Google turned in healthy third-quarter earnings largely thanks to the fact that Google is finally getting serious about cost containment. But that is only half the story. Going into the expected economic downturn, Google is now turning on every additional source of advertising revenues it can. For instance, so far earlier month it began offering AdSense in Flash games, new AdSense links at the bottom of Google Maps, and introduced click-to-buy buttons on YouTube videos. But there are at least two more ways Google is trying to juice those AdSense revenues: an AdSense search box and AdSense ads that link to syndication pages filled with . . . more AdSense ads!
Google might just be testing these, but these efforts are starting to get noticed. One reader who runs a site about Google Chrome, for instance, runs AdSense. But instead of a regular text ad, Google served up the search box at left, inviting people to search for specific ads. In effect, Google is saying, “We are not 100% sure what ads you’d like to see, so why don’t you just tell us?” An ad-only search box is a departure from Google’s past policy of showing the most relevant results, with ads on the side. Although it is clearly labeled, some people might still confuse the AdSense search box with a regular Web search box. Others might find it more helpful than the regular text ad links. [Update: Some readers say this search box is nothing new, see comments].
More troublesome is Google Syndication. Another reader, Michael Oxley, noticed that the AdSense text links on his golf site are directing readers not to a product page with information about a “Tiger Woods Caddy” or “Golf Wear,” but rather to a Google Syndication landing page filled with more AdSense ads (see screenshot below). These landing pages are run by Google (they take you to a googlesyndication.com URL). These pages basically syndicate a bunch of other AdSense ads triggered by the keywords in the original ad that was clicked on.
If Google starts using its Google Syndication pages more widely (they’ve actually been around for a while, it seems, and are also known as Link Units), it could become controversial. That is because they seem to run counter to Google’s own stated policy for landing page quality, a factor that goes into how Google scores each ad. As this NYT article explains:
Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads.
The lower the quality score, the higher an advertiser has to bid for a given keyword. Google itself provides the following guidelines to advertisers who want to improve the quality score of their AdSense ads (I’ve bolded parts for emphasis):
Relevance:
* Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
* Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a page with a description of several products.Originality:
* Feature unique content that can’t be found on another site. This guideline is particularly applicable to affiliates that use the following types of pages:
o Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company
o Mirror pages: Pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site; your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site
* Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional, unique content.
The question here is: Why isn’t Google heeding its own advice?
And is it in effect running house ads that it wouldn’t tolerate from an outside advertiser (or at least punish by increasing the minimum bid required to run them)? When times are tough, anything goes.
Capitalism at is best. Go Google.
http://www.coms....asp?press=2476
They should focus on monetizing YouTube search instead of putting search in Adsense ads.
YouTube gets more searches than Yahoo according to comscore!
I read an article about that recently. I am surprised to not see more of that.
These link ads and landing pages are old, its been like this for at least a year
Link units don’t land on syndicated pages.
Thats wrong. They always landed on syndicated pages like the screenshot above shows.
So this article is a little bit false, even though the basic message of Google doing more to monetize their properties is true. So we probably learn from this, that Erick isn´t clicking on AdSense ads. So … who does?
yeah, this is not new
As has been pointed out, neither of two ad formats described are new.
Here’s a post from 2005 describing Link Units:
http://www.liew...tal-link-units/
And here’s a post from early 2006 describing the search ads — though it was pointed out in the comments to that one that it wasn’t completely new back then either
http://blogosco...-02-02-n28.html
These ads may not be new, but they are newly relevant because of Google’s recent efforts to punish ads with poor quality scores. What I’m suggesting is that these landing pages should translate to low quality scores and, thus, it raises the question of whether Google is applying a double-standard.
Also, in the current economic environment Google needs to juice its revenues any way it can. Is it pushing these types of ads more aggressively now?
Oh this is going to cause all kinds of problems. Especially that misleading search box. It’ll benefit Google sure, but website owners using AdSense might find their clickthroughs dropping nicely once ads become less relevant. Damn you Google, people already equate AdSense with welfare in the world of online advertising!
google has shown they dont abide by their rules anyway.
I am interested to see how this market development will potentially change their operational approach. Maybe things won’t be as much of a ‘fun playground’ anymore in the near future. Or maybe Goog sees that as one fo their core values and sticks with it … It’s always interesting how corporate cultures change when markets turn.
The google syndication ads you point out are called Link Units. They’ve been offered as an ad format to AdSense publishers for quite a while (though I couldn’t tell you how long).
The best thing Google could do is to target ads at user behavior when context is really poor, as in the case with all the social media pages out there. We’ve proven demonstrable lift there. Google won’t do that though lest they “frighten the bunnies” — they already know too much about each of us, so it would trigger some privacy concerns.
Don’t the link units land on specific pages? Not syndicated ad pages?
No, they’ve always landed on pages of ads like this
Searching for ads is a non-sense. Google is just having trouble with their current implementation of content matching, which shows limitations not only in pure algorithmic terms but also in terms of back-filling inventory (not enough ads available for the diversity of content available on the web). Seems like new players are emerging with more efficient solutions to solve that problem, http://www.tech...ing-on-adsense/
who knew? problems with implementation. instead of “content matching” maybe there should be a focus on “location matching.”
Killer Locator -easy prey
u fucking suck
http://www.crunchbase.com appears to be down.
Welcome to 2006. These “view ads about” boxes have been around for quite a while.
The “ad search box” has been around for YEARS.
I can’t believe I am reading this on techcrunch. The author seems to be an adsense newbie.
Link units are pretty old and they have always landed on pages with more adsense text ads. Same with that ad search box, it’s been around from long, they are triggered mosty when there is no or less content.
~Sahil
Obviously the author doesn’t know anything about AdSense. These things have been around for a long time.
These new ad products indicate that Google’s efforts to improve AdSense quality earlier this year resulted in a backlash inside the company. As you may recall, changes were made to decrease the likelihood that users ‘accidentally’ clicked on an ad block, which hurt both AdSense publishers’ income and Google’s bottom line. It now appears that Google has been scrambling to undo this damage and find ways to cover the ad revenues lost from the earlier changes.
The disturbing thing about these changes is that not only is Google creating spammy pages, by its own definition as Erick points out, but that the prior improvements to ad usability have been completely erased on the whole. A page with nothing but AdSense ads? How could content be any less appealing to users? If you had integrated product ratings or something that added contextual meaning that would be one thing- but this new ad page format is a big loss for all users. Very few people who end up viewing one of these ad pages will actually have any desire to see it.
It’s another sign of Google’s monopoly status. A site that hosts spammy links should be penalized by search engines. But who’s left to do the penalizing- especially when there’s one dominant company that controls the rule book…
spamsense.
nice to see everyone working on sunday.
question: why is it that yahoo doesnt utilize patent 361 the same way as Goggl? more people would use yahoo ad auction if they made there system as easy to use as G’oggls. anybody?
Eventually (already there almost), the google directory will become just a list of paid links and searches will just return those links that will make money for google for each link.
Already what it shows is paid links at the top and bottom and to the right, nearly half of the links returned for a typical search are paid links anyway.
This will be self-defeating at some point when advertisers realize they are just paying to be listed on google, and not merely for extra ads. Yahoo did this in the early days, charging $200+ for links to be added to their directory, and look at what happened to their search engine today.
The point is that these syndication ads don’t conform to Google’s own guidelines, not whether they are new or not.
Erick, this has been around for months. It’s like their own version of illegal ad arbitration.
bit surprised to see this post – I agree that the link units could be debated but we had this discussion when they came out a couple of years ago.
I may be late to the party here, but because you discussed this a few years ago doesn’t mean I can’t bring it up again. Especially in light of Google’s recent crackdown on landing page quality. I think it’s worth debating some more.
Making adsense better definitely makes me happy!!
Jesse W.
http://www.churchofcowherd.com
@Justin Davey – Link units have been around forever (figuratively speaking) and take you to syndication pages. Maybe you are thinking of “text” links versus image ads?
Nothing new here…
Good points though on Google’s double standard. Talk about MFA sites!
Eric,
On the subject of maximizing revenues I’m surprised you didn’t take up this example as well: http://www.paid...-four-year-ban/
Pros have known about Google’s questionable adhesion to it’s “Do No Evil” slogan for years, but with a strongly critical post in TechCrunch about Google’s panicky pursuit of higher revenues, we see the behemoth starting to crumble. Beginning of the end?
Nothing new here… Link Units and Ad Search are old hat and pretty shit to be honest…
Remember guys, Google owns the Information Super Highway…
They make the rules but don’t have to follow them… They create no content, but pretty much own the market for monetizing content (i.e. Online Advertising). As Gekko once said, I create NOTHING – I own EVERYTHING.
They publish guidelines to suit themselves… They also created the link selling / buying marketplace as a by product of the over relevance of link popularity. Although, I have to say for the most part Google search results are excellent as a result of Page Rank blah, blah, blah…
Finally, they expect small / medium businesses (the guys that make up the majority of the web) to spend most of their time creating unique wonderful content, understand the the labourious process of SEO and dump lots of cash on PPC…
Oh, one more thing… Google is lifting the block on Gambling Ads for the UK… I wonder if it has anything to do with this particular sector being recession proof…
Pah!
Double dipping big Goog fella. You will fall hard soon for your evil crimes. Soon……
Well hey, Google is doing what they feel is in the best interest not only to themselves, but the advertisers and publishers, in efforts to help everyone make money online, despite the economic meltdown…
http://www.Buil...rewryonline.net
The AdSense search box started around September 2005.
AdSense Link Units started in the March of 2005 as AdSense AdLinks.
So, both are really old news.
http://www.goog...m/search?q=GOOG
It’s still sliding, it slid again in after hours after the Thursday announcement when it closed on Friday.
Kind of off topic, but I use Chrome as my primary browser. Recently while using Hulu I have noticed weird Google Analytics urls popping up in the loading bar (I doubt Hulu is using Google for analytics). Is it possible Google is monitoring user behavior through Chrome to get a better understanding of competitor sites.
no kidding sherlock holmes
I read the page about links units. What strikes me is that it seems it is up to the PUBLISHER to add link units: https://www.goo...&lev=answer
So the real question I would like an answer to is whether the reader Michael Oxley did or did not set up himself the link units. Links units may have been around for a while but IF now Google uses them WITHOUT publishers setting them up, then that is the real news, I think.
the Ad-only Search box, I have seen it many times. In China, Google Adsense’s pay is very low.
Both of these have been like this for months if not years. There is no news here!
Like others have said, this has been around quite a while. We also have search sponsored only right on Google if you look – for instance http://www.goog...llow+journalism
I believe one of the first Google Founders Award went to a few key people working on the AdSense team for coming up with the unit that we call “radlinks” which is the linked keywords shown above. Sometimes we don’t have good ad key words to show so we present the sponsored only search box. Despite the aspersions you cast, our intentions are to help people with commercial intent find what they are looking for balanced with using the minimum number of pixels. It is clearly an “Ad” (can’t miss that label) and we help the user disambiguate their intention by suggesting the keywords. So it is exactly what we promise to the user and the resulting ads are extremely relevant as you show in your example. The publisher could also just run a larger AdSense unit where we would put our best effort of contextually relevant ads leading directly to an advertisers site.
One thing that is often overlooked is how great this program is for the entrepreneurial spirit of the web. Adsense now supports a large number of sites that just would not be able to exist without Google. (I did notice an adsense skyscraper on this page too.) Oh, and they do help pay for the fuel for the 767 so we can hit all the green tech conferences and Davos. Thanks for that.
Go Green, Vote Obama.
I dont think this is any new feature of Adsense, I have been seeing this on various blogs for past one year or so..
as lots of people have said these have existed for over a year, whenever google can’t come up with relevant ads it invites you to search for what you want instead. likewise the link ad units which link to a page with real ads have been around for over a year. you sound like someone who has just discovered the internet/google.. not what one would expect to see on TC.
to summarize: fail.
The link units with only ’search’ are old – have been there for a long time. However ads that link to ad-syndicated pages are new to us.
Ron Mertens
Metalgrass software – publishers of “AdSenseLog” – the must-have tool for AdSense publishers
As another person already pointed out, it seems that perhaps these link units and the search box are implemented by Adsense publishers voluntarily.
I’m not a big adsense user, but the real story seems to be that if these things are being implemented by Google without the publisher implementing them that would be cause for some concern or at least a closer look.
Again, this may not be the case or perhaps it has always worked like this I don’t know.
I guess this is the problem with too much growth, at some point it becomes unsustainable. Its a great problem to have, hopefully they won’t try to do too much and as a result tarnish such a wonderful brand. Growth by acquisition is still a great strategy.
Yawn…if we are ever to take TechCrunch seriously it needs to do basic research before publishing articles.
As others have pointed out, this is nothing new. Both of these are old hat. The link units have been around for a long time and they have never landed people directly on an end-user landing page. After all, that would be an irrelevant ad for someone to click on based on only a keyword.
Don’t understand the fuss over this feature. Its been around for ages. I have blogged about it as soon as Dec’ 07.
http://shreeniw...le-feature.html
I wouldn’t be surprised if they start tweaking (down) the rev share for Adsense publishers.
The article and david’s comment has left me thinking that if Google can show searchboxes where ads would go, then they could put whatever they want in these rectangles all over the internet. So just like David’s hint around Chrome, they could put Analytics code in the ads, check who you are using for your RSS feed if not them, check how your page looks like at the end (after all the javascript, which GoogleBot does not see), even go check other ad units from competitors in that same page and choose their own ads based on the competitor’s link keywords…
google adsense is very nice,can get money by it….:)
the search box only shows up if there is no relevant link unit topics to show on the page. this is basically a PSA for ad units. it has been the same behavior since ‘05.
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this is one of the way bloggers use to monetize their blogs…very effective..
adsenseblog.info/