Google finally gets it- improving the content network

Well I have to say that its good that Google is listening, because the content network has always been kind of a joke in terms of quality and avoided studiously by marketers like me for the most part. Overture never did get it, and keeps trying to shove all their crappy traffic down the throat of advertisors, even though they have a lot of low quality sites in their network, and haven't listened to advertisors complaints for YEARS now. So I do have to give some kudos to Google for listening and attempting to work on the problem. What they are working on is to make it possible for advertisors to pick specific sites in the content network to run ads on, instead of having no choice and having to run it everywhere like it is now.

This should be a major improvement and will definately shake up the industry a little bit, because what will happen is that the sites that are really good at converting specific types of traffic will probably see their advertising revenues increase, and it will be much better for site visitors, too. It's good that advertisors will have the flexability to pick other sites to advertise on that is a better "fit" for them and it really makes a lot of sense.

Even though Overture was the first major player in this market, and even though they got bought by Yahoo for big bucks, they are really going to be falling behind now. This kind of superior targeting is what advertisors and site visitors both need, and it will encourage sites to provide useful things to their visitors. Sites with better contents and reputation will be rewarded with more reputable and richer (we hope) advertisors, and recieve more revenues as a result. Advertisors might have to pay more to advertise on "better" sites but that's fine, the market will adjust itself.

Google is also taking another big step with advertising on a cpm (cost per thousand) basis, with an "adjustable" cpm model kind of like adwords works on with their adjustable CPC. I am not thrilled about this one because it really is a "black box" like adwords is, where you don't know the prices your competitors are paying or sometimes even the price YOU are going to pay, until you do it. Then you have to resort to various hacks to figure out what your competitors are paying. But on the bright side, you can probably find ways to get a cheaper CPM than if you just had to pay a straight price to some big media company, so there is some benefit there.

You can read more about the changes here:

http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/sitetarget?hl=en

-Steve

Steve Blom
Certified Google Adwords Professional

Adwords Training Video Author:

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Contact: steve@adwordstraining.org