Make Money from Blogs » Placement

Adsense success stories as well as the virtue of patience

ashish — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:34:30 +0000

When you are struggling along with viewership and click rates not being upto the level you expect, it can be very frustrating. You criticize Google for not getting your pages into the search results to a level where the traffic to your site increases manifold, where the Adsene revenue that you get means that you have a nice alternative to whatever you are currently making, and at some point will be enough that you can leave your current job and jump into the world of blogging full scale.
Well, you would love to do all that, but it has been many days / weeks / months now, but the jump is not happening at the speed at which you want it, and you are losing your patience. Well, there are several things that you can do at this point of time without giving up:
- Have patience. To build up a committed viewership, as well as to advance higher into the Google search results takes time and effort. Unless you are writing on a niche area that has high user interest, there would be many others who are doing the same thing. You need to keep at it, writing high quality stuff that will bring more readers.
- Look for optimizations that you can do with your site. There are many improvements that are possible for existing websites dealing with layout, templates, colors, etc. Make sure that you search for optimization tips for these areas and implement such tips
- Look for Adsense optimization. There are a huge number of resources available through Google Search that provide tips for Adsense optimization. You might find that some simple tweaks can make a huge amount of change to your click ratio.

And of course, you should read the Adsense page for people who have become successful and are sharing their tips and techniques on what to do to become successful with Adsense (link for article). Some of the successful publishers are:
- Hometips
- Univision
- Teachnology.com
- AutomotiveForums.com
- Apartmentratings.com
- Swapalease.com
- TestMagic.com
- PVRBlog.com
- Medical-Coding.net
- SeatGuru.com

Placement of Adsense on Forums

ashish — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:31:12 +0000

Adsense is a very popular ad placement service; in fact, most people count it as the # 1 ad network. It is very easy to use, and there are millions of site all over the world that make money for themselves and for Google. Now, Adsense is typically seen on many content sites that have articles, but forums are a different game altogether. The impression has always been that forums have more dedicated users (with many more repeat users who grow impervious to ads and hence there is fewer revenue to be made). However, as always, it is the proper placement of ads that makes a lot of difference. Read on:

When you run a forum site, ad placement and formats are key to designing ads that will be successful but not intrusive to your regular users.
Placement: Display your ad units where repeat users will notice them

Because forum regulars tend to skip the header and go straight to the meat of the thread, placing your ad unit above or below the first post can be more effective than ads next to the logo.
Place a leaderboard immediately after the last post. This provides users who make it to the end of a thread with a ‘next step’ when the content ends. Try to avoid placing it after the footer, though, as your readers will likely move to the next thread without seeing the ad.

Formats: Adapting your design for multiple ad units and limited space.
Using multiple ad units, you can use a variety of formats to fill ad space throughout your site. Placing a skyscraper above the fold on the left side of your forum seems to produce slightly better performance than other positioning. However, when using multiple ad units throughout the page our horizontal bias still favors the leaderboard. Our heat map provides more details.
Use horizontal link units, which are small enough to fit near the top of your forum just below the header. For the regular forum visitor, link units offer a wider range of relevant topics to browse.

However you choose to implement your ads, keep in mind that forums are highly interactive sites with regular users. Be sure to blend the ads nicely, so they don’t appear overly intrusive – but don’t blend them so well they mislead your users!

Placement of Ads in different positions – the heat map

ashish — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:30:08 +0000

One of the most important points to consider when trying to make money from ads on web pages is the proper placement of ads. If you have done some studies in this area, you could have come across many people trying to sell their secrets of Ad placement or how to make more money from properly placing Ads. However, the basis of many secrets of ad placement is how the human eye perceives ads, how they fit into the page, and whether people notice the ads or ignore them. And the basis for much of this is something called the ‘Heat Map’. The Heat Map specifies positions on the page that are much more likely to catch user attention, and other places where users are likely to ignore the ads.

The Google page for the Heat Map specifies more details: Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This “heat map” illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.
Keep in mind that while the Heat Map is a good starting point, you need to spend more time on trying to figure out how your users read your page, and the amount of ads and their placement such that they earn the maximum money for you. This will not be a one-time activity, but something that is likely to take several iterations before you reach a higher level of earnings.

Getting Third Party Ads in Adsense

ashish — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:01:38 +0000

It’s only recently that the Google Adsense program has started accepting third party Ads for display in publishers ads. Here are the answers to some queries regarding this (and remember, the best place to search for answers regarding third party ads is in the official site).

1. Does Google Adsense Accept Third Party Ads ?
Yes. The Google content network accepts display ads from qualified third party vendors.
Many large, top-brand advertisers use third parties to create and manage their display ad campaigns. By accepting ads from these third parties, we can help advertisers deliver more advertising on the Google content network. As a result, you can benefit from these high quality (and potentially higher-paying) ads.

2. How to enable third party ads ?
If you’ve already enabled image ads on your site, you’re automatically eligible to receive third-party ads.

3. Which are the vendors supported for 3rd party ads ?
The official list is maintained at this stie (link)
North America: Ad servers
* DoubleClick DFA (www.doubleclick.com)
* Mediaplex (www.mediaplex.com)
North America: Rich media
* DoubleClick Rich Media (www.doubleclick.com)
* Eyeblaster (www.eyeblaster.com)
* EyeWonder (www.eyewonder.com)
* Interpolls (www.interpolls.com)
* Pointroll (www.pointroll.com)
* Unicast (www.unicast.com)
North America: Research
* Dynamic Logic/Safecount (www.safecount.net)
* Factor TG (www.factortg.com)
* IAG (www.iagr.com)
* InsightExpress (www.insightexpress.com)
All vendors must complete a certification process. At its sole discretion, Google reserves the right to change this vendor list at any time.

4. Will these ads seem different from normal Google Ads ?
Third-party ads won’t include the ‘Ads by Google’ text, and will open in a new browser window. However, because all third-party ads must abide by Google’s image ad and content policies, you likely won’t notice any differences at all.

Placement targeting & custom channels as part of Adsense

ashish — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:48:41 +0000

Adsense constantly seeks to innovate and try and devise new measures about how to make sure that the business of both placing ads and generating money from them works well for both publishers and advertisers. Towards this end, the Google Adsense program has in the past let advertisers bid specifically for sites which they feel have value for them (so if you are running a niche site and are getting a number of dedicated viewers, there is a good chance that you will advertisers who will want to place advertisements on your site). You can optimise this further through the use of custom channels. I will provide links to both these topics below.
The changes that Adsense (article) has introduced is that it will allow advertisers to now specifically bid on ad units or groups of pages. Further, advertisers can now also opt for this bidding on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis rather than only a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis.
- Some details on ad placement (based on this article): Custom channels are a great way to track the performance of individual ad units on your pages. Creating ad placements for more visible and desirable ad locations on your site increases their value to advertisers using site targeting and encourages those advertisers to bid more. To create an ad placement, you create and implement a custom channel just as you normally would. The only change is the additional step of providing attributes and an accurate description for your ad placement. On the ‘Channels’ page in your account, click the appropriate ‘edit settings’ link on the right. As you can see below, there will be a box labeled ‘Targeting’ on the next page which, once checked, will show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement.

Further, this page explains how exactly ad placement works (link to article):
An ad placement is a specific group of ad units on which an advertiser can choose to place their ads using placement targeting. Ad placements can be as broad as an entire website or as specific as a single ad unit. Placements are made visible to advertisers in two ways:
Placements automatically created by our system. Each publisher website in the AdSense network is automatically made available to advertisers as a placement where they can target their ads.
Placements defined by publishers. You have the ability to define your own ad placements using your custom channels. You choose how to group together specific ad units on your website that you wish to make available for advertisers to target.

If your blog is starting to generate a large number if views, then it would make sense for you to read all you can about custom channels (this article can only provide pointers) and ad placement to see how you can optimize what you can.