White-Label Adwords for AOL: This is a good thing

AOL and Google announced last week that AOL will be releasing a white label version of Adwords for AOL. This will allow advertisers to launch campaigns directly on AOL and target just AOL users and not all of the search providers that Adwords powers the advertising for.

In our experience, our highest converting Adwords campaigns have always been from searches performed on AOL. Now we can target them directly. As I mentioned above, this is a very good thing for us.

Vinny Lingham has a great blog post about the overall impact that the Adwords for AOL is going to have:

For the record, our logs indicate that AOL has the best conversion rate across all Google partners, and this simple means that if there is a separate marketplace for AOL, that prices across the Google Adwords network (especially direct) should fall, IN THEORY.

By AOL moving out of the marketplace, this would effectively mean that the remaining traffic would become too expensive, because AOL would not be cross subsidizing it (and obviously, they know this already, and that’s why they want their own marketplace). This would mean that prices would drop in order to offset the drop in traffic quality.

Take a look at his post here. Also the announcement is here via John Battelle and additional analysis is here and here.