Google Click-to-Call is a service provided by Google which allows users to call advertisers from Google search results pages. Users enter their phone number, Google calls them back and connects to the advertiser. Calling charges are paid by Google.
To help clients with the complexity of building and managing AdWords accounts search engine marketing agencies and consultants offer account management as a business service. This has allowed organisations that otherwise would not have the advertising skills to reach a global, online audience. Google has started the Google Advertising Professionals program to certify agencies and consultants who have met specific qualifications and passed an exam.
All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google's partner networks. The "search network" includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.
The "content network" shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model. AdSense is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. Click through rates on the content network are typically much lower than those on the search network and are therefore ignored when calculating an advertiser's quality score.
Google automatically determines the subject of pages and displays relevant ads based on the advertisers' keyword lists. AdSense publishers may select channels to help direct Google's ad placements on their pages, to better track performance of their ad units. There are many different types of ads you can run across Google's network, including text ads, image ads (banner ads), local business ads, mobile text ads, and in-page video ads.
Google AdWords' main competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.
In 2003 Google introduced site-targeted advertising. Using the AdWords control panel, advertisers can enter keywords of interest, and Google offers to place ads on what they claim are relevant sites within their content network. Advertisers then bid on a cost per mille (CPM) basis for placement. However, Google does not provide advertisers with a list of sites where their ads have been placed, and there is evidence that many of the "content network" sites are merely ad pages set up on parked domains. Advertisers can provide a list of sites where they do not wish their ads to appear, but cannot obtain a list of sites where their ads could or do appear.
| About The Author Titus Hoskins is a full-time online marketer who contributes his high rankings in Google as the major source of his online income. For the latest web marketing tools try: http://www.marketingtoolguide.com For the latest Internet Marketing Strategies go here: http://www.bizwaremagic.com Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached. |
Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google's search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as "sponsored link" on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.
The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers' bids (pay for placement P4P) and the "quality score" of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates and the relevance of an advertiser's ad text, keyword, and landing page to the search, as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords.
The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads has been called a "generalized second price" auction. It is a variation of the Vickrey auction.
AdWords has generated lawsuits in the area of trademark law and click fraud. In 2006, Google settled a click fraud lawsuit for US$90 million.
Overture Services, Inc. sued Google for patent infringement in April 2002 in relation to the AdWords service. Following Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture, the suit was settled in 2004 with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license under the patent.
The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL.
The AdWords product was launched in 2000. At first advertisers would pay a monthly amount, and Google would set up and manage their campaign. To accommodate small businesses and those who wanted to manage their own campaigns, Google soon introduced the AdWords self-service portal. As of 2005, Google provides a campaign management service called Jumpstart to assist advertisers in setting up their campaigns.
In 2005, Google launched a program to certify individuals and companies who have completed AdWords training and passed an exam. Due to the complexity of AdWords and the amount of money at stake, some advertisers hire a consultant to manage their campaigns.
AdWords is Google's branded P4P service. It provides relevant text-based ads on Google's site, and on external sites willing to host Google ads. On the Google site, they are pure text, and thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within an IFRAME tag, making them easy to remove with advertisement blockers like the Mozilla extension AdBlock. Companies wishing to promote their products can enroll in this program to their adds on Google or on websites which use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.
Due to concerns about click fraud, Google AdSense has been criticized by some Search engine optimization firms as a large source of what Google calls "invalid clicks" in which one company clicks on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs. Some publishers have been blocked by Google, complaining that little justification or transparency was provided.
To help prevent click fraud, publishers can choose from a number of click tracking programs. These programs will display detailed information about the visitors who click on the AdSense advertisements. Publishers can use that data to determine if they've been a victim of click fraud or not. There are a number of such commercial scripts available for purchase. An open source alternative is AdLogger.
Google has also come under fire for allowing AdWords advertisers to abuse trademarks. In 2004, Google started allowing advertisers to bid on any search terms, including the trademarks of their competitors.
The payment terms for AdSense customers have also been criticized. Google withholds payment until an account reaches US$100 , but many small content providers require a long time - years in many cases - to build up this much AdSense revenue. These pending payments are recorded on Google's balance sheet as "accrued revenue share". At the close of its 2006 fiscal year, the sum of all these small debts amounted to a little over US $370 million - cash that Google is able to invest but which effectively belongs to its customers.
Some webmasters create sites tailored to lure searchers from Google and other engines onto their AdSense site to make money from clicks. These "zombie" sites often contain nothing but a large amount of interconnected, automated content (e.g.: A directory with content from the Open Directory Project, or scraper sites relying on RSS feeds for content). Possibly the most popular form of such "AdSense farms" are splogs ("spam blogs"), which are centered around known high-paying keywords. Many of these sites use content from other web sites, such as Wikipedia, to attract visitors. These and related approaches are considered to be search engine spam and can be reported to Google.
There have also been reports of Trojans engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan Horse apparently downloads itself onto an unsuspecting computer through a web page and then replaces the original ads with its own set of malicious ads.
Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose src attribute includes the URL of the page. Google's servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. (Some of the details are described in the AdSense patent.) If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.
A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets website owners place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner. However, only if the ads on the page are clicked, the publisher is paid. Adsense does not pay publishers for mere searches.
In May 2005, Google unveiled AdSense for feeds, a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active subscribers. According to the Official Google Blog, "advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising — and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from".
AdSense for feeds works by inserting images into a feed. When the image is displayed by the reader/browser, Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. The ad content is chosen based on the content of the feed surrounding the image. When the user clicks the image, he or she is redirected to the advertiser's site in the same way as regular AdSense ads.
The underlying technology behind AdSense was derived originally from WordNet and Simpli, a company started by the founder of Wordnet — George A. Miller — and a number of professors and graduate students from Brown University, including James A. Anderson, Jeff Stibel and Steve Reiss. A variation of this technology utilizing Wordnet was developed by Oingo, a small search engine company based in Santa Monica founded in 1998. Oingo focused on semantic searches rather than brute force string searches. Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics, which was then bought by Google for $102 million in April 2003, to replace a similar system being developed in house.
AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.
Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.
Currently, the AdSense uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google's search index.)
Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:
1. They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
2. They build valuable content on their sites which attracts AdSense ads which pay out the most when they get clicked.
3. They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like "Click on my AdSense ads" to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are "Sponsored Links" and "Advertisements".
The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.
