AdWords is Google’s branded text-based pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service.

Google’s advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored link” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers’ bids (thus the system is classified as P4P) and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown for a given search.

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google’s partner networks. The “search network” includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The “content network” shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. Google automatically determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes resembling banner ads, with the designation “Ads By Gooooooooooogle.” These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.

AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and MSN’s soon-to-be-launched adCenter.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords.

Legal context

The service has generated lawsuits in the area of trademark law and click fraud. [1]

Interacting with Adwords

The ads are displayed on the right hand side of the natural search results. The ads are pure text, and thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within an IFRAME (an HTML element), making them easy to remove with advertisement blockers.

Technology

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL ([2])

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ
• Adwords Lawsuits
• Google AdWords API
• Google Advertising Professionals aka GAP’s
• WhoisaGAP Helps you find out who is a Google Advertising Professional

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A central ad server is a computer server that stores advertisements and delivers them to web site visitors. These servers centrally store the ads so that advertisers and publishers can track from one source the distribution of their online advertisements, and have one location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web.

The central ad server was first developed and introduced by FocaLink Media Services in 1995 for controlling online advertising or banner ads. The company was founded by Dave Zinman and Jason Strober, and based in Palo Alto, CA. In 1998, the company changed its name to AdKnowledge, and was eventually purchased by CMGI in 1999.

Ad Server Functionality

The typical common functionality of ad servers includes:

• Uploading creative, including display advertisements and rich media
• Trafficking ads according to differing business rules
• Targeting ads to different users, or content
• Optimizing creative based on results
• Reporting impressions, clicks, post-click activities, and interaction metrics

Advanced functionality may include:

• Frequency capping creative so users only see messages a limited amount of time
• Sequencing creative so users see messages in a specific order (sometimes known as surround sessions
• Excluding competitive creative so users do not see competitors’ ads directly next to one another
• Displaying creatives so an advertiser can own 100% of the inventory on a page (sometimes known as roadblocks
• Targeting creatives to users based on their previous behavior (Behavioral marketing)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the web site or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.

Two types of internet companies use ad serving: web sites and advertisers. The main purpose of using an ad server is different for both of them:

For a web site, the ad server needs to look through all the ads available to serve to a user who is on a page, and choose the one that will make the web site the most money, but still conform to the rules that the advertiser and web site have agreed. For example if a web site has 10 different advertisers that have paid for a big square ad, the ad server must decide which one to serve (or display). One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am – 5pm. If it is after 5pm, then the Ad Server must not serve that one. Another advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day. The ad server must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve it again if the user has seen it. Another advertiser may have agreed a high price, but only if the person watching the page is in the United States. In that case, the Ad Server needs to check the IP address to determine if the user is in the US and then decide which is the highest paying ad for that user, in the US, at that time, given what that user has seen in the past.

For an advertiser the ad server needs to try to serve the ad that is most likely to result in a sale of the product advertised. For example if a user is viewing a page, the advertiser’s ad server needs to decide from previous history, what ad that user is most likely to click on and then buy the product advertised. If the user is on a technology page, then the ad server may know that on technology types of pages, the ad that works best is a blue one with mostly text and pricing and numbers, not the green ad with a picture of a model and little text. The ad server will therefore serve this ad, to try and get the highest probability of a sale from the ad.

Ad Serving is most complex when it is used by an Advertising Network. An advertising network buys ads from many web sites and therefore acts like an advertiser user of Ad Serving. When the network buys ads, it tries to place ads on sites where they work best. However an ad network then sells its aggregated ad inventory to advertisers. When doing this, it uses its Ad Serving software as a web site does. In this case it tries to make the most money by only running the ads from advertisers that pay most.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Anti-spyware programs often report Web advertisers’ HTTP cookies as spyware. Web sites (including advertisers) set cookies — small pieces of data rather than software—to track Web-browsing activity: for instance to maintain a “shopping cart” for an online store or to maintain consistent user settings on a search engine.

Only the Web site that sets a cookie can access it. In the case of cookies associated with advertisements, the user generally does not intend to visit the Web site which sets the cookies, but gets redirected to a cookie-setting third-party site referenced by a banner ad image. Some Web browsers and privacy tools offer to reject cookies from sites other than the one that the user requested.

Advertisers use cookies to track people’s browsing among various sites carrying ads from the same firm and thus to build up a marketing profile of the person or family using the computer. For this reason many users object to such cookies, and anti-spyware programs offer to remove them.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Many forms of search engine optimization only amount to ensuring compliance to search engines’ guidelines for inclusion and removing any technical barriers that might keep the website from reaching a proper ranking. However, other methods of search engine optimization such as keyword spamming are often viewed as “gaming the system” and considered unethical.

Displaying advertisements or sponsored results in an area visually separated from the algorithmically determined results is generally considered ethical. However, some search engines allow the ranking of a website to be influenced with a payment and provide little or no indication to the end-user that this has happened. Since the search engines give the impression or claim that the rankings reflect the relevance or popularity of the websites, this is often seen unfair or deceptive.

Search engine advertising products that don’t guarantee a specific ranking or an amount of visibility are seen as unethical by some search engine marketers. The product might provide an unspecified “boost” or the final ranking or visibility might be a result of an auction.

Paid inclusion has not caused much concern. However, it has been suggested that search engines should improve the speed they pick up new websites and that paid inclusion services thus create a conflict of interest that discourages improving service levels across the board.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Googletestad appears to stand for Google’s Test Ad which is used for live testing of their AdWords and AdSense pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system.

At the moment there are no define: googletestad definitions in Google’s database for this keyword.

The Google Test Ad

The following paid advertisement appears for a Google search on googletestad:

Popularity of googletestad as a Search Term

In June 2005, googletestad began appearing increasingly in the top search terms for search engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing. and WordTracker.

In July 2005 this keyword was consistently in the top 30 searches as measured by WordTracker, and received over 100,000 searches according to Yahoo! Search Marketing thus:

• 72,161 searches – google googletestad monitor query
• 39,436 searches – googletestad
• 96 searches – foo google googletestad monitor query

The WordTracker Keywords Report dated August 9, 2005 (top 10 queries from the last 48 hours) reported:

• 1 jessica simpson (3377)
• 2 jessica alba (3314)
• 3 music lyrics (2679)
• 4 daniela hantuchova (1955)
• 5 paris hilton (1469)
• 6 playstation 2 cheats (1243)
• 7 xbox cheats (1231)
• 8 jokes (1069)

• googletestad (1048)

• 10 google (1013)

Regarding the keyword’s trend, back issues of that service’s Top 200 long-term keyword report (for the last 110 days) showed gaining popularity:

(date – rank, and count)

• August 9, 2005 – 55 (35,032)
• August 2, 2005 – 64 (32,737)
• July 26, 2005 – 94 (28,793)
• July 19, 2005 – 105 (24,878)

As of August 13th 2005, there were 12,800 hits found for googletestad in Google’s search engine.

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Because of the ability to track results of online advertising at a more granular level than what is available through traditional advertising, varying ways have developed for the advertisers and publishers to do business. The three most common ways in which online advertising is purchased are CPA, CPC, and CPM.

CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser only pays for the media on the basis of the number of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up.

CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising is also performance based and is common in search marketing, where it is often known as Pay per click (PPC). In this scheme, an advertisement may be displayed (and assumedly viewed) many times, but the advertiser only pays based on the number of user clicks. This system provides an incentive for publishers to target ads correctly (often by keyword), as the payment depends upon the ad not only being seen, but the viewer responding and following the hyperlink.

CPM (Cost per Thousand) advertising is the most common basis in the business and is used for most display advertising and rich media. This scheme most closely resembles offline advertising, wherein the advertiser is paying for exposure of their message to a specific audience. CPM costs are priced per thousand, so that a $1 CPM, means that the advertiser pays $1 for every thousand impressions.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

With the dawn of the Internet have come many new advertising opportunities. Popup, Flash, banner, and email advertisements (the last often being a form of spam) abound. Recently, the advertising community has attempted to make the adverts themselves desirable to the public. In one example, Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, which as a result contained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. Similarly, product placement for Rolex watches and BMW cars featured in recent James Bond films.

Each year, greater sums are paid to obtain a commercial spot during the Super Bowl. Companies attempt to make these commercials sufficiently entertaining that members of the public will actually want to watch them.

Particularly since the rise of “entertaining” advertising, some people may like an advert enough that they wish to watch it later or show a friend. In general, the advertising community has not yet made this easy, although some have used the Internet to widely distribute their adverts to anyone wishing to see or hear them.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

It currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google’s search index.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

1. They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
2. They build valuable content on their sites; content which attracts AdSense ads and which pay out the most when they get clicked.
3. They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on Ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like “Click on my AdSense ads” to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.

The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.

Links

• Google AdSense
• Google wants to dominate Madison avenue, too (The New York Times, 2005)
• AdSense patent application

One of the effects of advertising is to modify the nature of the communication media where it is shown. The most clear example is television. Channels that get most of their revenues from publicity try to make their medium a good place for communicating ads. That means trying to make the public stay for long times and in a mental state that will make spectators not to switch the channel through the ads. Programs that are low in mental stimulus and require light concentration and are varied are best for long sitting times and make for much easier emotional jumps to ads, that can become more entertaining than regular shows. A simple way to understand the objectives in television programming is to compare contents from channels paid and chosen by the viewer with channels that get their income mainly from advertisements.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.