If you have used the search box on our home page recently to check for advertisers on various keywords, you may have noticed we added a few options on the search results page. One allows you to see results for a specific country/language combination (the default being your own), another to select whether adult results are allowed or not, and the last one, which we are going to tackle today, allows you to select search or contextual mode and see associated results for any keyword.
First of all, why are there two modes? Simply because people actively searching for something (and typing a request in a search box for instance) are way more likely to click on the ad, and then to actually buy the advertised product or service. This means such users are more valuable to advertisers (they bring in more revenue, on average), and advertisers are thus likely to spend more money to get those.
On the other hand, contextual users are certainly interested in the product or service advertised (otherwise they wouldn’t be clicking on the ad), especially since it relates to the page they’re currently reading, but they’re still a little bit less likely to actually buy the product and service in the end. This means advertisers will not be willing to pay as much, and in some situations, they don’t want to use contextual mode at all.
Of course, contextual mode is still better than the “plain random” mode that many other networks use (and that we use in some cases, mainly when we do not have contextual ads for the user’s country).
Note that not all our partners make a distinction between the two modes, but Yahoo! Search Marketing, who provide the best paying PPC ads for the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Brazil, actually does make that distinction.
Now, you wonder, since Oxado is operating a contextual ad network, what’s the purpose of search mode? It’s pretty simple: our engine will automatically recognize a user that is actually doing a search, and switch to search mode when required. It might do this because a user has used a search box on your site, or because the user ended up on your site after doing a search on another site (most likely a search engine). Our software will then pick up the search query the user entered, and fetch and display relevant “search mode” ads specifically for this query. Being very targeted, you’ll get even higher click rates than usual, and being in “search mode”, there are more ads, and they get paid more.
Again, you wonder, if all of this is automatic, why am I ranting about it? There are still a few things to know: if you want our engine to recognize searches on your site, make sure your form uses the GET method rather than the POST method (it actually makes more sense semantically too, POST should be used only for requests that actually change something, not to fetch data), so that the search query appears in the URL. Also make sure you use a sensible query parameter name. We recognize most of the standard ones out there, just make sure you don’t use the parameter “schblorg” for the query, we might have a hard time finding out it’s actually a query!
The other point is that for our engine to be able to pick up searches that led to your site, avoid putting the banners in frames (or iframes) at all costs (they’re bad for the contextualization in any case), and don’t hesitate to place large Oxado banners prominently on pages that get a lot of search engine traffic. For the PHP and other dynamic page gurus out there, you might even consider displaying a larger or more preminent Oxado banner when the HTTP_REFERER matches any of the big search engines.
I hope this will help you get more revenue with Oxado!
