AdMoolah News and Views

Yahoo has introduced some new features to publishers.

First, they replaced the old “Content Setup” tab with a “Publisher Services” tab. It is subdivided into three sub-tabs – “Drive Traffic”, “Enhance Your Site” and “Build Your Site”. Each sub-tab has forms and links for various Yahoo! offerings that might be of interest to publishers. The “Drive Traffic” sub-tab has forms for site submission, RSS feed submission and site suggestion. It also has links to Yahoo! services such as podcast and video submission pages, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Search Submit Express. The “Enhance Your Site” sub-tab aggregates many Yahoo service that you can add to your site such as search boxes, Flickr badges, and Yahoo videos. The last sub-tab “Build Your Site” includes links to Yahoo! domain registration and hosting services, and Yahoo! Small Business.

I can see why Yahoo! added the Publisher Services tab. It promotes their own services by making it easier for publisher to find out about them and use them. It will be a convenience for publisher who regularly use these features.

The next change is a new help center. Yahoo! has started creating how-to guides for setting up and managing accounts. Several FAQs are included as well.

My favorite change is a new column on the reports – Revenue Per Click. This shows total revenue divided by number of clicks. I’m not sure why Yahoo! or AdSense have not included this column on their reports before. I’m sure its something that most publishers calculate on a regular basis.

The final change is bulk URL Reporting upload. Instead of adding reporting URLs one at a time, you can now cut and past up to 100 URLs into the form at once. The maximum number of active reporting URLs allowed is still 100.

It’s good to see Yahoo! adding features and helping to raise the bar. Now I hope AdSense follows suite and adds a Revenue-Per-Click column into their reports!

Last week Google added a new Site Diagnostics page to the AdSense console. It has since disappeared. Darren over at ProBlogger wrote to the AdSense team to find out what was going on, and Google wrote back that it was just a temporary test.

This seems a little strange to me. My guess is that this was put onto publishers pages by mistake, and Google quickly realized that it wasn’t supposed to be there and removed it.

eBay is going to launch their own contextual ad network, which means they will be competing with AdSense, YPN, Chitika, and eventually MSN’s adCenter. Their “AdContext” product will offer publishers a chance to put ads to eBay auctions on their sites. Much like AdSense, an eBay robot will scan pages for context and then display relevant ads. Publishers will get 35 percent to 60 percent of sales, depending on volumes. One major difference between AdContext and AdSense is that AdContext will pay the publisher only when an actual sale takes place, not on a per-impression or per-click basis.

Because this is a contextual program, AdContext ads will not be able to be placed on the same page as AdSense or YPN ads. They can however, be placed on the same site.

I have a feeling that this will be a good program for certain types of websites that deal with consumer goods. Because of this, the program might be a bigger threat to Chitika then AdSense.

The AdSense control panel has a new page – “Site Diagnostics”. This page lists URLs on your sites that the AdSense crawler was not able to access. All AdSense publishers should check this page to make sure that all of their pages are being fully monetized.

The reasons listed for the crawler not being able to access pages are:

• Robots.txt file
• Authentication
• URL not found
• Redirect

Found via ProBlogger

Google has announced an AdSense API for signing up and managing accounts. This API allows sites to have users sign up with AdSense, and then collect a revenue share, in addition to the regular $100 referral bonus when the user reaches $100 with 180 days.

This API will be very useful to anyone who has a revenue sharing program, making it easier for users to sign up and use AdSense.

The API is currently in beta and to sign up you need more than 100,000 daily pageviews. More details can be found at the AdSense API Home.

On the Inside AdSense blog, Google has announced that they will be launching click-to-pay video ads in the coming days.

This means that advertisers can place these video ads using site or keyword targeting and choose either CPM or CPC payment options. At first only advertisers in USA, Canada and Japan will be able to place these ads, although they will be able to geo-target the ads internationally.

The good part about these ads is that they won’t start automatically playing. An image will be displayed, and the user needs to click on the ad to start it, and then can pause it, advance it, adjust the volume, or click through to the advertisers site.

Google has not yet mentioned an option for publishers to opt-out of these ads, although I assume if you don’t have image ads selected, you won’t get the video ads. It would be nice to see individual opt-out options for image ads, flash ads and the new video ads. Publishers like to have control over what appears on their sites.

Update: Some interesting commentary on the new video ads: Greg Sterling sees this as a move for Google towards TV, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is not optimistic about the new format.

There is a new open source ad tracking package available. It seems like a really nice, fully featured tool. In addition to standard ad tracking, it also features some click fraud prevention tools. You can set it up to automatically disable ads if it detects too many click from a single IP.

I will be installing this on some of my websites shortly. I will post about this again once I’ve had a chance to see it in action.

There is some discussion about it at Digital Point.

Good news for YPN Publisher, they have just added direct deposit. I found this in my email this morning:

We’ve just made receiving your Yahoo! Publisher Network earnings quicker and easier than ever, with the introduction of a Direct Deposit option for all publisher accounts.

As with our pay-by-check option, you’ll still need to accrue at least $100 in earnings before payment is made. However, if you’re signed up for direct deposit, we will credit your bank account on the 26th of each month, rather than by the 10th of the following month, meaning that you’ll receive your earnings approximately 15 days sooner!

Getting paid on the 26th of the month is great.

Jennifer Slegg (a.k.a Jenstar) just finished the premiere episode of her new radio program on Webmaster Radio, called Click This!. The show focuses on contextual advertising and related topics.

Her guest was Kim Malone, Director of Online Sales & Operations for Google AdSense. It is always interesting to hear from people on the AdSense team. Here are a few highlights:

• Kim hinted that there were changes coming soon to the Reporting UI, Site Targeting, and New Referral Programs.
• To avoid getting kicked out of AdSense make sure to avoid “scumware”, Pay-to-surf programs, and any source of traffic that uses pop-ups. Also avoid clicking on your own ads.
• Like usual for Google, Kim avoided saying anything very specific about smartpricing, but suggested to avoid poor quality traffic
• Some interesting notes about premium publishers – in order to get the benefits of being a premium publisher they are required to have commitments for ad placements and pageviews.

The archive of the show will be available at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/index.php?showId=42

Congratulations on a successful show, Jennifer. Can’t wait for the next one.

Yahoo has posted a blog entry about positioning ads for the best click-through rates. It is interesting to compare this with Google’s Heat Map.

Both agree that the best positioning is just above the main content on the page. After that though, the opinions differ a little. Google’s heat map suggests four places as the secondary positions: 1) On the left hand side below the top level navigation , 2) In the center below the top level navigation, 3) On the left side of the content, and 4) Below the primary content. Yahoo’s advice is: “In general, Margaret has a found that the second most active placement in terms of click-through tends to be the right-hand rail or margin.”

I think this is a useful reminder that what works on one site, may not work on another. The key is to experiment on your own site and see which works best yourself.