Given the fact that advertisers are supposed to pay if and when a user happens to click on the ad, Google has every possible reason to put upfront more, not fewer, of them. It might seem absolutely logical that the company would fill the right-hand side space alongside individual e-mails. When users take the trouble, both advertisers and Google benefit.
Frequency of display ads is getting reduced
That’s not necessarily the case! According to Alex Gawley, the senior product manager, Google has reduced the number of ads displayed to a great extent and it wants users to feel confident that the ads have been carefully winnowed in order to showcase only the most relevant ones.
From the beginning itself, as we have discussed in the previous post, the search engine giant rightly followed that its users wouldn’t appreciate irrelevant ads. That’s why it conceived software for analyzing the text in a message so as to pick most appropriate ads. In essence, Gmail system tries to make them as useful as possible to an individual user.
Why do we get non-relevant messages with e-mails?
But the advertiser often employ key terms, very broad in nature, which can be put up with any e-mail message, leaving little scope for matching the ad to a user’s area of interest. Keeping this in mind, Gmail chose to revamp ad-matching system – now in limited tests – to analyze the content as well as context of a message.
Images to go with display ads
It follows and decodes ‘signals in a user’s inbox,” like whether one opens messages with specific key terms and avoid messages with some other least preferred keywords. Mr. Gawley reveals, Gmail would soon let advertisers use images. For instance, an e-mailed ski package offer, which shows a skier on the slopes, could carry along with on the screen’s right side an ad of a competing offer. The image in the ad would not be animated, and would be tried out only in instances where the message itself carried images.
In fact, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have long used image and animated ads. A Microsoft spokeswoman stated Hotmail had reduced the number of frequency of image ads per page from two to one. This suggests a ‘consumer-first approach’ on their part. The spokesperson added that the company had decided to do away entirely with text-only ads from Hotmail in order to offer a ‘cleaner user experience’.
Gmail does not want to alienate users
However, Gmail, as is known, has not permitted images or anything beyond text ads. In a way, this is going to be a significant change. Mr. Gawley underlines its relevance for its users and emphasizes that the search engine giant is moving gradually before Gmail actually introduces images as a preferred ad option.
