Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have bots that belong to their contextual ad programs.

These bots spider web pages to understand what the page is about so they can match appropriate advertising.

If any publishers are blocking these bots they will keep themselves from having the proper (or in some cases, any) ads show on their website.

Block these bots (if you’re showing contextual ads on your site) and you will lose money.

The useragents not to block:

Mediapartners-Google
MSNPTC
YahooYSMcm

Microsoft plans to launch their own contextual program this fall. It will be a US only invite pilot, however, one can request to be invited. What’s going to be interesting to see is how many features they plan on porting into contextual. For instance, they plan on supporting demographic targeting.
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One of the largest problems with AdSense is often the ads are irrelevant to your content.

This is especially true of blogs where the ads might be about blogging, or the rest of your navigation, and not about the specific topic on that page.

The more relevant an ad is to that exact topic, the higher the relevancy to your reader. The higher the relevancy to your reader – the higher the CTR (click through rate).

Alternately, the worse the targeting is, the lower Read the rest of this entry →

Aaron has a post about tracking AdSense click throughs with Google’s Urchin Analytics.

I haven’t tested it yet, it’s on the list of things todo. If someone gets a chance to see exactly how it works, and if it’s hackable to tracking other types of exit clicks (banners, YPN, etc), please let me know.

Digital point is also working on one, but doesn’t seem to work with Mozilla.

The Google AdSense blog just published the new details on the AdSense referral program.

Users who sign up for AdSense through your referral button will learn about a great product, and you’ll have a new way to generate revenue – $100 when each user you refer first earns $100.

There are a large number of banners that can be added to a website, including some that are not the usual AdSense size blocks.

Pretty simple information, and it was very much expected.

The part I didn’t expect was that Google is also paying $1 for every Firefox user who installs the Google Firefox toolbar.

Again, quite a few different banner sizes, some as small as buttons.

No text links for either program – only images, which seems out of character with Google’s fascination with everything text, and slow adoption of images overall.

The real question though is: Why is Google giving away this money?

• Are they recommending firefox?
• Are firefox users finding better plug-ins and not using the toolbar?
• Are firefox users not giving Google all the data it collects through the toolbar, and they need a higher firefox penetration?

It’s interesting to see Google not only push a browser and toolbar, but to pay for referrals.

If you’re willing to pay for something, you usually get something in return.

• Is it uses?
• Or data collection?

Personally, I uninstalled every Google product after both the GMail notifier and the last Google Toolbar updated itself on my machines without my permission. I consider this a security breach, and someone else trying to control my software.

It will be interesting to see what else Google starts paying for in the future. How about AdWords account referrals?

There’s only one place to read about AdSense TOS updates, and that’s at JenSense – Full Update Info Here.

I like Jen’s Blog, it makes it so I can keep up with the entire AdSense program from one location – quite a time saver.

She has a very interesting post today which highlights some of the smart pricing issues:

Here is what that team member disclosed, as well as other tidbits already known about smart pricing.

• Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.
• One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one.
• Smart pricing is evaluated each week. So removing ads from sites you suspect are converting poorly could result in seeing an adjustment to a higher smart pricing percent in as little as a week.
• Smart pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so you could be rewarded for new conversions that saw the initial click from your site up to 29 days earlier.
• Image ads are also affected by smart pricing.
• With smart pricing, an advertiser could end up paying less than their minimum bid, which would theoretically include the minimum bid price available, meaning publishers earn less for even the minimum valued clicks.
• Conversions for smart pricing publisher accounts are tracked by those advertisers who have opted into AdWords Conversion Tracking

As an advertiser, when I read this list, I like all the points quite a bit.

I found the point about the cookie quite interesting. I knew Google was coordinating some pricing data with conversion tracking.

However, this point makes me wonder if it would be cheaper for some advertisers who do a lot of contextual volume to use Google’s conversion tracking.

I suppose the experiment would be to take a site that has discontinued using contextual advertising due to horrible conversion rates and turn on the conversion tracking option. If the pricing went down, the conversions went up, or some combination in the middle, it would tell us a lot about how Google is leveraging conversion data to actually help advertisers pay appropriate amounts for contextual ads while possibly increasing the quality of the contextual network (if nothing converts, then the AdSense publisher gets paid less).

If anyone wants to conduct, or is in the middle of conducting an experiment like this, please let me know. I’d be interested in the results, and will help anyone set this up so the experiment is conducted properly (you might even get some free consulting out of the deal).

I’m a huge fan of the Google AdWords learning center that has plenty of Breeze Demos.

AdSense has 4 demos that I’ve found, as they’ve just added a payment Demo. I’m not a huge AdSense publisher, but as I’m an AdWords advertiser I like to keep up with what’s going on the in contextual world.

Here are the Breeze demo’s I’ve found so far:
Getting Started with AdSense Demo
Payment Demo
Ad Code Demo
AdSense Optimization

The AdSense blog has details on how engineeringtalk.com improved it’s AdSense performance.

Interesting that the AdSense blog also talks about how link units helped them out. I’ve not heard too much talk about the CTR and profitability of the link unit program; however, I often see it integrated quite well into the site navigation.

The overall goal seems to be, if a user can’t tell it’s not part of the site, then maybe they’ll click on it and the publisher will make some money. Whatever happened to people enjoying ‘site sponsored by’ and supporting sites and advertisers in a disclosure type environment?

There have been quite a few discussions on the web recently about Smart Pricing.

A quick overview of AdSense / AdWords smart pricing:

Because contextually targeted ads on our content network sometimes return lower conversion numbers than ads on Google.com search results pages, clicks from the content network use “smart pricing” adjustments. Google’s smart pricing technology automatically lowers the cost of content clicks based on the referring site, to maximize the return on investment for advertisers.

Source: AdWords Learning Center

Google Launches Contextual Network – June 2003

Starting today, AdWords ads will also appear on sites that are accepted into our ad network through our new Google AdSense program. These websites are reviewed and monitored according to the same rigorous standards as our current network sites. And your AdWords ads will continue to appear only in relevant places that make sense to web users. The only difference is that now your ads will be targeted to more content web pages, bringing you even more customers.

Source: AdWords News Archives

Google Launches Improved Smart Pricing – April 2004

We’re introducing automatic price adjustments for certain clicks you get from the Google Network. Google’s smart pricing model has always provided better placement for better performing ads, and reduced the cost of a click to the least amount possible to stay above your competitor’s ad. And now, with no change in how you bid, Google may reduce the cost for a click if that better reflects the value it brings to advertisers like you.

Source: April 04 Google AdWords Newsletter announces Improved Smart Pricing.

Google Defends Smart Pricing – October 05

The blog entry lists a few reasons on how smart pricing is determined, however, as an advertiser, the last line is my favorite:

The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR.

Source: Inside AdSense