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."

Comments

About Time?

[hsmith]

Adwords has always seemed a bit rudimentary in the way it has worked in looked. The jscript page include to the way it is displayed. Even nicely layed out sites that rely on it, it has always felt out of place. Why not sooner?

Re:About Time?

[chris09876]

There are still issues though - the API is only for advertisers (not for publishers). ...it's always bothered me how they don't provide an ssl version of the javascript code. If you want to use their ads on an ssl'd page, your users get a popup message telling them that not all elements are secured.

Re:About Time?

[Everleet]

If you want to use their ads on an ssl'd page, your users get a popup message telling them that not all elements are secured.

As well they should. I'm certainly not going to trust a page that lets outsiders place [annoying] content into my "secure" session.

Scoop - real links.

[RobertTaylor]

The links to the full article are here and here .

The link in the story is to an overview paragraph.

Secret?

[bramez]

the company secretly brought 1,800 marketing and sales people to San Francisco
Sure, if you want to keep a secret, invite 1,800 marketing and sales people!

Re:Secret?

[ceeam]

The trick is to hide corpses well.

Key part of the article

[SuperJason]

Be sure you notice this line: The Google API is only available to advertisers and not to online publishers carrying Google ads.

Re:Key part of the article

[markhb]

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.

DE-brief?

[tjic]

to "brief" means to tell someone something.

to "debrief" means to ask THEM for details.

I sincerely doubt that Google brought 1,500 marketroids out to harvest intelligence from them.

Re:DE-brief?

[sepluv]

Actually debrief can also mean:

1. to remove someones underwear
2. to tell someone how a process works after they have been through it (maybe this is the definition being used here)
3. to instruct an ex-employee not to reveal secret information

For advertisers only

[lachlan76]

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.

adword abuse

[jrschulz]

In other news, The Register shows how stupid google's adword system is abused.

Re:adword abuse

[Spy Hunter]

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.

What about the publishers?

[frostman]

Google seems once again to be catering to the advertisers and ignoring the publishers.

The API will allow advertisers to self-administer the delivery, the timing and the price they will pay for their text ads.

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.

Re:AdWords are on the decline?

[ceeam]

... something to add. Immediately after posting the above tirade I went to google and searched for my name just for kicks. Imagine this:

Cyril Sale
New & used Cyril. aff
Check out the deals now!
www.eBay.com

Thank you very much, Google! : )

Re:FREE MAC MINIS

[jascat]

Not ready for everyday usage? That's funny because I use it every day. People should write sites that are standards compliant and Firefox wouldn't have problems rendering it. I can't think of any time that Firefox has had problems rendering a site for many months, certainly since well before 1.0. Standards are there for a reason and just becuase certain browsers decided to ignore them doesn't mean that the authors of those sites should be catering to those non-compliant browsers. But all of this is off-topic.

If you ask me

[value_added]

I think Google and the folks that showed up stand to do well.

Only one in six users of internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds.

Article here.

My predictions

[tod_miller]

The API will be aimed at reducing ad-sense-fraud. Giving people the option to opt-out of bad performing sites. In addition the webmasters will be able to maximise thier effectiveness in good advertising, to climb up the earnings ranks quicker.

Google is clever!

Rather an API for webmasters

[digitalgimpus]

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.