AdMoolah News and Views

There is a new post today on the inside AdSense blog. This new entry includes a letter that was written by a publisher that has recently implemented image ads and seen good results. It has some interesting nuggets of information.

We’ve seen a 34% increase in AdSense revenues by allowing image ads in our ad codes and implementing section targeting on key pages. These technologies by their nature mean that impressions may initially drop, however, we have still seen increased revenues because our eCPM has doubled.

I’m not sure I understand why impressions may drop due to implementing image ads. There should be a larger of inventory of ads to choose from, meaning better there should be fewer PSAs shown. I guess I could imagine that section targeting may reduce the impressions since it could narrow the focus of the page, increasing the chance of PSAs. But overall, I’m surprised that Google let this statement go in without any explanation.

The letter goes on to talk about reporting…

Of course Google doesn’t give us all the stats yet on image v. text v. site-targeted ads, so we can’t be sure exactly what the cause is .

and Google responds with…

… thanks for sharing this part of your AdSense success story – and how additional reporting will be useful for you. No promises, but we’ll keep doing our best to give you what you need to maximize your AdSense earnings.

This looks like good news! Yesterday I posted about how better reporting was on my AdSense Wish List.

A third curious thing about this letter is this statement:

Because our AdSense ads are super-targeted, our customers tend to view them as “additional content” rather than diversionary advertising.

I have heard that before from AdSense case studies but I never really believed it. That seems to be stretching the truth a little. I agree that AdSense ads are less annoying than banner ads, but I would never view them as “additional content”. To back up my views we see that the site that the letter refers to, Recipezaar, has a “Remove this ad” link which leads to a membership page. I seems rather odd that users would want to remove this”additional content”