Domainer's Gazette-Home

#3 big boy entering the contextual ad space..

domainers are gonna have another distribution channel to test (which is great)..bad thing is the amount of advertisers in the MSN network is pitifully low….ask.com may have more in their network..debatable though.

here’s what they just emailed me in regards to “Microsoft Content Ads Beta”

Dear Peter,

We’re excited to announce the release of the Microsoft® Content AdsBeta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29. With this release, you can extend your advertising reach beyond search, and choose how your accounts are upgraded.

Choose how you want to upgrade
On August 29, you don’t have to make any changes and your ad groups will automatically expand to hybrid distribution, meaning they will distribute to search and content pages.

If you’re not ready for Content Ads at this time, fill out this web form by August 26 to upgrade in search-only mode. By upgrading in search-only mode, you’ll still have access to the content network; however, your existing ad groups will not expand to include content distribution at this time. After the Content Ads release, all new ad groups will default to hybrid distribution.

Where Content Ads appear
Ad groups expanded for contextual distribution will display on relevant webpages on the quality Microsoft network, including MSN® Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows® Marketplace, as well as partner websites.

Learn more about Content Ads
After you upgrade, you’ll see expanded distribution and pricing controls, as well as new reporting options to help you run your Content Ads campaigns. Visit our upgrade guide for information about running hybrid ad groups, bidding separately for search and content, or turning off Content Ads. You can also watch our Content Ads webinar to learn more.

If you have questions, contact our Microsoft adCenter Support Team.

Sincerely,
The Microsoft adCenter Team

while tossing some domains into SnapNames today, I noticed the reserve price had been lowered.. nothing drastic - lowered from $60 to $59..

wasn’t sure why - I haven’t heard any announcements…it’s probably some developers testing something..

or maybe our “inside guy” Craig Calder can give us an update in our comments section..

Within AdWords, Google offers a great Auto-Optimization feature which rotates several ad creatives to determine which receives the highest CTR. Once it determines this, it’ll predominantly show the highest performing written creative (which is great for both Google and the advertiser). Google gets more clicks, and customer gets more leads. Truly, an ingenious addition which doesn’t get much recognition.

In contrast, for AdSense publishers (or any contextual publishers), there really aren’t any auto-optimizing features available. Publishers can manually optimize the color of their ad units, which is highly recommended cause better color combos = better CTR = more $. Poor color combos obviously = awful CTR = and no $.

The tough aspect of color combo testing, is the “testing” part. It takes a significant amount of time to determine which layout is truly the best performer. Testing an analysis *is* everything, but hey, there are only so many hours in the day. Personally, once I “seem” to find the best performer, I implement it and tend to stick with it.

And you want to know what? THAT’S WRONG, and I’m losing money cause of it.

So here’s a plea:

Will someone (anyone/Google), please create a contextual ad unit color combination shifting application, which uses CTR to determine the colored ad of choice to run.

For all I know, from a testing standpoint, red hyperlinks perform best on Mondays, blue on Tuesdays, and green on Wednesdays. Or, who knows, maybe a pink colored combo unit would perform well over Valentines Day, and an Irish Green unit would kill it over St. Patty’s day. Also, what colors work best on theme related sites? Does purple or orange work better for a bowling site? Who knows. It’d be great if we knew, but for me in my situation (and most others I assume) it’s physically impossible to test the thousands - if not tens of thousands - of combinations out there.

In reality, there should be an automated system performing these tasks. Running color CTR analysis based on theme of site, color of site, color of site hyperlinks, time of day, day of week, month, holiday, shoot - analyzing individual user behavior to generate colors they tend to click. AdWords auto-optimizes written creative, so why couldn’t they apply that same logic application to AdSense and color combos.. Or maybe this is an opportunity for YPN, or any 3rd tier contextual network. Create it, shoot, patent it, and be a first mover. Even a 3rd party could create it, and sell a subscription to use the service.

I’d use it.

Would you?

not sure if this is old news..(I’ve never seen it before)

check out this morphed Google AdSense 468×60 Ad Unit that incorporates a link unit inside the box..

when you click one of the links (I clicked ‘Software’), the ad unit updates to show software related ads (seen below)

seems neat, but the ad unit looks a little crowded with all those links.. I can’t see this helping CTR for us publishers..

I recently bought an old directory focused domain (similar to dmoz and yahoo dir), which I’m in the midst of building out and adding relevant sites. As I was concentrating on my ‘Arts’ category, an old painting website came to mind - Next Monet - one I used to visit and window shop quite frequently, but had simply fallen off my radar.

I initially forgot the name, but remembered the ‘Monet’ portion, so I searched in google.. ‘my monet’, not it. ‘buy monet’, nope. Then the actual name popped in my head.

So I google searched it, ‘next monet’……….*no results*

uh-oh, maybe they got pinged running some nasty seo…

I knew the site still existed, so I typed the name in the address bar, and up it came. When I looked around, though, the site didn’t seem penalized. Still appeared to be a trusted site. Then I glanced at their source code and found this:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

…a noindex…..and…..a nofollow…on an ecommerce website….hmmm…customers are overrated I guess..

In their defense, maybe they have some sort of search engine specific no-compete with the artists they represent? (Not likely)

Could it be they decided to layoff ‘Jack the web guy’ to slow their burn rate, and he in exchange tossed that time bomb on their homepage as a little f-you as he’s walking out the door? Who knows..

(they can thank their lucky stars that Yahoo is ignoring that tag - otherwise their site traffic would prob fall to zero.)(and I’m not even gonna go into the fact that they’re failing to use paid search to advertise when someone searches their name - gallerydirectart.com is eating their lunch there..)

perusing the local Atlanta rag, the AJC, I witnessed a Comcast ad for their bundled internet, phone, and tv service. Here’s the ad I saw:

now, get a load of the fine print that cycled through as the next frame of the ad unit. I laughed out loud. It’s physically impossible to read..