Google's Smart Advertising Leads to More Clicks

The New York Times has a story discussing the sophisticated technique that allows for the spot-on advertisements Google serves up on pages across the internet. From the article: "Hidden behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond. Because of this technology, users click ads 50 percent to 100 percent more often on Google than they do on Yahoo, Mr. Noto estimates, and that is a powerful driver of Google's growth and profits. 'Because the ads are more relevant," he said, "they create a better return for advertisers, which causes them to spend more money, which gives Google better margins.' (Yahoo is working on its own technology to narrow that gap.)"

Comments

Re:More relevant ads == more clicks?

[leonmergen]

Don't forget about all the fraudulent clicks ey... It seems like they're having a lot of problems with those...

Complete article on a single page

[Hulkster]

Here's the 5 page article on a single "printer-friendly" page which makes for easier reading. Decent re-hash of stuff that has been well known.

BTW, the funniest Adsense I saw was on the Hulk'in Lunar Eclipse page where ads were offering Lunar Real Estate for Sale - turns out some company sells "deeds" for land on the moon ... ;-)

I advertise on both

[mumblestheclown]

I spend about $15k / month on Google, and about $5k / month on Yahoo.

Yahoo costs about a third, but generates significantly less than a third the number of clicks.

In our 'where did you hear of our product' feedback from our customers, the split between google and yahoo is about 90% google, 10% yahoo. even if some percentage of people dont know the difference between yahoo and google, and even if some people just click on google because it's easy to do (the feedback switches between a type-in-your-answer and a drop down enable us to do quality of data checks, and the order of items in the drop-down, when presented, is constantly randomized).

Yahoo's miminum cost per click is an unreasonably high $10, while google's, if i understand it, has just come down in price.

All that said, the yahoo ads are still profitable for us. However, should that margin begin to thin, you can guess who is on the chopping block first. All the moreso if microsoft finally unveils a credible online ad program.

Incidentally: if you ever wanted to see an example of ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE UI design on the web, try google's overture service (or whatever the heck it's called now - i have the terms mixed up). it's not just "baseline bad", it's "textbook example of bad, bad". I use yahoo's web interface about every 3-4 weeks, and have to constantly read the instructions for basic operations, since it is never really quite clear what is going on. That's right - i have to re-read instructions that i read 3 weeks ago because the interface is really that lousy. I've never looked at a single instuction with Google.

Tell me again what value yahoo provides? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. They are what--a link index of out of date links? Free email? While I like that they send me clicks, I can not understand why they can generate such traffic to be a major internet site.