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Friday, June 29, 2007

AdWords Placement Performance Report Example

The new Google AdWords placement performance report is going to be very useful. Here are some quick observations, based on this report:

placement performance report
  1. Glad to NOT be paying on a CPM basis for MySpace ads!
  2. How much revenue is NY Times generating from AdSense on about.com? (New York Times bought About.com in 2005.)
  3. "Domain ads" in this example have a reasonable CTR.
  4. Why won't Google show actual domains for domain ads?
  5. How much revenue is Google making from "Error page ads" traffic?
I've been tracking content network clicks (demo) for awhile, but it's fascinating to be able to see impressions by domain (and URL) across the content network. I'd really like to see this data broken out for parked domain traffic, as well. There is a Google AdWords help page explaining the "Domain ads" and "Error page ads" categories:
I. Error page ads
All error page ads are aggregated and labeled as error page ads in the ‘special category’ column. To learn more about error page ads, read about our AdSense for errors program.

II. Domain ads
An ad may appear on a parked domain site that’s a part of our AdSense for domains program, which places targeted AdWords ads on parked domain sites.
Hmm, AdSense for Errors? How many flavors of AdSense are there? How many of them, like AdSense for Domains, overlap on both the search and content networks on the AdWords side? I'm aware of:
  1. AdSense for Content
  2. AdSense for Search
  3. AdSense for Domains
  4. AdSense for Video
  5. AdSense for Audio
  6. AdSense for Feeds
  7. AdSense for Newspapers
  8. AdSense for Errors
Are there more? Is Google, through AdSense + Gadgets, becoming ubiquitous? How much of their future business plan does NOT rely on Google.com itself? Perhaps it's time to stop referring to Google, the company, as a search engine. What is Google?

Apogee Tags: , , , , , , ,

posted by Richard at 11:19 PM

4 Comments:

Blogger Rehan said...

In May 2007, About.com had $7.4 million revenue from ads (source). About half of that is AdSense, so they're pulling in almost $4 million per month.

Sat Jun 30, 10:10:00 AM EDT  
Blogger Richard said...

Hi Robert. I think the content network can be useful. However, contextual advertising is very different from search engine advertising, so I don't think they should be combined. I recommend:

1) Turn off content network
2) Optimize search ad campaign(s)
3) If budget still available, try content ads
4) Only run content ads in separate campaigns
5) Track content ads carefully
6) Use site exclusion in content campaign(s)

Mon Jul 02, 03:04:00 PM EDT  
Blogger Richard said...

Thanks for the data, Rehan. Interesting that more than half of the About.com revenue comes from Google AdSense. Even if that works out to ~$50 million per year, that's a small percentage of the New York Times ~$3.3 billion in annual revenue (source).

Mon Jul 02, 03:25:00 PM EDT  

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