Back in January I wanted to do a little competitive analysis and understand Google and their AdSense model. They have built a huge grassroots network of people to host ads on their websites and blogs. The ads are targeted based on keywords (text) found in your webpage. When people visiting your site click on a link, you get paid a small fee or cut of what the advertiser paid Google to host the advertisement.

Back in January I wanted to do a little competitive analysis and understand Google and their AdSense model. They have built a huge grassroots network of people to host ads on their websites and blogs. The ads are targeted based on keywords (text) found in your webpage. When people visiting your site click on a link, you get paid a small fee or cut of what the advertiser paid Google to host the advertisement.

Setting up the ads on my site was incredibly easy. I got to choose the size or the ads, the color scheme and I could filter certain advertisers if I identified specific products or services that I didn’t want to promote through ads on my site.

Now fast forward a few months. I decided that I knew what I needed to know and since streamsfamily isn’t the most trafficked site on the net and I wasn’t getting rich hosting ads, I decided to pull them down.

Within two days I got the following email from Google:

———————————————————————–

Hello, We’ve noticed that the Google AdSense ad code no longer appears on your site, or that you are not currently receiving AdSense page impressions. If you’ve experienced problems with AdSense, we encourage you to try our easy-to-use troubleshooting wizard to assist you in resolving the issue. By answering a few yes/no questions, most publishers can find solutions for common ad serving issues within minutes. To begin, simply click on the link below which best describes the issue you’ve experienced:

1. AdSense ads still appear on my site, but I haven’t received many AdSense page impressions: http://www.google.com/adwizard/no_impressions

2. I had problems implementing the AdSense ad code on my site: http://www.google.com/adwizard/implementation_problems

3. I was not satisfied with the targeting of ads appearing on my site: http://www.google.com/adwizard/not_satisfied

4. I’m not ready/haven’t had time to use AdSense on my site: http://www.google.com/adwizard/woi

5. Other: http://www.google.com/adwizard/other_problem If the wizard is unable to help you resolve this issue, you’re welcome to reply to this email and an AdSense support representative will contact you shortly. We’d also like to encourage you to let us know how we can improve AdSense. Please take a few minutes to fill out our brief survey at http://services.google.com/surveys/as_churn .

Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team
————————————————————————-

Wow! I’m impressed with how on top of their business these guys are. They were able to detect that their Java Script was no longer running on my site and they had a targeted message for me already prepared which was subsequently sent to me as the email above. We (Microsoft) have quite a challenge in front of us in this space.

We are finally getting into the game though. We just announced AdCenter and it’s the first step towards building an ad platform that will compete with and (in my not so humble opinion) surpass Google.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.