Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
At the recent WebmasterWorld Conference (Pubcon), I talked to lots of site owners who derive at least some of their income from contextual ads, typically Google’s Adsense product or the Yahoo Publisher Network. I asked quite a few for their opinions on the two networks. Surprisingly, there was quite a bit of agreement on a few key points:
1) The most important criteria is revenue production, and the unanimous conclusion was that both Adsense and YPN can outperform each other on different sites.
2) YPN tends to have more difficulty delivering highly relevant ads, but this, too, varies by site.
3) Adsense remains the most popular choice, though quite a few are testing or actively using YPN.
4) Owners of serious content sites are concerned that Google is hurting itself by not policing quality better. While so called “made for Adsense” sites (MFAs) may generate clicks, these sites are probably more likely to click fraud and even non-fraudulent clicks may convert more poorly. There is anecdotal evidence that Adwords advertisers are increasingly turning off the entire “content network”, freezing out the good publishers at the same time as the marginal ones.
5) Some sites found the YPN category targeting helpful in getting relevant ads; others were neutral on this tool.
As noted in past posts, there’s no simple advice for making the Adsense vs. YPN decision (or Adsense vs. affiliate ads, etc.). The only valid approach is to test, test, and keep testing. Results will vary over time, so more or less continuous evaluation is needed. And remember that results won’t always scale and maintain the same revenue per exposure - CPM calculated at a thousand exposures a day may change dramatically at ten thousand or a hundred thousand.
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