I was looking at a website today that shows ads within the text, or in-text advertising, as it’s known. As a reader I don’t like them, because the ads expand if I accidentally move my mouse over them, and they don’t always go away when you click the ‘X’ (click elsewhere on the page to remove them). But I was even more concerned today, as all the ads on this page were irrelevant including one ad showed an ad for British wheely bins that was linked to ‘bathroom cabinet’ text.
I naively thought this was a one off, but when I hovered over a few more ads, all the text ads on the same page produced totally irrelevant ads for gambling sites. When I let the wheely bin advertiser know, he said he would have ‘cabinet’ as a negative word, and that he only advertised with Google Adwords, who must sell these ads to other companies including Infolinks.
I had noticed ‘bin’ was part of ‘cabinet’ but I honestly thought advertising algorithms were a bit more sophisticated than to include every word within a word! This could mean we have to spend many hours finding thousands of negative keywords, or we’re all throwing a lot of money away.
And I couldn’t find words within words on the other irrelevant ads for online casinos and online bingo, which is more worrying.
Google Adwords expert Perry Marshall believes it can still be worth advertising on the content network, though I have only done search ads so far.
From an internet marketer’s perspective, site owners are paid by Infolinks and other in-text ad companies to have these ads on their pages, so a lot may not care how irrelevant they are.
But I prefer to give my readers an uninterrupted experience and not to support service providers who fail to give advertisers the service they have been promised. But the people who do have these ads on their pages may also be concerned, because if the ads are not relevant when they are rolled over, how many people are actually going to click on them?
