First released in March as a limited beta, Google Ad Manager is now available to anyone that has an AdSense account.  According to Google’s blog, Ad Manager…

can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

If you sell ads on your site, or run ads from more than one company, this is likely to be a very useful tool.

I’m just getting my feet wet with it, so I can’t say much from personal experience.  How about you? Have you tried it yet?  What did you think of it?

Google Ad Manager now available to all is a post from: MickMel

It’s been a few months since they first announced it, but AdSense for Feeds is now available to all AdSense/FeedBurner users.

You should notice a new entry on your main AdSense page for “AdSense for Feeds”.  To get started, you need to ask Google to manually tie your AdSense and FeedBurner accounts together.  To do that, send an e-mail to adsense-support-aff@google.com and give them your Feedburner account name and the Google Account e-mail address that you use to sign into AdSense.  I was bummed when I heard that it was a manual process, but they turned mine around in about 45 minutes.  I’ve just added the ads to a few feeds of mine, so we’ll see how it goes.

The Google Operating System blog has more details (and screenshots) on how to get started.

I’ll post back with my results in a few days.

AdSense for Feeds now open to all! is a post from: MickMel

I apologize for not posting very much lately.  I’ve been working with a handful of bloggers to try to get their traffic (and revenue) beefed up, and I’ve not had much time for this site lately.  The techniques I’m using are really working quite well, and now I’m opening it up to other people.  I don’t want to try to assist too many people (it takes a personal relationship with each blog), but if you’d like some help with your blog, let me know.  Here’s the simple version of how it works:

1. I manage your blog (WordPress updates, plugins, SEO tweaks, ad placement, etc).
2. You continue to write your blog posts.
3. I get a 25% split of your ad impressions.

To help explain this idea to potential clients, I’ve set up a simple site outlining how it works.  The first question that most people have is: “Wait.  I’m trying to earn more revenue, and I’m not sure I want to give up 25% of my revenue.”  It’s a fair question.  However, my clients (so far) have all been very pleased, as they’ve started earning much more than the 25% that I get.  Here are some stats froma recent client I’ve started helping.

Those are genuine stats from Google Analytics, snipped just a few minutes ago.  Each dot represents one week, leading up to last week.

The beauty of the revenue-sharing is this — you pay nothing.  Nada. $0.00.  Also, because I’m getting a small portion of the ad revenue, you can rest assured that I will work hard to get your blog running as smoothly as possible.

If you’re already WordPress-savvy and doing well, then you certainly don’t need my help.  However, if you’re having problems keeping your site running well, or if traffic just isn’t increasing as quickly as you think it show, shoot me an e-mail and we can chat.

Need help getting more traffic to your blog? is a post from: MickMel

There have been arguments about this for months, but Google has finally made it clear — you are allowed to show ads from more than one AdSense account on a single page.

For revenue-sharing sites, it makes configuration much easier.  Instead of having to make sure all of the ads on a page are from the same account, you can mix-and-match however you want.  This has been the case since the last TOS revision back in February, but there has been a lot of confusion.  Google simply wanted to make it clear.

Google makes it clear — you can show ads from multiple AdSense accounts on a single page is a post from: MickMel

I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but FeedBurner publishers will soon be able to insert AdSense ads in their feeds.  I’d love to insert some insightful commentary here, but there’s not much else to say.  If you don’t know what AdSense or FeedBurner are, then I don’t know why you’re on an SEO blog.

It’ll be interesting to see how well it works.  I have a couple of very large feeds (not this site – ha!), so I’m anxious to give it a shot.  They’ll be rolling it out to a small group of publishers next week, and the rest of us “soon”.  Once I’m able to try it, I’ll be sure to post my findings.

AdSense ads finally coming to FeedBurner is a post from: MickMel

The last few days aside, AdSense tends to keep a pretty consistent pace for me each day. Over the last month, I’ve tried to keep track of my earnings every 30 minutes throughout the day so I could chart them. On 10 different days I was able to get at least 10 different numbers to plot.  Most days started at 6am and ended around midnight.  The missing data was simply interpolated from the surrounding data and the zero hour of 3AM EST (midnight PST).

I figured having this chart would help to me to get a better idea of how the current day is doing, rather than just saying “it feels high” or “it seems low”. The few gems I’ve been able to pull out of it:

• When I get up at 6am, AdSense is between 5-10% of my daily total.
• The halfway point of my day is between 1:15pm and 3:00pm, with the average being right around 2:00.
• When I go to bed (usually around midnight), we’re just over 90% of the daily total.

I’m making a big effort to check the stats less often now, but I thought it’d be fun to generate a chart like that. I hope you find it useful!

The daily pace of AdSense is a post from: MickMel

My stats looked decent at 6am (EST), and haven’t moved much since.  I just saw a tiny bump a few minutes ago, but that’s about it.  You’re probably seeing the same thing.

There’s still no official word from the AdSense folks, but the AdWords engineers have spoken.  As posted on JenSense and the WMW forums:

Yes – some advertisers are seeing a delay in their stats today. The engineering teams are aware of this and, as you might imagine, are working to resolve it as a priority.

Please know that ads have continued to run as normal. This issue revolves around the reporting of statistics only, and does not impact ad delivery.

I’ll post again when I have anything of substance to add – and, in the meantime, my apology for the inconvenience this is causing you.

AWA

I find it interesting that they said “some” advertisers are seeing a delay, because it appears that all AdSense publishers are.  The thread at WMW has over 75 replies, and all of them are publishers that aren’t seeing any updates.

For more info, you can also check out this long thread at the DP forums.  I’ll post an update in the comments here and on my twitter feed when I hear anything else.

You're not alone – AdSense is WAY behind today is a post from: MickMel

As reported by Darren Rowse, it appears that AdSense ads will be finding their way into Feedburner feeds pretty soon.

There is a feed (Inhabitat) that is showing some ads. They’re being served as image maps, as opposed to JavaScript, which hopefully will help them work with a wider variety of feed readers. I’ve not had much luck with Feedburner FAN (feed advertising network), and not many people had much luck with the older “AdSense for RSS” system either. Hopefully this new format will perform well.

AdSense and Feedburner getting closer to launch? is a post from: MickMel

Last month I posted some revenue stats about my sites, along with a few goals.  I thought I’d try to re-visit that data at the beginning of each month.

My goals were to diversify better among my sites, diversify better in terms of revenue sources, and then to obviously generate more total revenue.  I only managed to improve one out of three, but for good reason.

My largest site saw a significant boost in AdSense revenue, thanks to some changes that I made.  As a result, that site now has even more of my total revenue, and AdSense still has about the same amount.

Generate more revenue

This is the biggest one, and it’s trending up.  Total revenue across my sites was up by 10.1% from February to March. Woo-hoo!

Diversify among my sites

This month, my largest site accounted for 90.8% of my total revenue.  Again, this is due to some AdSense changes that I made, which I’ll dig into in a later post.

Diversify away from AdSense

I have no problem with them, but I don’t like keeping all of my eggs in the same basket.

• In February, AdSense accounted for 89.7% of my total revenue.  This month it creeped up to 89.8%.
• FastClick’s share increased from 7.3% to 8.4%, as I made a few small changes there.
• FeedBurner revenue fell from 1.6% to just 0.5%.  I can’t explain that one, as the feed that I use for it is only getting larger.
• In an effort to diversify, I ran some ads from Kontera and Chitika.  They were both pitiful, each earning less than 0.1% of my total revenue.  Kontera is now gone from my sites, and Chitika is just about there.

I still would like to diversity a bit more, but it’s tough.  AdSense is doing so well that I hate to turn away from it at all.  The areas I really need to work on expanding are:

• Direct ad sales.
• Affiliate ads.

My overall goals remain the same — have my largest site generate less than 50% of my total revenue, and have AdSense account for less than 50% of my total revenue.  As soon as some of my smaller sites start gaining momentum, I should see some progress toward those goals.

Monthly monetization update is a post from: MickMel

A mentioned a few days ago that I attended a brief “webinar” about AdSense Placement Targeting. After the webinar, my first order of business was to start swapping out some of my 336×280 ads and replacing them with 300×250 to see if that helped, as Google indicated that it might.

Google has just sent me a short summary of the webinar and I thought I’d share a few pieces of it with you:

• Placement Targeting: Formerly known as “site targeting”, placement targeting allows AdWords advertisers to choose specific ad placements to display their ads. Ad placements can be entire websites or publisher-defined sub-sections of their sites.
• Attracting Advertisers: Use the most desirable ad units to advertisers – 300×250 medium rectangles, 160×600 wide skyscrapers, 728×90 leaderboards. Place these ad units in areas that your users will notice them, especially above-the-fold. Advertisers want users to see their image or video campaigns.
  • I had known about the 160×600 being superior to the 120×600, as well the 728×90 being superior to the 468×60. However, the 300×250 being better than the 336×280 was news to me, so I’m testing it. So far, as expected, I’m seeing a slightly lower CTR, slightly higher CPC and about the same eCPM.
• Targetable Custom Channels: Publishers can now make their custom channels visible to advertisers, creating “targetable placements” within their site. By utilizing this feature, you can create custom channels for specific sections of your site, like a sports section or young women’s section.
  • I’ve not done much of this — yet. I don’t think it’s worth doing while I’m still playing with ad sizes and positions. Once I get things stabilized, I’ll probably create a few.
• Advertiser Perspective: Advertisers are interested in delivering their campaign to a specific audience. You can use this perspective when designing custom channels by asking the questions, “what is a specific audience that visits my site” and “what pages will they visit regularly”?
  • Google recommends creating large niches. An example they gave was “New York Times: Sports”. Make sure it’s a unique category, but don’t create too small of a niche unless you have a LOT of traffic. Also, including things like “ATF” (Above the Fold) and “Non-UGC” (not user-generated content, like a forum) if those apply, as those things look good to advertisers.

Have any of you had much success with Placement Targeting yet?  Share your tips!

A little more about Placement Targeting in AdSense is a post from: MickMel