Inside AdSense: December 2016

Other sites are using my ad code. What should I do?

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Verify which sites in your account are yours.

Sign in to your AdSense account.
Click Settings in the sidebar.
In the dropdown, select My sites.
In your site list, locate the site you want to verify and click the Down arrow

Next to "Verified site", turn the switch on

2. Once verified, enable site authorization. Site authorization is an optional feature that lets you identify your verified sites as the only sites that are permitted to use your Google ad code.

Click Settings in the sidebar.
In the dropdown, select My sites.
On the "Manage sites" page, click More

Click Site authorization.
Next to "Only authorize my verified sites to use my ad code", turn the switch on

Click Save. Your changes should take effect within 48 hours.

Once your sites are verified and site authorization is turned on, ads will still show on the unverified site(s), and impressions and clicks will be recorded. However, advertisers will not be charged, and you won't receive any earnings for that site. Any policy violations that occur on these sites also won’t count against you.

The URLs will still show up in your list of sites so you are aware of who else is using your ad code. The sites may also still show in your performance report in order to keep a definitive record of activity. If you are seeing the sites in your reports but don’t want to, consider setting your report type to “Verified Sites” to ensure you are only seeing data related to your verified sites. More on managing your sites here.

Post by Brandon Canniff, AdSense Support Specialist

How to optimize your Adsense ad placements for mobile users

Monday, December 19, 2016

This is the final guest post from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Every year more people are using their phones and devices to browse web pages. In 2013, mobile made up only 17% of web traffic. In 2016, this number has risen to over 38%. Within the next couple of years, mobile traffic will easily surpass 50%.

This is why you need to take time to optimize your AdSense ads for mobile traffic. Although you can easily grab a responsive AdSense ad unit, there are more ways to optimize your ad units for mobile. It may be the easiest way, but I’ve found that the easy way usually does not always produce the best results. I’ve tested the responsive ad units on my blogs against manual optimization, and the results were staggering.

The manual optimization of my ads produced a 54% increase in my AdSense revenue.

Here’s what I learned from the tests I ran:

#1 A large mobile banner at the top of the page earned the most money on my site

The highest producing location was below the title of a post and above the first paragraph. It’s important to know that AdSense amended their policy on ads above the fold on mobile devices, and you can no longer use the 300x250 ad above the fold on mobile.

#2 Hide the sidebar ads in tablets and mobile

The sidebar is going to be pushed down to the bottom of the post when it is viewed in mobile. This is essentially banishing any ads in the sidebar to no man’s land. Most premium WordPress themes will allow you to turn off ad spots in the sidebar. This will allow you to drop in an additional AdSense ad into the post to get maximum monetization from mobile.

#3 The best ad grouping was top, middle, and bottom

Out of all the mobile ad groupings, this one easily produced the most revenue for me. The grouping was made up of one 320x100 ad and two 250x250 ads. The first ad was below the title and above the first paragraph. The second ad was placed after the 6th paragraph of the post. The final ad was placed at the end of the post.

In addition to mobile optimization, I applied four AdSense optimization strategies, which resulted in an overall revenue increase of close to 300%. Whether you are making $500/month or $5000/month, a 300% increase can make a huge impact on your yearly earnings.

Go here to read all of my “5 AdSense Optimization Strategies that Will Increase Your Earnings.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Find out if you should go programmatic

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

In the third part of the #SuccessStack, we take a look at programmatic ad sales. This article will give you the tools to decide whether programmatic may be the right route for you to grow your publishing business.

What is programmatic?
Originally, digital ad sales required you to go out and sell your ad space direct to advertisers. If they liked the price they agreed to the sale. If not, they may have negotiated with you. All this took time, required advanced bookings, and necessitated a lot of leg work on both sides.

Programmatic advertising takes your digital ad inventory and matches it to buyers looking for the ad space you offer, doing the selling for you. It uses software and algorithms as a go between, increasing ad revenues through a bidding system where the highest paying buyer’s ad is chosen for each space.

The easy way to try programmatic

For most publishers, the easiest and most effective way to try programmatic ad sales is to use an automated ad network like AdSense to sell their ad inventory. This means you don’t have to worry about generating direct sales or any high-touch manual optimizations of your ad sales.

The AdSense platform will find advertisers for you from AdWords and other Google advertisers and accept bids on your behalf, automatically selling your ad units for the highest possible price and placing the winning ad in that spot.

Programmatic advertising 2.0
If you’re a larger publisher who has a significant amount of direct sales or needs to manage their ads at a granular level to avoid conflict, you may need a more advanced programmatic solution.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange is for publishers looking to go beyond the basics of programmatic advertising. You’ll be able to access a wider pool of advertisers, agencies and ad networks to tap into advertising markets beyond Google advertisers. In addition to expanding demand, Ad Exchange provides publishers with advanced Programmatic Direct tools to help grow your business. But it’s important to know, you’ll also be required to manage more manual inputs and adjustments, so it’s not ideally suited for every publisher.

Consider your next step

If you’re thinking about what you should do next, you might begin with this short quiz to help you decide which is the correct next step for your business and programmatic advertising.

Ready to take the plunge?
Make sure you choose the right tool to give yourself the best possible potential earnings. To help you with this, arrange a free consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right programmatic solution for your business.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Three ways to grow ad revenue this holiday season

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

$6.9 billion was spent on mobile digital ads in Q4 2015

Tip 1: The early bird catches the wormover $3 billion in online saleschoose the right toolad space is optimizedmobile friendlyexperimentsTip 2: Tailor your content to what users are looking fortaps into each stage of the buyer journeyour guide to help youTip 3: Use the right advertising partnerAdSense

Enjoy an expert consultation*Google/Luth Research, U.S. Google partnered with Luth to analyze the digital activity of its opt-in panel participants. The data was analyzed between April and Aug. 2016.

How to earn more money with AdSense by decreasing your bounce rate

Monday, December 12, 2016

This is the fourth of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, which essentially means the people that left your site after seeing only a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it also means that your AdSense ads may not be seen by a large percentage of your audience.

Over the years, I've researched this topic many times over in an effort to constantly decrease the bounce rate of my sites and my clients’ sites. Through countless hours of A/B testing and deep analytics research, I was able to identify 25 tactics that consistently reduced the bounce rate.

The great thing about most of these tactics is that they usually only take a matter of minutes to incorporate, and you can start seeing results the next day.

#1 Do not use more than 7 sentences per paragraph

You never want to block too much text together. One really long paragraph can easily overwhelm your visitors and lead them to hitting the back button.

Most bloggers write their posts on a desktop or laptop computer. From a computer, the occasional 12 to 15 sentence paragraph does not look too intimidating. However, over 50% of my blog visitors are using their phones to read the posts on my site. On a phone, these long paragraphs will fill up the entire screen and add to your bounce rate.

I like to break up my paragraphs into different sizes. This can make the text of a post visually stimulating, which can turn scanners into readers.

Using an occasional single sentence paragraph will speed up the flow of article and add some nice white space.

#2 Keep your column width between 700 and 800 pixels

There have been many big name bloggers that have been considering ditching the sidebar. Although the sidebar does not get as many clicks as it once did, this is largely due to the increase in mobile traffic.

A post without a sidebar will have a column width well beyond 800 pixels. This is going to make your content look very long on a desktop computer. The ideal width for engagement is 700 pixels, which will allow between 80 and 90 characters per line.

Smashing Magazine did a study on the typographic design patterns in websites. When they looked at a segment of websites with the highest engagement, they found the majority of these sites had between 75 and 90 characters per line.

Source of image: Smashing Magazine

#3 Organize your content with headers and sub-headers

Based on reviewing heat maps of million and millions of page views, I’ve found that visitors of blog posts are made up of a mix of readers and scanners. To be precise, the results showed that 40% are readers and 60% are scanners. The readers start by reading the introduction paragraph, and the scanners scroll through the entire post. The scanners consistently stop scrolling to read each header and sub-header.

For the readers, most bloggers are pulling them into the post with a great introduction. However, the vast majority fail to create compelling headers. The easiest type of post to break into headers is the list post. For example, “13 Habits that Lead to Success.”

Each habit should be turned into a bold header and be able to stand alone as its own title. The goal here is to create thirteen compelling titles. Each title is designed to grab the reader’s attention and drive them into reading that section.

If you’ve enjoyed these three tips to decrease your bounce rate, go here to read all of the “25 Proven Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

How to choose the right ad tools for your site

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Welcome to the #SuccessStack, a new series of articles designed to help you:

Access Google’s large network of advertisers
Grow your publishing business
Earn more from the ads on your site

This first article can help you choose the right tools to sell and manage the ads on your site.

AdSense: Get started with easy access to Google’s network of advertisers
Who it’s for: Publishers looking for a smart and easy-to-use tool to optimize their ad space and revenue.

What it does: AdSense makes it easy for you to place, manage and earn revenue from ads on your site. With AdSense, Google is your advertising sales team, bringing you ads from millions of advertisers using AdWords and other Google advertising programs.

AdSense includes simple and easy controls to help you get started with earning money from ads, but it also does a lot of work behind the scenes to help you make more money. It’s a bit like an automatic car -- it removes some of the manual adjustment, allowing you to cruise along with less effort. You still need regular “tune ups” to get optimal performance, but you won’t need to shift gears all the time.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Control who gets programmatic access to the ads on your site with advanced features
Who it’s for: Publishers who require a more granular control over their inventory and who have the resources and expertise to manage ongoing optimizations. This product is suited to publishers with yield management expertise and those who have need for advanced features like Programmatic Direct.

What it does: DoubleClick Ad Exchange gives you real-time access to the largest pool of advertisers. This means that in addition to AdWords advertisers, you can also access major ad networks and agencies.

A major difference between DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense is that AdSense does a lot of the technical settings and optimization work for you, such as automating the sale of all your ad space to the highest bidder. With DoubleClick Ad Exchange, you can control these adjustments yourself and control exactly how your inventory is sold. As an example, DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows you to choose which ad space is for public sale and which is reserved for private auctions. This increased amount of user input is necessary for you to get the best results from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Another important distinction is that the AdSense demand is majority AdWords advertisers, whereas DoubleClick Ad Exchange pulls demand from multiple sources. You can see the full list of differences at our help center.

DoubleClick For Publishers: Scale your advertising business
Who it’s for: Publishers who are looking for a tool that has AdSense or Ad Exchange built in, along with lots of useful features to help them, schedule, deliver and measure their ad inventory regardless of how they sell it, to networks, programmatically or through their own direct sales teams.

What it does: DoubleClick for Publishers is a single platform that allows you to manage and deliver all of your web, mobile, and video advertising across all your sales channels. It doesn’t come with it’s own ads, but rather helps you scale your ads business by managing your ad sales across a variety of ad networks such as AdSense, ad exchanges like DoubleClick and direct advertising partners. You can get started with the small business version right away for free, or talk to us about integrating with the premium, paid version that is built for large organizations with sophisticated ad sales teams.

Both versions have a simple interface, lots of great tools, built-in revenue optimization, and Google powered ad delivery to provide a simple, worry-free way to potentially increase the value of your ad impressions.

Ready to get started?
You can arrange a consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business, and setup AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team.

How to create better blog titles that can drive more traffic to your ads

Monday, December 05, 2016

This is the third of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date. With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic.

The title of your page or blog post will play one of the largest roles in how much traffic you receive. From my extensive experience, a really great title can move your blog post dis and increase the number of social shares by over 300%.

The bottom line is… If you fail to write a compelling title that gets people to click, then your post is doomed to wallow in mediocrity.

Here are a few title optimization tactics that have proven to drive the most traffic.

#1 Place a number at the beginning of your title

If you have a list formatted post, then you need to be using numbered titles every single time. Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic. This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically.
This makes it really easy for anyone to scan through the big takeaways and decide whether to dive deeper into the article. When people see the number 13 at the beginning of the title, they know they can scan through all 13 key points in a matter of seconds.

A numbered title paired with a list post will drive more clicks to your post and list style posts have one of the highest engagement rates. Posts with more clicks and higher engagement often are rewarded by becoming more discoverable to users.

Here are a couple of examples of numbered blog titles:

11 Tools to Create Share-Worthy Content
17 Incredible Social Media Statistics

I recommend crafting numbered blog post titles for more than half of your posts.

A Conductor study on headline preferences also backs up what I’ve found to be true on my blog.

blog headline statistics numbered titles

#2 The odd number gets 20% more clicks than the even number

Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles. Here’s an example.
Odd Numbered Title: 11 Keys to Earning More Money on Adsense
Even Numbered Title: 12 Types of Ads that Convert

Before you hit publish on the blog post titled, “8 Crazy Ways to Double Your Ad Revenue,” take a moment to either add one more tip or remove the least valuable tip. This will allow you to capitalize on the extra twenty percent of clicks by having an odd numbered title.

Learn more about creating better blog titles from my blog and read all of the “17 Ways to Create Catchy Blog Titles That Drive Traffic.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Inside AdSense

Other sites are using my ad code. What should I do?

How to optimize your Adsense ad placements for mobile users

Find out if you should go programmatic

Three ways to grow ad revenue this holiday season

How to earn more money with AdSense by decreasing your bounce rate

How to choose the right ad tools for your site

How to create better blog titles that can drive more traffic to your ads

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