Category Archives: Advertising Networks

Google ends prohibition

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve just read the news about Google’s ad network now allowing the promotion of alcohol. It just makes sense.

In most countries I’ve been to I can see advertisement for alcohol everywhere in the offline world. Most major sports events are sponsored by beer brands. It seems that Google want their share of the advertising budgets of those companies.

This move also gives retailers a chance to sell good wine and spirits via AdWords. These can be luxury items with high profit margins for vendors. I suspect this results in good bid prices and higher revenues for Google.

Tell me when you see some ads with the Budweiser frogs or the Jäger deer.

Google’s Reaction To Bing

Posted on by
Reply

Google must be living in fear of Bing. Maybe not, but it made me wonder why they rolled out their most radical change in ten years today: They got rid of the black/blue on white screen.

The cool thing is that you can customize the background and use your own pictures. But in order to make that work you have to be logged in and let Google collect all sorts of information about on the side.

I still like the Bing backgrounds better though. What do you think?

Good-bye AOL

Posted on by
Reply

AOL is shutting down. This should really tell us something.

Ten years ago they were one of the world’s biggest internet service providers. Remeber the numerous free installation CDs they distributed like crazy? Some of them even built ash trays out of them. But that’s another story. At some point they also purchased CompuServe, remember that one too?

AOL sold their dial-up business and kept what was then very profitable for them: online advertising. They owned high-volume sites such as their own aol.com, simply because they made it the default site for their customers.

Ten years later things have changed. Advertisers aren’t willing and able to pay outrageous CPM rates anymore. That paired with some serious miscalculations internally led to a huge operational loss in the company. Their display advertising business wasn’t working anymore.

AOL is downsizing, getting rid of many advertising sales organizations. This includes Advertising.com aka Platform A in Germany, Europe’s largest display market. They’re looking for other companies to take over their business now and are in talks with the unions about layoffs.

So what do we learn from this? Well, in online media you can’t survive with a ten-year old business model. The market value of any asset slowly but surely disappears. Once you’ve reached the stage where you’re really comfortable you need to continue developing new stuff. Otherwise you fall behind because there are more smart people out there than you think.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing in Germany

Posted on by
1

Pascal Fantou is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. If you can read German you should check out his latest post on the future of the affiliate industry in Germany. I’m not 100% sure if things are going to change as drastically as predicted, but I can definitely see Pascal’s points. Here’s a short summary in my own words:

Advertisers usually group their online marketing teams mainly by traffic source: search marketing, display campaigns, affiliate marketing. Back in the dark ages affiliates were primarily web site owners who would place text links or banners on their own sites to make some extra cash. These days many affiliates have turned into full-time entrepreneurs who have expanded their dominance also to search engines and social media.

Pascal’s point is that the media agencies and not the affiliates will be the key players in the future. They’re in close contact with the advertisers, they administer the big budgets and they’re actually becoming better at what they do. At the same time, small- and medium-sized advertisers will run their activities more and more in-house instead of through an affiliate or search marketing agency.

So what will happen to affiliates? A lot of their territory will be taken away by large agencies or the advertiser itself. For example in search marketing, why should advertisers pay for the profit of the affiliates and the affiliate networks if they can pull the sales in themselves? In some cases that would lower the cost of acquisition by 50%. Same thing with Google. They’re going after affiliates big time these days because they want the other 50% of the advertiser’s budget.

With the redundance of traditiional affiliates, especially in search marketing, the traditional affiliate networks are going to be dinosaurs. If they’re not changing their role to a technical solution provider they’re likely to die out. The winners are going to be the media agencies. They can combine large budgets of several advertisers and that way pay a lot less for ad network traffic.

The key to survival and growth for affiliates is specialization. Affiliates need to find niches where they do not have to compete with large advertisers and agencies. How about mobile?

One domain per ad group only

Posted on by
2

Google announced that they’re going to start enforcing their new one-domain-per-ad-group policy next week. They are trying to get rid of multiple domains within the same ad group.

I can understand that they want to improve their user experience and get rid of affiliate spam. However, with this new rule they also keep advertisers from absolutely legitimate testing.

For instance many advertisers test example.com vs. uk.example.com vs. example.co.uk vs. example.net. I’ve seen huge changes in click-through rates just by choosing the right domain for a specific audience.

And when it comes to mobile ads, advertisers would like to be able to test whether m.example.com or example.mobi or even just example.com generates the highest click-through rate.

With the new policy in place all these tests are going to be outlawed. I suppose they don’t want people to create multiple ad groups per keyword or use multiple AdWords accounts. But at the minute I think these are the only options.

Google Really Hates Ringtones

Posted on by
Reply

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Google hates ringtones and other mobile content products. About six month ago they installed a manual approval for mobile content ads.

I’ve just been forwarded an email from a partner who is doing a lot of PPC in the mobile content industry. Google will require mobile content providers and their affiliates to put the price and billing interval for subscription services in the actual AdWords ads. Quote:

In the coming weeks [...] we will require text and image ads for these services to display the price and billing interval (such as per week or per month) in the ad text, e.g. ‘£5.99/month’. We will no longer accept text or image ads that don’t contain the price and billing interval when promoting mobile content services. When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy.

The guy is seriously scared and concerned about his income now. For more than five years he has been living off mobile content stuff as an affiliate. The only advise I can give him is to move on to other niches. Mobile content has become a somewhat outdated product anyways. I wonder for how much longer people will actually be willing to pay money for this.

Anyways, I just wanted to take this instance as an occasion to reiterate three fundamental principles in affiliate marketing:

  1. Never ever ever rely on Google alone. It’s never good to bet all your money on one horse. If you want to generate additional profit from AdWords campaigns, that’s fine. But the core of your business must be independent of the big G.
  2. Do not copy but innovate. Focus on niches that are up-and-coming and not the ones that are going down the hill. This way you will generate much more sustainable profit.
  3. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. Invest in new ideas and test them to prepare yourself for the future.

More Non-Search Ads via Google AdWords in Germany

Posted on by
Reply

The Content Network has only been the very beginning. Google will be rolling out more advertising opportunities that are not related to search. Publishing offline ads in print media or local radio stations through Google AdWords has been possible in the U.S. for a while already. It looks like that stuff will come to Germany soon.

Here’s a screen shot of the reports section of the AdWords interface. Unfortunately it’s in German because it was sent to me by a friend. But you can figure out yourself that it covers click-to-call (telephone), video and audio ads. Click on the image to see the full version.

The End of Cookie Tracking?

Posted on by
Reply

Concerns about data protection have inspired publishers of web browsers to come up with “stealth” modes. Especially traditional browser cookies are under attack now. Today a large percentage of the online advertising business is based on these cookies. What are the implications?

Internet Explorer

The current version 7 of IE blocks all third-party cookies by default. That means that pages loaded via frames cannot drop cookies at all if their domains are not equipped with a proper P3P policy. Many advertisers haven’t taken care of that, so all the iFrame affiliates will have more and more difficulties.

Internet Explorer 8 is going to introduce a private browsing mode. Cookies are not rejected right away but are treated as session cookies and deleted when the user closes the browser window. Some people refer to it as the “porn mode” but it was originally designed for the use of the internet on somebody else’s machine. Another new feature is giving users the ability to delete all cookies except those of bookmarked websites.

Mozilla Firefox

The current Firefox does not block third-party cookies. But it’s very easy to tell the browser to delete all cookies on closure. And a lot of people actually do this. Also, there are many plugins that filter out banners and cookies today already. The funny thing is that sometimes these impressions are still counted by the delivering ad networks even though nothing is being displayed.

Google Chrome

This sucker is quite ironic. It allows users to switch to a “stealth” mode making it difficult for ad networks to re-target ads and track conversions. However, the browser software itself collects data and passes it back to Google. As a result Chrome only allows Google ads to work, the other ad networks can be blocked. In my mind Chrome is the biggest spyware ever, nicely packaged I have to admit. I hope they’ll get sued over this.

Solution for Online Advertising Networks

For many years the effect of rejected/deleted cookies has been unkown. Now we finally have a profound data basis. AffiliateFuture, an affiliate network based in the UK, observed a 7% increase in tracked conversions after they introduced flash cookies. I think with the introduction of new browser generations the effect will be much higher.

Online advertising networks can’t rely on traditional browser cookies alone anymore. They must also incorporate technologies such as finger-print tracking and the use of flash cookies. Not one of these methods alone will work. They have to be used simultaneously.

Mobile Tracking

A lot of browsers on mobile phones do not support cookies, Javascript and Flash. So none of these methods can be used to track well on the mobile internet. That’s why for example Google’s conversion tracking is useless for mobile ad campaigns. The way to go on mobile is server tracking on the side of the advertiser and batch imports to the ad network.