Will AdSense Content Bids Impact You?
Google AdWords offers advertisers the ability to set different price points for search result ads versus content ads via what they call content bids. What’s the difference? Search ads are those that show up when someone searches on Google for a term. Content ads are those that show up on publisher sites like yours and mine.
On first thought, one might think that advertisers will set their bids higher for search results than content sites. This might be true in many cases, but there are just as many reasons to think that content ads would be more valuable to advertisers. In my mind, content ads might actually serve to pre-qualify a purchaser more than someone who just searched for a term. Why? Since so many websites get their traffic via search engines anyway, these searchers have already seen an ad on the search engine and have chosen to see content first (first click). If the searcher still is interested in the topic at hand and choose to click on a contextual AdSense ad, then they might actually be more inclined to take action on the advertisers site. Of course this is only my conjecture, but I like the sound of it, and I’m sticking with it.
If the tendency is for advertisers to pay less on content sites though, there may be a slimming of the publisher ranks running AdSense ads. It seems that every webmaster in the world is running AdSense ads right now, and many of the sites are crap. By crap I mean the content not very unique and is geared strictly towards running AdSense ads (a site for the sake of AdSense, not for the sake of the content). Heck, I even have a site like that (although I have all but pulled the site from existence). If the money to be made decreases substantially, then these sites will be less of a draw. If they are less of a draw, many may fade away. If many fade away, it’s possible that publishers putting together really good sites that draw good traffic will actually increase traffic and the corresponding revenues even in the case of content ads drawing less money per click.
I guess time will really tell. Get all of the details on content bids in the Google help section.
I agree with you about the Adsense crap sites. I can see with Google’s ability to develop FAST, those will go away soon.
I sort of disagree with you on the Adsense lowering bids and slimming the ranks. As both an Adwords advertiser and Adsense host via blog, the only thing I am interested in is results. If my ad appears on your blog and returns x% above the search results, then I increase my bid. If it’s below, then I leave it the same or lower it.
I had to “hack it” to get it to work that way in the past and this just makes it more simple. I can actually visualize adsense revenue increasing because where before we had to dump all our keywords into a static “network campaign” and bid one price. We now have the flexibility to bid higher and lower based on returns. :-)