Usability

Even though Tradedoubler has made a huge step in the right direction, AdSense is still better. For example, Tradedoubler forgot to translate some of the interface words into local languages. Here’s an example of a mixture of a German interface with English wordings:

1:0 in favor of AdSense

Flexibility

Tradedoubler AdMatch lets you do way more stuff than Google AdSense. I like the fact that Tradedoubler also employs the product databases of its affiliate programs. However, Tradedoubler’s inventory of advertisers is minimal compared to Google’s. So even though Tradedoubler offers more in terms of looks, Google offers you way more matching ads.
2:0 in favor of AdSense

Technical Performance

I’m not impressed by AdMatch’s performance. It takes longer to load than AdSense, especially when it needs to examine a URL for the first time. Also, on Internet Explorer 7.0 on my Vista machine, AdMatch fails to display the ads under certain conditions. I can see that text is moved down and space reserved by the ad, but I can just see a blank space. I could reproduce that error on another machine.
3:0 in favor of AdSense

Conclusion

AdMatch is buggy! And Tradedoubler doesn’t have enough ads to be able to provide a good match for all these content sites out there. AdMatch is worth a try for those who run Tradedoubler affiliate programs already. Don’t use it if you make most of your money from contextual advertising!

Today Tradedoubler announced that they would offer a contextual advertising creative format called AdMatch, promising a “market-leading contextual advertising solution”:

AdMatch launches across Europe on 31st March and is unique in its ability to serve ads across three separate ad formats: text, product and display. By scanning the content of web pages and facilitating the placement of ads alongside contextually relevant website content, AdMatch will help to improve the relevancy of advertising on your site …

Technically it seems to me that this is just a mix of the existing AdTool (2004) and a spider bot. The business idea behind it is good and other players have had great success with their contextual advertising solutions. Individual merchants such as eBay and Amazon as well as ad networks such as Google (AdSense), affilinet (affilimatch) or now Pepperjam have been offering this for years already. They all have a great inventory of advertisers on board.

But I’m not sure if Tradedoubler has got a product and creative library big enough for the world-wide web. Pepperjam or even AdSense might be the better solutions here, especially when it comes to usability. The Tradedoubler interface is a pain in the neck. But hey, you can prove me wrong.

Long time no news from Swedish online media company Tradedoubler. Now they finally decided to expand to Asia with an office in Tokyo. Also they introduced their own search marketing tool called td Searchware 4, formerly known as BidBuddy by the acquired company The Technology Works.