Comments on: Shopping.com Encouraging Users to Click on AdSense Ads

By: Price Comparison

Price Comparison — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:46:33 +0000

I have been using comparison websites for a while now but I hate the fact that you can never be satisfied that the price that is being advertised as the minimum is actual the lowest unless you cross reference with other comparison sites. I was thinking to myself the other day why there wasn’t a somparison site that would have a very comprehensive list of merchants and products and I stumbled on tafuma.co.uk. It is a new site but these guys seem to be listing more products from more merchants than the big 5, the likes of kelkoo, ciao, pricerunner, pricegrabber and nextag. I don’t know I thought the same when nextag burst on the scene but it’s all gone down hill hopefully you guys at tafuma.co.uk keep it up.

By: SEO'Brien

SEO'Brien — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 02:23:58 +0000

Nice discovery
Must be sanctioned by Google, Shopping is too large for it to go unnoticed due to a lack of manpower. I actually like the integration, I think it makes it clearer to the user that you are going somewhere else: “See Site”
As for Shopping’s use (policy?) in ensuring arbitrage for keywords on which they’ve bid in adwords but may not have inventory, I’m appalled. That amounts to nothing more than domain squatting by attracting customers to their site/domain, adding no value, and redirecting the user off to another site through Google’s ads which is what the user should have followed from Google in the first place. Shopping.com should know better; rather, I’m sure they know better, they should act responsibly and ethically and clean up their act.

By: search_junkie

search_junkie — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:00:45 +0000

I agree with you Brian in that they are going against Adsense policies. But I have come across many sites that go against the policies. It seems to me that Google is not in a big hurry to “bust” people going against their policies, as long as they are making money. I also believe that Google just does not have the manpower to monitor the entire system. The only way that they would catch someone would be if someone brought it to their attention and if enough people complained about it. Google allows MANY sites to commit arbitrage because they benefit from it!

By: Brian Smith

Brian Smith — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:47:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment, affiliata. I tried to leave a comment on your blog, but had trouble. Yup, you�re right, Shopping.com (SDC) has a special relationship with Google, and they don�t use AdSense, but do you think that Google would allow SDC to encourage users to click on ads in the way they did in the screen shots above? I can�t imagine this happening�but I�ll ping Jennifer Slegg and some other people who know contextual advertising much better than I do.

By: Affiliata

Affiliata — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:30:00 +0000

Brian – you made a post the other day about shogging.com and made reference to an admission that pepperjam called it arbitrage. We all know that shopping.com and every other comparison engine have exactly the same model. The above example is slightly innacurate in the way you have described it. Shopping.com do not use AdSense. They may show the same Google ads but they have an entirely different deal with Google through their syndication team. Their contract will be very different to a standard AdSense contract. In your specific example, their system will first check to see if they have merchants on the term �buy nintendo wii� [we know that merchants stopped using the comparison engines on this term due to stock issues]. So, rather than pulling their AdWords advertising [very difficult if you bid on millions of terms] they pull in their Google feed and send that same term to Google to show these results. It basically stops them losing money through sending the user to a page with nothing on it.

By: vic_berggren

vic_berggren — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:17:00 +0000

Programmer error? Looks like overzealous marketing geek error.