Search Advertising on own database

[damon]

I want to implement paid search advertising on my PHP/MySQL-based vertical/parametric search site. Read the CTR for paid search advertisers on today's Real Impact of Blended Search (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627322) article (I'll summarise, it's 12-15%).

I am still a little new to this, but, as I understand it, Google for Search displays Google's organic results alongside the paid search advertising. I want something that displays my search results and targetted paid search advertising.

I know I can implement a basic version of this using OpenAds, which allows advertisers to restrict ads by URL and query string terms. In my case, advertisers would choose search.php and search terms (including parameters) that get included in the query string.

However, I would prefer to use an already existing advertising agency, like AdSense, to target search ads based on the query string.

Does anyone know of any agencies that allow targetting based on query strings?

[acoupland]

With Openads, you could theoretically turn any network into a 'network which targets against my search term'. Mainly, it would be a good idea to run alongside any network which you get that specifically does do this for you. Rather than rely on the 1 network, you could for instance have multiple banners from a generic network which are specific for certain categories. You could then tell Openads to load one of those 'category' banners based on the keyword (you can pass the search keyword to openads using what is called the 'source' parameter, and target your banners against certain 'sources')

Hope this helps at least to get started :)

Arlen Coupland
Openads.org

[damon]

Thanks for the suggestion.

This might work really well because there is a limited number of parameters that are interesting from an advertising point of view, so I could target just the most interesting parameters and get a high-value targetting for a minimum amount of effort. I guess I could also set up groups of similar higher-value search terms when I have the time.

Still, it would be nice if one of the major PPC networks provided an API that let the publisher tell the PPC provider what sort of ads to send.

d.