blogvp

Google is giving webmasters more control over what part of their site is index and what part is not.

“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. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.”

To emphasize something to the Googlebot, use:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

To ignore add: (weight=ignore) as in:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Of course Google says that doing the above will only influence the ads taht appear on the page, but since it’ll automated you can pretty much guess that it’ll do more than influence.

google, adsense, targeting

So Google is using themed Christmas ads in Adsense. As you can see the example here. I’ve seen some of them on my sites. But the important question is: How will they performd? we’ll have to wait until after Christmas to find that out.

google, adsense

So Google has increased the font of their ads, looks like it’s mainly on the search engine. But this is still not where I want it, the best thing would be to let us choose the link fonts, etc. Give us more control.

google, adwords, adsense

The way Click-To-Call works is you click on the little “phone” next to an ad, enter your phone, Google calls you and connects you to the advertiser.

I wonder if they are going to have these on the Adsense ads. Probably after they see that it works on their searches, the greed will drive them to release it to all of us.

google, adsense, click-to-call

Here’s what they wrote:

Will Firefox plus Google Toolbar referrals be made available to publishers outside the U.S.?

Currently, Firefox plus Google Toolbar referrals are only available for U.S. publishers. However, we’re continuing to improve the referrals feature and hope to make Firefox referrals available to international publishers soon.

Can publishers use language endorsing AdSense or Firefox plus the Google Toolbar (e.g., “I use Firefox with the Google Toolbar and recommend it to other web users”)?

Including such language is fine. However, as with AdSense for content, publishers should not use language encouraging clicks on your referral buttons (e.g., “Click here”, “Visit these links”, etc). The AdSense program policies is the best place to find more specific information about referral policies.

What happens if a user who clicks on the Firefox referral button already has Firefox?

In this situation, the user will be redirected to the Google Toolbar for Firefox page. Because we only count referrals for Windows users who have not previously downloaded Firefox, this will not appear as a Firefox conversion in your reports.

google+adsense, referral+program

Google launched the new Adsense Referral Program:

With our new referrals feature, you can increase your revenue while increasing your users’ awareness of useful products and services. By adding a referral button to your site, you can direct users to sign up for AdSense and monetize their web content, or to download Firefox with Google Toolbar and improve their web browsing experience.

While your users learn more, you can earn more — US $100 for every new AdSense publisher who earns $100 and up to $1 for every new Firefox user.

You can begin referring users immediately - just visit the Referrals tab within your account, choose the product and the referral button you like best, and add the associated snippet of code to your site.

Thanks to Jen

Take a break from raking in all of the moneys from Adsense and laugh. Watch this video. Thanks to Official Google Blog.

Since the last Adsense note that typography (which is the “study” of fonts) matters a lot in advertising, I’ve been doing a lot of testing and I think I’ve nailed it.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve discovered the exact font and font size that Google Adsense uses, and that is….

H2 bold 11px Verdana

I’m testing this out on one of my blogs and I’ll let report the results here. If you try this, and I recommend that you do, let me know it affects your results.

UPDATE: Admoolah reports you might also try: font: normal 13px/17px arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

google, adsense, adsense+font, blog+design

Adsense just posted a review of the site Engineeringtalk, and here are some ideas to take away for yourself:

• Know where your visitors are coming from and optimize for it - “Realizing that the vast majority of visitors reached the site through search engines, editor Chris Rand wondered: “Why are we prioritizing on helping visitors find their way around the site when they’ve already come straight in to what they’re looking for?” Moving site navigation from the prime ad positions - across the top and down the side - to a more logical place gave the team more options for ad placement.”
• Google Adsense RECOMMENDS playing around with font design & matching - “team experimented with AdSense designs, focusing on optimization through typography and placement. They found the biggest influence on CTR was the similarity between the AdSense type (size and font), and the main body text of the page. The more similar the type, the higher the CTR.”
• “little difference in CTR between between left-versus-right positioning”
• Question to ask yourself: “Ask yourself if your website’s current fonts, font sizes and colors are really that important to you, or if you’d be prepared to change them for better AdSense results!”

google, adsense

Duncan has a long write up on ad sizes and their results.

Some quick takeaways if you don’t want to read it all:

1. General ad placement
   

   Inline ad spots, such as a Google Adsense ad placed within the text post for example is highly regarded by many

   Side bar spots have various levels of success, where as top banners (above the heading) or footer ad spots have the lowest level of clickthru.

2. Ad sizes
   

   Leaderboard (728×90)
   36.7%

   Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
   16.7%

   Half Banner (234×60)
   12.0%

   Button #1 (120×90)
   11.7%

   Full Banner (468×60)
   7.5%

3. Blog unique spots
   

   Google Adlinks bar, which I use in a 728×15 configeration on a number of blogs, and it works well. Its not my highest paying spot at the Blog Herald but it regularly ranks at no 2. On other blogs I’ve had no luck with it, and others its been beyond successful.

4. The Chitika factor
   

   One last different sort of ad spot that is getting a lot of raves across the blogosphere,

5. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
   

   Dont be afraid to experiment with your template as you would with any other aspect of your blog. First and foremost, its fun.

chitika, ads, adsense

Apparently it’s become an issue that some bloggers are not getting their PIN numbers in the mail. So Google is extending the recommended wait time to 3 weeks if you’re in the States and even longer if you’re international.

My suggestions is to just set up the direct deposit, so you don’t have to worry about waiting for PIN numbers or your checks to be sent to you, but get it electronically and be sure that you receive it.

google+adsense+payment

To summarize:

1. Place multiple ad units on a page to give users most relevant ads next to the content they are reading
2. Too few ads? “multiple ad unit system works best for pages with highly targeted ads and therefore may only display the first few units”
3. Advance tips:
   

   1) Create a channel (see AdSense Help for creating channels) for each ad placement. For example, if you have a leaderboard on the top of the page, a skyscraper on the right hand side, and another leaderboard on the bottom of the page, make sure you have a channel for all the top leaderboards, a second for the right skyscrapers, and a third for the bottom leaderboards.

   2) Test the channels for at least a week to compare which position has the greatest clickthrough rate.

   3) Make sure the the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in the HTML. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

Per google

adsense, multipleads

Joel writes: “I predict that you’ll see a massive expulsion of smaller AdSense sites by Google, and it better happen soon, or AdSense will ruin Google’s reputation among advertisers, something which could be deadly.”

And I like the response by Toivo from AdMoolah: “Don’t worry, Joel, the sky is not falling. Do you thing Yahoo! and MSN would both be trying to join in on this game if it was a doomed business model?”

I’m sure that Google will come up with some solution to managing spam blogs on blogger, which will shut down most of the blog spam.

adsense, google

Those of you that are using Mambo as your publishing software. Here are some tips on using Adsense with mambo:

• Icedowl says:
  

  I use mambo but I don’t bother with the mambots.

  First: be sure that you have the WYSIWYG editor turned off or it will mess things up royally. Then just create a new module, paste the adsense code inside, give it a location & name (I don’t display the name) and you’re good to go.

  Doing it this way means you can get your channel code inserted and useable. Better than a mambot.

• Use the Google AdSense module - We have released a new Google AdSense module 1.2 for Joomla! 1.x. It has been tested to work seamlessly on Joomla! 1.0.x It is available in the downloads section of this site. Many new features are available with this release.
• Google Adsense Mambot - I added some features like hide ads in intro, new parameter channel: write: {mosgoogle left 123456} will display an ad with channel 123456. Channel info can now be fetched from user_extended component. Get it here.

mambo, adsense, mambot

So I was chatting with some serious bloggers and the discussion came around how would we, as bloggers, fix Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and related services. There was many ideas, I think we came to at least 10 good ideas, but the two at the top were:

• Better stats - fix the stats. Nobody does great stats, at least not with a lot of hacking from the blog owners. What would be nice is for Google to actually reveal more of the stats that they keep on everything and empower us with it. We would be even more happy. Because testing and stats are some of the most important numbers in blogging.
• Provide a server side solution - don’t rely only on browser side JavaScript, give us something that can be embedded in PHP, that way we won’t have to worry about the people that turn off the javascript. And if google or somebody else did provide PHP instead of JavaScript, that would give us more control, and we would be able to track it better for better stats and customize it.

If you have other ideas, please let me know.

google, adsense, ypn, yahoopublishernetwork