Silicon Valley Watcher writes that Google are getting ready to announce some big changes to their Adsense/Adwords program which will be of interest to many bloggers using the system.
‘As this is being writtten, about 1800 Google marketing people from its offices around the world are at an internal sales conference at a secret location in San Francisco, being briefed on a completely revamped Google Adwords/Adsense program and other new features.
The text ads business is crucial to maintaining Google’s pace of growth and its share price, which reflects high expectations for the dominant search giant. But Google offers few tools to advertisers to let them control where their ads appear and on which web sites. Similarly, web site publishers have virtually no control over what types of ads Google sends their way. This has caused some shifting to competitors such as Kanoodle that offer such controls.
That’s why the revamped Adwords/Adsense will provide a suite of tools that provide greater control, management and monitoring data to advertisers, to better target their sales messages.’
I’ll be watching any announced changes carefully as Adsense has been a major part of my earning strategy on my blogs – hopefully the changes not only benefit the advertisers but also are worthwhile for publishers.
Update: Silicon Valley Watcher has just announced more details of the ‘revamp’ writing:
‘For the first time, the search giant will provide its advertisers with an application programming interface (API), which will enable them to link their computer systems with Google and control parts of the mammoth Google ad delivery system. The API will allow advertisers to self-administer the delivery, the timing and the price they will pay for their text ads.’
The API will not be available to publishers.
Thanks for the heads up. As it seems they are legitimately looking to improve their service and offering to advertisers (their paying customers), this would seem only logical.
Regarding website publishers having virtually no control, I’d have to respectfully disagree. Certainly I’d like more control, but as AdWords are targeted based on your site’s content, you can simply change the content or your site to re-target the ads. Body text and title tags are about all it takes to get targeted ads. I believe you can also choose to exclude ads from certain URLs if you wish (i.e. competitors).
Adsense was never about “choosing” your display, per se. Relevent traffic is important for adwords clients, and I don’t think the big G is going to let restaurant sites run Vioxx campaigns…
Sweeping changes are rare, but I am anxious to see what will happen.