New Performance Ads: 11/21/11!

[Prosperent Mike]

I was shooting for an 11/11/11 launch, but some things cropped up that needed improvement before we launched these new ads.

Couple of big things:


The ads have been greatly simplified to show only what is necessary: A big image of the product, the brand and the price. If you hover over, you'll get more details.
We have updated the way we evaluate on-page content to get relevant products. The ads work on by proximity, meaning if you have a heading near the ad about a product, it will pick that heading up and use it to find products. (This is improved if you use the custom: prosperent_heading_selector string to specify an exact block level element to use during search. More on this below)


New option: prosperent_heading_selector. When used, this string tells the Performance Ad where to look when finding headings to use for the query (or queries). The Performance Ads now use multiple queries to find relevant products, so you can specify a selector that would yield multiple results. The selector requires the syntax of jQuery and can be based on selector documentation from version 1.2.3 or later.

For example: let's say I have a block of content on my page that contains tags about the blog post:



<div class="blogPost">
<div class="heading">Gears of War 3 ruined my life</div>
<div class="postSnippet">Gears of War 3 is out! This game kept me up all night, blah, blah, blah. Nerd talk, nerd talk, nerd talk.</div>
<div class="adBlock">
<script language="text/javascript">
prosperent_uid = 11111;
prosperent_unit = 0232023032;
prosperent_ad_height = 300;
prosperent_ad_width = 300;
//here's the important part:
//i'm specifying div.tag because i want it to return each tag div
//specifying the div.tags would return a combined longer string
//and 0 products
prosperent_heading_selector = 'div.tag';
</script>
<script language="text/javascript" src="http://prosperent.com/js/ad.js"></script>
</div>
<div class="tags">
<div class="tag">xbox 360 games</div>
<div class="tag">gears of war 3</div>
<div class="tag">gaming</div>
</div>
</div>


This heading selector would send the queries: "xbox 360 games", "gears of war 3", "gaming" AND "Gears of War 3 ruined my life" to our search engine. The new update also searches the page for headings and block level elements that contain the words: heading, title, etc.

Questions?

[AcidRaZor]

What happened to the left/right thingy Brian showed in one of the screenshots?

[prosperent brian]

Next phase. This is just the start of the updates to performance ads. We still have to convert them over to ajax, add in what you saw, add in our machine learning algorithm's, etc, etc, etc. It will be ever evolving.

[AcidRaZor]

Just tell me which pokemon to buy that'll evolve into that and I'll buy it! :p

[Hoops]

I can't seem to get the fallback query to work. I'm using "books" as the query and have tried both false and true as the default but I just get a blank ad..

[Prosperent Mike]

Can you PM me the URL where this is set up? I'll have a look at it.

[Mike 76]

You mentioned that there's a large product picture. I just added a large skyscraper and the pictures are tiny. The vast majority of the ad unit is white space. Most only display 3 products instead of 4. And most of the ads are completely irrelevant.

I would like to put something at the top of the sidebar widget like "Site Sponsors" or "Recommended Suppliers" but when I do it brings up some random product with the word "suppliers" or "sponsors" in it.

Even after removing the caption, it still displays irrelevant products.

And the pages are clearly about popular affiliate products.

One page title is "(Affiliate Product) Side Effects" It seems to ignore the mention of the product, and displays an add for a book with the words "side effects" in it.

Another example is "(Affiliate Product) Benefits" It displays no ads for the product mentioned, but it does show an add for a T shirt entitled "My Space Friend With 'Benefits'" I might buy it :)

It seems like the name of a tangible good, would get precedence over a vague word such as "Benefits" Some of the other irrelevant results, I can't even find an explanation for. Surely it's not from cookies on my browser.

Should I PM somebody the urls?

I didn't come here to complain, but it seems to have gotten worse since the last time I tried Performance Ads.

Hope everybody is having a happy and profitable New Year. :)

[prosperent brian]

pm some examples and we can offer up some tips :)

[Mike 76]

Thanks for the response Brian. I did read the OP, I just wasn't sure what I was looking at. LOL...

Hmmmm...I can't specify a keyword for each ad because the sidebar ad is site wide. And when I entered some more of my page titles in to check the test query, they didn't return any results. Not all of my pages are directly product related, but they are all indirectly product related.

Hmmm.....

Can I set it so it targets the body content of the page, or maybe the first paragraph? For a couple of those products it targeted the word "Category" from my category menu.

Do Performance Ads still appear based on the search query people use? For the home page I sent you at the c-s.org site, google the product name that is in the domain. Scroll halfway down the page and click on my site. It still displays the same ads. Not the product that is named in the Google search.

It looks like I've missed a few things.

[prosperent brian]

The best bet is likely to target your headings above the content from what I am seeing on your sites. Your examples are showing me some areas we need to improve though. Specifically the ease of targeting from the start. I think we can tweak the way we do things to make it better out of the box.

The ads should still target the serp queries. I'll investigate that issue as well. I appreciate the feedback :)

[prosperent brian]

Looking over the pages i'm actually surprised most by how bad the google adsense targeting is. We can definitely do better than that once we get things tweaked a bit here.

[Mike 76]

Hi Brian, I thought I made a post here 2 days ago , but I was a little effed up, so maybe I didn't. :)

But yeah, I'm looking for any solution you can find. I tested the ads again coming from a search query. They still don't match up. Even when searching the exact product name.

I like the 500 by 250 ad. It usually returns 9 products. But sometimes it returns only 3 (when I know there's a lot more). Sometimes it returns 9 products with some duplicates. That's preferable to having blank spaces. Blank spaces make the Performance Ads look really bad.

95% of my traffic comes from search engines, though some search queries don't show any product, even though a product name is mentioned in the search query. I have a couple other sites with the same format.

Hopefully there's a solution that will benefit everybody.