Don't settle for Google AdSense

There has been a lot of talk lately about the performance of Google AdSense as a viable source of revenue for bloggers and publishers alike. Recently, a post on TechCrunch inspired a debate about the potential performance of Google AdSense on the MySpace behemoth as Fox and Google have struck a billion dollar deal. While I believe that AdSense is a great source of potential revenue, it is by no means perfect and, in my opinion, needs to be updated to meet the demands of its users.

We are in an interesting position at ProductWiki as we generate our revenue from two different sources of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Google AdSense and Shopping.com Merchant Listings. These ads show up on all of our product pages (never at the same time) and each type of ad gets approximately a 50% share of our page views across a broad spectrum of products.

I've compiled data contrasting the performance of Shopping.com and Google AdSense on ProductWiki taken from a one week period at the end of last month.

	Shopping.com	AdSense
Clickthrough rate (%)	29%	6.5%
Revenue per click ($/click)	$0.21	$0.19
eCPM ($/1000 impressions)	$59	$13

Taking a look at the most significant of these figures (eCPM), Shopping.com outperforms AdSense by a factor of 4.6!

Here’s a brief explanation of how the ads work on ProductWiki.

Google AdSense

AdSense is very simple to implement. When a product page is requested by a user, simultaneously a request is made to Google Ad Services to deliver a banner ad containing two links from their ad database. The database is populated by advertisers. Google has already analyzed the product page and attempts to deliver the most relevant ads. We have neither control on how the ads are formatted (with the exception of some minor font and colour tweaking), nor which ads are chosen.

Creative Zen Vision:M with AdSense

You would expect to see very relevant results since the theme of our site is consumer products, but it’s often not the case. In the above example, we see an ad for “creative products” and for a Zen Vision case, not exactly what we were going for.

Shopping.com Merchant Listings

Wherever possible we display links to online merchants who sell the product in question. This is handled by our software interacting with a Shopping.com XML Web Service that pulls a specific set of ads for each of our products. Unlike AdSense, we are able to control both what ads are displayed and how they look.

Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F40 with Shopping.com

Why do Shopping.com Ads do so much better?

1. Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy
By far the most significant reason for such a huge gap in performance is relevancy. In our previous AdSense example, the user is presented with two vaguely relevant ads that have only little to do with the Creative Zen Vision:M. Whereas, in our Shopping.com example with the Toshiba Gigabeat, you see links to three reputable merchants who sell the exact mp3 player you’re looking at.

2. Style
Our integration with Shopping.com allows us to style the ads in almost any way we choose, and thus we are able to maintain a consistent theme throughout the page. As far as AdSense is concerned, since we have very little say in how they are displayed, we struggle in creating a consistent theme.

3. The “ignore” factor
AdSense is omnipresent on the Web and, like a boring TV ad, people are getting better at tuning them out. (Take a look at this post by Seth Godin). That portion of our page might as well be invisible.

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Google does have something that Shopping.com does not – breadth. Their database of ads is much more extensive than anything Shopping.com has to offer beyond products; they have ads for blogs, publishers, services, etc.

So how do you get the best of both worlds: the relevancy and style of Shopping.com ads coupled with the breadth of Google AdSense? Simple. Google needs to allow publishers to control what ads are displayed and how they are styled. Another possible improvement is to allow advertisers to classify their ads across broad categories (product, service, blog, etc.) and then publishers could exclusively select ads from those categories.

In the meantime, don’t merely be satisfied with Google Adsense without exploring other alternatives. While our situation is specific to consumer products, I believe there is likely something out there that will be more prosperous for the theme of your website.

Update: Eric Giguere has written an excellent piece on his blog providing detailed suggestions on what we can do to improve our AdSense performance. We plan to implement these changes and examine how much of an effect they have on revenue.

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