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A little more about Placement Targeting in AdSense

March 14, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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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!

Should you sculpt PageRank using nofollow?

March 14, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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I’ve seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I’d share my view of it.

Both posts bring up the same analogy, attributed to Matt Cutts:

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

While I agree in theory, I think that’s a bit oversimplified. What if you could re-allocate your $100 more effectively in just a few minutes, then go try to raise it to $300?

Sculpting PageRank is one of those things that can earn a nice benefit in a short period of time, but you can keep tweaking forever for progressively lesser and lesser gains. See the chart on the left.

For example, you probably have links on your site for “log-in”, “privacy policy” and other such pages. Go in and nofollow those. How long did that take? Two minutes? That alone probably brought as much benefit as it will to go through every page and carefully sculpt things out.

Knock out a few of those links, then spend your time trying to work on getting $300.

Google Launches Sky Online

March 13, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Google has just released

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a version of Google Sky that can be viewed in your browser, very similar to Google Maps.

The interface is very similar to Google Maps, but with some sky-based changes. The main change is that the tools which are normally “Map”, “Satellite” and “Terrain” have now become “Backyard Astronomy”, “Infrared”, “Microwave” and “Historical”. I think they’re pretty self-explanatory.

Enough talk — go check it out! Here are some screens if you just want a quick peek:

Updates — A few other sites have more detailed reviews of this product:

Google releases Ad Manager

March 13, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Google has just announced the release of “Ad Manager” (in beta, of course), to help manage your ads. This goes way beyond AdSense. It allows you to manually ad advertisers, add other ad networks, and also integrate AdSense. The system will help pick the highest paying and best performing ads for your site.

From the Ad Manager site:

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

Simple, intuitive user interface: Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management.
Google serving speed and reliability. Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies.
Significant cost savings – it’s free! Pay nothing for ad serving, feature upgrades, or system maintenance.

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Right now the system is only open to invited beta testers, but you can apply here.

Animoto now exports directly to YouTube

March 13, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Animoto, the very cool video mixing service, has announced that you can now export a video directly to YouTube!

Animoto, for those that don’t know, allows you to create a killer video in about five minutes. You upload a batch of your pictures, choose a song (or upload your own), and tell it to go. It analyzes your song and pictures and creates a video with them. The pictures move in time to the music, and it’s got some cool effects.

If you haven’t tried it before, give it a shot. If you already use them, go dig out your old videos and put them on YouTube! Here is one that we did for our church a while back:

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Which Performs Better: 336×280 or 300×250?

March 12, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Google hosted a 30 minute “webinar” today, with a focus on site targeting — creating ways for advertisers to target areas of your site to advertise on. I’ll probably post about that in a few days when Google releases their summary of the webinar.

However, one interesting bit of discussion popped up in the Q&A portion of the webinar. Google advised webmasters to use the 300×250 ad unit, as that is preferred by advertisers (especially for image and video ads). However, some of the attendees said that they get a higher CTR when they use the 336×280 unit. Google agreed that it was often the case, but that you’d probably get a higher CPC if you used the smaller unit — especially for image ads.

Another user asked if 300×250 image/video ads could show up inside of the 336×280 ad unit. Google gave a clear “no” to that. They said that advertisers can build a creative in both sizes, but image/video ads only show in the size they were created for. The text ads, of course, can float around to any of the ad units.

As a result of that, I’ve swapped out a few of my 336×280 units for 300×250’s. I’ll track the channels and see how it goes.

Any of you have previous experiences comparing these two sizes?

Don’t Be Inaccessible

March 11, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Heal Your Church Website has a nice article today about churches that have problems with being inaccessible.

Some of the specifics that Dean mentions:

Bad Markup
Browser-Specific Navigation — Things that only work in certain browsers
Charging Money for Sermons
Poor Navigation Hierarchy
Too Much Flash

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He gets into more detail about why each item can cause problems. It’s a good read – check it out

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What message are you sending to your visitors?

March 10, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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Liberty Hill Church in Canton, GA is an awesome church. I’ve visited for worship a few times, and they are top notch — great preaching and excellent music. If you happen to live in the area, I highly recommend you check them out. However, they’ve done something with their website that I think is a bit mis-guided.

They’ll probably change it soon, so I’ve put a screenshot on the right. The have put some text on the top of their site in huge letters. It reads:

WARNING! If you have received on overnight UPS package showing the shipper as iberty Hill Church your package contains counterfeit checks. Liberty Hill DID NOT send these packages!

It takes up most of the space above the fold on the home page. I can appreciate that this appears to be a major problem and they need to alert their congregation. However, there are better ways to do this:

E-mail everyone. I’m sure they have e-mail addresses for most of the congregation.
Call those that you couldn’t e-mail.
Put it on the site in an obvious, but less-intrusive location.
Announce it on Sunday mornings.

Text like this, especially in this location and size, is likely to scare off any first-time visitors to the site. It’s a not brand-new situation, either. The Google cache from a week ago shows it there, and it may have been up before then. You have just a few seconds to tell a new user your primary message, and this is what you want to say?

A few other small notes:

Part of the text is underlined, but isn’t linked. I fully expected to be able to click on it. Never underline text unless it’s a link.
The “under construction” graphic is cute, but should never be used. I realize there’s a new site coming, but you still have a content-rich site here. Make it as good as you can until the new one is ready, then switch over. A small “Get ready for the new site!” graphic would be fine, but the big “under construction” isn’t necessary.

The result of the “ZOMG!!!!!!!1111” warning and the huge “under construction” pic means that the main content is way down on the front page — about 1100 pixels by my count. That’s nearly two screens for a lot of users.

Liberty Hill Church is everything they claim at the bottom — God-seeking, Jesus-focused, Bible Based, etc. They just need to make sure and tell people that message.

What terms are your pages REALLY targeting?

March 10, 2008 by mickmel Leave a Comment

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If you’ve not used it before, the Term Extractor at SEOmoz is an eye-opening tool. You give it the URL of your page, and it tells you what search terms it thinks you’re trying to target.

As SEONoobs put it — “that way if you’re trying to target “garden tools” and the term extractor tells you that it thinks “sea monkey poop” is more SE targeted, that you have some work to do, keyword density wise!“.

I run this on all of my sites from time to time, just to make sure I’m not missing anything major, and I usually find a handful of small things to correct. I consider it one of the best free tools out there.