Great writeup Phillip! AuctionAds for us was really a breath of fresh air. We had a site about stamps and other collectables and were having a heck of a time trying to monetize it. AuctionAds gives us a great source of revenue we never had. |
May I ask where's your site Roger and since when do you use AuctionAds? |
Philipp,
FYI: There is a delay when you change keywords. Thats most likely why you saw PS3 ads for different keywords. |
Phillip I would rather not disclose it on your site but I will email it to you if you want. I rank awesome for my keywords and I don't want everyone copying what I am doing. I am sure you understand. |
Wow, Patrick is just launchiing a ton of new sites lately.
Patrick, you hiring? :) |
OK Roger, thanks, yes if you can email me...
David, I was able to reproduce it again just now. I opened the "Get Code" form, didn't type anything but "google", and this was presented to me – and I waited a minute or so afterwards and there was nothing new loading or waiting to be loaded:
http://blogoscoped.com/files/adauction-get-code-google.png
However, I then tried to exactly reproduce the steps, and tried half a dozen times but now it shows previews with more relation to the keyword. Well, it sometimes shows "Googles", which is still kinda unrelated...
http://blogoscoped.com/files/auction-ads-googles-ads.jpg |
Phillip,
First of all the preview page should not be used like this. It says right under the ad "Note that the ads shown here are not always representative of your keywords." For that page to show you relevant ads it would have to retrieve them in real time. Can you imagine what 5000+ users hammering on that would do?
Further, the engine is in no way shape or form contextual. This is by design and choice, not accident. If you type in "google" for a keyword, it can't "know" that you don't want someones WWII Military Googles. It all comes down to keyword selection, and 'google' is probably a poor keyword choice under any circumstance. |
> If you type in "google" for a keyword, it can't "know"
> that you don't want someones WWII Military Googles
"Google" is not "Googles", so at least it shouldn't try to change my keyword. I just checked, and at eBay's search engine, which I guess you use, you can prevent this behavior by putting the search in quotes. Then you don't get the "military googles" on top.
By the way: during the review (and I reproduced this just now), when I hovered over the question mark next to the Ad Keywords input field, it didn't show a help, but this instead – as my review indicated, I also entered "google books" to be more specific, but I didn't know whether you expect me to use comma, spaces, quotes or what-not:
http://blogoscoped.com/files/get-code-ad-help.jpg
But just think of my review as a look at your product from the user perspective that you can work with, or ignore. You don't need to convince me that it's hard to scale this system, or hard to contextualize ads, or to get working real-time previews, etc., because I already believe you... |
Thanks for reminding me to do this, I had an email about it a few days ago. It's a brilliant idea for a site. |
Phillip,
Thanks for that tooltip bug. No one had reported that. As you may have suspected, there's more info in the tooltop. |
And thanks for your comments David! If you have any tips to share which keywords work well and how to enter them it's welcome. Some selections I got were already good, like for [google book] as it shows in the post's screenshot, maybe it just takes some time to find what eBay offers best... |
There is a interesting post here where a gentleman posted his experiences Yahoo Search Marketing VS AuctionAds head to head
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=267017&highlight=auctionads |
Gotta say, it actually works really well so far! It's working much better than Amazon Associates on CoverBrowser.com in the first 10 days, and better than AdSense at that domain (the AuctionAds-affiliated links, that is). |
Phil-
You should do a updated post about your results I think many people would be really interested! |
