Saturday, February 04, 2006
Targeting Advertising
The feature is live (and if you are reading this entry via the RSS feed, you may want to click over to the site to see what I'm talking about).
Okay, sure, it's just a block of advertisements from Amazon and you may ask “You had bugs just adding some HTML to your templates?” But you see, it wasn't just some HTML to my templates that I added. Nope, there's a bit more going on behind the scenes than just that. And to describe what that is, I have to digress a bit.
When I first wrote mod_blog, I was on a big kick to add
metainformation to every page on my site. And part of that metainformation
included keywords embedded in the <META> tags. So
mod_blog supported, pretty much from day one, a list of keywords
for each entry. That was five or six years ago and while I've kept up the
process of adding keywords (or “tags” as the concept is now called) since the
start, I haven't really done much with the information.
The intent originally was to have the ability to list entries based on a
tag—something like http://boston.conman.org/keyword/programming
but you can see I never got around to doing that. I also discovered, over the
years, that I had way more tags than actual entries.
One of the problems I see with multi-faceted classification is the proliferation of classifications. My own blogging software allows for the classification of each entry; in fact, it allows multiple classifications for each entry (and although every entry of mine has such classifications, there isn't support yet for using the data for anything).
Out of 1,514 current entries (nearly four years worth) I have created 2,671 distinct classifications—1.76 catagories per entry). Part of that is unintentional duplication (five different typings of “Cue Cat” for example); silly classifications are another reason (“dead zombie languages rising from the dead” anyone?). It's what you get when you allow free form classifications.
I suppose you could go through and automatically pull out relevent words but there is an art to indexing; “Dave Weiner” should not only be treated as one word for indexing, but it should instead be “Dave Winer” (typos and mispellings are another problem).
myself in a comment on Wikis Aren't Enough
Be that as it may, time went on, I kept up with adding tags for each entry, and I still hadn't had a use for them, until I came across this web page about a week or so ago:
Yes, indeed, amongst Howard Tayler's readers there are a lot of computer geeks. I know I am not a typical web user, but I am a pretty typical web developer. And I have zero desire to “Boost XML app performance.” I also have all the “ODBC drivers” that I need.
Many of you, my readers, are bloggers or have regular web sites with AdSense ads. Look at them. How many you'd say are “inefficient, dishonest and a total waste of people's … precious time”?
I say—about 99.5%. And clickthrough ratios are pretty horrible. People try to tweak them by playing around with ad types, look and feel, positioning and excluding advertisers, but it's all rather ineffective.
In short, I feel that even though Google's ads are a step in the right direction, AdSense sucks, especially for a blog with a smallish audience, such as mine. The useless, stupid ads that clog AdSense are a waste, even though they might generate a few “pity clicks.” Only half of my ad revenue for the site came from AdSense last year. The rest came from my experiment that I think will be of great interest to everyone.
I believe that my 1000 readers are a lot like myself. And what do I spend a huge amount of money on every year? Books, movies, cds and gadgets. Also I purchase some rather esoteric items on eBay too, but the majority of my spending happens squarely at Amazon.com. My wishlist there is humongous, and in fact, I spent my advertising revenue there.
Luckily, Amazon has a pretty generous associate program. You can link to any of the products they sell and get a cut of the sale price, if the sale happens as a result of your clickthrough. In fact, you get a cut of the entire shopping cart amount (I am not sure, this could be only the items that were added after the click). In any case, it's decent money, and most importantly, a great selection of new and even used items to sell.
New Billboard Day Effect : How to Advertise More Effectively on Your Blog
I already belong to the Amazon Associates Program. And it's already netted me $200 for a few hours worth of work (I was given that site and the previous owner suggested the Amazon thing—glad I did). So why not?
And in playing around with the Amazon ad layout, I discovered that one can select the catagories one wishes to display ads for.
Hmmm …
Every entry I've written has tags associated with them.
I can choose which catagory Amazon will display ads for.
Hmmm …
Then problem then came one of implementation. And a few hours of thought on that produced the simplist solution: for each entry being displayed, collect all the tags and pick one at random. Feed that tag to Amazon. I do not weed out duplicate tags—if say, all the entries being display (say, the front page here) all have the tag “programming” (among other tags) then the catagory “programming” has a higher chance of being passed to Amazon.
In a way, I'm targeting the ads myself, instead of relying upon the advertiser (and Google, I'm looking at you).
Sure, there'll be some stuff Amazon can't deal with properly (say, “dead zombie languages rising from the dead”) but overall, the targeting of ads from Amazon will be much better than from Google AdSense.
- General. You agree not to display on the same Web page in connection with which any Ad Unit, Ad, Link, Search Box, or Referral Button is displayed (a “Serviced Page”) any advertisement(s) that an end user of Your Site(s) would reasonably confuse with a Google advertisement or otherwise associate with Google. If You have elected to receive content or Site-based Ads, You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content- targeted advertisement(s). If You have elected to receive Search Results on any Site(s), You agree that Google will be the exclusive provider of Internet search services on such Site(s). Certain Google services available as part of the Program may contain filtering capability, such as SafeSearch or AdSafe, that You may access through Your account. However, if You elect to enable any such filters, You acknowledge and agree that: (i) it is Your responsibility to enable such features in accordance with the specifications provided by Google, and (ii) Google does not and cannot commit that all results (including Ads, Links and Search Results) will be limited to results elected by enabling such filter(s). Google may also include in certain services features which are unsupported under Google's then current technical documentation. Such features are provided “as is” and Your use of them shall be undertaken solely at Your own risk.
Google AdSense™ Online Standard Terms and Conditions (emphasis added)
But I'm keeping the ads from AdSense, until I'm told otherwise. I'm not sure how to interpret the Terms and Conditions about this, given that I'm the one doing the targeting, not Amazon, and that back in May when I was initially talking with Google, I was told:
From: “XXXX XXXXX” <XXXXXX@google.com>
To: “Sean Conner” <sean@conman.org>
Subject: RE: Google partnership
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:44:59 -0500Hi Sean,
Other affiliate programs are fine, all we ask is that on any given page, we are the only ‘text based’ ads running.
How does you schedule look tomorrow? I can be reached at the below number at your convenience.
Best regards,
XXXX
And the ads from Amazon aren't pure text—they include graphics as well. I've written Google to solicit their reaction to this, and to suggest they allow hints as to the type of advertising people want—like Amazon does.
