A look inside Google AdSense
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Channel your energy
Different sites have different optimization needs - where some sites benefit from simple changes like switching to a wider ad format, others see more improvements after changing ad placement or color. Subtle changes can produce significant results. The key is to experiment, measure, and find what works best for your site. That's where channels come in.Using your channels can help you see a more complete picture of how different types of ads are performing on your site. Do leaderboards perform better than skyscrapers? Or do ads above a navigation bar perform better than ads next to it? Channels help you measure the results. Assign a custom channel to each of the different ad formats running on your site to measure which ones perform best - then you can make changes to maximize your findings.
Here's another tip: include page name, position, ad format, and color in your channel name so you can easily identify what each channel is measuring. 'HomeTopLeaderMotherEarth' tells you the channel is reporting on the leaderboard at the top of the home page with the Mother Earth color palette. These names might look a little funny, but they can help you combine channels into more detailed and valuable reports.
Read more of these tips and learn more from your fellow AdSense publishers who have implemented similar strategies.
Maybe they really are looking for a "needle in a haystack"?
What do your site visitors really want? To find out you could commission an expensive six month research study involving focus groups, demographic trending and expert consultants.Or you could deploy AdSense for Search and use the "Top Queries" reporting feature to see the Top 25 searches performed on your site. It's a peek inside the minds of your visitors (x-ray equipment not included). To see it in action, check out your Quick Reports section or go to Advanced Reports for even more customization options.
Not yet using AdSense for Search on your website? Click on the AdSense for Search tab inside AdSense to get started. With web and site search running you'll begin collecting the data you need to build out your content to match your visitor's interests. And make some money while you're at it.
From the trenches: a publisher's story
We recently caught up with Dan Hogan from ScienceDaily magazine to learn more about his experiences as a web publisher and how AdSense programs are an integral part of his online business. Dan found it easy to get started and after some experimentation and suggestions from the AdSense support team on ad placement, he quickly saw a 10 percent increase in his effective CPM. "Google provided great suggestions for ad format and placement, which helped us optimize our results," Dan reports.With these results from AdSense for content, Dan decided to also try AdSense for search on his website in hopes of increasing his revenue potential and perhaps providing another useful service to his visitors.
Since then, Dan says, "AdSense for search performs extremely well. It gives us an exceptional clickthrough rate of 10 percent and generates 10 to 20 times the clicks of a job search service we've tried. Plus, by using Google site search, I can now drive traffic to content on ScienceDaily that visitors might not find otherwise."
Read more about Dan's story and those from other publishers on the News and Case Studies page.
From the Inside AdSense mail bag
Rowland asks:I signed up for AdSense with my blog URL, but I’d like to paste AdSense on my forum site as well. Do I have to submit a new application?Inside AdSense says: You don't have to submit a new application to add your code to a new site. As long as your pages comply with our policies, you can put your code on them - whether they share the same domain name as your original site or not. We'll detect the new pages once the code is there, and we'll start serving ads to them almost immediately.
Jackie asks: I added my competitor’s URL to my filter list last week, and ads for this competitor continue to appear on my site. Can you figure out what’s wrong?
Inside AdSense says: Jackie, here are three tips for creating effective filters:
1) Make sure that you have added these URLs to your AdSense for Content filter list rather than your AdSense for Search filter list.
2) As you know, some AdSense ad formats contain a URL within the ad text. However, filtering this URL wouldn’t necessarily block ads from this advertiser. To create effective filters, you should verify that you’re filtering the destination URL of the ad. For instructions on how to determine the destination URL, check out the Competitive Ad Filter Guide.
3) If you're keen on blocking all ads from a particular site, and you've found the destination URL, you can enter simply domainname.com in your filter list (where domainname is, of course, the domain name in their destination URL). Dropping the www. and any folder or file names will ensure that anything coming from that site will be blocked from your pages.
David asks: I recently posted several blog entries about airplanes, but the ads are still targeted to an old post about kites. How can I get AdSense to show ads about airplanes?
Inside AdSense says: Crawling is done automatically by our bots, and we don’t manually control how often your pages get indexed but we’re always trying to improve how quickly we can crawl your pages to display the most relevant ads. When you update a site or add new content, you may have to wait until these changes are reflected in our index before relevant ads appear. During this time, your ads may be targeted to older content.
In the meantime, you may be interested in trying a new feature, section targeting, to improve the relevancy of ads appearing on your blog. Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. Here's more information.
Keeping your account alive and well
Occasionally, we get emails from publishers who are worried about having their AdSense accounts disabled. And recently, we've seen that others have been talking about it too. While we do take our program policies seriously, no one should lose any sleep over their AdSense account -- after all, there's a person behind every one of them. And a big part of maintaining a positive experience is working with publishers to understand the policies. In every possible case we first try to work with the publisher over email to remedy the issue -- and in nearly every case there is a quick and easy solution. (You might want to add adsense-support@google.com to your email contacts list to make sure any email messages about your account make it past your spam filters.)We know you care about your AdSense account and we do too. As long as you're familiar with our simple guidelines, we're positive we can continue to work together for a very long time.
Ben, AdSense Publisher Support
Machines Can't Dream, Part II
Yesterday we talked about the site targeting feature that was released within the past few months. As we introduce new ways of targeting ads, we also need new ways of capturing user and advertiser value. That's why our system now supports cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. This lets advertisers try out their best ideas while we make sure that that the right economic incentives are in place.Regardless of bidding method and format, all ads compete for placement on a page - and that means the winning ad meets a high bar for user value . Since site-targeted CPM ads and keyword-targeted CPC ads compete for every slot on a publisher's site, this improves how you make money.
For many publishers, site targeting actually serves as a sales team. When advertisers want to buy space on your site, tell them, "Just bid directly on our site using Google AdWords site targeting!" And the ads placed by our system will run alongside ads targeted directly by marketers.
Getting your RDA of Inside AdSense
Since we launched Inside AdSense, we've received many requests like this one from Jay:"Can you add an email subscription list on Inside AdSense?"
You bet! Check out our mailing list subscription box in the right navigation bar and start getting your regular dose of Inside AdSense.
Machines Can't Dream, Part I
We launched site targeting a couple of months ago. Why site targeting? Well, to put it succinctly, because machines can't dream. We're proud of our engineers and their work, but even they can't make computers dream. They can't make a machine feel the emotions that people feel, experience the desires that people have, or imagine all the concepts that might resonate with users (we think they do a pretty good job on this last one, though).We want to allow the very best ideas, whether they're from machines or marketers, to serve the needs of users. So, we've introduced site targeting, opening up our ads system to the intelligence, ideas and insights of thousands of AdWords advertisers.
Advertisers can now specify and bid on sites within the AdSense network where they want their ads to appear. We've enabled these advertisers to try out their best ideas and concepts within the AdWords system. Their site-targeted ads compete in the same auction as keyword-targeted ads. If these ads don't do well, they'll quickly give way to other ads from elsewhere in our system. And if these ads do perform well, they'll continue to win placement more and more broadly.
In this way we're also ensuring that web publishers display the highest-performing, most relevant ads through AdSense.
More Channels (but still no MTV)
Today we increased the number of active reporting channels to 200 so you can track the performance of more of your pages. We also now feature custom reports, allowing you to save and name your frequently used report settings and get one-click access to them on the reports overview page. And last but not least, we've added reporting to show your site's top queries in AdSense for Search. This helps you see what your site visitors are searching on.Check out the “What’s New” page to get more details. We hope you enjoy using these new features.
Put your pages on the map
Driving traffic to your site is certainly essential to maximizing your AdSense earnings. We get lots of emails asking, "How can I get more traffic from Google search results?" and "Why aren't some of my pages found by Google's search crawlers?" While we do not guarantee inclusion in the Google index, we do have a new product that will help to ensure Google is aware of all of your content pages.Google Sitemaps enables you to directly inform Google about when you make changes to your web pages or create new ones. That, in turn, enables Google to crawl your site more effectively and comprehensively. This helps site owners solve two current challenges :
1. Keeping Google informed of all of your new web pages or updates;
2. Increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index
Learn more here.
Fewer Ads, More Money?
You may have noticed a new feature in AdSense ads this past week - variations in the number of text ads we show in any ad unit. We caught up with Brian A., a product manager for AdSense, to pick his brain about this new feature.How have Google ads changed?
"We've updated AdSense to now vary the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. When we have a set of highly relevant and useful ads, we give them more of a presence in the ad unit by eliminating other ads. In some cases, if we determine a particular ad performs extremely well on a page, we'll remove all other ads from the unit and show just this single ad."
Sounds great for advertisers, but is this good for publishers?
"When we tested this feature, we saw that the increased user attention to these relevant ads resulted in a higher CTR. This means more revenue for publishers."
Is this good for a site's visitors?
"Definitely. The better-performing ads are more useful to users and this new feature gives them more presence in the ad unit. We are very careful to consider the user benefits with every feature so we can help our publishers grow their repeat traffic by showing more useful links on their pages."
Here's an example of an ad that has been expanded to fill an entire ad unit:
So don't be surprised if you see fewer ads taking up the same space in your ad units. Google AdSense technology will automatically determine the optimal number of ads to display on your pages and will only show fewer ads when doing so will increase your revenue.
Welcome to Inside AdSense!
Google is still a pretty small place, so when we heard that our AdWords friends had put together an Inside AdWords blog, it got our competitive juices flowing! It also made us think about all of the information we'd love to share with our publishers – and there's quite a bit of it, from site optimization tips, to product feature descriptions, to ideas on getting more out of AdSense.Which is why we're proud to announce the launch of Inside AdSense here at adsense.blogspot.com. We think you'll find it useful and fun. We'll cover all of the items listed above, plus anything else that can help you to grow your AdSense revenue.
You can look forward to posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense – engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff. We hope you'll visit often.
If you have suggestions for our blog, please send them to inside-adsense@google.com.
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