Google Ad Manager could change the affiliate industry ..

Posted on March 18, 2008 
Filed Under Affiliate Resources, General Internet

If you hadn’t heard that Google recently bought DoubleClick (still seeking commission appovals) then you must have been hiding under a rock for the past six months.

The question when they did this was what were they going to do with it?

Late last year I spoke with the Australian DoubleClick sales rep who essentially said they believed it would be business as usual.

It looks like Google have now shown exactly why they bought DoubleClick and it follows their new standard practice. Buy up a big company where small businesses can’t afford their services, roll a limited version of their services out for free to the small business, drop the price to enterprises and bring on ten times the number of enterprises thereby effectively becoming the default provider in the market.

This is what Google Ad Manager looks like it could achieve.

From an affiliate perspective, the constant complaint (or frustration for affiliate managers) is that affiliates just don’t have sophisticated systems for optimising advertising placements across their site. This has always been the area of enterprise level websites only.

Google Ad Manager has just launched its website as “Invitation Only” with a basic tour of what the package will be when it’s available.

It’s every affiliate’s dream.

A simple system the affiliate (or any publisher) can roll out on a new site to start serving adverts, optimising adverts and pulling them up and down based on timing and impressions.

To date the only options have been to do some basic HTML, use a system that an affiliate program has built just for themselves or go the whole way and install an open-source version of an ad server (like OpenAds). None of these provided an easy, quick or intelligent solution across multiple sites with many banner spots.

Check out the new Google Ad Manager yourself. Hopefully it’ll be available for more publishers soon.

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DoubleClick purchase

Posted on April 20, 2007 
Filed Under General Internet, NZ Affiliate Market

It’s reasonably hard to have missed the news over the last week that Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick for USD3.1 billion (NZD 4.1 billion).

The question is now what does this do to the global advertising industry and more importantly (for here anyway), how is this going to affect affiliates through-out the world and New Zealand?

Google has been experimenting with graphical and now video adverts on its content advertising network through Adsense for some time. Reports from advertisers that I have seen have been mixed compared to the main textual search based results from Adsense.

Now Google have bought one of the largest advertising networks worldwide, who happen to have a speciality of working with graphical, media rich content across many different networks. One of the issues here has been that DoubleClick are focused on very large portal sites. The small affiliate based publishers in the advertising market online have not been a focus for them.

We can hope that one of the affects of this purchase will be the ability for smaller affiliate style advertisers to be allowed access through Adsense to this wider media-rich network of adverts.

With the resources of Google and the usual rate of integration they work on hopefully smaller portals will start to see the benefits of this by the end of 2007.

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