Good afternoon, SEOmoz  fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we are talking about something that we at SEOmoz rarely talk about. We’re actually going to be talking about search advertising. So I wanted to discuss a little bit of the difference between paid search ads and contextual search ads. I think that a lot of times, they get lumped together. They should never be lumped together and I’m going to talk about that.

I’m also going to talk about a little bit of user evolution and what happens to advertising in general, not just search advertising as that process goes along. So, let’s start ourselves off in the search results ad. I mean this is – what we’re really talking about here is AdWords. Who wrote sense there? Is that my handwriting? AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter. Right, the ads that you see when you do a search like, I want to build muscle, you see, you know, search results in blue maybe at the top or in pink now. Google is doing them pink. Right.

And the results might be something like, okay, “buy protein shakes” or “join 24-hour fitness” whereas you might see or get results that are like “learn how muscle growth works” or “build muscle with anaerobic exercise”. More informational content a lot of the time and sometimes, less commercial. Sometimes, it’s just as commercial if the intent of the search is clearly a commercial one but really what you’re looking at here is someone saying, okay, you know, Google has a quality score. They’ve got a – you know, all sorts of things to try and determine and here’s the reason why because when we’ve got two people, you know, looking at those ads, they might be like, “Oh, that’s a good ad. I should join that gym. You know, it’s geo-targeted to me,” because you can do that in AdWords, “And it’s relevant to my search. Great”

Or you’ve got this guy over here and this is generally the philosophy boat that I’m in which is these ads are crap. I don’t want to see this junk. Okay. So the problem is, if somebody thinks these ads are crap, Google shares go down. Larry and Sergey are sad. If somebody loves that ad, if they think, “I should join that gym,” and they go over there and they actually do convert into a buyer, those Google shares go up and Larry and Sergey are happy along with the rest of the Google employees.

So you can see kind of the intent here and what’s really important is that Google needs to be serving much more than they need to be serving your ad because you’re paying a lot of money [Indiscernible] [0:02:47] to be serving the users because they need users to keep clicking those ads. Ads are 99 percent of Google’s revenue so if Google is not clicking, if Google is not converting people into a good experience, a good user experience with their advertising, over time, they’re going to stop. They’re going to stop clicking ads and if we all stop clicking ads because we’ve had that experiences with ads, Google’s growth is not going to be like it was.

Okay. Contextual advertising, the reason this is such a different story is this. So here I am. I got to Strong.com and I’m learning how muscle growth works and here’s this strong stick figure guy who is telling me that I can get tough like him. Then there’s some AdSense that serve it on the page and that AdSense says, you know, “Buy protein,” or “Get big,” or “Buy cow hormones.” Steroids, right? Hopefully, there’s no AdSense for steroids. Gosh, I hope not. And here’s our little guy up here and maybe he’s thinking like, “I came to this site for information. I didn’t really come to buy something.” You know, he has clicked on a search result. Now, it’s possible maybe he’ll see this and he’ll think, “Okay, maybe I should. Maybe I should buy some protein. Maybe I should join the gym. Maybe I should click one of those ads.”

And that click is done because he’s truly interested. But a lot of the time and certainly the AdSense guidelines would suggest that there’s a lot of this kind of click because you’re fooled. Right? Click because it looks like internal navigation, because it looks like its part of the site and that’s kind of tough. And what happens there? Well, both are generating earnings for Google over the search engines. But one of them is generating long term value, right? One of them is generating long term value.

Here’s the thing. If you are getting contextual ads and those ads are not relevant and the experience of clicking those ads is terrible, you have the same thing happening that you did back in search advertising which is, people abandoning those results, stopping clicking on ads.

As they get more advanced and realize that they’re having a terrible experience with AdSense or with YPN or what have you, they’re not going to be clicking those ads anymore. That’s going to be a huge problem for Google again. You know, they make a lot of money on these ads so they need people to have a positive experience. This is kind of the historical model. Take a look. Over time, users have gotten more and more savvy and they click ads less and less so this is kind of the rule of the internet. And if you have someone who has been online for 10 years and they’re heavily into the space and they really know a lot about the Web, they’re not an ad user. Right? These are the kinds of people you find at Digg for example or in the Webmaster sphere or just a very experienced entrepreneur who’s in the Web world

So we started with things like pop-ups and pop-unders. We got into banners, maybe some overlays like those ads that nobody likes on SEOmoz. And now, we are into contextual advertising. Well, contextual advertising is designed to be more relevant and it’s designed to provide, you know, something of a better experience but I think you’re still going to deal with this problem. What happens to contextual or search ads when users evolve? You know, users are going to become more savvy. They’re going to become smarter and if Google and Yahoo! and the rest can’t play to that and can’t recognize that the pattern, that historical pattern of users on the Web is to stop clicking a type of ad and become blind to it, I think there’s going to be some real issues.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this Whiteboard Friday and we will see you all again next week.