Google Looks to Conquer Mobile Phone Ad Market

Google, a champion of internet advertising, seeks to test its hand at cell phone adsWith more and more cell phones supporting capable browsers, a logical area of expansions is the advertising market for cell phone browsers. Most ads have trouble with cell phone browsers resolutions and are not conducive for the environment. This is troublesome as the cell phone internet industry today is what the internet of yesterday was -- financially unfueled.
In the early days of the internet in the 1990s, large companies sprang up promoting websites which reached massive values by only providing amorphous content and limited services. These sites made billionaires of people like Mark Cuban, but inevitably the bubble burst and the market fell apart.Today much of the modern internet is driven heavily by advertising, similar to the offline news industry. If the internet is a vehicle, advertising is the fuel that drives much of it. And these days, cell phone internet connections provide little "fuel" to the internet. Google seeks to change that.Google on Wednesday announced that it will be deploying small brand-image advertisements, which it is custom making. When the site detects a cell-phone browser, it will switch to displaying these ads. This, Google hopes, will help it conquer the vast new emerging market.Google feels that its fate is inextricably tied to cell phones and other mobile devices as the industry continues to shift toward mobile sales and development. The company has heavily invested in developing an OS named Android, which it hopes will help standardize the mobile phone industry. And like most Google products, the OS will likely find a way to tie in ads for revenue.The new system Google will be rolling out for mobile browser advertising will display images similar to those seen on PC browsers. The images will be scaled optimally to look appropriate on the small screen. Advertisers will pay on a per click basis, and are only allowed to link to pages optimized for mobile phones.One key difference between Google ads on the cell phone and its PC cousin is that the cell phone variety will only display one ad per page. Google understands that on a small display, clutter becomes an increasing issue, so it hopes that this policy will make the system friendlier and interfere with host pages less.Alexandra Kenin, a product marketing manager, for Google Mobile Ads stated in a Google blog post that, "For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good click-through rates."Google announced that the following countries will be receiving the special current ads, at the time of roll out: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States.

Google Sued for Ad Fraud

Legal firm Kabateck Brown Kellner filed a class action lawsuit against Google on Tuesday. The suit, filed on behalf of one David Almeida, accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn’t expressly request. Elinor Mills at CNET gives the details:
“When participating in Google’s online auction-based advertising system, customers specify what they would be willing to pay for pay per-click for words or phrases that will trigger ads displayed on Google’s search site, as part of Google AdWords. They are also given the option of bidding for ads that appear on third-party Web sites, also called Google’s ‘content network’, which is part of Google AdSense.
On the system, customers see two blank boxes, one for typing in a bid for ads on Google.com, and another one, marked ‘optional’, for putting ads on content network sites. Sophisticated search engine marketers know to put a ‘0’ in the box for the content network AdSense sites if they don’t want ads there…
Google does not inform its advertisers that if they leave the box next to the content bid blank, Google will use the advertiser’s bid for clicks occurring on the content network, the lawsuit says.”

Google sued over advertising program

A lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn't expressly request.
The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed by the firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on behalf of David Almeida, a Massachusetts-based private investigator who enrolled in Google AdWords in November 2006.
When participating in Google's online auction-based advertising system, customers specify what they would be willing to pay per-click for words or phrases that will trigger ads displayed on Google's search site, as part of Google AdWords. They are also given the option of bidding for ads that appear on third-party Web sites, also called Google's "content network," which is part of Google AdSense.
When customers do not bid for ads on third-party sites, Google places ads there anyway and automatically charges customers the amount they specified for ads on Google.com, the lawsuit says.
On the system, customers see two blank boxes, one for typing in a bid for ads on Google.com and another one, marked "optional," for putting ads on content network sites. Sophisticated search engine marketers know to put a "0" in the box for the content network AdSense sites if they don't want ads there, says Brian Kabateck, lead counsel on the case. "For most people, if you see a box and leave it blank, you think you're not going to be charged," he says.
Google does not inform its advertisers that if they leave the box next to the content bid blank, Google will use the advertiser's bid for clicks occurring on the content network, the lawsuit says. There is no option to opt out of content ads during the process, according to the document.
"Ads on third-party sites are widely acknowledged to be far less effective (and therefore less valuable to the advertiser) than ads on Google.com," a statement from Los Angeles-based Kabateck Brown Kellner says. "Google, of course, still profits greatly from these ads."
A Google spokesman said: "We have not been served with the complaint and will have no comment until we have the chance to review it."
Kabateck recently won a multimillion-dollar click fraud settlement from Yahoo and was part of a $90 million click fraud settlement from Google on behalf of advertisers who sued the search companies claiming they were charged for clicks on ads that were fraudulent.

Yahoo refining search-ad bidding process

In an attempt to improve the relevance of ads attached to search results, Yahoo plans to adjust the process advertisers use to bid for placement as soon as next week.
Today, there's a minimum bid of 10 cents per keyword. Soon, though, Yahoo will move to a variable minimum price, the company said Friday. The new minimum price could be higher or lower, depending on the keyword and the quality of the individual advertiser who's bidding for it, the company said.
For example, with the new system, a minimum bid--called a reserve price--could be lower for a high-quality advertiser whose ads have proven to be relevant to what searchers are looking for. Or it could be higher for a keyword that's in high demand, requiring advertisers to think more carefully about which keywords they truly want to sponsor.
Overall, the goal is improved relevance--the likelihood that an ad will appeal to somebody searching for information on the Web and that that person is who the advertiser wants to reach.
The changes are part of Yahoo's overhauled search ad system, called Panama, which has enabled a series of changes over the last year and a half. One change was the ability for Yahoo to assign a quality ranking to each advertiser based on factors such as how often users click on their ads. Another was discounts to the price advertisers pay when users click on ads hosted on non-premier sites that use Yahoo for serving up ads.
Yahoo has been trying to improve its search-ad results to boost its business, attract more advertising, and better compete against leader Google. Meanwhile, Google has been adding refinements of its own, changes that yielded fewer clicks on ads but more revenue per click. The competition has been going on for years, but it's under more intense scrutiny with Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo.
The seriousness of the situation for Yahoo was spotlighted earlier this week when Yahoo announced a limited test of Google's search-ad delivery system alongside Panama. Google makes more money per click on its search ads than Yahoo, so using Google's ads could theoretically increase Yahoo revenue depending on how the proceeds were divided.
Don't expect variable pricing to be switched on completely in one fell swoop. The change is launching in the United States and will arrive internationally later, spokeswoman Kristen Wareham said. Also, it will begin with some keywords and eventually spread to all of them, she said.
Yahoo alerted advertisers of the minimum-price change in February on its search marketing blog, and offered some answers to frequently asked questions page.