This session will look at ways that site owners can capitalize on current contextual advertising options.

Moderator: Joe Laratro

Speakers:
Cody Simms, Sr. Product Manager for Yahoo! Publisher Network, Yahoo!
Jennifer Slegg, President, JenSense
Tom Pickett, Online Sales and Operations, AdSense, Google
Jay Sears, Vice President, Business Development and Publisher Relations, ContextWeb
Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management, Quigo, Inc.

Jennifer Slegg, President, JenSense

Tools for Testing
Official Google AdSense and YPN Tools:

• Channels (necessary for testing multiple ad units)
• URL Channels (can be confusing when dealing with directory levels)

Third Party Tools

• Know what specific ads are being clicked and what page they are located on (search for ad tracker)
• Get CTR color data on a title, description, URL, border and background level

Starting Your Testing

• Keep track of changes and results (note what you are changing and what changes you made — also download before and after)
• Timing is everything (don’t do testing during Thanksgiving, etc)

Using URL Channels

• Pros: requires no changes to your JS and easily tracks overalls earnings for overall URLs
• Cons: can be confusing when tracking sites with multiple directory levels and can’t easily track ad links or RSS

Custom Channels
Pretty much all of her tracking is done this way.

What Should You Test?

• Borderless can be good but isn’t always the best. Test a complementary or contrasting border.
• While blue title link is best for many sites, it’s not always the best
• Image, Flash and video ads
• Size and placement — don’t always use the same ad unit
• Go “above the fold”
• Eye tracking studies (search eye tracking advertising) — right hand column performs very poorly
• Test switching placement on each page so that people don’t get “ad blindness”

Final Thoughts

• Continue testing on a regular basis
• Revisit pages every six months or so and make sure they are working
• Keep track of your changes
• Don’t click on your own ads

Cody Simms, Sr. Product Manager for Yahoo! Publisher Network, Yahoo!

YPN — display ads that are relevant to the content of your site and earn money from qualified clicks. No investment is required and setup is quick and easy.

What motivates publishers to publish?

• Lifestyle / share interests
• Revenue and increased traffic are the primary measures of success

What is contextual advertising?

• Non-search advertising
• People searching for things express clear intent — consuming content does not…

Challenges
On non-search pages, intent must be derived. Derive user intent based on factors not express directly by users.

Anatomy of a web page

• Logo is the gristle (inedible)
• Search box is the brains (inedible)
• Images are the hair — make it pretty but inedible
• URLs are the ribs (not completely edible)
• Meta tags are really important
• Article heads/sub headers/article pointers are really important for contextual ads
• The article text itself is the goldmine for contextual ads — they are the tenderloin (mmmm…)

Robotic Indigestion

• Robots digest everything they eat… but only if they can eat it!
• Robots have problems with images/Flash/etc
• Text-based content is the way to go
• In his opinion, About.com is one of the best SEO’ed and contextually optimized sites on the web
• Have a high signal to noise ratio (he gives a knitting page example)

Content Do’s

• Write the way a user thinks / maintain your editorial integrity
• Take the time to optimize the key text areas (Meta / pages section headers and headlines / body content)
• Limit low content pages (pages with only Flash, pics or videos / if you must — add as much Meta info as possible)

Content Don’ts

• Don’t use unnecessary code (use structured, consistent code / reference a CSS file rather than hard coded HTML tags)
• Don’t use unnecessary language (don’t have too many topics on a page / reduce unnecessary marketing copy such as “best in class”; remove jargon)
• Don’t take shortcuts around lack of content or traffic (keyword stuffing / link farms / etc)
• Don’t violate TOS

Ask Yourself

• Is it good for the user?
• What’s good for the user is generally good for the crawler
• What’s good for the crawler is good for the semantic analyzer

URL Power

• Integrate keywords into your URL structure
• Use permalinks, not query strings
• Use strong keywords as “anchor text” when linking to your own sites, both in navigation and editorial content

Let the robots in

• There’s no place like home
• Home (index) pages can be tricky
• If content is really static (ads don’t change and can create user fatigue)
• http://publisher.yahoo.com
• http://publisher.yahoo.com/contentmatch

Tom Pickett, Online Sales and Operations, AdSense, Google

Media consumption habits have changed, and spend is slowly shifting and overdue for expansion. It’s all about reach — “How can I reach the target audience”?

AdSense growth is providing desired reach for advertisers. Be ready with image and video enabled formats (video ad demo pointing to www.carconnection.com).

Showcase your best inventory

• Share a new feature
• Define attractive inventory for advertisers
• Group ad units
• Advertisers will be able to selects sites using a site targeting tool
• Information provided by publisher for Ad Placement will be shown
• More transparency for advertisers
• This will be officially rolled out in the coming month

New ways to engage users

• Google Video
• Google gadgets (9,000 and growing)
• Maps API (embed on your sites)
• Related links

Engagement through search

• AFS improvements
• Search results now on your own pages
• Custom Search Engine (CSE) — create your own custom search engine, monetized with AFS

Future directions

• AdSense API Program (Hosts can let users monetize user generated content on host’s website)
• Google Referrals
• Online Video (experimentation bundling content and ads — they did this with MTV)
• Increased visibility and control (for advertisers and publishers). He said that transparency was a big thing at Google — I laughed at this and so did he.

Tips

• Prepare for brand advertiser
• Focus on quality content
• Utilize image and video

Jay Sears, Vice President, Business Development and Publisher Relations, ContextWeb

Congrats to Yahoo! for rolling out Panama (with a pic of Noriega). Jay is really taking the offensive with his talk and trying to show how they are better than the big boys…

In less than 2 years, they’re the 25^th largest ad-supported property in the US but still a “best kept secret.” They are reaching 1 in 4 Americans every month.

When he thinks of ContextWeb, he thinks of:

• Quality technology
• Quality management
• Quality community (pubs and advertisers)

The difference?

• Monetize dynamic content with real-time indexing
• Increase page yield with categorization and keywords
• Maximize eCPM with optimization

R.O.C.K Methodology
R.O.C.K is ContextWeb’s acronym that loosely stands for “Real-Time Indexing; Optimization of eCPM; Categorization and Keyword Hierarchy.”

They have a self-serve interface / JS plug & go / online reporting that’s continually updated.

Jay then took everyone through a quick live demo.

Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management, Quigo, Inc.

The Long Tail of Click Subsidies

The better the traffic / the higher quality, the more advertisers are willing to pay. For example, AOL Sports vs. sportsi.com (parked domain).

High quality legit traffics are subsidizing the crappy sites. In the long run the advertisers aren’t the suckers here — the big publishers (like AOL) who are leaving money on the table are.

Adsonar is their product. They private label it so that the big publishers can control the relationship. He gives the example of the Houston Chronicle using it as chronlinks.

National publisher results — “bid to brand” effect bids up PPCs. He shares a special Promo code: WMW06 – $50 in free clicks with a $200 deposit.

Q&A

Question: Can you talk about Google’s paid referral service?
Tom: It’s a CPA type of deal.

Question: What’s the difference between CSE and GSA?
Tom: GSA is more for your broader enterprise needs. GSA comes with actual hardware.

Question: Philosophical question for Cody — why is it incumbent on the publishers to have you crawl us the best?
Cody: I was trying to give best practices — do what you do best.
Jay: As a follow-up — you guys have to do what you do best and let us all of do the rest.

Question: I uncovered massive click fraud on the adsonar network and we were spending millions of year and no calls were being returned.
Yaron: Our customer service is usually excellent — that’s one of our biggest selling points. As far as click fraud, I think we have the best protection in terms of market fraud. We have tools that others on this panel don’t have. Let’s talk — I have a check here.

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