Boston Pubcon day 2 was as interesting as day one.

There were lots of sessions on SEO, content writing and webmaster issues however let me cover two of the sessions which I thought were really good and relevant for publishers and advertisers.

For publishers I want to cover Contextual Advertising Space (in today's report) and for Advertisers the pay per click offering of the various search companies ( in part two for tomorrows report).

So without further ado lets dig in and hear what the session takeaways were:

Contextual Advertising:

Average user spends 5% of time searching and 95% browsing the web.

So to monetize the first 5% of the time we have the PPC campaigns on search properties and for the balance 95 % we have the contextual advertising platforms of different vendors at various websites.

Contextual advertising is important in number terms also because it is expected to have a 20% revenue share ( by 2008 ) from current 15 % of the overall paid search industry volumes.

Two qualities for publishers that the search networks look for before signing a site in their contextual or content network are:

The three top qualities that publishers should look for in their contextual advertising platform provider are:

1) Earnings Potential:

• Breath of advertisers that the platform has.
• Ad types that they allow
• Targeting Services and optimization potential.

2) Control they get on the entire program

3) Networks relationship management history and reputation.

Now let's quickly review the contextual platforms that various vendors presented in the session in pubcon today.

The two search giants Google and Yahoo were there in the session as also three other contextual ad companies presented their capabilities. These were Kanoodle, ContextWeb and Quigo.

Most of the features in these networks overlap however the major difference in all of them was the way they define relevance of the ad displayed on the page.

Bright Ads ( BA): By Kanoodle

BA utilizes editorial mapping, behavioral data and page scan technology to decide the ad relevance. The targeting is based on themes (not keywords).They have a topic taxonomy of 15000 categories and subcategories with which to decode the relevance puzzle.

Their cost per click is north of 70 cents and their best verticals are finance, health, computing, travel and automotive.

Some of the cool stuff they are doing is that they are trying to monetize ads by putting them in RSS feeds and articles mouse over as well.

Also since they use cookie based advertising in targeting users on their behavioral cycle so a publisher makes money even if the ad is not clicked on their site but some other site. However the visitor should have visited them once to get the cookie deposited.

For sites with pageviews in excess of 100 K Kanoodle is building a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based program as well.

ContextWeb ( CW):

Advertisers with CW need to buy on categories not keywords. They have 380 categories in their taxonomy to disambiguate the context of the website.

They optimize client campaigns by domain and not category.

They claim to have 50 of the top 200 rated (Comscoremedia) websites in their network.

Some of the cool stuff that can be done with CW is that third party ad serving is also possible on their network as also the fact that dynamic content can be monetized with real time indexing as ad serving is on the fly. In other words the real time indexing scans web content the moment user navigates to the page and then serves the relevant ads on the page. This is something which is not possible with spider based search technology.

Google Adsense:

Google remains the most popular Contextual Advertising Platform till date. A show of hands in the hall proved that almost 70% of the people use Goggles Adsense program.

That is some achievement for the company which is accessed in 17 languages in over 100 countries.

Google uses link structure & search query data (helps refine page meaning) to determine context

It helps webmasters attract more users by using content from its services like videos, maps, news and then help you monetize that content by Adsense.

Some of the cool things with Google are that you can advertise by link units (low real estate) as compared to ad units. One can try both the units to see which works both. In general link units are more generic and hence can be used to target more generic context.

You can view samples of Google ad units here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats#adlinks

Also you can sign up for Google site search and then use Adsense on your site results pages.

Then Google has started to provide a facility for publishers to sign up their own advertisers as well through their OASU (onsite advertiser sign up) program. They create a customized login page which is co branded with the publisher and can be used for advertiser sign up.

Section targeting can be used to target multiple ad units on the same page.

Google also provides analytics facility with their Google analytics tool.

Yahoo Partner Network (YPN):

YPN is being promoted as an open platform so developers can build applications on it.

The relevance in case of YPN is determined by editorial review and algorithmic site review.

YPN allows publishers to choose categories and sub categories for their site and this also determines the ads displayed. They sometimes let this kind of selection override their own engines relevance determination. They do this because they believe webmasters know what works best for their site. So their involvement is important for right context selection.

A cool thing about YPN is that they are also building a Self Serve platform (in beta) for contextual ad serving. Publishers can set up their own advertiser network using yahoo platform. At the moment it is for US publishers only and that to by invitation.

For more one can visit www.ypnblog.com

Adsonar: Quigo

Adsonar is the contextual platform from Quigo. They determine relevance based on Topics and not Keywords. They also do page match (even if the pages are generic) to determine context.

They allow white labeling of their service by publishers to set up their own advertising platforms. They believe that by delegating control to the publisher you empower them to sell the services that they can offer to advertisers.

In conclusion on this session at pubcon the consensus view was that a publisher can sign up with more than one network and then see what works best for him.

Click here to read more on PPC program comparisons…

Click here to read - Day One at Pubcon

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