I was curious about this: Many advertisers are realizing that search has better results that content based syndication (including myself as an adwords advertiser) due to the click fraud, etc issues. With the trend of them moving away from content advertising, do you think these contextual advertising programs (YPN, Adwords, etc) will be hurt by this in the next year or so?
I think google et al will do a better job in detecting click fraud, which is also an issue for search based advertising, by the way.
How can click fraud become an issue with search? My understanding was the comparison between advertising on contextual networks versus serach results [putting focus on content to garner "free" search results]. Maybe I misunderstand the question?
Is he comparing a free and paid service??? I thought he meant ads that show in google (that's search) and content based are those in publishers sites
Click fraud is a problem for search just as it is for content. I would expect increased anti-fraud systems, but I don't see contextual advertising stopping. I, for one, have several Google Adwords campaigns that convert better on content traffic than the search traffic.
yeah, I'm only talking in the realm of PPC not free organic searches. Comparing between contextual PPC (adwords in content aka adsense for the publisher) and search PPC (sponsored adwords in search)
This is rather a more complex issue than it would seem. The results you get with search and content advertising will definitely depend largely on what you are advertising. For some products/services advertising in search results will be a better option, for others advertising on the content sites will do much better. So there will always be people that do advertise on the content network. With the introduction of CPM site-targeted ads, I think Google has provided a new way for people to advertise to minimize the click-fraud doubts. That being said, I think we will start seeing much more selection orientated advertising from advertisers point of view. Instead of advertising on the general content network, they can go and search for sites on their topic and only advertise on the ones they like (site advertising). Contextual advertising will definitely not be hurt... I think they will actually grow. Especially if webmasters start acting ethically and provided geniune content.
In my opinion contextual advertising will stay as long as people read text. Google is not really facing a new problem with click fraud. It existed since the beginnings of internet marketing. Now the problem itself just became more popular because a) we have much more publishers and advertisers and b) people learned more about the technology of internet advertising. All the older advertising networks like ad pepper had to face the exact same problems with their campaigns (they were offering CPM and CPC campaigns). I remember myself cheating the system of one of those agencies by making an auto refresh on the sites that displayed CPM ads (I was getting a fixed price for 1000 PIs). That was something I would really call easy money. Nowadays it's harder. Mainly because we have so much more competition in the field. Companies want to provide a better ROI to the advertisers. Google was the first company that could give them such a good ROI with the SERPs, and with AdSense they were able to build a huge automated advertising network. They make good money with it, so I guess they will be investing quite a bit into its improvement. They might not be able to get much more than they are getting nowadays, but I think they want to preserve the status quo, at least. But contextual advertising is not all that we will get from Google. In my opinion they could be running CPA ads in the near future. This would improve their credibility from the advertiser's point of view. In the past weeks I saw a few articles from people saying that AdWords does not pay off for them, so they just stop using it. CPA ads would be safer for advertisers because they would only have to pay when the customer actually buys something and they make revenue. I don't know yet how Google should rank those types of ads among the other types, but that's a different topic.
I also don't think any of it's going away, and there will just be more of everything as Internet usage grows. The CPC model is really just a specific version of the CPA in which the action is the 'click'. In the future I think we're going to see more and more choices for actions as advertisers. One example that comes to mind if google's recent trial of pay-per-call ads (for more info - http ://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/28/business/ecom.php ).
At some point someone has to click something, whether it's an ad on a page or a search result. Fraud isn't mitigated by search.