Reading Time: 2 minutes

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!

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Jennifer Slegg (often known as “JenSense”) has posted a nice piece about choosing the right “ad title” color for your AdSense ads.  She primarily gives two tips:

• Use “hyperlink blue” (described below), or…
• Use the main link color on your site

She doesn’t mention suggestions for the other parts of the ad, but I’ve found the following works best:

• Background and border color the same as the site background color at that location, so the ads blend in.
• Black text for the text
• Gray text for the URL at the bottom

Jennifer didn’t say exactly what “hyperlink blue” is, but I’ve found that #000080 and #0000CC work quite well.  Again, if every other link on your site is a different color (such as the greenish links on here), then you’re probably better off making the ad titles use that color instead.  Be sure to use channels to track the CTR on the different colors and see what works best.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Few things are more frustrating to me then when I want to pay for something and they make it hard for me to do so. Some examples:

Wells Fargo

– As of now, they have no on-line bill paying available and we prefer not to mail checks. So, we call them. However, we’ve found that it’s quite a pain to do it that way, as you have to “press 1 for this, press 2 for that” stuff for a while before you get to a human. Then they have to look up your account, find your vehicle, see what you owe, get your info, blah blah blah. It’s easiest if we let the payment get late and then let them call us, because they already have our info in front of them and we don’t have to sit on hold. That works great, but it costs more (late charge).

Wal-Mart / Target / Etc – Long lines. It drives us all nuts. If you have so many customers buying things at your store, then you should be making more money and you could afford a few more clerks, right?

Home Depot – I have a few gripes about this place. First, they used to be great. You could go down almost any aisle and find a person in an orange apron and get excellent help. Now it seems you need to hunt all over the store to find help. The salespeople are still very friendly and knowledgeable, but there seems to be far fewer of them lately.

My second gripe with them deals with their long lines. I was there on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago and it was packed. They had about half of the registers open and the lines were pretty long. That would have been bad enough, but they had an employee behind us trying to sell us Home Depot credit cards! Now, I don’t mind if they push their cards on us, but not when things are crazy and they obviously need another register or five open. This woman selling credit cards should have been behind a register to help keep the paying customers happy. I don’t blame her, as it was likely a manager’s decision. The bottom line is that I don’t care whose decision it was – it shouldn’t have been like that.

It’s really quite simple:

A

– You’re a business
B – You want my money
C – I want to give you my money

D should be “take it!”, but it’s not always that simple, is it?