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Google muscles into Display Advertising via Adwords

11 November 2008 by admin
Filed under Articles + Google

Google has recently launched it’s display network capabilities through the Adwords advertising system.  Traditionally this has been called the “Content Network” and has, in the main, been underwhelming for most advertisers and SEM agencies.  In fact, it is fair to argue that most PPC account managers disable to content network.  Why is this?  Because Google’s content network has gained a reputation, rightly or wrongly as producing thousands of impressions, very little traffic and not very well qualified traffic at that.  When I have used it I have found that for lead generation sites for example, the conversions were low quality compared to those gained through search.

In Google’s defence however, they have gone to great efforts to improve the performance on the content network.  One of the ways they have done this is with the PPR report (Product Placement Report) allowing you to see which sites your ads are appearing on and the relevant performance metrics.  From this you can exclude certain sites from the inventory or just advertise on the most successful ones. They have also increased the size and quality of the inventory that the ads are displayed on as well as allowing other forms of ads to appear aside from text ads, such as image ads, video ads and flash banner ads.  In fact the new flash driven display ads formats are set out as basic templates that can be easily modified, eliminating the need for a design agency for those who are happy with these free templates.

Money Spinner?

Google realise there is huge potential for revenue here and is trying to cut out the other vested interests, namely Display Networks.  They act as the middle man between the advertiser and publisher.  Traditionally display advertising has been the activity of larger corporates and established businesses who wish to spread their brand message. Google by allowing display advertising to be set up in a matter on minutes via Adwords is exposing a great deal more of advertisers to this form of marketing.  Also it’s inventory is likely to be much greater than that of an orthodox display network (although maybe not as high profile), with thousands of publishers signed up to it’s adsense scheme, which is responsible for a third of Google’s income.  There are certainly more and more high profile websites accepting adsense ads.  This is because of improvements made by Google, allowing flash banners etc, which make the ads appear more attractive to the major publishers.  Some publishers use a mixture of traditional display and adsense ads - for example the timesonline uses traditional display ads for the most prominent areas (tracked via a network), with adsense ads further down the page. Google has also been on a massive PR drive with regard to the content network, I know from my own experience they have been promoting it within the adwords interface and also via interaction with SEM agencies.  I would assume they have also been banging on the door of the major online publishers, guardian, times etc trying to extol the benefits of using adsense.

If the major publishers think they can get more revenue from Adsense than from advertising brokered through a network then they more likely to give space and position to them.  For advertisers, at present to run a display campaign they will usually hire an ad agency who will charge them a fee based on advertising spend.  On top of this they will have to pay an override for the ad delivery (network) charges.  Is it possible that an advertiser could run a successful display campaign without a network or agency.  Not yet, how many clients know how to use adwords?  However Google’s display advertising drive appears to endager display networks more than SEM agencies.

Media Planning

Having not run either a display campaign or indeed an adwords driven display campaign I cannot profess to be any sort of authority in this area.  What I do know is that traditional display campaigns are booked in advanced with the various publishers.  For example you might pay for 1,000,000 impressions in the Guardian money section for one month for example.  Google’s content network is driven by CPM and CPC but you pay once the impressions or clicks have accrued, having set a campaign daily budget and max CPC/CPM.  In that respect it can be argued you cannot plan the campaign as effectively as you cannot guarantee coverage at the very start as you will not know how high to set a CPC or CPM?

I suppose the key difference is that the Adwords driven campaign will be keyword related, so you can assist Google in deciding which content your ads appear against.  Another difference is the rates for CPM in a traditional campaign are brokered between the publisher and the advertiser or someone  working on behalf of the advertiser.  Also with an adsense display campaign, the ads are automatically placed next to most relevant content by Google, whereas with a traditional display majority of the the publisher sites are usually chosen in advance.   In addition to this, the Adwords CPM and CPC are set by the advetiser, and can be adjusted on  daily basis to increase / decrease coverage.  With a traditional campaign, the CPM is agreed at the start.  Publishers can optimise their adsense by placing high CTR ads higher up the page or in the most prominent positions to maximise revenue.  One thing that will be interesting is the percentage of the click that Google will share with the publishers (an equivelent network charge), a mystery to most?

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