Category Archives: Advertising

Google Acquires DoubleClick

April 13th saw Google finalise a deal to acquire online media and advertising heavy weight DoubleClick Inc. The announcement from Google states that they’ve purchased DoubleClick for USD$3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity.

The interesting thing here isn’t that Google have purchased yet another monster business but that they are one of the biggest forces in the online advertising landscape. DoubleClick currently service a different type of online advertising client than Google, so the DoubleClick business will definitely complement Google’s online advertising strategies. More importantly though, Google gain all of the technology that DoubleClick have been developing which focuses strongly around rich media advertising. I expect it won’t be long before we see Google start to aggressively roll out rich media advertising into their current products such as Google Video and YouTube and subsequently into the wider market as well.

Interesting times ahead for online advertisers, the internet landscape is changing yet again.

Search Engine Optimisation & Referral Tracking

If you’re looking to set up an affiliate network or you’ve already got one, you should be aware of a couple important points which might just change how you have or are thinking about setting it up.

Physically setting up an affiliate program is quite straight forward and you have two choices in handling the inbound links and referral tracking:

Single entry point
Using a single entry point in your site, where everyone links to with their respective referral code which then shunts the user to the desired page. Using this method, you might end up with:

  • http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=1
  • http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=2
  • http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=3
Multiple entry points
Allowing multiple entry points facilitates deep linking. If you allow multiple entry points, you might end up with:

  • http://mydomain.com/page-1/?ref=abc
  • http://mydomain.com/page-2/?ref=abc
  • http://mydomain.com/page-3/?ref=abc

Both of these methods will work but which one is better for search engine optimisation? If you use a single entry point, you end up in a position where you’ll have hundreds or thousands of inbound links to a particular page. Unfortunately, the page that they are linking to isn’t useful to a search engine for indexing – it simply redirects to another page. You do however get the benefit of being able to effortlessly reorganise a web sites structure and only have to worry about updating destination URL’s in a single location.

Using multiple entry points allows your marketing or affiliates to link directly to their intended page with their referral code, which can make a difference on various levels:

  • it’s convenient for the people linking to the page
  • it’s less error prone, as the linker can simply copy the URL from the browser
  • the linked URL will begin to gain inbound links, which is critical for effective search engine optimisation
  • the person clicking on the URL can hover the URL and see where it is going

The last point might seem like something you might otherwise gloss over, however as internet users become more savvy – they are becoming acutely aware of their online actions. Letting the user clicking on the link see the destination URL will help build trust between your web site and them, as they will be less inclined to think the link is spam.

My personal preference is towards deep linking, it’s just so convenient. If you allow deep linking, the next problem you have is your affiliated links making their way into the search engine result pages; which is definitely not what you want. Fortunately, through the use of a robots.txt file it is possible to drop the affiliated URL’s from being indexed. In the above multiple entry point example, you could stop those URL’s from being indexed by including the following line into your robots.txt file:

  1. User-agent: *
  2. Disallow: /?ref

Unfortunately, your work isn’t quite done, as all of the inbound links are linking into distinct URL’s (ie, with the referral code). As far as a search engine is concerned, these are totally separate web pages which could/should have unique content. To leverage the most out of your inbound links, you want to make sure the link ends up pointing to the permanent URL for the content (ie, without the referral code).

Remembering that you are tracking referral codes, the web site must first do something useful with the referral code. Useful might be placing the referral code in a cookie for later use or storing it in a database, but something generally needs to happen with it. Once the useful action has been completed, you need to send a standard HTTP redirect to the user agent (browser, bot, ..) to tell it the permanent URL for that content exists at a different URL – in this case the same URL without the referral code. Consult the documentation for your favourite server side language about handling HTTP response codes.

By implementing these two simple techniques, you now only have a single copy of any of your web pages indexed in the search engines and any inbound referral links will ultimately be attributed to the permanent URL for the actual content.

You can now sleep easily at night knowing you have search engine optimised referral tracking.

Google Adsense & Images Clarified

The Google Adsense team have clarified the use of images near Google Adsense advertising.

For those that can’t be bothered clicking through and want a quick run down:

Can you display little images beside the Google Adsense ad units?
No, you cannot display little images beside the Google Adsense ad units. Doing so implies a relationship between the images and the advertising, which there isn’t.
Can you display images beside the Google Adsense advertising?
Yes, you can display images beside the Google Adsense ad units, so long as it is clear that there is no association between the image(s) and the advertising.
Can I display images on the same page as Google Adsense advertising?
Yes, of course you can but you must take the above two points into consideration first.
Can you add in some white space or a separating bar between the images and the advertising?
No, adding in white space or a separator would still appear as though there was a relationship between the images and the advertising.

I first noticed people placing images beside the Google Adsense advertising a couple of months ago. As soon as I noticed it, I knew that it wouldn’t be within the acceptable usage policy for Google Adsense. Unfortunately, at the time the policy didn’t explicitly disallow doing such a thing. So, while it wasn’t expressly forbidden, publishers took advantage of the loop hole and I’m sure enjoyed far higher click through rates than they would have otherwise seen.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Launches Sponsored Results

Yahoo! have been in the search engine and search marketing game for a long time. Recently, Yahoo! Search Marketing increased their offering to match those of Google by allowing sponsored search results.

Using Yahoo! Search Marketing, you’re now able to have your advertisements listed along side the normal Yahoo! search results. In a similar fashion to that of Google, you have two general positions where your advertisements can be placed:

  • Directly above to search results in a wide banner style
  • On the right hand side of the search results, stacked in a tall skyscraper shape

Yahoo! have also included one more advertising position:

  • Directly below the search results in a wide banner style

Its interesting that Yahoo! have included the advertising space below the main results. Typically, the lower section of a web site is under developed. There is significant amounts of research which describes the benefits you can receive by optimising the lower section of your web site. If the price of that advertising space is right, I think it might turn out to be a fantastic value proposition for advertisers.

Without signing up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, it seems reasonable that you’ll be paying more for the advertising space directly above the search results; as they are more visually prominent and look similar to natural search listings. Second will probably be the sponsored search results on the right and the cheapest will probably be the advertising at the bottom.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Yahoo! search results:

  • There sponsored advertising isn’t always clearly marked. As an example, the right hand side advertising is quite clearly marked, however the above and below is not.
  • Yahoo! seem to always present a lot of other stuff in search results. For example, you are likely to see alternative search suggestions, the top advertising block, some Yahoo! shortcut links and finally the actual natural search results.
  • As a derivative of point #2, the search results page feels cluttered and busy

To the defense of Yahoo!, they do place little icons beside each block in an attempt to separate them. For a savvy internet user, they will probably notice and associate the icons and realise there is something different about those results. Unfortunately, I expect that an average user probably won’t; at which point they are clicking on advertising without knowing it.