This page was linked to from various site targeted AdSense ads to explain a bit about how the technology works. There are a couple links at the end of this post which also point to a few ways to creatively use Ads by Goooooogle.

Easy to Set Up:
I just set up my first site targeted AdWords ad account. Setting up a campaign was fairly easy.

This post is my intro to the site targeted ads, if you are interested with my thoughts of it click on and read with your bad self. hehehe Overpriced Impressions:
While there is lots of active discussion on them, I tried to avoid CPM advertising on most of the major SEO forums because I know that its not uncommon for me to generate 50 to 500 page views myself in a day when I am in the posting mood.

The $2 minimum CPM for forums is probably a bit rich for my business model, especially when I can participate in the threads and be seen as part of the activity instead of part of the ads. I might advertise on them soon, but am not yet.

Business Model / Quality of Business / Why to be Social:
I spent a couple hours picking out sites to advertise on, but some people have far more profitable business models than I do. Shortly it will likely get to where site targeting is not a viable option for my current business model, but I might as well try it out while its new.

A good link broker (hi Patrick) or an SEO firm can make far more money than my business model because my business model currently lacks recurring fees.

One major benefit my business model has over most others is that I spend most all day reading and playing on blogs & forums, and thus know many people who are hip and help market my stuff for me. Another benefit I have is that I have low living costs and limited infistructure, so I could change quickly.

Keywords & Site Targeting?
Some people have recently told me that the site targeting also allows you to target keywords on those sites, but I did not see that feature. Likely it will eventually be added. Yet another reason why primarily designing a site about a niche is huge: making efficient ad sales easy to target, automate, and buy.

When you pick your initial content sites to advertise on it allows you to add a number of keywords with the seed set of sites you entered to help refine the concepts you are interested in and offer other similar sites you may want to advertise on. Some of the suggestions were a far miss, but a large portion of them were dead on.

Another useful feature would be allowing you to specify filepaths. Currently it looks as though they only allow site and subdomain targeting, which can make it hard to reach other parts of sites with huge forums.

Context Without Search:
In the past you could not buy contextual ads without also buying in on Google.com search ads as well. With the new CPM program you can buy text ads, graphic ads, or annimations. When you place your bid it is a max bid. Google does a bunch of math to convert your CPM max bid to a CPC to compare it to the AdSense contextual ads for pricing purposes.

By picking what sites to advertise on, and shifting the ads from CPC to CPM, you lower your clickfraud risk profile.

A Low Noise Hello:
One of the best deals with the new CPM program is that you can make sure certain site owners know you exist for a low price. With blogs sometimes you can do that with a comment or a trackback, but it is not possible with many sites. A site targeted ad might be a good way to say hello.

If you randomly start seeing a bunch of ads from my site on your site then I probably targeted your site.

Other Cool Things:

• Whenever there is breaking news you can quickly add that site to your account to make sure you advertise where large active streams of new traffic are.

• In the same way that Google makes irrelevant ads pay a premium for having a low clickthrough rate on Google, this program also uses community feedback (in this case peer pricing pressures) to help ensure the ads stay as relevant as possible.
• This program helps quality publishers get more value out of their content while lowering the fraud risks associated with participating in AdSense.
• Displays clicks and cost per conversion with each URL.
• Allows you to bid different prices on each URL within a group.

The Down Sides:

• Just like all Google ads, the system is a bit unpredictable. I put in a max CPM and ad spend amount, and odds are my real costs will be nothing like I bid and I will get less impressions than the associated amout that I bid for.

• There were no suggested CPM bid prices, or expected costs listed, just estimated pages viewed in the past.
• If large advertisers buy up the best ads by overpaying for the best content sites that means that the average advertiser, which may be locked out of many of those sites, might not have much left but the clickfraud and scrapper sites to pick through.
• When initially selecting a seed set of sites it helps suggest many others. It seems as though after you set up your ad group you can't get that feature back again without starting up a new ad group? But then again I am tired and maybe I missed something.
• Sometimes I might want to advertise specifically because I want to reach a site owner, but Google considers clicking ads on your own site as clickfraud.
• It is probably a bit easier to fake page impressions than ad clicks, and Google will quickly be dealing with another form of fraud.

Bonus creative site targeted AdSense ad ideas:

• Guerilla Marketing

• Market Research Data

2005 Stanford Commencement address by Steve Jobs - well worth a read

Bad clients will waste your time and destroy your business. Since SEO can deliever such cheap marketing sometimes it is easy to sell yourself short, taking on bad clients.

The worst prospects I have ever encountered are:

• those burned by SEOs who have no trust left

• those who used to rank well, feel they deserve free top rankings, and are unwilling to change with the algorithms
• those who think SEO should be free marketing

A person recently emailed me, telling me they were having a rough situation, wanting me to commit to them, but not wanting to pay anything before their problems are guaranteed to be solved. Sometimes even analyzing a situation can take hours, and you would be a nut case to do that work free unless it was for a cause you believed in.

Eventually they even thought they were going to taunt me into fixing their problems for them:

Having read your blog I had thought you were up for a challenge to put right what is not only an unfair penalty, but potentially one that shows that Yahoo applies one set of rules for its 'channel' partners and another to its 'channel' partner's competitors.

If you are at all serious about what you do, check out this search and tell me if Yahoo should be penalizing this website.

This person assumes that there is a hidden agenda, where the search engine is out to get them, unwilling to look in the mirror to see if he is providing the search engine with something they would like.

As far as that want a challenge bit goes, there are many challenges in life:

• save Big Bird

• spread words, messages, or ideas
• learn the lenses history is viewed through
• ask unasked questions
• learn how media is created, layered, bought, or sold, hyped, & killed
• or learn about myself...

Sometimes it is easy to feel too important, but you can only do so much, and there is no reason to spend your life helping someone who wants guaranteed results who pushes blame on others. Last time I had a lead like that I blew them off. A friend later worked for them, and is still regretting it.

If you bronze a turd it is still a turd. Any decent SEO knows that they can't make the search engine listen if it does not want to. Even if I could find a way to make a search engine eat itself, taking on a client who is only interested in pushing risk and blame is still not a gamble I would want to take. Most SEO leads are not worth much.

Danny Sullivan writes Search Marketing Isn't Just Math & Machines, which is in reaction to some chatter that the only way to work in search is to work it mathematically.

When I was younger I was good at math, but have not practiced it much in years and still do fine. From what I have see creativity is a much larger part of the battle.

Some people say you need to work at Google if you are in search. Like Danny, I totally disagree with that statement. All you really need to know, is what Google wants.

An example:

Google wanted to push their Google Sitemaps program. Recently a few people posted code about how to create one in various languages, or with various content management systems. Google quickly created a page linking to those resources.

If one acted quick enough they could have got a link from Google. For those who did not act quick enough, they can try to buy ads on the pages Google linked at, or create Google SiteMap pages that interface with other CMS's or languages. Even if you did not know the language I am guessing that a programmer could be hired for a few hundred dollars. A low one time fee for a link from Google.

An even better example:

Google recently updated their page about SEO and linked out to this news article about fraudulent SEO companies.

Currently there are Toyota ads on that content. I am betting that I could call them and see if it was possible to run an ad on that page, paying a premium much greater than what Toyota pays because there is much greater value for me than Toyota for an ad on that page.

What better place for me to run an ad like:

Don't get ripped off by a shady SEO firm. Buy the best selling SEO Book and learn how to market your site in Google ethically. Increase your site rankings and traffic today.

I perhaps would feel a bit guilty / sleezy for running the ethics line (as most people using the term ethics in the SEO field do not use it in an honest manner), but Google sets up that ad and that marketing copy for me.

As a matter of fact, I just called that newspaper to see if I could buy an ad. First I got a disconnected number that offered me no assistance, then I tried another number and got another person who transfered me through to another person, who was not at their desk, so I got to leave a message.

Sloppy ad sales compared to AdWords.

The exact reason Google does well is that they make it easy and automated to buy targeted ads. Many of the newspaper companies would make significantly greater profits if they automated a portion of their ad sales, and allowed more people to compete for their ad inventory (the same way partnerships with AdSense do).

CNN has over 200,000 links from DMOZ. Imagine what links on some of those pages are worth to webmasters and think of how little they make from sloppy untargeted ad sales. That is why link brokers can partner with so many newspaper sites, because the newspapers are too sloppy at ad sales and behind on technology to get good value out of their ad space without a middleman doing their marketing for them.

Andrew Goodman recently stated:

I find it hard to fret much about Google dependency at this stage when General Motors is spending $3.3 billion a year on offline ads. That’s about the same as Google’s total revenues from all advertisers for 2004!

So if Google is making that big of a wave with that little income it makes sense that they are on to something with their ad targeting, and that there is much room for growth with Google.

At the end of the day good SEO and PPC marketing are just ad buys. When you think of how large the web is there are many more opportunities away from Google than in it. Most ad buyers and sellers are lazy, working with outdated technologies, or are not creative.

Andy Beal is a JimGuide, and yet there is a thread over at VirtualPromote ripping up his SEO firm?

Now a bunch of what you read in the forums is rubbish, but there are some strong alligations about Keyword Ranking in that thread:

They go after small companies, persistient sales force who promises everything, once you sign you find out that for the money you pay them YOU do all the work.... it's like hiring someone to read you a book on SEO. They provide generic canned reports, basically "find and replace" company name, no specific analysis to your site, only what you provide to them they take an reformat into another useless report.

and

Keywordranking has a shoddy record with the BBB.

Visit the website of the Better Business Bureau and search for "keywordranking" under the section "Check It Out". The BBB report on Keywordranking / Websourced states "The Bureau has processed 22 complaints about this company in the last 36 months concerning unfulfilled contract and refund and credit issues. Eighteen of those were processed in the last 12 months"

Can you find any other large SEO company with such a bad BBB record? I couldn't!

Also check out Alexa/Amazon for Keywordranking.com the reviews. Out of 11 current reviews, 8 reviews are very negative.

bhartzer, a fellow JimGuide, even worked Traffic Power into the thread!

I am sure I am going to get some hate for this post, but at what point should large SEO companies also have people who work the forums, and not just the phones?

Clearly they have many bright marketers over there, some of the best in the industry, and yet they are getting torn up on forums where they moderate at.

On another front, that thread is over 5 months old. You would think a company trying to position themselves as a cutting edge marketing firm would track what the major channels say about them at least a few times a year, wouldn't you?