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Google To Release AdWords API
An anonymous reader writes "Good Morning Silicon Valley reports that Google is planning to release an API for AdWords. Apparently, the company secretly brought 1,800 marketing and sales people to San Francisco last week to debrief them on the initiative."
Although it may seem like it is about a clent-side API for displaying ads outside of web pages, from what the article says, it appears that it is so that advertisers can modify their ad campaign when necessary.
I'm just glad I won't have Google ads in every app I download.
Having used AdSense on the content publishing side, I've seen its glaring weaknesses as well as its strengths.
If you look in the webmaster and SEO forums you'll find lots of great suggestions for how to make the system work better from the publisher's point of view.
I just hope Google pays some attention to that and includes the other half of their revenue model in either this API or a forthcoming one.
I particularly want some level of keyword override when AdSense gets the context wrong, and the ability to get standards-compliant, valid XHTML out of the ad machine.
This Like That - fun with words!
Um... what part of the article makes you believe that the API is going to allow anyone to manipulate the Google search results? I read it that it's going to allow advertisers to manipulate the placement, content, etc. of their ads, and I believe that you need to degauss your tinfoil hat.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
As well they should. I'm certainly not going to trust a page that lets outsiders place [annoying] content into my "secure" session.
It's tragic. Laugh.
AdSense has a flaw that it can't serve ads behind a password, since the spider can't scan password protected sites.
I'd like to see an API webmasters can implement that would be able to feed the spider safe data (as deemed by the webApp developer) so it can serve ads behind passwords.
Create a PHP, Perl, Java class that can easily be used to feed keywords, and text to google so it can generate relevent ads, in a secure way.
There's millions of pageviews behind online services that could use adsense.
Adsense is pretty profitable for a webmaster, so this ability could help defray costs of some online services.
Really Google ought to implement a user complaint system for AdWords. At first Google ads had a very high signal-to-noise ratio, but that ratio has now dropped to the point where Google ads are no better than the rest of the tripe that passes for advertising on the web these days. I used to look at Google ads as a source of useful information; but as a result of the declining quality the attention I pay to Google ads has gone down to about the same as other web ads (i.e. basically none). IMHO Google should work a lot harder to ensure the quality of the ads they are running, because surfers learn fast to ignore ads that are useless to them. Google doesn't want to teach surfers that AdWords ads are generally useless and misleading! If an advertiser publishes a link claiming to have an item, and that item is not available for immediate ordering on the *very first* page linked to by the ad, the advertiser should be fined harshly by Google. (ebay affiliates, this means you!) If the ad is low quality in other ways, and Google recieves complaints and verifies those complaints, that should also result in fines for the advertiser.
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