Who to Blame for Poor Contextual Advertising?

Online Advertising

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

SeoMoz feat. 2kmediat.com's rants and raves

Last week I suffered from bronchitis and pinkeye and decided to see what Google had to offer. I have nothing to complain about within the organic search results, but the sponsored links got me laughing. It seems Pink Gems Jewelry or Stunning Candle Holders are something that I should be interested in.

Yesterday I did a search for “SEO” in Finnish Google and explicitly set the language to Finnish. Once again, nothing to complain about with the organic results. However, I disliked the sponsored links. If I explicitly want results written with a specific language why are 9 out of 10 ads I see in english (extremely common phenomena in non-english languages)?

One of my favourite news sites runs AdSense. While reading the site, (a totally non-marketing related news item) I noticed a weird but catchy title: “Buy Optimization or SEO?”. Funny, I considered these to be the same thing. Trust me as I say this is nowhere near the worst / funniest looking title's I've seen.

If I go to Google and type “AdWords” about 50% of screen space is filled with various types of sponsored listings. I know I wanted AdWords but this is a bit too much. The more I use Google, the more it begins to feel like “old time” MSN which had more 3 pages of paid results before the actual results.

Who's to blame for making contextual advertising such a lame experience – search engines (in this case Google) or “so called” SEM professionals?

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EGOL

2006-03-03T18:37:58-08:00

lol... Both... Google will give you an SEO professional logo to display on your website if you can earn a score of only 75% on their exam. That means they will endorse you to manage other people's money when you missed 25% of the questions on their exam. Not professional in my book.

I am 100% confident that their results would be much higher if they demanded 90% for the right to call yourself a pro. Imagine the difference in value that would result.

If I was the boss at Google the score required would be more like 95% or even 98%. I would also require reexamination when new features came available.

That's professional.

EGOL edited 2006-03-03T18:45:00-08:00
1 0

lol... Both... Google will give you an SEO professional logo to display on your website if you can earn a score of only 75% on their exam. That means they will endorse you to manage other people's money when you missed 25% of the questions on their exam. Not professional in my book. I am 100% confident that their results would be much higher if they demanded 90% for the right to call yourself a pro. Imagine the difference in value that would result. If I was the boss at Google the score required would be more like 95% or even 98%. I would also require reexamination when new features came available. That's professional.
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