Google and Amazon ads: Experimenting with online advertising
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
October 12, 2004 [6881 views]
There is a conventional wisdom from the dotcom years that online advertising doesn’t work. In order to have revenue you have to have traffic and in order to grow traffic you have to run advertising or marketing campaigns that cost more money than the revenue you will make from the ads.
But perhaps that’s no longer true? Amazon, Google and others now make it easy to run contextual ads. These are highly targeted to the content of the pages on which they sit. Google has a new spider (separate from its search engine bot) that sniffs each page and schedules appropriate ads even offering different ads in different languages and parts of the world.
Amazon has run an affiliate scheme almost since it started highly tuned to driving customers to their store. This has grown into a comprehensive range of promotional devices and plans from simple buttons and banners to keyword based product selections.
How much money can you make?
My suspicion is that the revenue generated still does not cover the work involved; in writing content, promoting the site, hosting and design. But even some money would help defray these costs.
This site will therefore be experimenting with revenue generation from companies like Google and Amazon. I am interested in the products and links that get shown as well as the levels of revenue that I can make. Google pays me a small percentage of their revenue when each ad is clicked whereas Amazon requires you to actually make a purchase. So far I have made a few dollars from Google although traffic levels are still building.
I am also interested in the audience reaction to the ads. This is an educational resource and would traditionally be advertising free. But every year I get bombarded by publishers trying to persuade me to adopt their text books and encouraged to register my books by the local bookshop to ensure that my students have access to these key texts. Is it really any different to have a link from my site to these books so that students can buy them even more easily?
Of course advertising can become highly intrusive and I need to take great care in explaining why it appears on this site. If the ads stray too far from being useful content then I will remove them.
I will also be looking for other experiments that we can do to see under the hood of some of the largest ecommerce players.
Recent comments:
What do you think?
On October 12, 2004 at 1:40 PM, Andy Stone wrote:
The Google Adsense FAQ is something worth reading - if I've just read it correctly, amongst other things, you can set it to deliver an ad of your own if Adsense can't deliver what it feels to be an appopriate ad.
If you combined this with an ability to block out ads which you felt we not of relevance to your site (or, ideally, your pages if you wished to set up some deliberately different pages), this could be a good way to evaluate how well it works for different sectors.
Perhaps those people who have websites and traffic that could exploit this idea might like to try this idea out... and share their experiences? The more people that have different types of content on their website in this group that try this, the better the overall results would be.
https://www.google.com/adsense/faq