Contextual Targeting Sucks

Well it sure sucks a lot of the time.

This morning I woke up and checked in on my blog.

There were ads for stem cells and pro-life wristbands on it.

Neither of which I am advocating.

And neither of which I would expect my audience to be particularly interested in either.

Sometimes the contextual stuff works brilliantly.  Like the Amazon ads in my RSS feed (courtesy of Feedburner) that place an ad for the Bright Eyes or Sondra Lerche albums right at the bottom of those posts.

And I think contextual may work even better in RSS than it does in HTML since the post is often a tighter set of context than a web page.

But in general, the results are really mixed.  And it makes me wonder about the long term viability of contextual advertising at large.  At a minimum, the ads need to be delivered with some filter that is publisher driven so that the really off base stuff doesn't get in.

This is not the first time I've made this point.  Last November my blog was full of Ralph Nader and OTC Venture Capital deals.

It hasn't gotten any better since then and I fear its gotten worse.

Comments

[Derek Scruggs]

For what it's worth, a friend of mine who makes a pretty penny off AdSense has figured out how the Google algorithm works for content targetting (more or less - only Google knows for sure). Basically, pick your preferred keywords and put them in <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tags. And/or bold and italicize them.

And for blogs, remove the words "RSS" and "blog" wherever possible because these always generate ads for (surprise!) RSS and blog tools.

We've talked about how, if this catches on, "corporate control of the media" will not be a conspiracy theory. It will show up in headlines and body copy. Whereas pithiness and alliteration are the current standards for excellence in headline writing, keyword cramming could become the norm. (I'm kidding. Nervously.)

[Toby]

I think the key to sucessful contextual advertising is going to be descriptive metadata. I really think social tagging goes a long way towards properly defining the meaning of a piece of information.

For example, I've always thought it would be cool if del.icio.us offered some sort of adsense functionality where advertisers could bid on tags, and then have their ad show up in the RSS feed and on the delicious pages where that tag was prevelant (user or url pages).

This has the nice effect of community metadata definition and is probably harder to game than the current adsense system.

[direwolff]

Hey Fred,

This is why so many see the ability to generate 2% or 6% clickthroughs as being an effective enough return. It's ridiculous, and worse, not much better than this being pure chance. The fact is, that keywords are not "key ideas". Key ideas are contained in any piece of unstructured text (ie. blog, news article, short story, etc.), and don't always require the use of the words in the text to convey the idea. Keywords are what Google synthesizes all of these ideas too...poorly...though not much worse that Alexa's Quicklinks for the Amazon store(s), or any of the other contextual matching schemes I've seen, (but one). Matching keywords to key ideas and hoping that this will produce good results is ludicrous. Context *is* important, and it's good to see you realizing this too in so many words. I blogged about this issue and touch on what I believe is missing here...

http://direwolff.blogspot.com/2005/02/simplistic-discussion-on-tags-and.html

Having said that, I'm hopeful that we will begin to see a technology emerge that will begin addressing the issues you've raised.

[steve]

and yet *what* percentage of google's revenues allegedly come from contextual targeting? 50% of their revenue comes from non-google sites. i dare say a huge piece of that is "contextual targeting." which we all know stinks. and yet its generating huge click thrus and happy buyers? the industry (incl. google) basically acknowledges 10-15% click fraud. how high is it really?

[AdSense Sucks]

Google burned me good with AdSense.

I had been running their contextual text links on a half dozen of my sites.. after I had earned about $400, they sent me an "invalid clicks" email which looked like it wasn't even written by a human. I had no idea what they were talking about, and I promptly asked what was up, and nicely offered to fix the problem..

They ignored my responses and I never did see the money.

I would suggest that folks avoid AdSense like the plague. I searched around about this "invalid clicks" issue, and it seems to happen to a lot of people, and it always seems to happen when it's getting close to payout time. Maybe this is part of a plan to increase their margins?

I've since swapped out all my CPC Google AdSense ads with CPA ads from AzoogleAds. I'm making WAY more money with them, and the checks show up on time every month when they're supposed to. No lame excuses or reps hiding under their desks.

I have earned over $200,000 USD lifetime with them, and I've been paid on time every time. I would strongly suggest that folks check them out, and stop running Google AdSense ads on your sites before you get burned too. It seems to be standard protocol. It's quite unpleasant to drive in thousands of legitimate clicks over the course of a few months for an advertiser, and then get screwed by them when it comes time for them to square up.

I'd also like to mention that I'm NOT an employee of AzoogleAds, nor am I trying to just spam their name out. I have had great personal experiences with them, and I think they're a rock solid Internet marketing agency.

...and they've never burned me like Google AdSense did.. even on 5 figure checks.

Two Thumbs Up!
Whammy