Yahoo! is stepping up its fight against click fraud as it announces that between 12 and 15% of clicks coming through Yahoo! PPC ads are identified as invalid and are removed from advertiser’s bills.
E-consultancy has reported on a new Nokia ad platform that enables marketers to plan and manage ad campaigns to produce targeted advertising on mobile services and applications.
Nokia Ad Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile network and platform to deploy and manage mobile advertising campaigns.
Currently only trailling in the US, according to the Wall Street Journal, customers of Astound Broadband are currently seeing the ads which advertisers have sold to Google during normal ad breaks.
Google is testing a new version of AdSense which embeds YouTube videos in ads, and which clearly points the next steps in Google’s advertising strategy.
While Google’s 2006 take over of YouTube caused a confused response from the internet community, the revenue potential of the video sharing site is becoming more evident as Google presses ahead with a new Flash based AdSense unit which includes text links alongside an embedded YouTube video.
Click through rose from 10.1% to 11.1% in the two weeks following launch.
Google has begun to employ its contextual advertising system Adsense to offer adverts in its global mapping system Google Earth. The move will allow adverts to be seen as clickable links, while contact and address information will put advertisers ina local context.
The offer allows advertisers to place sponsored local adverts into map markers across the site. Google announced the news to advertisers saying: “If you’ve created Local Business Ads in you AdWords accounts, they’ll now appear on Google Earth in addition to Google Maps.
“Advertising a hotel in Lake Louise? A neighbourhood café in Paris? Google Earth users across the globe can zoom in on your business. Don’t forget to add a customised icon to make your ad stand out.”
Yahoo! is taking the last step with its new Panama ad system today and releasing the new ‘Marketplace Design’ algorithm in the US, the biggest threat to Google’s stranglehold on advertising dollars ever seen.
While parts of Panama have gone live over the past few weeks, the new ranking algorithm will see the system move from a bid price ranking model to a system which takes bid, ad quality and other factors into account when determining where ads are ranked on results pages.
The new system is meant to give users more relevant ad results which sounds good. However, the other reason behind the Panama project has been to increase monetization, which won’t sound so good to advertisers. There are fears that while the new algorithm will increase ad quality, it will also force advertisers to overpay.
Advertisers aren’t used to a system which doesn’t rely on bid price only, so it won’t be a surprise if this stirs up some complaints. In fact, in a New York Times article today Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel isn’t resting on his laurels, saying: “It has been and continues to be our No. 1 company priority.”
Although Panama is US only at present, roll out to the UK is expected in the next few months, giving us time to sit back, watch the fall out and prepare the best we can in the meantime.
Search Engine Land’s Mona Elesseily has given us a great review of the technical aspects of the new algorithm including how historical clickthrough rates (CTRs), Expected CTRs, ad copy, bids, URLs and advertiser information are some of the major relevance factors considered in the new algorithm.
