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Tuesday, December 4, 2007

No More "Advertise On This Site" for AdSense

Search Engine Land is reporting that in the coming weeks, according to Google, Google will drop the “Advertise on this site” link displayed next to AdSense ads. Using this link, advertisers were able to directly target a specific site. However, AdWords still has targeting by URL available for placement-targeted campaigns, as long as the webmaster offers these placements via their AdSense account (choose AdSense -> AdSense Setup -> Channels -> Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement)... and I don’t see anything in this announcement saying Google plans on dropping that too, though I asked them just in case.

The “Advertise on this site” feature was introduced in 2005. Back then Dave Taylor in a blog post, from which above image is taken from, wrote:

I think it’s quite significant, actually, for two reasons: one, it demonstrates that the Google AdWords system is being extended to allow advertisers to bid on specific Web sites.

This also bridges a very important gap in the AdWords program because it finally lets potential advertisers who see a group of AdSense advertisements how they can be included. Sophisticated online advertisers scoff at this because they can already recognize an AdSense block at 100 paces, but the majority of potential online advertisers are lost and find the complexity of bidding and advertising in a pay-per-click (PPC) world hopelessly baffling.

Now, Google tells Search Engine Land that this feature had “not been performing as well” as Google had hoped, adding:

As the AdSense product evolves, we occasionally re-evaluate aspects of the product to make sure they are performing well for our publishers and meeting our goals. We found that the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up feature was under-performing, and so we have made the decision to focus our efforts on features that we believe will drive the best results for publishers.

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