BlogAllAlong

I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

Popularity: 17% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Google and Yahoo! have been undergoing a testing period for the efficiency of delivering Google Ads alongside Yahoo search results. This is to measure how the ad click-throughs are compared to Yahoo’s own ads. Yahoo themselves estimate that Google Ads bring 60-70% more revenue than Yahoo. This is because of ad relevancy for one, and two I’m sure from the large collection of advertisers Google has. The more options you have, the more possible it is to deliver better results. Also, the user won’t get bored from the same results all the time. And when it comes to global market, say the Arabic region for example, or any other non-English site, it’s pretty difficult to get any geo-targeted ads. I don’t see any Arabic ads at Yahoo or any other ad network, while Google is getting more and more every day.

The test was to show Google ads at 3% of Yahoo search results inside the US for two weeks only. How did it go? Both parties have spoken general good deal of it so far. The Justice Department have been officially informed about the ongoing tests, and questions are rising right now about whether a deal between the two would give Google a monopoly over the internet ad market. Frankly, I would love for my Google Ads to show on Yahoo results for two reasons. One, Google is the best advertising program I’ve tried from many others, and gives very strong ad control and tracking. Two, I don’t want to split my money and time following multiple ad programs. Still however, for a multi-billion dollar business that large, I believe Google are over looking certain areas and need to improve on them:

• Ad Filtering: Filter unwanted ads on my site. Sex & gambling mainly. Google does a brilliant job catching fraud ads, ads that do not reflect the site content, heck they even ban certain Arabic words if they are about medical terms without valid permit. I’ve had one keyword disabled “عقار” which means both real-estate and medicine. It was banned because it’s a medical term and I can’t promote medical stuff without any proof of permit, even if I really meant real estate. So their filtering is strong when they want to, yet their Google AdSense competitive ad filtering is pretty lousy. I filter a certain site and after 12 hours I can still see the ads showing up on my site. This could be really embarrassing and bad for a business. I also don’t get any chance to disallow gambling and sex sites, which I believe should be a normal easy to implement option. Google already offers to filter offensive content in it’s search, so an option to disallow those sites from advertising on mine should be pretty simple.
• Customer Support: How easy is it to contact Google for support? And how long does it take for them to reply. Not what you hope for from a leading company. Google support has always been disappointing to me.
• Wire-Transfer: For AdSense, most countries are still not supported for money transfer. Many smaller sites are ahead of Google and transfer to any place in the world. Google is only slowly expanding, and yet promoting the green environment thing.
• Money Split: For some reason Google just don’t wish to tell you how much your share is from the click. Many other sites do. The ad is on my site and we are sharing the revenue. Any business would usually include share percentage. Google always gives vague unclear answers about the subject. If it’s bad, then you’re doing EVIL. If it’s good, then say it. One report was published before by New York Times based on announced 2006 Google financial reports estimating 78.5% of the AdSense clicks going to the publishers. Such a big number makes you wonder why wouldn’t Google reveal it. One reason I can think of is maybe they don’t want competitors to know the percentage and start a percentage share war.

All in all, Google remains a very strong source for advertising and revenue that I would like to see expand further. A bit more attention is required hoewever for customer needs.

Popularity: 36% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

I’ve noticed this today on Q8igg. Google seems to be testing new type of ads with up/down arrows to dynamically display more ads.

Circled is the scroll arrow for up/down

Transitioning from one group ads to another

New ads shown

While I don’t think so many people in general would go and browse for more ads, it certainly doesn’t harm at all and could become useful in some situations. Sometimes when the site is really focused on one topic, and ads are so relevant, I do tend to refresh or go back to see some certain ads. So browsing for more would come in handy as well.

Speaking of Google by the way, it could be a good time to invest in it after it’s recent strong share drop suffering the lower than expected end of year report, and the recent Microsoft record bid (twice as large as current largest) to acquire Yahoo.

Popularity: 33% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Google Ads come with different size and shapes. One of them, which appeal to me the most, happen to be the very rounded corner ones. Google are very careful and enforce many constraints on the ads, do many changed and monitoring to protect the advertiser from invalid clicks, and do their best to increase the quality of the click for the both the advertiser and end user. Since it’s release I’ve been having doubts about the very rounded corner ads. If you take a look at the sample below, which a snapshot of a real ad.

Notice something? The very rounded corner ads don’t come with the display url of the site. What that means is, before the user clicks he has absolutely no idea where he will end up, and after clicking, he may just end up at the same site he clicked before. If he have seen the URL before, perhaps he would’ve not wanted to click the ad at all. For him, it was a waste of time, and for the advertiser, it was a kind of waste for his money as well. This personally happens a lot to me. I see ads similar to previous ones that interest me, but I’m not sure if I will get to the same site or not. Moving the mouse over the link ofcourse does not show the real address. Sometimes out of sympathy to the advertiser, I just copy the whole lengthy ad url and fetch the domain name to see if it’s the same or not. The example shown above is a perfect example (I somehow got it when I wanted to write the post… Lucky!). Reading both ads reveal almost the same site, however it can’t be as they are showing next to each other. Which one would I click? And if one of the ads show up again later, should I click it? I don’t know if I visited the site before or not.

I know the rounded corner eats some space, but I just wish even  snippet of the URL would be shown to give the user small hint. This would increase the value of the click I believe. What do you guys think?

Popularity: 62% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

I am playing with some new Amazon Associates widgets that I came across today. These are the new ones to me:

• Unbox Video: Lists some videos to play from. Nice feature, but it’s too wide to fit into a blog, and there isn’t large variety of videos. For example, I chose documentaries and biographies, but ended up having only movie films showing. Why? Simply, no variety or it’s still buggy. Both ways I can’t risk showing any type of video on my site.
• Slideshow: I love this kind of interactive ad. You can fade in from one item to another. Again, minimum size is 336×280. Not suitable for a blog.
• Product Cloud: The typical cloud of words, bigger is most popular. I don’t like that type of ad very much.
• My Favorites: This is what I used to list down another list of What I’m Reading. So far, I prefer the old links as they are faster to load and take less space. What do you think?
• Wish List: If you want everyone to know your wish list. Not that it’s very different than my Favorite list, but I just don’t feel like letting people in. Ofcourse my wife sneaks on my list from my PC I can do nothing about it :(.
• Quick Linker: This might be interesting for some. Installing the widget on your blog/site will enable you to use custom HTML tags for quick associate linking to Amazon like this:
  • <a type=”amzn” >Harry Potter</a> –> Links to Amazon.com search results page for “Harry Potter”
  • <a type=”amzn” search=”Harry Potter”>My favorite hero</a> –> The link reads “My favorite hero” and points to a search results page for the phrase”Harry Potter”.
• Search: On the fly AJAX based search results. Width can fit sidebar of a blog.

As to how is the overall experience with Amazon conversions? Not so great at all. I just have it there become it doesn’t harm for one, plus I want to list my recommended items and guide the site visitors to buying it. What do you think?

Popularity: 50% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Seoz have reported on his blog about the new type of interactive Ad format that is coming from Google. The new type of ads, still in Beta, will open the door to advertisers to interact with their customers through rich media capabilities that supports real data feed, images, videos and more, all in on single ad unit that can be built using Flash, HTML, or combination of both. Here is a sample of the Honda ad unit:

The reported initial impression from early testers, like Pepsi-Cola and Honda are so far positive. I can only think of the endless possibilities this type of ads will open. What’s great about it is that it’s unlike the conventional type of ads which the user tends to avoid. A useful gadget in a catchy design would get you more sticky users. I cannot wait to read more on this.

To read more about the gadgets click here. Alas, most Adwords users are still not eligible for the service.

Popularity: 40% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Only once I was not shocked by PIXAR product, and this was when they released the Toy Story sequel only. I have seen all their movies and every time you see one you say “This is the top!”. Next movie proves you were wrong. What I love about this company is their patience and determination to bring something totally new every time. Just like Walt Disney used to be in the old days. Their start was with 3D animated commercials for outside companies. This is one of the ads they produced for a telecom service. Not sure when or who came up with idea, but the implementation is lovely. And it’s definitely a lot better than the classical ads we see.

Popularity: 72% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...