Last week, the interesting speaker in class briefly talked about the online application/tools of AdSense and AdWords, and a quick run-through of these, as well as some related issues, will be the topic of today’s blog.
AdSense was an ad serving application run by Google, where website owners could enroll to enable text, image and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements were administered by Google and generated revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis.
Here is a picture of the typical reports page in the AdSense application:
The application was actually discontinued last year and superseded by DoubleClick, which was quickly snatched by Google after the huge potential of the application was revealed. This was solidly underlined by the $3.1 billion price tag! As an ironic twist, Microsoft actually tried to stall the acquisition on grounds of monopolistic effects – something quite hilarious considering the myriad of similar accusations against, well, Microsoft. DoubleClick, however, has not been without its problems; it has been linked to spy ware as cookies are tracked and it is therefore even considered “malware” by several antivirus programs. Additionally, DoubleClick was accused of misleading the consumer by proposing an, in effect, useless opt-out option of the tracking feature. Nonetheless, it continues to strive as a more or less independent subsidiary of Google and churns out some interesting products, especially for advertising and media companies to allow their clients to traffic, target, deliver, and report on their interactive advertising campaigns.
Below, one of many useful tools in the DoubleClick application is shown:
The other tool mentioned in class was AdWords – the grand flagship of Google’s online advertising, bringing in a staggering $21 billion in revenue in 2008 alone.
Below, an image of the AdWords position in the typical web browser is shown:
It is in relation to this that we see the currently ubiquitous Pay-Per-Click advertising model mentioned several times in my earlier blogs. The product has been developed extensively and is now relatively simple for anyone to operate and includes a suite of tools to enhance a website and monitor traffic. Despite of its huge success, there have also been a few glitches with the product, both in the form of trademark law suits (e.g. American Blind vs. Google and Rescuecom Corp vs. Google), patent infringements, and click fraud. The latter especially marred the reputation for and was settled for $90 million.
Nevertheless, the success of Google currently seems relentless and a plethora of sub-industries has appeared to cater for the increasing need of companbies needing to access all the people using the search engine. Included in such sub-industries are thousands of SEO and SEM specialists, as well as companies designing entire online campaigns to tap into the full potential of the online consumers. The interesting aspect here is that, as Google increases the range of products offered directly to the companies, the intermediaries have to offer even more specialized and tailor-made solutions. It is currently not sure what the market for these will be in the future, but for now, it appears to be a lucrative market. A couple of examples of such intermediate companies are www.marketiniano.com as mentioned in class, as well as the even more interesting company www.guavamedia.com, which has received some attention in Scandinavia for having greatly increased the value of the companies in their portfolios. Apart from offering a complete overhaul of all online and branding issues of a company, Guava Media undertakes the innovative “Pay for Performance” solution where a company only pays for the actual sales realized as a consequence of an online campaign as opposed to the simple “pay-per-click” or “pay-per-lead” models.
The only question is, how long it will be before such services merely become a standard part of the already rapidly expanding range of B2B and B2C offerings by Google…
Tags: adsense, adwords, click, doubleclick, google, guava, marketiniano, media, pay, per
