AdMoolah News and Views

The second part of the AdSense Optimization webinar was three case studies.

HybridCars.com

The site gets about 25,000 views per day.

Initially Hybridcars.com only had ads on a small percentage of their pages and they were making $80-90 dollars a day. They managed to increase this to $200-300 dollars a day by putting ads on the majority of their pages, and improving the positioning of the ads.

Advice from HybridCars.com was to put content first to keep visitors and to experiment with different ads.

www.geekzone.co.nz

Geekzone gets about 75,000 page views a day and has 7,000 RSS subscribers.

Originally the site had ads on the top right of the page. They increased their AdSense revenue by about $20-$30 a day by moving the ads to be positioned between the title and the content.

Changing the ads from ones that stood out to ones that blend in caused their revenue to go from $30-$40 a day to $90-$100 a day.

Their advice was to focus on content to bring in traffic and use good navigation to keep users on your site.

AskTheBuilder.com

They get about 100,000 page views a day.

When they switched from having ads at the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, revenue increased by about 60%.

In one experiment, they went from using blend-in ads to ads with a yellow background and revenue dropped about 65%.

Their advice was to concentrate on having good content. Having 500-600 pages is far better than having 20-30 pages. Experimentation was again mentioned.

The first part of the webinar was a best practices presentation. Most of these tips have been talked about on many blogs and discussion groups, including my own AdSense tips series. It’s always good to have a review though.

Positioning

They showed the AdSense heat map and discussed how you should consider how visitors read your site and where their eyes are drawn too.

Format

Generally, wider ad formats are better than narrow ones. They have fewer line breaks in them so they are easier to read. The best ad formats are 336X280, 300X250 and 160X600.

Ad Color

The best ads often blend-in with the rest of the site. Ads that don’t blend in tend to cause ad-blindness and visitors will ignore the ads. Another trick is rotating several color palettes, each of which blend. This can also help fight ad-blindness.

Which Pages Should AdSense Go On?

As many as possible. Consider putting AdSense ads in places like forums, shopping and search results pages.

Tools

There are several tools which AdSense provides which can help optimize ads.

Channels
Channels are useful for experimenting with different positioning, formats and colors.

Image Ads
Most image ads are run on a CPM basis (which pay per impression), this can be good for sites that have low click-through rates.

Link Units
Link units can be good because of their small size; they take up less screen real estate. Link units can be placed in addition to the three regular ad units allowed per page.

AdSense for Search
This is another option available to help monetize a site.

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.

It’s a new month so get you July earning records into the AdMoolah database. Just go to the input page.

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.