Google AdWords
Google has for some time now run Ads on their search results in terms of so called AdWords (check here. This is ok, and interesting and all that and it seems to be making them good money. On top of that, it might allow googles to share revenue with bloggers, giving them the option to put AdWords on their blogs.
The interesting part came to me now. Google is running ads! Yes! But! What they are doing is running ads on other sites which display a set number of AdWords from a category that fits to the site that they ad is on. You go to a jewlery shop, which also runs ads, and suddenly there is an ad with 4 text links to other jewlery shops. Great great targetting to say the least, especially because through their search engine, Google more or less knows what kind of site they currently need to send an ad to.
This has happened on counted.com for example. This is the counter I co-built, and it’s running ads from TribalFusion.
There are several things I need to ask myself now though. For one, do I want to kill any ads from Google? They are pointing people to the direct competition. Normally this wouldn’t happen, because normally you would screen your ads, but we don’t. We let TribalFusion handle it all, which makes for less work obviously.
The second question is money. Google, obviously pays money to run those ads. TribalFusion is a CPM network, meaning that Google pays per 1000 ads being displayed. AdWords is a CPC system, meaning that Google gets money per click on a link. This would only be good for Google, if they got more money out of it than they put into it. If they do however, it makes you wonder if CPM is getting too cheap. CPM ads are not about clicks really, they include a branding part in the equation. This branding part needs to be taken into account. CPC shouldn’t have any branding associated to it, which is true for AdWords, but hence it should be cheaper when calculating it in terms of displays of the ad in relation to a CPM deal.
All in all, it gets confusing but mighty interesting.