But are advertisers or publishers happy about it?
Google announced that they are now offering video ads that play when the user clicks on them. These ads are purchased through Adwords and distributed only throughout the Adsense network, not on Google’s search results.
I’m agreeing with Mike Arrington at Techcrunch on this one, I don’t think this is a surefire hit for Google.
From the advertiser perspective, I have more work to do to create a compelling video ad that actually works. It’s not like text ads where you can easily create multiple variations in seconds and test them. Video ads are getting easier to create, but they still require work, and if your ad doesn’t perform well, it’s much harder to test a new version.
It’s also not tied through as well to a direct click-through that leads to a conversion where an ROI can be calculated. If someone just watches my ad what did I earn from that? Brand awareness? That’s great, but it’s much harder to measure in what’s been a very measurable direct-response medium.
Lastly, video advertisers only get to show these on the Adsense content network. As most Adwords advertisers will tell you, they get far better results currently with Adwords by having their ads on Google Search results. A lot of the time advertisers stop their ads from showing on Adsense altogether. Apparently Google doesn’t believe enough in the unit to show it on their own results.
From the publisher perspect, as Jensense suggests it doesn’t look yet that a publisher can opt-out of these ads. That seems like a horrible idea, and it seems like something Google will need to change to avoid angering publishers who don’t want these ads. I think the bottom line with publishers will be if it earns them a higher eCPM, which it’s possible it could do, but not if it doesn’t get good advertiser adoption.
Bottom line, will this fade into the background like their pay per call ads? Or wildly succeed like their text ads? My bet’s on the first option.
There is perhaps one more way potential thought other than fade into background or wildly succeed. Something in between the two. As with all thing google we have no idea what they are really thinking about in their own “big” or “werid” brains. The one thing this does do is bring a lot more democracy to the world of video ads and lets the little guys go out and fish and see if something happens. The web is evolving and we are too in terms of our habits and based on the world we know today maybe this is crap but GOOG has enough money to hang in, experiment and see what happens. 🙂
I’ve done 2 video Ad campaigns for Adwords merchant clients. Both the video Ads and the tasteful banners get more Google impression exposure on the content network due to higher CTR then the text Ads. Merchants get average conversion ratios due to many “lookie loo” clicks but the bid fees are half or 1/3 of the text only search click fees.
I actually run some parallel campaigns for Site targeting and content which have ZERO text Ads eliminating 100% of the MFA click traps. They convert very well and give great branding on the free impressions.