Today, Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch noticed that a small Google Ads was appearing at the bottom of Google Maps. For the blog writer, the story makes sense: Google’s stocks are losing value, and so the company is tapping into its unexploited page views to increase distributed ads and revenues. Unfortunately, if you click on an ad at the bottom of a map, it will not pop up a marker on the map, it will just open the Website of the advertiser, just like regular Google ads do. Disappointing!

Image from Techcrunch

On Cnet, Stephen Shankland notices a few variations in ads appearances:

“shoe store San Francisco” shows results but “shoe store” while looking at San Francisco doesn’t. Presumably this behavior will change according to what keywords advertisers bid on.

That’s the downside of such a precipitated move: Google has applied a traditional bidding system. For maps, it would make more sense if advertisers could bid on keywords overlaid on geographic areas bids. Unfortunately, this system would require more development efforts, and it seems that Google doesn’t have time for subtleties these days.

Here at Click2map, users can chose to display Google Ads around the maps they create, and generate money out of it. Antony, can you specify in the comments if our users will get to make some money out of this new ad placement as well?

Tags: google maps, text ads

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 11:37 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you are curious to learn more about us, visit Click2Map: Try our free plan to build your own professional maps.