Google announced an agreement yesterday to display its contextual ad listings on one of Europe's largest shopping search engines, Kelkoo.
The deal puts Google's AdSense listings on search and content pages on Kelkoo sites in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. Google generates the listings by scanning the content on the page and returning relevant text listings tied to the keywords found on the page. Kelkoo boasts more than 100 million search and content pages and 27 million monthly users. Kelkoo also powers the shopping section of MSN's sites in Europe and Yahoo's in France, but those sites will not carry the AdSense listings.
Financial details were not disclosed. Google typically either splits the revenue generated by each click with a publisher or buys the space on a CPM basis.
Google's gain is Espotting's loss. Kelkoo previously contracted with the European company for its paid listings. Espotting had concluded an expanded deal to provide contextual listings on four Kelkoo country sites last May. The lost deal adds to Espotting's woes, following its loss of Yahoo Europe and Ask Jeeves UK, as well as its troubled proposed merger with U.S. paid search firm FindWhat.com. That deal is still in limbo following FindWhat's discovery of problems in Espotting's finances. FindWhat, which can call off the deal as soon as Jan. 31, is insisting on a lower purchase price than the $163 million when the acquisition was announced last June.
The Kelkoo deal is one of the largest to date for AdSense in Europe, joining its deal with Lycos Europe. Since launching in Europe in April, AdSense has signed up large sites such as Burda Digital and Gruner + Jahr in Germany, Sports.fr in France and The Economist in the UK. Google said it also has signed up thousands of small sites worldwide through its self-service AdSense program. Google expanded AdSense to French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese last month.
While Google also operates its own comparison-shopping engine, Froogle, its sponsored links appear on other shopping sites including Amazon.com. Paid listings allow sites like Amazon and Kelkoo to make money off more of their page, though they risk taking consumers to competing sites.
Brian Morrissey covers search marketing for DM News.com. To keep up with the latest search marketing news subscribe to our free e-mail weekly newsletter Search Engine Marketing by visiting www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/newslettersub.cgi .
