Web Marketing Strategy Update

Yesterday Google finally revealed the share of revenue received by publishers using the Adsense for Content and Adsense for Search products.

In a post on the Adsense Blog, Neal Mohan VP, Product Management writes,

“AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites … Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.”

“We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations … The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”
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Google has announced that it is collecting and storing data collected from searches users carry out on any search engine, and using it to better target ads to them on AdSense enabled sites they visit over the next few hours.

Google was already using the referral URL (the link a user followed to arrive at a site) as a factor in determining which ads to display on an AdSense enabled page.

Whenever a user arrives at a website after clicking a link in the search results of a search engine, the keyword terms they used in the search query are always appended to the referral URL (you can see this in your server logs).

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Google makes money by selling targeted advertising space. That’s really its core business. Providing search results is just the vehicle for doing so. Search doesn’t generate revenue in itself.

Has it ever occurred to you how contradictory the goals of these two activities are?

One being to provide perfectly targeted search results, the other to sell as much advertising as possible?

What would happen if every time someone performed a search, they found EXACTLY what they were looking for in the first few results?

This is what would happen: people would hardly ever click on the Adsense ads displayed on the results pages.

Why do people click on ANY link?
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I was over at Jeremy Schoemaker’s ShoeMoney Blog today. Jeremy’s one of the internet marketing entrepreneurs who’s been monetizing traffic since the early days, and that’s reflected in his blog (it seems he’s a fellow Mac user as well, which can’t be a bad thing!).

Topical, opinionated and hype-free, with a sprinkling of industry gossip; it’s one of those blogs that you stumble on and then realise an hour’s gone by and you’re still reading …

Besides his other Internet ventures, Jeremy is also well known for generating huge AdSense revenues and hosts Net Income on WebmasterRadio.FM, where he’s interviewed Darren Rowse of Problogger, WordPress Creator Matt Mullenweg, SeoBlackHat QuadZilla, and SEO marketer Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl, amongst others.
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