It has happened before,
and it will happen again. I was reading
a story on
the San Jose Mercury News' Web site about federal
agents arresting people for running a sex-trafficking
ring out of massage parlors. And when I saw the
text ads below the story served through Google
AdSense, they were for day spas and massage services
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The ads are deemed relevant by the computer
algorithm that might search the story for key
words and match them to the key words that these
advertisers bought. But the algorithm can't
quite match human judgment that might consider
this to be the wrong place for legitimate spas
to promote their services.
When Google launched self-service
AdSense
advertisements in June 2003, these types of
mismatched ads proliferated -- almost to the
point of being a parlor game where you find
the weirdest mix of ads and content. But over
time, Google AdSense and Yahoo's competing
ContentMatch
have improved their algorithms,
have worked more closely with big publishers,
and have taken feedback from readers and advertisers
to improve their systems and reduce mismatches.
Even so, contextual advertisements remain a
strange breed, living alongside journalistic
content or blog postings as text ads and fighting
for attention with rich media ads. Contextual
ads have performed well for Google and Yahoo,
brought in some good money for online publishers,
and given the advertisers some bang for their
buck. If all three parties are happy, that's
nice for their business, but how much tolerance
should there be for goofy pairings?
John Battelle, who is starting
FM Publishing
to help bloggers sell
ads on their sites, sees advertising as a conversation
and believes that there's only so much an algorithm
can do in matching advertisers with publishers.
"I think it rings a sour note in the conversation
in the publishing community [when mismatches
happen]," Battelle told me. "And sour
notes over time can lessen the conversation.
I know that the platform guys [at Yahoo and
Google] are working really hard to stop that
problem, which is really difficult to do, because
it's language. ... You can do a hierarchy and
say if this is a news story, you show only these
types of ads, but then you're missing out on
what might be the right ad."
As Google improves AdSense, Yahoo is readying
a similar self-service platform, which is only
in limited beta currently. But Yahoo's Search
Marketing division (formerly Overture) has worked
with large publishers for some time and has
a long history of matching ads with search key
words. Here's a rundown on the good, bad and
ugly of these contextual ad services -- and
which content works best in matching ads and
bringing in more revenues for sites.
The
good
The first rule of thumb for contextual ads is
the opposite of the old local TV news maxim,
"If it bleeds, it leads." In the case
of hard news related to war, terrorism, rapes,
murders and other unpleasant current events,
the best bet could be to remove contextual ads
or just run more generic run-of-site ads. Of
course, some site publishers have no problem
with hawking commemorative Iraqi War playing
cards on stories about people dying in the war.
Yahoo's ContentMatch uses various sensitivity
filters for what ads are shown with content
-- along with human oversight from a staff of
more than 100 editorial people. Paul Volen,
who is vice president of product marketing for
Yahoo Search Marketing, told me that Yahoo's
human oversight is what differentiates his service
from Google's.
"First, we do have a dynamic proprietary
algorithm which takes the theme of a page and
matches advertising to it," Volen told
me. "We also add a layer of editorial oversight
to that. We look at a site and try to understand
if there's content that's evergreen and won't
change, like index pages that are generic and
aren't updated every day. In those cases, we
could have the editorial staff look at them
and come up with the best matches. We work with
the publishers pretty closely across their site
to figure out how we want to attack the relevancy
and matching."
Google doesn't have an editorial staff for AdSense,
but does assign account managers to bigger sites
for
the premium level
of AdSense services
-- though it is only available for sites above
20 million page views per month. Gokul Rajaram,
group product manager for Google AdSense, told
me that there are just too many dynamic pages
served for humans to watch every ad that's served
up.
So what content works well with contextual ad
services? Usually the more focused the content,
and the more commercial it is, the better. So
a blog that covers Asian travel should outperform
a blog about inner-city crime. Rajaram says
there are a number of factors that affect how
well the ads do for publishers and advertisers
-- including how fertile a topic area is for
advertisers and where the ads are placed on
a page.
"If the advertiser makes $100 per sale,
then they're willing to pay $5 per click,"
he said. "If the advertiser only makes
$10 then they would only be able to pay one-tenth
of that. The cost-per-click depends on the vertical
that the advertiser is in, as well as the competitiveness
of the term that it's in. ... Finally, there's
the matter of clickthrough rates, which depends
on the relevance of the ads and the placement
of the ads on the page. What is the mode of
the users, are they in a browse mode and just
reading news articles?"
For a general news site, the breaking news sections
might not perform as well as lifestyle, travel,
business and technology. One great example of
a fertile ground for contextual ads is
Weblogs Inc.,
the network of blogs set up by entrepreneur
Jason Calacanis. Calacanis has used AdSense
to help jumpstart his business as he also sells
display ads on his 80-plus blogs that are very
targeted into vertical categories -- from digital
photography to babies and pregnancy.
For that reason, Calacanis has nothing negative
to say about his experience with AdSense.
"The ads are absurdly targeted in my experience,"
Calacanis told me via e-mail. "People look
at them like content and they don't even mind
them. It's a revolution in advertising --for
the first time since the Super Bowl people want
the ads! It's advertising nirvana for everyone
involved: advertiser, publisher, and Google.
... Text-based advertisers find out about our
site because of Google AdSense and then they
wind up buying display ads. So, Google is doing
free marketing for us in a way. I've found no
downside as a publisher -- zero."
Still, Calacanis isn't putting all his eggs
in the contextual ad basket and realizes the
majority of his income is from display ads sold
directly to advertisers. Plus, he says Weblogs
Inc. is considering using the FM Publishing
network being set up by Battelle to help match
advertisers with blogs using the human touch.
The
bad
While automated contextual ad services take
the hassle out of selling advertisements for
small publishers or bloggers, they might not
perform that well for medium-sized sites that
aren't focused on very specific commercial niches
or cover more strategic or philosophical subject
mattter.
Matt McAlister is vice president and general
manager of tech trade magazine InfoWorld's online
operations and also runs the remains of the
Industry Standard's Web
site. While
the latter site does get about 50,000 unique
users per month, according to McAlister, the
AdSense ads just don't seem to fit well or bring
in much income.
"In terms of revenues, there's certainly
a threshold that your site needs to reach before
[AdSense] does anything for you," McAlister
said. "TheStandard.com has 50,000 uniques,
but [the income] is almost laughable. It's better
to do sponsorship, where someone owns a section
of the site. I remember examples of the stuff
that came up that was either completely abstract
or inappropriate. I don't think it has great
value to the people who are using the site.
With the site at 50,000 uniques, that should
be attractive at a certain level, but I have
a feeling it's not a useful way to use your
ad inventory."
InfoWorld
itself is owned by media
conglomerate IDG, and its site uses the contextual
ad services of a company called Industry Brains.
When you click on an InfoWorld story, you'll
see small text ads placed adjacent to the first
paragraph or two of the story. They look like
AdSense ads but, they're actually served and
created by InfoWorld itself. McAlister says
they decided to run these ads in order to help
advertisers who wanted to generate leads. In
many cases, he said, people tune out graphical
ads or don't ever click on them -- but they're
more likely to click on text ads that are relatively
relevant.
"We started off by targeting them at a
very granular level," McAlister said. "Our
taxonomy has about 200-some terms in it, so
we were targeting two or three levels down the
tree. But we found that it was better to back
out and only target the top level, the top 14
categories, because you're able to reach a little
bit further on the number of impressions you're
able to serve. The targeting at that level wasn't
that effective. They might not be as relevant,
but with InfoWorld you don't have to be that
specific to convert ads."
But McAlister does see the value in contextual
ads and clicked on various ads while planning
a recent vacation using Yahoo Travel.
"In a vertical like that, where the inventory
is limited to a number of partners, then that
scarcity creates value," he said. "But
if you're using a blanket key-words matching
system against the text on a page against an
infinite number of sites, I don't think that's
going to have much value for the publisher or
the readers."
Battelle, who also founded
the Industry Standard magazine, agrees with
McAlister when it comes to automated contextual
ads. He reiterates the point that medium-sized
publishers are often stuck in the cold with
Google and Yahoo. And his experience with AdSense
on the popular group blog
BoingBoing was that
the ads just didn't fit with the often esoteric
subject matter.
"Big publishers are slowly working out
human relationships with the Googles and Yahoos
of the world and start to filter and create
feeds [of ads] that work for them," he
said. "But you can't have a guy who has
250,000 readers a month as opposed to 2.5 million
who can have a conversation with the AdSenses
of the world."
The problem is that a Web page with content
on it -- whether a reported article or a blog
rant -- isn't the same as a page that has basic
search results. So the interaction between key-word
triggered ads and the content is different and
more subtle to work out. That's how Battelle
sees FM Publishing squeezing in to serve high-traffic
blogs.
"Search has proven that point with this
great aggregator on one end of the conversation,
where people were putting their question into
a search box, and a magic list came up that
appeared to be relevant," Battelle said.
"But what about the places where the conversation
is already happening? A blog is not where someone
is putting a question into a search box, but
where a community is already very real, and
you need to know the mores of that community
before you can enter that conversation in way
where you'll be accepted."
Jennifer Slegg runs a blog covering contextual
ads called
JenSense.
Slegg
compared ad relevancy
using early versions
of Yahoo's self-service network and says they
still have a ways to go to match up with Google
AdSense. She also mentioned one other fault
with the AdSense matching system -- dynamic
content pages aren't checked by Google very
often.
"Bloggers have a harder time with relevancy,
particularly on their blog index page when they
post frequently," Slegg told me via e-mail.
"Because Google indexes about once per
month, writing a single entry about popcorn
right before the [Google] bot visits can result
in popcorn ads for about a month, even if the
majority of the posts are about a tech subject.
Targeting on individual blog entry pages is
usually very good. This is why many of the news
sites running contextual ad programs do not
often run ads on the pages that change frequently,
such as the index page and the subsection pages,
but run it on the articles themselves."
The
ugly
While many of the early kinks of contextual
mismatches have been worked out at big news
sites, there still remains a gray area that's
difficult to catch. Just spend some time digging
through the local news online, and you're bound
to come up with a doozy or two.
For instance,
a story on
LATimes.com about police spying on activists
ends with ads for doing public records searches
-- basically spying on people. And below
an obituary
for a rabbi in NYTimes.com
is an ad link to
humorous Yiddish garb.
While publishers and
the technology companies might be watching for
problems, they still slip through.
I
talked with one of the advertisers who was included
below the Mercury News story about the massage
parlor busts. Pierce Salguero is executive director
of
Tao Mountain,
a non-profit which offers courses in Thai massage
and herbal medicine. He wasn't sure why his
ad came up in that case and told me that he
actually used the terms "sex" and
"prostitution" as negative key words
in AdSense so the ad wouldn't come up in association
with these search terms or content.
"[Mismatches] probably happen more often
than I know about which is unfortunate, because
we're not a spa," Salguero said. "We're
a non-profit network of researchers who are
working at the medical application and history
and context of traditional medicine in Thailand."
But despite the problems, Salguero wouldn't
give up using Google and Yahoo for lead generation
for his programs. He says he gets 80 to 85 percent
of his business through paid search and contextual
ads online vs. print ads and the occasional
direct mailer.
"It's definitely been worth doing no matter
what snafus might have happened along the way,"
Salguero said.
One sign of the effectiveness of these types
of ads is that the publishers themselves have
been experimenting with buying paid search and
contextual ads to promote their own stories.
NYTimes.com and Washingtonpost.com have both
been pretty aggressive at using key words related
to stories they want to promote.
Tim Ruder, vice president of marketing at WashingtonPost.Newsweek
Interactive, told me they have promoted stories
as well as sections of the site. The only problem
is that as this method of promotion becomes
more popular, the cost of key words will go
up and it will lose its allure.
"We've seen that happen across the board
within search," Ruder told me. "As
it becomes more competitive, you make all this
stuff based on return-on-investment decisions.
The ability to make a healthy ROI is harder
and harder as it becomes more competitive."
One ugly side effect of this promotion is when
competitors end up promoting their news stories
as a place to get more information on a rival
site's ad box. While Ruder hasn't seen any NYTimes.com
promotions come up on Washingtonpost.com, he
did briefly see a Washingtonpost.com promo on
a NYTimes.com page. But these are the type of
glitches that are easily reported to Google
or Yahoo, or fixed through filtering -- as long
as you can keep up with all the pages served.
Ruder notes that Washingtonpost.com does already
offer self-service ads for job listings and
other classifieds but thinks the key word auctions
at Google and Yahoo are a bit more complex to
emulate. In the end, publishers of all sizes
will have to weigh out how much return they'll
get from automated contextual ads and whether
it makes sense to split ad revenues with the
tech companies.
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