Friday, January 5, 2007

AdWords Distribution

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google's partner networks. The "search network" includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The "content network" shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. Google automatically determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes resembling banner ads, with the designation "Ads By Gooooooooooogle." These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model. Click through rates on the content network are typically much lower than those on the search network and are therefore ignored when calculating an advertiser's quality score.

AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (following Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture Services, Inc.) and Microsoft adCenter.

No comments: