AdMoolah News and Views

The AdSense optimization webinar took place today at 5:00 PM Pacific Time. It consisted of three main parts:

1. A best practices presentation,
2. Case studies, and
3. Questions.

I will post about each of these in separate entries in the next little bit. I tried to jot down as much of the information as I could, but I’m sure there is plenty I missed.

Update: here are links to the posts:
Best Practices
Case Studies
Questions and Answers: Part 1
Questions and Answers: Part 2

In a NY Times article published today, is going to launch it’s AdSense competitor tomorrow (Wednesday). This has been talked about for a while now, but it looks like its finally going to happen.

I think this is good news for the whole PPC industry. Competition is always good, and we should Yahoo and Google push each other to bring out better features, and (I hardly even dare to day it) maybe even better revenue shares for publishers.

I know I’ll be signing up as soon as I can to try it out. I may need to update the site to allow entries for both AdSense and Yahoo publisher network.

Now we just need Microsoft to join in on this too.

I can’t wait.

Found via John Battelle’s SearchBlog.

Google is having an AdSense Optimization Webinar on Tuesday August 2nd at 5:00 PM Pacific time.

An hour-long seminar on AdSense implementation techniques that can boost revenue. The program will cover ways publishers can use ad formats, colors, and positioning – as well as new AdSense features – to improve the performance of AdSense. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions during an open Q&A session.

I recently used my AdWords account to check if my websites were available for site-targeted campaigns in Google’s AdWords campaign. It turns out 3 out of 5 of my sites were. One of the sites that wasn’t available was just a few days old, and the other one is a very low traffic site that has been up for a few months.

I think in general site-targeting is good for webmasters with high quality sites. People who have set up sites just to try to make money off AdSense with little or no real content will not be chosen by advertisers and they will suffer for it.

This got me thinking about how Google chooses which sites are chosen. I would think brand new sites and sites with low traffic would not be shown, but are there any other criteria? Does anyone know?

Have you checked if your sites are available?

Over in the WebMasterWord forums, the AdSense representative posted a message about some AdSense downtime today:

I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow, July 22, 2005, between approximately 9 PM – 11 PM Pacific Time we will be conducting scheduled AdSense maintenance. During this time, you may not be able to access the ‘My Accounts’ tab of your account.

Your earnings will continue to accrue during this timeframe, and will appear in your reports after the maintenance is complete.

This is something every AdSense publisher should be warned about. Some unscrupulous AdSense publishers are inserting their own AdSense ads into JavaScript without knowledge of the webmaster using the script.

There is a thread at WebMasterWorld which describes what happened to on unsuspecting webmaster when he was using an “email to a friend” script on his site when he happened to notice that every now and then an AdSense ad would be displayed instead of what was supposed to be displayed.

This is a big deal because it violates the Google TOS to display two publishers ads on the same page without prior permission from Google. So if you are running any third party scripts on your site you may want to keep an eye on it!

JenSense has a good write up about what happened

Google has updated the terms and policies of the AdSense program. The changes are mostly to reflect the new programs available in AdSense such as site-targeted ads and AdSense for RSS. JenSense has a good summary of the changes.

They have also updated the reports section of AdSense. There is a new overview page that provides a snapshot of the daily activity and links to a lot of common reports.

You’ll notice both of these changes the next time you log into AdSense.

Good news for people who run AdSense ads on forums. Google is conducting a “forum optimization study”. The owner of VBWebmaster Forums (who I blogged about earlier) has been contacted by AdSense to be a part of this study. They will be testing different ad placements and targeting options. Joeychgo, the administrator of the VBWebmaster forum has details about it at the forum.

Publishers often complain that the CTR for ads in forums is very low, so this will hopefully result in findings that will help this situation.

Found via: JenSense

As a sort of follow up to my last post.

It seems Google won a lawsuit against a click fraudster back in May. This didn’t seem to make much news whan it happened, which is surprising. Google should have been talking a lot about this to show that they are actively combating click fraud and to try to scare off others who are considering getting into the click fraud business.

I found this from Search Engine Watch blog.

JenSense is reporting that Google now allows people to report suspected click fraud against a publisher via the “Ads by Google” link that appears on AdSense ads.

This has my head scratching for a few reasons.

First, it allows for anonymous reporting, which makes easier for a unscrupulous competitor to try to bring a competing website down. Why would Google want anonymous reporting? If there really is click fraud going on, people should be willing to report it without hiding behind anonymity.

Second, how are people supposed to know about click fraud? The JenSense posting mentions a few things like click rings and emails soliciting clicks, but if that was the case, wouldn’t you want to send the email or the location of the click ring to Google? Why would you want to report it through the publisher’s web site?

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I can understand why Google wants to get a handle on click fraud, but this doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing it.