Tradedoubler AdMatch vs. Google AdSense

April 2nd, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

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!

  1. 4 Responses to “Tradedoubler AdMatch vs. Google AdSense”

  2. By Andy Andreou on Apr 3, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Peter,

    Many thanks for your review on AdMatch. I am glad you see this as a step in the right direction, I am a strong believer of this too as it opens up so many new opportunities for our clients (Publishers and Advertisers).

    We have created a new interface for AdMatch. The pages have been designed with usability in mind by testing this with publishers and advertisers. Their feedback helped shape the design of these pages. We have now changed ‘save as new style’ to German as it should be. Thanks for pointing this out!

    As you say AdMatch is very flexible and publishers have a lot of control over the design (colours, rounded edges) but also the performance (Automatic or manual matching) etc. Our product database has over 17.5 million products. There are over 200,000 active image ads in the system and we are constantly adding more text ads for our 1600 + advertisers. Quantity is very important but we need to also focus on quality, as I have seen other ads in the market place that aren’t so relevant even though they are contextual. Our solution is based on relevancy which is why we do not tag keywords to the text ads. This means our ads will be more relevant which should increase the CTR for publishers but also improve the user experience.

    AdMatch may take slightly longer to load because it scans the page on every impression. This means it can work with secure/password protected pages but also and most importantly always matches our ads with the most up to date copy. If the content has changed then our ads will change with the content.

    Thanks again for your constructive feedback. I hope the above has shed some more light on AdMatch and really hope you will benefit from it.

    Cheers,
    Andy Andreou

  3. By Vincent on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply

    Andy, thanks for TD email but where can we contact you directly!?

    Is your solution compatible with Google Adsense on a website?

  4. By Andreas Andreou on Apr 21, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Vincent,

    Feel free to contact me at Andreas.Andreou [at] TradeDoubler.com

    Yes it certainly is.

    Regards,

    Andy

  5. By Paul on Aug 13, 2008 | Reply

    Thanks Peter for the review. I am currently weighing up the options between AdSense and AdMatch.

    The one problem I am having at the minute is that the image ad being displayed is always the same, even after I added the optional keyword stuff.

    Any help on the topic would be apreciated.

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