SES - The Pros and Pitfalls of Contextual Ads
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Written By Reprise Media | February 27, 2006 | Share This
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Bear with us today; the wireless connection is fritzy in several parts of the Hilton, which also features a luxurious dearth of electrical outlets. After the keynote, we attended a contextual advertising session moderated by Andrew Goodman of SEM firm Page Zero Media.
Our own Peter Hershberg spoke first, and his address re-capped the contextual advertising story thus far while keeping an eye on the future. He emphasized that Yahoo! Publisher Network’s entry into the field two years after Google launched AdSense was a welcome change, as it forced Google to revise and improve their network - although Yahoo! is facing a supply and demand problem (too many publishers, not enough advertisers) in part due to its tardiness, which is causing ads to be served on pages where they have little relevance.
Hershberg noted that MSN and Amazon are launching contextual advertising networks this year, and innovations like Google’s auction based experiments with print advertising, its radio-advertising project with dMarc and forays into contextual advertising on mobile networks by many companies are pushing us toward a future in with the specialized SEM firm becomes what ad agencies are today.
Goodman followed by addressing issues that contextual advertisers face. He pointed out that some companies are just not using analytics effectively, which would allow them to see which sources are converting at the best rates. He also sang the praises of working with companies who own multiple ‘parked domains,’ those generically named sites (his example was hamburgers.com) that pretend to be search engines, but actually just serve ads rather than search results. Even if one of these sites only generates a few clicks a year, a company that owns tens of thousands of such parked domains can convert at a rate comparable to that of one high traffic publisher with great content.
The session concluded with a question and answer session that started with sparks when an unhappy contextual advertiser berated the Yahoo! and Google representatives on the panel for their services’ shortcomings, including what she called spammy publishers recommended by Google. She said she wanted her ads to appear mainly on hi tech sites and cited her preference for Industry Brains, a vertical contextual advertiser with a technology niche. Hershberg chimed in to say that he wasn’t surprised that an advertiser with such specific needs had a bad experience with the bigger contextual networks, and noted that verticals like Kanoodle (a finance specialist) and Industry Brains filled their advertising niches admirably.
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