Matt Cutts has elliptically proposed that AdSense is a form of Behavioural Targeting. Or, maybe he’s proposing something else… Hmm. Let’s look at that.
The proposition represents that AdSense is to Behavioural Targeting as Hydrogen Bonds are to Van Der Waals Forces.
While both forces arise from the intermolecular behaviour of electrical charge, the Hydrogen Bond is usually stronger than the Van Der Waals Force.
AdSense is implied to be more powerful (and possibly more ubiquitous) than behavioral targeting.
AdSense offers contextual matching - or what Google calls contextual matching. I’ll ignore, for the moment, my concerns that “contextual match” is overplaying what AdSense actually delivers. Let’s look at what AdSense does. AFAICS (not having access to Google code or engineers and only working from Google’s handwaving descriptions of the system), AdSense uses a bot to scrape the target page, eliminates common words and looks to see if any of the remaining words match words also in the keyword list.
Side Note: There is an undocumented mechanism for advertisers to control the degree of matching that is considered acceptable. This is something that I’ve inferred from experiments - it isn’t documented anywhere that I know of and Google’s reps give you that “what drugs are you on?” look if you suggest this may be how the system works. AdSense can be tuned by the advertiser for the degree of matching that is acceptable.
Back to the main thread. If the proposition had been:
Google Search History : Behavioural Targeting :: Hydrogen Bond : Van Der Waals Force
then I’d be happier about it. AdSense, as it is now, doesn’t really belong in Behavioural Targeting. It doesn’t find me 18-30 year olds with an interest in extreme sports and with expensive lifestyle habits. It could find me people interested in extreme sports, extreme political opinions and those involved in an argument, or those wanting to find out about the Olympics. That’s not behavioural. That’s weakly linguistically related.
So, no, I’m not at all happy to group AdSense and Behavioural Targeting.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that behavioural targeting can find me a socioeconomic group, or an aspirational target. Maybe the answer to the puzzle is that they are both overhyped as to their effectiveness?
Is AdSense Stronger Than Behavioural Targeting?
Oh ho. Now that’s an interesting idea! If you only have a history of where people have been, then adverts that match concepts (not content, but concept) probably are more likely to attract clicks than adverts that may not be based on what you are looking at, but on what you have been looking at.
Is content matching stronger than behavioural targeting? Possibly, but only if you exercise the undocumented controls over the breadth of matching that is acceptable.
Material Disclosure
I’m working on an idea for a system that would optimise message presentation. Potentially this competes with Google’s targeting systems. Admittedly my reach is much, much less than 1% that of Google… But I should ethically still declare that I have a potential interest in making sure that AdSense is not seen as behavioural targeting.
Updates
I’ve been tweaking this as the responses grow. It’s an interesting puzzle. What was on his mind? Chilli deficiency?
Advertiser Watch » Blog Archive » AdSense and Behavioural Targeting wrote,
[…] Read more: Jeremy Chatfield Filed in Advertisers […]
Link | April 26th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Adsense Income In 24 Hours » Blog Archive » Adwords Adsense - Ask.com Launches AdSense Competitor wrote,
[…] AdSense and Behavioural TargetingAdSense offers contextual matching - or what Google calls contextual matching. I ll ignore, for the moment, my concerns that contextual match is overplaying what AdSense actually delivers. Let s look at what AdSense does. … […]
Link | April 26th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Ari wrote,
Jeremy,
Your blog is the best source I have found on the net (and out of it) on context and search-based advertising (CSA). Please don’t stop!
I wonder how you would call the area? It took me a few minutes to decide on “CSA”, but I am not sure this title is perfect for the area. It should not be “search engine optimization”, of course, because this does not mention advsertising, which is a central aspect of the area (and ignores the context-based ads such as adsense). It should not be “internet advertising”, which includes those banners and which precludes context and search on mobile phones, games etc. John Battelle would perhaps use “intent-based advertising”, but I feel that “intent” may be a too high abstraction for grouping “context” and “search”, because they represent very different types of intent.
I think that terminology is important (shouldn’t be hard to convince a person who does advertising on the importance of a good name..); as long as people keep thinking only about “search engines”, they continue falling in the trap of ignoring the
fact that advertisers are the ones who pay for all of this. I suspect that many of your complaints about Google’s attitude (which I am sure are correct) stem from the “title”, so to speak, that they use when thinking of the whole area.
Ari
PS I would like to ask you a few concrete questions, could you please establish contact through email?
Link | April 27th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
HI Ari,
Thanks for the nice comment.
I’m pretty sure that there’ll be a Rev C, probably with a title change - something like “The Search Fallacy”. I’m also thinking about an article on the insanity of mixing content match and keyword search, and writing up some experiments on geotargeting that I’ve been working on. I’ve also got some observations about keyword tools especially when used with Romance languages, and the use of mixed-language targeting… I have to earn a crust working on client accounts, which gives me a lot of these ideas, but it’s pretty time consuming!
You are spot on about the importance of a name. I’m thinking about it…
FWIW, I’m also wondering about banners, content match, behavioral targeting and message sequencing. The area currently called “search marketing” could, indeed, become part of “intent marketing” - but requires the development of some new or reworked advertising systems. With Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, some of those smarter systems could be built now.
Link | April 27th, 2007 at 6:19 pm