay as relevant as possible.
  • This program helps quality publishers get more value out of their content while lowering the fraud risks associated with participating in AdSense.
  • Displays clicks and cost per conversion with each URL.
  • Allows you to bid different prices on each URL within a group.

The Down Sides:

  • Just like all Google ads, the system is a bit unpredictable. I put in a max CPM and ad spend amount, and odds are my real costs will be nothing like I bid and I will get less impressions than the associated amout that I bid for.

  • There were no suggested CPM bid prices, or expected costs listed, just estimated pages viewed in the past.
  • If large advertisers buy up the best ads by overpaying for the best content sites that means that the average advertiser, which may be locked out of many of those sites, might not have much left but the clickfraud and scrapper sites to pick through.
  • When initially selecting a seed set of sites it helps suggest many others. It seems as though after you set up your ad group you can't get that feature back again without starting up a new ad group? But then again I am tired and maybe I missed something.
  • Sometimes I might want to advertise specifically because I want to reach a site owner, but Google considers clicking ads on your own site as clickfraud.
  • It is probably a bit easier to fake page impressions than ad clicks, and Google will quickly be dealing with another form of fraud.

Bonus creative site targeted AdSense ad ideas:

SEMphonic Competitive Analysis, Yahoo! Buys VOIP Player Dial Pad

SEMphonic:
New SEO competitive analysis tool. I have not tried it, but it seems similar to Adgooroo.

Bundles:
of fun & software. Google Toolbar bundled with WinZip

Washington Times:
switched from Google to Yahoo! Search.

Relevant:
EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers <-- I need to take a peak at that.
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000859.html

VoIP:
Yahoo! buys Dial Pad. they also bought Blo.gs

WordPress vs MovableType:
Jeremy Z switching to WordPress. surely thats not a good thing for MovableType. Also, why is the Yahoo! Search Blog using MovableType instead of their Yahoo! 360 or whatever?

More on Google's Secret Review Labs & Why Google Hates Affiliate Sites

Henk posted a couple more posts about his interactions with GoogleGuy on WebmasterWorld, as well as explaining his reasonings for creating the Search Bistro site:

The published insights are not that spectacular. But insight in Google's evaluation of websources is rare. I wanted to forward the details to the web community to get some discussion. Why? People should know how a search engine works. Basically, it's a stupid thing. Intelligence has to come from the user. If he/she doesn't ask a smart question, he/she gets a stupid answer.

Spam Guidelines:
In my last post about Google Search quality evaluators I also forgot to post a link up to the Spam Guidelines document (doc) that Henk posted.

GoogleGuy requested that the documents not be posted, so they may get removed. Downloading copies for internal use and training may be a good idea. The spam guidelines document goes on to show a number of sites deemed as search spam and how / why Google would evaluate them as such. Since affiliate marketing or reselling pay per click ads are the usual forms of search spam most of the examples fall into those categories.

When comparing spam sites to good sites the document states:

To appreciate the difference, ask yourself this question: would any user want to go to www.bookfinder4u.com rather than directly to Barnes & Noble? To http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html rather than to Amazon? The answer to the former question is Yes, because at Barnes & Noble, the user would not be able to see any direct price comparison between the B&N’s price and competitors’ prices for any given item; the answer to the latter question is No or Indifferent between the two.

They also bolded the following statement:

To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site’s existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?

They also go heavily into reviewing hotel sites, stating IAC properties are whitelisted, and showing many spam sites, offering additional tips such as:

One cannot both be an affiliate of others and offer affiliation opportunities. So the presence of the link to become an affiliate is your hint that the site has its own booking functionality and can complete transactions for its visitors.

Automation VS Unique & Useful:
As a summary, most search spam sites are heavily automated and provide little useful, unique, or compelling to the end user.

Recently Rand did a review of a paper about link spam as well, stating

The paper also notes the common achilles heel of spam pages - automatic generation.

and

It is also the opinion of the author that link spam will eventually require such sophistication and effort that it lose its ROI and become a less effective tactic than attempting to obtain natural incoming links through quality content and legitimate promotion.

Why the Spam Guidelines Document is Useful:
Google's reviewers may not be used to directly effect search results, but at the very least they are used to help train the relevancy algorithms. By seeing how Google trains them you get to see what Google wants. If you know what they are looking for it is far easier to give it to them.

Just like pay per click, SEO is a game of margins. Search engines aim to decrease the margins on both fronts so they can extract maximum profits.

Automation can bring great returns until it is caught. Algorithms, editors, search reviewers, and other webmasters who may link to you all look for reasons why people should WANT to visit your site instead of thousands of competing sites.

Due to a lack of sophistication (especially within the young MSN Search) many people are still making large sums of money from low quality bulk affiliate or AdSense websites.

Owning a few of those types of sites might be a good call for creating passive revenue streams, but most webmasters who like the web would do well to create at least one great site about something they were passionate about.

Further coverage on the Google search review labs:

Google Search Result Quality Evaluators

Google's search quality evaluation process site may have been around for years.

SearchBistro recently posted a 22 page PDF titled General Guidelines on Random-Query Evaluation that was last revised on December 31, 2003. In addition to posting the Random-Query Evaluation PDF, Henk van Ess has recently posted:

  • examples of offensive (or low quality) sites

  • some whitelisted sites:
    Here is a non-exhaustive "white list" of the sites whose pages are not to be rated as Offensive (nor as Erroneous):
    Kelkoo, Shopping.com, dealtime.com, bizrate.com, bizrate.lycos.com, dooyoo.com;

  • tips for rating sites:
    If it's a machine-generated, no added value affiliates, it's Spam. If it provides some unique values, for example, customer feedback, local information, it should be rated on the merit scale even if it has some affiliates. Similarly, if the game site allows you to download a game, without being intrusive (i.e. install a spyware without notice), it should be rated on the merit scale, instead of Spam.

  • How reviewers communicate to come up with solutions when review quality scores are far apart from one another

Search Classification Types:
The Google review guide classifies searches as being

  • navigational (example: a search for United Airlines)

  • informational (example: how do I..)
  • transactional (example: buy 18K White Gold Omega Watch)
  • any mixture of the above categories.

Resource Quality Rating:
Google then asks raters to classify sites listed in random queries using the following categories:

  • Vital

    • most queries, especially generic type queries do not have a Vital result.

    • Vital result example: search for Ask Jeeves returns www.ask.com.
  • Useful
    • these should have some of the following characteristics (although it likely will not exhibit all of them): comprehensive, quality, answers the search query with precission, timly, authoritative.

    • This is the highest rating attainable for most pages on most search queries.
    • Useful result example: search for USA Patriot Act returning the ACLU page covering the USA Patriot Act.
    • For some plural queries, such as Newspapers in Scotland, the best results may be lists of related sites. Reviewers must also check some links on the page to ensure the page is functional.
  • Relevant
    • One step down from Useful. Relevant results may satisfy only one important facet of a query, whereas Useful results are expected to be more broad and thorough.

    • Results that would have been Vital if a more common interpretation did not overshadow it are considered relevant.
  • Not Relevant
    • Not Relevant results are related to the topic but do not help users.

    • If a person searching for Real Estate finds a San Diego Real Estate website that would probably not be relevant since most people searching for that do not live in or want to move specifically to San Diego.
    • As the San Diego example is too narrow geographically other sites could also be too narrow in other non location based ways, such as being outdated or too specific to a subset idea of the query.
  • Off Topic
    • Is not a useful page. Irrelevant.

    • Usually occurs when text matching algorithms do not account for some terms that can have multiple meanings.
  • Offensive
    • Pages or sites that often do not hold merit on any query.

    • Example Offensive sites: spyware, unrequested porn, AdSense scraper and other keyword net type sites, etc.
  • Erronious
  • Didn't Load
  • Foreign Language
  • Unrated

Vital to Offensive are in order of quality. The higher the better. Erronious through Unrated are cast as non votes. When in doubt between rating values raters are expected to rate at the lower of the two rating values.

Why this is Important:
By learning how and what they want evaluators to look for it makes it easier to understand how to deliver what the search engines want.

This post was a quick review of General Guidelines on Random-Query Evaluation. If you are heavily interested in SEO it is well worth your time to read the original document, which lists many more examples and is in far greater detail than this post.

Random Thoughts:
With how relatively low the wages are for these positions ($10 - $20 an hour) you have to wonder:

  • why it took so long for this information to come out

  • if some of these people are using the information they gained from participating in other ways
  • if these people know anything about Google's business model, and how much THEY could be making on a per click basis if they created well cited content that fit Google's guidelines.
  • and a far off tangent! what would happen if Google's business model made self employment too profitable to where they could not afford to pay workers

AdSense Tips, Google Israel, Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines, More...

AdSense:
Subscribers thread at WMW offering tips to making money from AdSense

here is an example of some of OddSod's advice:

Adwords cost:
unreliable hosting £0.04
server going down £0.04

If you do a special landing page and convert those to dedicated server (£3.00 of which you'll likely get £2) you need only a 2% CTR to break even. Many sites find it quite easy to achieve 5%.

Shalom:
One of the few words I remember from my brief stay in Israel. Apparently Google wants to go there too, as they are pondering opening up a new office.

Webmaster Guidelines:
Google recently updated them.

The Beauty of Search:
rant post by Sebastian

Google Server IP Address:
DaveN pointed at a cool new FireFox plugin that shows the IP address your search results are coming from.

Glossaries:
A hip SEO technique. says Woz

Sites Postioned Above Mine:
thread about ways to penalize sites which are overtly manipulating search relevancy. A few interesting posts and points of view in there, as well as links to a white paper on the topic.

ClickTracks:
Interview of John Marshall

Like the French, Germans to Challenge Google Print

Not too long ago there were many reports of French trying to rival the Google print program. The International Herald Tribune reports the same thing is now happening in Germany.

Then this year, when Google started wooing publishers to sign on for its own digital book project, that German executive, Matthias Ulmer, decided the time was ripe to seize control with a homegrown counterattack.

Now Ulmer and a five-member task force of the German book trade association Börsenverein are organizing their own digital indexing project, Volltextsuche Online. The effort of the 6,000-member association of booksellers and publishers comes in reaction to Google's plans, unveiled in December, to start digitizing books in the world, with the first step being major university library collections in the United States.

Ultimately variety is going to be important to keep the free flow of information possible. A few companies controlling the information supply is a scary thought, though it looks as though it is where we are headed.

The scalability of search and requested ad networks requires that anyone jumping into the market either

  • creates a strong brand in a niche, or

  • jumps in big

It will be hard for Google and others to appease publishers as they try to convince them to allow others to control free copies of their content, which at the least will transform the publishing business model and could eventually undermine large segments of it.

Even if some of the uprising forces have little effect on the outcome being a leader in an outraged group helps market the leaders as being market leaders. An article with "challenges Google" in the title is bound to get syndicated thousands of times.

If you can find some angle where you can go against Google which others find nobel it might be some of the cheapest marketing you ever experience.

Whether or not people view Google's desire to control information as evil it is hard to deny that they are at the forefront of pushing others to modernize data.

Google Using Human Reviewers, Google Launches Google Sitemaps

Human Reviewers:
Google using humans to improve relevancy. They may eventually accept feedback on AdSense publisher quality. Maybe.

GoogleGuy:
exclusive thread. He thinks summer is a good time to code. New Orleans is only a few weeks off.

Lazy Crawling:
One of Google's major hangups with paid inclusion was that it allows lazy crawling. It appears that is no longer an issue, as Danny spots the free new Google Sitemaps program. FAQs here

Goole Toolbar PageRank Missing, Google Engineers at WMW Conference, Yahoo! & DMOZ Weighting

PageRank:
goes missing from toolbar. Brett Tabke said it is just a temporary glitch though.

Google Engineers:to appear at the New Orleans WMW conference

Does Reciprocal Linking Work?
Recently I saw the Blue Gecko SEO forums ranking at #10 for SEO. Most of his link popularity looked like it was from link trades associated with his webmaster resources directory. The reason people say link trades do not work are mostly because:

  • they are usually slow and expensive to build if you do not outsource or automate

  • most people exchanging links in bulk are not doing so with quality sites

DMOZ Weighting in Yahoo!:
I created a one page site about Effexor which is listed in DMOZ. I have not built any other linkage data, and it is ranking in the mid 30s for Effexor out of over 7,000,000 sites.

A Trawl Through a Little Bit of Fishtory

Once Upon a Time in a Galaxy Far Far Away...

from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

a few years later:

It looks bad, coming days after the recent song-and-dance at the Google Factory Tour about how much energy is supposedly expended on core search and ads. Here's a personalized home page, but don't worry, we're not a portal, Google said.

Funny, this type of inattention is exactly what made people get turned off from the portals of the past, when they lost focus on search quality. Yahoo seems to have fixed this redirect hijacking problem, but Google is still struggling with it?

Danny Sullivan, on Google's hijacking of their own site. Danny rarely sounds ticked off, but that post hints at more than a little disappointment in Google.

Someone Who Hates Google...

Should write a press release about Google not being about to control their search index, and nefarious webmasters hijacking other sites to remove them from the search index. Why?

Currently the ball is in Google's court, with SEO being branded as spam and scum of the web.

If someone could push the idea that Google could not even control their own index, or how to rate their own site, then perhaps they could somehow shift the frame, saying that Google does not know how to control their index and needs the help of good SEOs to improve their search relevancy.

They should reference:

Search engines have yet to be seriously challenged about:

Most consumers do not realize how search results are manipulated, and most don't even know where the ads are.

It would be cool to see an SEO more daring or less lazy than me use this opportunity to toot their own horn and talk about how they help Google solve a problem it hasn't fully figured out yet - relevancy.

It would certainly be cheap marketing if you get national media coverage with the current feeding frenzy for Google's stock.

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