Re: Google AdSense vs. Yahoo! Publisher Network

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Mon 13 Mar 2006 16:57:57 -0600

Back in November I started a thread on my relative experiences
between Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher, using them to run ads on
a tennis-related online publication. At the time, the Yahoo ads paid
much better per click, but the Google ads generated many more clicks,
and the net result was in Google's favor -- about 10-15% on average.
I attributed the result to Yahoo Publisher's apparently poor ability
to supply a sufficient inventory of relevant ads.

I've recently rerun my test, both on the tennis site and on the
Online Advertising Discussion List site. On the tennis site, Yahoo
Publisher has improved, and I now think it is comparable and maybe
even slightly advantageous compared to Google AdSense. But the big
surprise was what happened when I did the A/B testing on o-a.com. I
had expected to see similar results, but instead found that Yahoo
Publisher generated dramatically more revenue on that site than does
AdSense.... revenues nearly tripled overnight. I wish I could give
specific numbers, but my user agreements with both sites prohibit me
from doing so.

Still for some pages, the ads Publisher is serving seem irrelevant to
the content... on those pages, I will probably retain AdSense, which
seems to be much better at figuring out what is relevant on a page
than does Publisher.

The moral is... your mileage may vary. Running this kind of a test on
one site may not translate into a generalization that can be applied
to another site. The important thing is to TEST, and then keep on
TESTING and TUNING.

--Cliff

Clifford R. Kurtzman
CEO | Moderator
ADASTRO Incorporated | The Online Advertising Discussion List
http://www.adastro.com | http://www.o-a.com
(281) 480-6300

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http://www.ad-tech.com/conference-sf.asp?subevent=5#session292




Received on Mon Mar 13 2006 - 16:57:57 CST