Opportunities Tab Beta: Now available to more advertisers: In July we announced U.S. beta testing of the Opportu.. http://bit.ly/xlchN

Opportunities Tab Beta: Now available to more advertisers: In July we announced U.S. beta testing of the Opportu.. http://bit.ly/xlchN

New Interface Thursdays: Tips for keyword management: Now that most advertisers are using the new interface excl.. http://bit.ly/8SbGx

We’re writing to let you know about an upcoming update in your AdSense account designed to help you generate the maximum revenue from your ad units. You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

If you’re unfamiliar with what ad networks are, they’re companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don’t own themselves, similar to AdSense. Ads from these networks will compete with Google ads to show on publisher sites, and the ad generating the highest revenue for publishers will be displayed.

To ensure the quality of the ads appearing on your sites, we’re certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You’ll also have control over which networks can show ads on your pages — you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely. This means you can continue to show ads from only AdWords advertisers if you’d like.

Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google’s interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won’t be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we’ll allow those who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. You’ll have the ability to opt out of showing ads based on user interests from these ad networks, and we’ve changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this. More information is available at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94230 .

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you’ll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks. Please note that we’ll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won’t see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To learn more about this launch and managing the ad networks appearing on your pages, visit the AdSense Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=13522 and watch our video demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HyJPOVLd3I .

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Advertisers Can Celebrate: Google’s Bid Simulator is now Live! http://ping.fm/UdTfz

New Interface Thursday: Introducing spreadsheet editing: Many advertisers use spreadsheets when managing their A.. http://bit.ly/iiVpX

YouTube has launched an innovative new marketing tool for brand advertisers called the YouTube Mosaic http://ow.ly/8hXQ

New “Google for Advertisers” site has launched. Its is a place for information about Google marketing solutions http://ow.ly/4e1J

Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords’ monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool.

Here’s a screenshot of the updated Keyword Tool:

(Click the image for a full-size version)

We’re happy to announce that the Google content network now
accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors.
During this initial release, only ads in English are eligible,
although we look forward to offering more options in the future.

By accepting third-party ads, we can attract a greater variety of
advertising on the Google content network, which we believe will
result over time in increased revenue for publishers and more
relevant advertising for end users.

If you’re currently opted in to image ads, you’re already able to
receive third-party ads. If not, you can enable image ads to start
receiving third-party ads immediately. (Learn how to enable image
ads at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9741.)

If you choose to allow third-party ads on your site, please update
your privacy policy to inform your visitors that third-party
vendors may serve ads on your site. Please also provide links to
these vendor websites and inform your users that they may opt out
of cookies (if the vendor offers this capability). For more
information about updating your policies, visit
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94150.

You’ll continue to have full control over which ads appear on your
site with tools like competitive ad filtering and the Ad Review
Center. Also, only advertisers with whom we have proven
relationships and who’ve clearly demonstrated commitments to our
quality standards may participate in this program. Our policies
governing ad content and formatting remain unchanged.

To learn more about third-party ads, please visit our blog post at
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-third-party-ads-on-google.html
and our FAQ at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14535.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact us at
adsense-support@google.com.

Some of our publishers have asked us about the policies surrounding promotion for referral units, and so we’d like to address two of the most frequent areas of confusion. While the policies are generally the same for referrals as for standard AdSense for content ad units, there are a few minor differences.

Recommending products vs. encouraging clicks

We previously addressed this topic, but we’d like to remind you of the policy and provide some additional clarification. You can endorse or recommend products you’ve chosen to refer on your sites, but we ask that you only make recommendations when you’re familiar with the specific product and you’ve decided not to use the ‘Pick best performing ads’ feature for that ad unit. For example, if you’re familiar with a specific travel agency you’re referring, you may use language such as “I use this agency and recommend it to book your next vacation.” By being honest with product recommendations, you can help build user loyalty and trust, which will benefit your site in the long run.

You may be wondering why we allow publishers to call attention to referral units but not standard ad units. This is because there are significant differences between these two types of ads, the most important being that advertisers only pay for traffic from referral units if the user performs a specific action the advertiser has designated (such as making a purchase from the site or signing up for a newsletter). Please keep in mind that there is a fine line between recommending a product and encouraging your users to click on a referral button for personal profit. Publishers may not ask users to click on the referrals to help them earn money, and may not refer themselves to their own referral products. In addition, publishers may not draw unnatural attention to their referral units with arrows pointing to the units or other similar methods.

Using online advertising

As is true for all sites displaying AdSense ad units, referral units, or search boxes, your site must comply with Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines (LPQ) if you’d like to use online advertising of any kind as a traffic source. The term ‘online advertising’ refers to a range of methods, from advertising programs such as AdWords to posting your site within a link exchange or in a forum. However, if the primary purpose of your site is to generate conversions from referral ads, you’ll need to go one step further before advertising your site. You’ll need to first receive permission from the advertisers whose products you’re referring before advertising your site or their products. Please note that Google has made the decision to not allow publishers to use online advertising for any of the Google products or those of our Google Pack partners.

We’ve updated the Site Exclusion tool to give you more control over where your ads appear on the Google content network. It’s now called the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and it allows you to exclude certain catgegories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.

If you find that you’re repeatedly excluding many sites of the same type, either to optimize for the content network or to further control your campaign’s exposure, using category exclusion can be a simpler way to control your ads’ visibility. Category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the content network: keyword-targeted or placement-targeted.

Here’s how category exclusion works: when we use our contextual targeting technology to scan a page in the Google content network and determine relevant ads to show, we also check to see if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types available for exclusion. If there is a match between a category you’ve excluded and the page’s classification, your ads won’t show on that page. We classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you’ve excluded.

Before using category exclusion, it’s important to consider the following points:
 

• All sites in the content network are already required to comply with Google’s AdSense policies. Several levels of review are in place to detect that pages in the network comply with these guidelines. However, some advertisers have requested the ability to avoid additional types of content that don’t meet their advertising goals, and we’ve released category exclusion in order to provide this control.

   

• Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusions. Keep in mind that a low clickthrough rate on content network pages is not necessarily an indication of poor performance, especially if your goal is to maximize ROI. Further, your ads’ clickthrough rate on the content network does not affect your quality score, minimum bids, or position on Google.com or other pages in the search network.

   

• While webpages are categorized to the best of our technology’s ability, excluding a category does not guarantee that you have excluded every related webpage. If you see that your ad has shown on an undesired webpage, you can exclude that page by adding the URL through the tool’s Sites tab.

Category exclusion is our latest tool to give you increased control over your content network campaigns. If you are looking for additional insight and flexibility when advertising on the Google content network, we encourage you to check out CPC bidding for placement targeting and Placement Performance reports.

You love your website and you want it to thrive. You create content, manage your community, and keep an eye on your AdSense performance. If AdSense revenue is down, you’re understandably concerned. If AdSense revenue is up, you’re happy, but you want to know why. Revenue fluctuations are obvious enough when they occur, but the root cause isn’t equally clear. It can be challenging for both new and experienced publishers alike to analyze their AdSense data and respond effectively to changes.

The goal of this post, and our follow-up later this week, is to help you understand the AdSense revenue model so you can diagnose and treat revenue fluctuations like an experienced MD.

Study up

The first step is knowing how the figures reported in your account (such as eCPM, CTR, and page impressions) interact to describe your total revenue. Think of each number as a variable in the revenue formula for your site. At the highest level, you can calculate revenue by multiplying your page impressions by the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) and dividing by 1000.
 

Revenue = Page Impressions * eCPM / 1000

eCPM = Revenue / Page Impressions * 1000

The eCPM metric provides an estimate of how much revenue you can expect to earn for every 1000 page impressions. For example, if you serve 10,000 page impressions and earn $40, your eCPM is $4. If page impressions increase to 30,000, you can predict that you’ll earn $120 given the $4 eCPM.

Most AdSense ads pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, so eCPM is really a measure of your average ad performance. Breaking eCPM into the click-through-rate (CTR) and the average cost that advertisers pay per click (CPC) gives you a more accurate measure of performance.
 

Revenue = Page Impressions * CTR * average CPC

Once you know your average CTR and your average CPC, you can predict how much revenue you’ll earn for a given amount of page views. You can also analyze your revenue by looking at placement-targeted ads versus contextually-targeted ads.
 

Total Revenue = Revenue (contextual) + Revenue (placement-targeted)

While contextually targeted ads always pay per click, advertisers can pay for placement-targeted ads by impression (CPM) or by click (CPC). To account for both of these bid types, you should look at the average eCPM for placement-targeted ads. More simply, you can just add placement-targeted revenue to your contextually targeted revenue.
 

Revenue = (Page Impressions (contextual) * CTR * average CPC) + (Page Impressions (placement-targeted) * eCPM (placement targeted) / 1000)

Revenue = (Page Impressions (contextual) * CTR * average CPC ) + Revenue (placement-targeted)

Even though we’re looking at contextual and placement-targeted revenue separately, don’t forget that these two types of ads compete against each other in the auction. We’ll always show the best performing ad, regardless of targeting type, so more competition creates higher winning bids.

Identify the symptoms

Now you’re ready to diagnose any revenue fluctuation. Just like the revenue formulas above, let’s start simple and gradually get more complex.

The first question to ask is: Did either your page impressions or your eCPM change? You can compare trends in both page impressions and eCPM using the Advanced Reports in your account.

If your AdSense page impressions have declined, you should determine if traffic to your entire site is declining as well. A web analytics tool such as Google Analytics can provide you with this information. In addition, you should check your pages for unpaid public service ads (PSAs).

If your eCPM is down, you’ll need to dig one level deeper and find out if your contextual or placement targeted ad performance has dropped. You can also find this data in the Advanced Reports tab using the options shown below.

Let’s consider your contextual ads first. The two key metrics to investigate are CTR and average CPC. CTR is given in your reports, but you’ll need to calculate your average CPC using your favorite spreadsheet. (My favorite goes without saying). Please keep in mind that this is still an average CPC for your account and doesn’t necessarily correspond with the price paid by any specific advertiser. Once you’ve narrowed the change to CTR or average CPC you’re ready to start treatment.

For placement-targeted ads, you should analyze how much total placement-targeted revenue you are receiving and the average eCPM. Changes in either of these metrics usually indicate that advertisers are beginning or ending campaigns targeted to your site. Again, placement-targeted campaigns are more likely to be short-term than contextual campaigns.

That’s all we have time for today — now that you have a better understanding of what factors can affect revenue, don’t forget to check back later this week for the second part of this series. We’ll be treating ways to treat revenue fluctuations based on the symptoms you’ve discovered.

We’d like to give you advance notice of an update to our display URL policy, which will take effect on April 1st. While the majority of advertisers will not be affected at all, action will be required from those who are. Please take a few minutes to read this post thoroughly, as the information below should help you determine whether you will be affected by this change.

In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

For example, if your destination URL is www.google.com, your display URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:

• www.google.co.uk – because this URL leads to a different site
• www.gogle.com – even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it is still not acceptable
• www.gooogle.com – because this URL leads to a page showing content identical to www.google.com

What about tracking URLs?
We do understand that many advertisers utilize tracking URLs within the destination field of their ads. Therefore, if the URL of your landing page matches that of your display URL, your ads will be approved.

For example:

Are sub-domains still acceptable?
Yes, the use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will continue to be acceptable provided the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.

For example, display URLs such as the following:

would all be acceptable for the landing page URL below, as the top-level domain of google.com is matched:

In light of this update to display URL policy, we’d encourage you to make any necessary changes to your ads in advance of the April 1st date to ensure that they’ll run without disruption by future disapprovals related to this policy.

Thanks for reading this far, and please note that more information will be provided before April 1st via alerts in all AdWords accounts.

We have high standards for the services we offer, which means we constantly reevaluate existing features to ensure they are effective as the AdSense product continues to expand.

Our recent findings indicate that the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up feature, which allowed advertisers to sign up for AdWords campaigns on your site, hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped. We’ve elected to gracefully retire this feature and focus our efforts on developing and supporting features that drive better monetization results for you. Call it time management, call it ROI, call it our unwavering commitment to our publishers. We want you to earn more revenue, and sometimes that means “sunsetting” certain features we created.

Please be aware that any links you’ve created that lead to a customizable Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page will soon re-direct to the main AdWords sign-up page. Of course, AdWords advertisers will still be able to target your individual sites by using placement targeting. Thanks for your support of this feature in the past. We hope its departure won’t cause you any inconvenience.

I for one an GLAD Google droped this, out of the blue i was getting non english ads on my site, all my settings were fine, I wasted hours checkihng my site code, readdng & removing the adsence code, manually blocking all the url, and it looks like someone signed up to place these ads on my site. Now Google wouldnt confirm this, but after the 4 hours or so i takes to disable this option my ads were back to normal.

Whats a hellish day that was.

In this third post of our content network series, we would like to share some content optimization tips for your keywords and ad text. In a future post, we will write more about other tips. Contextual targetingon the content network happens at the ad group level, not at the keyword level. That means all the keywords in an ad group, along with the ad text, are evaluated when Google is deciding whether to show your ad on a specific content page. In other words, it’s important for all the keywords in an ad group to belong to a common theme. We recommend keeping separate campaigns for advertising on content and search. Please keep in mind that these tips below are specific to contexual targeting and advertising on the content network and may be different from your search network strategies.

• Create a manageable, targeted keyword list. Advertisers have found most success on the content network with ad groups of around 15 to 30 keywords.
• Use tightly themed ad groups. For contextual targeting, we look for pages that match most of the keywords in your ad group. For example, if your ad group has a number of keywords about lilies and tulips, we try to find pages about these two topics together. If you have an ad group with diverse keywords on different themes, it may decrease the number of pages on which your ad is likely to appear. When picking keywords, imagine what keywords would likely appear on the pages that you are trying to target, and create tightly themed ad groups around those keywords.
• Use duplicate keywords for appropriate ad groups. To continue the previous example, let’s say you were creating a campaign for flowers and had ad groups for lilies, roses and tulips. Unlike search, we would recommend that the general keyword flowers be included in all three ad groups to help establish a floral theme.
• Use ad group level URLs instead of keyword level URLs. Because no one particular keyword is used to trigger your ads on the content network, keyword level URLs are not relevant. We recommend using ad group level URLs instead.
• Measure content performance at the ad group level. We’ve found that measuring your performance on the content network at the ad group level offers a better gauge of what strategies work best.
• Build a comprehensive negative keyword list. The more negative keywords you include on a particular topic, the less likely your ad is to appear on pages that match that topic. If a page is predominately about your negative keywords, while partially about your positive keywords, our system is not likely to show you on that page. If a page is principally about your positive keywords, but mentions a few negative keywords, then your ad may still appear on this page. We recommend that you include multiple negative keywords on topics you would like to avoid. If you sold camera film and wanted to reduce the likelihood of your ad showing on movie-related pages, you should include multiple negative keywords like -movie, -movies, as well as synonyms like -cinema, -cinemas.

We hope you found these tips useful. As always, we recommend that you track performance of your content network ads using Placement Performance reports and set up conversion tracking or use Google Analytics. And please let us know what content network topics you would like to read about in this blog.

In a post last month we told you about the location names that appear beneath locally targeted ads. We’ve recently made updates with the introduction of the AdWords Local PlusBox. The Local PlusBox is a feature that displays more geographical information for a local business ad that appears in the top position above Google search results. When users see the Local PlusBox and click on it (see the ‘closed’ screenshot below), the ad expands to include a map, address, driving instructions, and phone number, in addition to the location name that appears beneath the last line of ad.

Closed:

Expanded:

We are in the process of rolling out this feature to AdWords accounts in the US, Canada, UK, and Germany. It should be available to all advertisers with top placement ads in these countries within the coming week or so.

We’re a few days into the new year, so hopefully you’ve been making good progress on your resolutions so far. If you’ve only gotten as far as “don’t procrastinate” on your list, here are 8 AdSense-related resolutions you might want to try:

1. Turn my custom channels into ad placements, complete with descriptive details to attract placement-targeting advertisers.
2. Regularly check my sites for compliance with the AdSense program policies.
3. Keep my address and tax info up to date so that my payments are accurate and timely. (And sign up for EFT if it’s available to me!)
4. Place more of my ad units above the fold and on my homepage for increased visibility — and advertiser appeal.
5. Share my AdSense expertise with other publishers in the AdSense Help Forum.
6. Opt in to text and image ads to make the most of the available ad inventory for my content.
7. Use the Manage Ads feature to experiment with removing the borders from my ad units.
8. View the Payments Demo and payments schedule with rapt attention so I’ll always know when to expect my next payment.

And just as some resolutions always manage to make an appearance every year, why not also take a look at our oldie-but-goodie AdSense resolutions from 2006 for further inspiration? (We still like #10 a lot.) As for us here at Inside AdSense, we resolve to keep listening to your feedback and bringing you the latest AdSense updates — complete with the occasional cheesy title, of course.

Thanks Google for this great list of  resolutions for 2008
 

In our first post in this series, we highlighted some of the most notable improvements we’ve made to the Google content network over this past year. Today, we wanted to focus on the range of options that the content network provides to make campaign management simple.

To ensure that our advertisers have increased flexibility and control across all aspects of their campaign, we offer multiple targeting options, a variety of ad formats, and hundreds of thousands of sites on which your ads can show.

Targeting Options
Ever wonder how we match ads to relevant pages? By scanning the millions of pages on the web, Google’s contextual targeting technology analyzes the content of different web pages to determine the theme of a page. Then, by looking at all the keywords and ad text in your ad groups, our system matches the most relevant ads to the theme of that page. For example, if you have an ad for a digital camera, our system may place your ad next to a news article that reviews the latest digital photographic technology.

To ensure that you are targeting your ads to the right users, you can create tightly-themed ad groups. You can also try using negative keywords but remember that they work by exact match on the content network. The more theme-specific negative keywords you include, the less likely your ad is to appear on sites that match that theme. Following the example above, to ensure your digital camera ad doesn’t show up on pages related to video equipment, be sure to enter keywords like video, video camera, and video cameras as negative keywords. But keep in mind that doing so will exclude pages that review both video and digital cameras.

For further control, you can use the site exclusion tool to prevent your ads from appearing on specific pages, subpages, or types of pages that you don’t think are a good match for your message.

If you want even greater control, you can use placement targeting to hand-pick specific sites or sections of sites you want your ads to appear on. If your goal is conversion-oriented metrics likes sales or leads, you can select CPC pricing and pay when users click on your ads. To increase brand awareness and maximize impressions among your target users, you may choose CPM pricing.

Environments
The Google content network has partnered with a variety of different websites, from news sites like Reuters and CNN, to social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster, to smaller niche sites like Ask the Builder and WhateverLife. This wide selection helps you match your message with the right audience. To find out more about how one advertiser found success through advertising on niche sites, you can read this case study.

Ad Formats
Text ads are a great way to reach your audience with a brief, pointed message. When you want to communicate a simple, visual message, try image ads, which are accepted on over 95% of content network sites. And if you’re looking to engage your audience with sight, sound, and motion, or if your product requires a demonstration, Google click-to-play video ads offer an effective way to connect your message to the right users. You can read this case study on how one advertiser engaged with customers and increased revenue by using click-to-play video ads to demonstrate his robotic guitar tuners.

You can also check out demos of video ads and learn more about the Ad Creation Marketplace, where you can find a professional to help create your video ad.

Altogether, Google’s targeting options give you full control over the parts of the content network where your ads appear, and AdWords reporting gives you insight into how your ads perform in different environments. By matching the right ad formats with the right environments, you can reach the audience that matters to you most when they’re engaged with content that’s relevant to your business.

As always, you can read more about the content network here. And if you have specific questions that you would like answered in upcoming blog posts, we invite you to email us. In the meantime, stay tuned more information on optimizing your content network campaign in the coming weeks.

2007 is drawing to a close, but before you get out the party hats and start practicing the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, we’d like to take a moment to recap some of the biggest developments in AdSense this year.

New feature launches were abundant in 2007, and many were based on your direct feedback and requests. To help improve the performance of your ads, we revamped the look of our ad formats and introduced ad placements to let you promote your site to potential advertisers. The new Manage Ads feature gave you the ability to make changes to your ad units directly in your account and quickly experiment with optimizations. In addition, we launched such features as video units, AdSense for mobile content, and referrals 2.0 to bring in new revenue streams for your site. Still others like the Allowed Sites list and the recently announced Ad Review Center were inspired by your requests for more control over your ads and your account.

With our growing community of publishers around the world, we also continued our international expansion of products and online resources. AdSense for content was launched in languages such as Hebrew, Greek, and Bulgarian, while AdSense for search became available in a number of Southeast Asian languages. We added payment options such as Western Union Quick Cash in a few countries and EFT in Mexico. To help publishers connect with one another around the world, we introduced AdSense Help Forums in 9 new languages, including Polish, Arabic, and Russian.

And of course, we can’t forget to mention the exciting things that happened right here on our blog. We welcomed 6 new languages into the Inside AdSense family (Italian, Korean, Japanese, French, Turkish, and Simplified Chinese), bringing the total number of AdSense blogs to 11. All 11 blogs combined received 2.6 million pageviews from 1.7 million visits, and global Groups subscriptions to all blogs crossed the 43,000 mark.

Finally, we’d like to close with our second annual Reader’s Choice Award, which goes to the post you visited most this year: ‘Introducing video units‘. Accepting the award on behalf of the post is author Ryan Hayward, who had this to say: “In a world where Hollywood writers are striking and my favorite show, ‘The Office,’ is off-air, I hope that announcing video units helped to fill the creative void and made each of our lives just a little more entertaining. Cue the orchestra.”

Here’s to a very happy and prosperous 2008. Cheers!

In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we’ve developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we’ll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site’s users.

When you first opt into the Ad Review Center, you’ll be able to see all placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site, and a couple of days later you’ll be able to review placement-targeted ads that have previously run on your site. If you think an ad is not relevant for your users, you can prevent it from appearing again by blocking it in the Ad Review Center. We recommend you carefully consider the revenue impact of blocking an ad, since blocked ads won’t compete in the auction on your site, and advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition to letting publishers weigh in on the relevance of placement-targeted ads, the Ad Review Center will also help advertisers improve their placement-targeted ad campaigns. When you block an ad, you’ll be prompted to select a reason. We’ll share this constructive feedback with advertisers so they can use it to improve the quality and relevance of future ad campaigns.

As we’ve done with past features, we’re gradually launching the Ad Review Center to all publishers over the next few months. When it has been enabled for your account, you’ll see a green notification box at the top of your ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the ‘update settings’ link in the Ad Review Center. You’ll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad.

We strongly recommend you keep your review preference set to ‘auto-allow’ and review ads after they have run. Ads don’t participate in the auction while they are awaiting review, and ads that you have blocked cannot compete in the auction either. The actual revenue impact will vary in each publisher’s situation, but when using the Ad Review Center, please consider the revenue effects of blocking ads or switching from the auto-allow setting.

To learn more about the Ad Review Center, please visit the Help Center. We hope you find this new feature useful and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Since launching video units to U.S. publishers with English-language websites, we’ve received quite a few emails about this new product. Here are the top 4 questions we’d like to address:

1. I selected “Automated Content” but the videos aren’t relevant to my site. What can I do?

Thanks to your feedback, we’ve implemented a feature to improve content relevance. Before, if you typed in [cars planes taxis], for example, only videos which matched all of these keywords would be returned. If there were no videos which matched all of these keywords, we delivered a default set of videos from the most popular YouTube partner content. We’ve modified this so that now [cars planes taxis] will deliver videos which have to do with cars or planes or taxis. This will greatly reduce the likelihood of default popular content being delivered to your units. In general, to refine video targeting with the “Automated Content” setting, you should try different keyword combinations to see what works best.

2. Can I select the individual videos that appear in my video unit?

It isn’t currently possible to select individual videos for your video units. If you’re choosing “Automated Content” for your video unit, you can further refine video targeting by testing different combinations of keywords.

3. I followed your instructions to link my AdSense and YouTube accounts, but my account still shows as “pending”. I haven’t gotten a confirmation email yet.

You might have to manually link your AdSense Account to your YouTube account. To do so please follow the steps below.

1. Log in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the “Account Access” link located under the “My Account” tab.
3. Under “sites”, find “www.youtube.com” and click the “grant access” link.

Your AdSense account should now successfully be linked to your YouTube account.

4. Do you offer any other sizes for the video units?

Right now, we only offer the three sizes listed in your account when you generate the ad code — note that the ‘mini’ size is larger than what appears on your code generation page. We’ll be sure to announce any new sizes and styles as they become available.

Please keep in mind that video units are different from click-to-play video ads; while video units contain YouTube partner videos complemented by standard AdSense ads, click-to-play video ads are ads created by AdWords advertisers in video format. At this time, no in-stream video ads will show in your video units.

To make changes to your video units or try them out for the first time, visit your AdSense Setup page. Thanks again for your feedback, and stay tuned for more updates on video units.

We’d like to announce two changes to site targeting in Google’s content network. First, because site targeting now offers more precise targeting options, we’ve given it a more appropriate name: placement targeting. Second, we’re introducing a new cost-per-click bidding option so you can now pay per click or per impression.

Introducing placement targeting

When site targeting was first introduced two years ago, advertisers could search for specific URLs or topics to find individual sites in the Google content network and run their image and text ads on these sites. Over time, we’ve introduced other features like targeting by demographics and richer ad formats such as click-to-play video ads. Now, advertisers can target not only websites but also precise subsections of sites, such as the football pages of a news site, the show times section of a movie site, and even a specific ad unit (a block of Google ads) on a particular webpage.

Because of these new changes, we’ve changed the name from site targeting to placement targeting. The term “placement” can be used to refer to any site or subsection of a site that you choose to target. As the number of placements available for targeting continues to grow, you’ll have even greater control over the parts of the Google content network on which your ads appear.

Cost-per-click bidding for placement targeting

With the launch of cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, advertisers can now choose the bidding option that best matches their needs. If the purpose of your placement-targeted campaign is to increase sales, leads, sign-ups, or other conversion-oriented metrics, you can select CPC bidding and pay when users click on your ads. If you want to maximize impressions and increase brand awareness among your target audience, you can select cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. And you can specify either the maximum price or the average price (with preferred bidding), that you’d like to pay for each click or 1000 impressions.

Along with Placement Performance reports, CPC bidding for placement targeting was one of the most common advertiser requests we received for Google content network campaigns. We’re excited to make this feature available as part of our ongoing efforts to increase the flexibility and control advertisers have when advertising on the content network.

If you’d like to get started on placement targeting, you can read more about it here.

Earlier this year we stepped back to examine the value users, advertisers, and publishers derive from clicks on content ads. As you integrate ads with your site’s content and navigation, we want to ensure a positive user experience. We identified a few areas for improvement and began implementing changes, starting with our new ad formats in April.

Continuing these improvements, we’ve just changed our text ads slightly to help reduce accidental clicks. In the past, users could click on both the background and full text of an ad, but now they can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. By allowing users to click only on the ad title and URL, we aim to decrease accidental clicks, better aligning visitor behavior with their intent. Overall, the decrease in accidental clicks will keep users on your website, interacting your content, until they intend to click on an ad.

In addition, this new clickable format better aligns with the text ad formats shown on Google.com. We hope this format change contributes to a better, more consistent user experience.

Finally, this change won’t just improve user experience on your site; it benefits advertisers as well. We currently monitor clicks on Google ads for accidental clicks, and the format change complements our monitoring system by further ensuring advertisers only pay for meaningful clicks. By reducing accidental clicks, we hope to increase advertiser campaign value and satisfaction, encouraging additional spend and facilitating higher monetization for all publishers.

I’m not sure how other’s are doing, but I’ve had some wierd stuff going on my main site, first some non english ads invade my site.This was their response to that,Hi Jason,

Thanks for writing in. Our engineering team has looked into your issue and
in order for us to better target Google ads to the content on your pages,
you will need to use a slightly modified version of our ad code. Please
insert the following line of JavaScript in your current AdSense ad code:

google_language = ‘en’;

Insert this code on a new line just above the line in your current code
that begins:

// –>

Note that this ad code is for use only on pages with a majority of the
content in English. Please let us know if you have any trouble with this
code or if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

xxx
The Google AdSense TeamMy ResponceSubject: Re: [#xxxxxxxx] My ads are in the wrong language
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:58:54 -0600

Hi is anyone able to explain why these ads showed up out of the blue?
I have had adsense on this site since 2004 and never had one issue.

JasonAll i got was some cut and paste responceHi Jason,

Thanks for your reply. Our engineering team did not see any problems with
the way our crawler was reading your site so we’re not sure if any recent
changes you’ve made to your site or a system bug may be affecting your
language targeting. Regardless, if you add the “en” language line in my
previous email to your code that action should prevent you from seeing
non-english ads in the future.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding in this matter and feel
free to let us know if your issue remains unresolved.

Sincerely,

xxxxx
The Google AdSense TeamWhat the heck my entire site is english, how can’t there billion dollar spider not know that. Also at the same time my income dropped by FIFTY yes 50% PERCENT. WTH is going on Google.And I can’t add the line of code as I use an 3rd party plug-in to add the ads to my pages. What I did to possible fix the issue was remove site targeting advertising and block the non English ads.So now I’m looking for other ways to monetize my sites as Google changes seem to be a BAD thing.

I cannot believe that my sites had that many accidental clicks.

We’re excited to let you know that the AdWords Optimization Team is offering a new round of campaign optimizations. As we’ve mentioned in a recent post on the subject, requesting an optimization is easy. Simply fill out this request form and tell us about your specific business and advertising goals. Our optimization team will review your website, campaign structure, ad text, and keywords — then, within 10 day or less, they’ll send you customized recommendations to help you reach your goals. You’ll have complete control over which of these recommendations you choose to implement.

If you’ve had us complete an optimization before, we encourage you to submit a different campaign now. Whether you are a first time or a repeat customer, please be sure to specify which campaign you’d like the team optimize. You can do this in the ‘Your Advertising Goals’ section of the request form. Also, please keep in mind that this service is currently available for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada, for campaigns in English.

Depending on your business, it may be a bit late in the game to request an optimization for a campaign focused on the winter holidays. If the timing makes sense for you, though, please be sure to let us know of the seasonal nature of your campaign.

The optimization team is looking forward to hearing from you.

This is a very cool service Google is offering, since its free take advantage of it.

Jason

We’re pleased to announce a change that we’ve made to the incidence of clicks on text ads on the Google content network. Previously, users could click anywhere on text ads running on the content network, including the ad’s background and any part of the ad text, for their click to be registered. Now only clicks on the title or URL of text ads will be counted.

This change better aligns what is considered a click for ads on the Google content network with what is considered a click for ads shown on Google.com. By changing the clickable area on text ads, we hope to increase user satisfaction with both our advertisers and our publishers.

As a result of this change, some advertisers may notice a decrease in both the number of clicks and the clickthrough rate (CTR) in content network campaigns — along with an increase in the average return on investment (ROI) of content network traffic. For insight into the ROI you receive from your AdWords ads, you can install conversion tracking or Google Analytics to measure whether the clicks your ads receive lead to valuable actions on your site. If you use a third-party tracking service, you can use ValueTrack tags to identify the traffic coming to your site from the Google search and content networks.

We hope that this change will result in better user experience with Google content network ads, along with potentially improved ROI for advertisers. If you have any comments on this change, please let us know and we will forward your thoughts to the content network team.

See this post to see what this change has done to my income.

http://www.jasonfrovich.com/seo-and-search-engines/accidental-clicks-fade-into-the-background/

Many of our readers have emailed us asking for more information about the Google content network. As you ramp up your advertising efforts for the holiday season, we wanted to provide you with an overview of the content network, including recent improvements, tips, and examples of how others have used the content network to grow their business. Today’s post is the first of a three-part series on the content network that we’ll be sharing with you over the next few weeks.

The Google content network is a wide network of AdSense partners, ranging from household names such as the New York Times, to sites that cater to niche audiences, such as blogs, forums, and social networks. Together, these sites reach more worldwide Internet users than any other online property or network.

As an advertiser, you can use the content network to achieve goals across the buying cycle, from raising awareness to driving conversions. However, the impact of your content network campaigns can extend beyond the content network — these content network campaigns can raise awareness for your business and create demand among your potential customers that can be captured later by your search campaigns. Here is what we heard recently from an AdWords advertiser:

There is no doubt that if we were to take our clients’ campaigns off of the content network today, we would see a decrease in their conversions on search tomorrow.”

- Edward Llach, founder, SearchRev SEM agency.

You can read more about Search Rev’s experience with the content network in this case study.

Over the past year, we’ve made numerous changes to the ways you can manage, monitor, and optimize campaigns on the Google content network. Here are the most notable features we’ve added recently, based on your feedback.

Transparent reporting
The Placement Performance report provides site-by-site performance metrics for your contextually-targeted campaigns — tracking clicks, impressions, cost, and conversion data at the URL level. When coupled with Google’s conversion tracking, the Placement Performance report becomes a powerful tool that can show you the placements where you’re meeting your objectives, and those where you aren’t. You can read tips on how to use these reports effectively to boost campaign performance here.

Targeting and pricing improvements
We’re constantly making changes to our contextual targeting system to ensure that we place your ads next to the content most relevant to your message, and as a result, measured more than a 25% increase in well-targeted ads over the last year. We’ve also made improvements to our smart pricing technology, which discounts the price of clicks on specific sites based on their likelihood to result in strong advertiser ROI. All together, these changes have led to more relevant ads for users and better results for advertisers.

More bidding choices
As we mentioned last week, we also released cost-per-click bidding for placement targeting. You can now hand-pick the parts of the content network where you’d like your ads to appear and choose the bidding option (CPM or CPC) that fits your needs.

Let us know if there are specific topics on the content network that you would like to hear about. In the meantime, keep your eye out for posts in this series in the coming weeks.

We wanted to let you know about two recent changes to our site targeting feature. As you may know, site targeting allows advertisers to select specific publisher sites on which to run their ads. Advertisers can target your site if they’ve determined a match between their offerings and the interests of visitors to your site.

The first change is that we’ve renamed ‘site targeting’ to ‘placement targeting’ to better reflect the variety of targeting options we offer. Advertisers can still target their ads to an entire site, but they can now also target your individual ad units or groups of pages based on how you’ve set up ad placements using custom channels. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating references to ‘site targeting’ in your account and in our Help Center.

The second change is that advertisers can bid on placement-targeted ads (formerly known as site-targeted ads) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. Previously, advertisers could only bid on these targeted ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Just as with contextually targeted CPC ads, you’ll generate earnings for valid clicks on placement-targeted CPC ads.

While you can also add the URLs of specific CPC placement-targeted ads to your filter list, please keep in mind that all placement-targeted ads will participate in the ad auction with contextually targeted ads. Allowing more ads into the auction will help increase competition and ultimately your revenue.

Finally, we’d like to leave you with a few reminders to help you maximize your revenue potential with placement targeting:

• Turn your custom channels into ad placements. These ad placements will allow you to highlight specific sections of your site that may appeal to advertisers.
• Enable text and image ads for your ad units. By opting in to different ad types on your site, you’ll increase the competition in the ad auction, which can lead to additional revenue for your account over time.
• Use the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. This ad format is one of our best-performing ad units, and many advertisers use it when creating rich media (image and video) campaigns. Again, you’ll benefit from the increased competition for your ad space.

Online advertisers have noticed that CPCs tend to increase during the holiday season and have asked us why. We turned to Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, for an explanation:

Many advertisers track their average cost-per-click (CPC), but what really matters for the bottom line is the average cost-per-acquisition (CPA): how much you have to spend on advertising to make a sale. The third factor to watch is the conversion rate, which is defined as conversions (sales) per click.

Note that these numbers are neatly tied together by the convenient formula:

CPA = CPC/Conversion rate = (cost/click)/(conversions/click).

Clicks, cost, and conversions all go up during the holidays. As it happens, conversions increase more than clicks, so conversion rates tend to rise. This makes the clicks more valuable, so advertisers raise their bids to reach more consumers. As a result CPCs get pushed up.

(Click image for full-size version)

The plot above shows the median CPC, the median conversion rate, and the median CPA during the 2006 holiday season for those Google AdWords advertisers who use conversion tracking. The series have been normalized so they all start at the same point on November 1.

Last year, Thanksgiving fell on November 23. Note how the conversion rate (green) and the CPC (blue) both dropped on that day which means CPA (red) went up. Perhaps watching football and eating turkey trumped online shopping on Thanksgiving?

Right after Turkey Day, people started on their Christmas shopping so conversion rates started to rise. During this period, advertisers raised their bids in order to get more prominent positions in the ad auctions so they could attract those shoppers. That increased the median CPC (blue). But the conversion rate rose more than the CPC, which pushed CPA (red) down. Even though the clicks cost more, the conversions — what really matter — cost less.

The conversion rate peaked on December 11, somewhat before the peak of overall retail sales, since it takes time to process and ship the online orders. By December 23, things were pretty much back to normal. Once Christmas Day arrived, conversion rates dropped to their lowest point of the year — people were just too busy opening presents to think about buying more things… at least for the next few days.

The bottom line is that is that the cost of clicks does tend to rise during the holidays. But since those clicks are more likely to turn into sales, the CPA goes down, making those seemingly expensive clicks quite a bargain. If you are interested in tracking how your own conversion rates and CPAs change during the holiday season, you can set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your ads and see how these metrics work for you.

If you follow our series on Optimization Tips, you know that we frequently encourage using negative keywords to improve your ROI. Specifically, adding negative keywords to your account can help better target your ads, increase clickthrough rates, and lower your minimum cost-per-click. You can read more on how to brainstorm negative keywords as well as how you can use them to improve your account performance in an earlier post. Today, we wanted to bring attention to an important feature of negative keywords that many advertisers frequently overlook when composing their negative keyword list: keyword match types.

You may know about the different keyword match types (broad, phrase, and exact) for the keywords you want to show your ads on. But did you know that negative keywords also run on these different keyword match types? Many advertisers use broad match for their negative keywords, and accidentally filter out too many search queries, including ones that they would have wanted their ad to show on. Let’s check out an example below.

Say you own a men’s clothing store and you would like to increase traffic to your site by running a special winter holiday campaign for your men’s accessories line. In the Search Query Report you recently ran, you noticed that the ads in your holiday campaign for men’s accessories are also showing up when users are searching for women’s silk scarves. You have the broad match keywords silk ties, wool scarves, and men’s gifts in your keyword list, and now you want to add the negative keyword of silk scarves. But which negative keyword match type should you choose? Below is a graph illustrating what would happen if you chose negative broad (-silk scarves), negative phrase (-”silk scarves”), and negative exact (-[silk scarves]) match types.

As illustrated above, different match types for negative keywords can seriously impact when your ads show. In the first column for negative broad match, you would be losing out on many relevant search queries such as men’s scarves and even your own selected keywords of silk ties and wool scarves, simply because the broad match type filters out queries that have either the word silk or scarves. In the last column for negative exact match, search queries containing items that you do not sell like silk scarves gifts and women’s silk scarves still cause your ad to show because you are only filtering out the exact match silk scarves.

Using negative keywords effectively requires carefully thinking about how negative keywords will impact your campaign. In addition, you should always monitor your traffic, clickthrough rate, cost per conversion, and search queries to make sure that you are seeing the desired result.

Earlier this year, Google announced an important agreement with Clear Channel Radio, the largest radio station group owner in the U.S., to bring access to guaranteed inventory on top-rated AM and FM stations to AdWords advertisers. We’re excited to report back that Clear Channel’s inventory is now available through Audio Ads in AdWords. AdWords advertisers can reach their target customers on over 1,700 AM and FM radio stations, including almost 700 Clear Channel AM/FM stations. Our entire network averages 12 stations per market in each of the top 50 markets and covers every major station format. Advertisers will also have access to a guaranteed amount of premium inventory across these stations in all prime dayparts and in “Top 10″ stations in all of the top 25 U.S. markets.

With access to this premium inventory, advertisers can broadcast their messages to millions of potential customers in markets like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as markets like Boise, ID, Madison, WI, and Spokane, WA. Audio Ads allows advertisers to continue to increase the impact of their AdWords campaigns, even when potential customers aren’t online.

Here’s a recent comment from an advertiser who’s been successful with Google Audio Ads:

Google Audio Ads has allowed us to expand our advertising into new markets we otherwise may not have reached. For our business, small, rural markets are extremely important: Audio Ads makes it easy and efficient to get our message out to these customers.

- Karl Kelman, Marketing Manager, US Airport Parking, www.USAirportparking.com

If you’re interested in Audio Ads and you’d like to learn more, you can visit the Audio Ads Beginner’s Guide or check out the Audio Ads website to listen to sample ads and read success stories.

Recently we posted about a common misconception regarding Minimum CPC (cost-per-click) and how it is determined. Today we’d like to expand on the theme of CPC, and define the other CPC types that you’ll see in your AdWords account.

Minimum CPC – also referred to as Min CPC or Minimum CPC bid:
As discussed in our previous post, a minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is assigned to each keyword in your account based on its quality (as measured by its Quality Score). The minimum bid is typically the least amount you can pay per click in order for your keyword to show ads. It is important to note that minimum CPC is set by the AdWords system, and not by the advertiser.

Maximum CPC – also referred to as Max CPC:
Maximum cost-per-click (CPC) is set by you, the advertiser, and is the highest amount that you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. You can set a maximum CPC at the keyword or ad group level. If you’re interested in a deeper look at Max CPC, you’ll find more information here.

Average CPC – also referred to as Avg. CPC:
This is literally the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad. The Avg. CPC you see in your account is determined by totalling the cost of all clicks and dividing that total by the number of clicks.

For example: if your ad receives three clicks, one costing $0.33, one costing $0.38, and the third costing $0.49, then your average CPC for those clicks is $1.20 divided by 3 clicks, or $0.40.

We hope this information will shed a little light on a topic that is sometimes unclear to advertisers, particularly those who have just started with us and are new to the somewhat specialized vocabulary of AdWords advertising.

Online advertisers have noticed that CPCs tend to increase during the holiday season and have asked us why. We turned to Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, for an explanation:

Many advertisers track their average cost-per-click (CPC), but what really matters for the bottom line is the average cost-per-acquisition (CPA): how much you have to spend on advertising to make a sale. The third factor to watch is the conversion rate, which is defined as conversions (sales) per click.

Note that these numbers are neatly tied together by the convenient formula:

CPA = CPC/Conversion rate = (cost/click)/(conversions/click).

Clicks, cost, and conversions all go up during the holidays. As it happens, conversions increase more than clicks, so conversion rates tend to rise. This makes the clicks more valuable, so advertisers raise their bids to reach more consumers. As a result CPCs get pushed up.

(Click image for full-size version)

The plot above shows the median CPC, the median conversion rate, and the median CPA during the 2006 holiday season for those Google AdWords advertisers who use conversion tracking. The series have been normalized so they all start at the same point on November 1.

Last year, Thanksgiving fell on November 23. Note how the conversion rate (green) and the CPC (blue) both dropped on that day which means CPA (red) went up. Perhaps watching football and eating turkey trumped online shopping on Thanksgiving?

Right after Turkey Day, people started on their Christmas shopping so conversion rates started to rise. During this period, advertisers raised their bids in order to get more prominent positions in the ad auctions so they could attract those shoppers. That increased the median CPC (blue). But the conversion rate rose more than the CPC, which pushed CPA (red) down. Even though the clicks cost more, the conversions — what really matter — cost less.

The conversion rate peaked on December 11, somewhat before the peak of overall retail sales, since it takes time to process and ship the online orders. By December 23, things were pretty much back to normal. Once Christmas Day arrived, conversion rates dropped to their lowest point of the year — people were just too busy opening presents to think about buying more things… at least for the next few days.

The bottom line is that is that the cost of clicks does tend to rise during the holidays. But since those clicks are more likely to turn into sales, the CPA goes down, making those seemingly expensive clicks quite a bargain. If you are interested in tracking how your own conversion rates and CPAs change during the holiday season, you can set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your ads and see how these metrics work for you.

Thanks to Hal for his explanation on how the holiday season can affect the ROI for an AdWords campaign. And remember, you can always visit the AdWords Help Center year-round to read up on tips on how to improve your ad performance.

Today, we’d like to revisit a common misconception, about which we receive quite a few questions. In the first part of the post, we will very briefly cover the most important facts and in the second we’ll take a more detailed look at four related questions.

The common misconception: Many advertisers believe that if they have no competitors for a keyword, their minimum cost-per-click (CPC) will automatically be lowered by the AdWords system to $0.01, the lowest possible CPC.

How it actually works: The minimum CPC for a keyword is not related to the number of competitors one has that keyword. Instead, minimum CPC is dependent on the Quality Score of the keyword, as it’s used in the advertiser’s account. This functionality was introduced in August 2005, when keyword bidding evolved to a quality-based model.

Are there really no competitors?
If you look for your ad and see no competitors, this does not necessarily mean that there are no others advertising on that keyword. For example, many advertisers choose to show their ads only during particular times of the day, so you will not necessarily see them when your ad appears. Or, while you might be targeting the entire United States, competing advertisers may be regionally targeting and not including the area in which you are located — in which case you’ll not see their ads.

Why doesn’t Google show ads for every keyword?
We are often asked if we wouldn’t prefer to make additional revenue, rather than allowing keywords for which no ads appear. In point of fact, Google would prefer to show no ads for a user’s search query, rather than to show ads which provide a poor quality experience for users who click on them — and which might damage long-term user trust in the the quality of information delivered by AdWords ads.

How do I lower my minimum CPC?
To achieve the lowest possible minimum CPC, make sure your keywords, ads, and landing pages provide an excellent user experience for those who search for those keywords, click on your ads, and visit your site. There is a great deal of useful information to help you reach this goal in the Ads Quality and Performance section of the AdWords Help Center — so much so that we’ve heard advertisers say it takes a fair amount of time to read and absorb it. However, for those who truly wish to improve their Quality Score, improve the experience of potential customers who click on their ads and visit their sites — and lower their Minimum CPCs — this is likely to be time well spent.

Should I search for my ad on Google.com to see who my competitors are?
If you are an advertiser who searches for your own ad to judge the competitive landscape, we recommend using the Ad Preview Tool, rather than searching for your ad on Google.com. Using this tool, you’ll see your ad (and the ads of your competitors which are showing in the moment you check) as they actually appear on Google.com — but you won’t accrue an impression. Please take a look at this very straightforward tool here, and try a sample search. You may even want to bookmark the page.

Bangalore, Sept. 20Google has introduced Gadget Ads and AdSense for Mobile – two new advertising formats. With the interactive Gadget Ads, advertisers can target audiences via regular updates — real-time data feeds, images, and video. This is c…

Many advertisers have asked us to provide more information about the Quality Score for their keywords. So we’ve answered by recently launching a feature that does just that: the Keyword Analysis page.

The new Keyword Analysis page gives you a detailed breakdown of your keyword’s Quality Score and how it might impact your ad’s visibility. Specifically, you’ll learn how keyword quality and landing page quality are performing and receive recommendations for improvement.

For example, let’s say a keyword has a poor Quality Score because your landing page doesn’t relate to your keyword. On the Keyword Analysis page, we’ll alert you that your landing page quality is low and provide tips on how to improve it. You’ll also see your Quality Score rating, your minimum bid, and whether your keyword is showing ads.

To launch Keyword Analysis page, click the magnifying glass icon beside any keyword in your account; then click one of the ‘Details and recommendations’ links.

(Click the screenshot for a full-size image)

And here’s an example of the Details and recommendations page:

(Click the screenshot for a full-size image)
We’d appreciate your feedback on the Keyword Analysis page. If you’d like to share how the tool is working for you, just click the ‘Send feedback’ link on the Keyword Analysis page.

How to apply for your Newsletter Editor's License?

by Michael Green

For many people Newsletter or Ezine creation is shrouded in
absolute mystery.

How do I know?

Well listen to this story…

The other day I was contacted by a lady who wanted to know
which authority she had to apply to in order to obtain her
Newsletter Editor's License.

Wait a minute….did you say "NEWSLETTER EDITOR'S LICENSE"?

Yep – that's right – I was being asked where the average Joe
should go to apply to be given the right to publish their
own Newsletter (or Ezine for that matter).

Oh…and also…how much would it cost them?

Hmm…now before you roll about the floor laughing, just
think about this for a moment.

While most people do realize that you don't actually require
a license to write whatever the heck you like – I've
gotta tell you – that's NOT the first time I've been asked
that exact same question.

Now in my view, if you're asked the same question by more
than one person within a short period of time, then there's
probably an army of others who think the same thing, but
just haven't plucked up the courage to ask the question!

Now obviously the answer is that you DON'T require a license
to publish your own Ezine or Newsletter – at least not in
the free world.

…But the question is a revealing one, as it points to the
fact that a lot of people out there are still confused about
how to become a successful Newsletter editor.

So now, based on actual questions asked by the public, I've
compiled my TOP EIGHT questions asked about newsletters.

And here goes…

Q. SHOULD I PUBLISH ON OR OFFLINE?

A. Only you can answer this question. Broadly speaking an
online Ezine – delivered by email or via your website -
has a big cost advantage of being near free to produce.
But an offline printed newsletter has greater impact.

Q. WHERE DO I ACTUALLY START WHEN CREATING MY NEWSLETTER?

A. Start by sitting down and creating an outline plan for
your new newsletter. How many articles and features will
you require for example? Then sketch out a rough format
before you do anything else.

Q. SHOULD MY EZINE BE IN PLAIN TEXT?

A. Conventionally Ezine publishing has been done in plain
text, but increasingly many people's email systems can
read HTML. There are many considerations and you might
want to ask about your specific newsletter on a helpful
forum like my http://www.howtocorp.com/forum where
other more experienced newsletter editors will be able
to provide you with personalized advice for your
situation.

Q. SHOULD MY NEWSLETTER BE PRINTED IN COLOR?

A. If you're printing your newsletter, then your biggest
choice will be the use of "color", "black & white", or
what's known as "spot color" printing. This is largely a
cost consideration, but don't forget how important design
can be to creating the right impression. I've seen lots
of EXCELLENT black and white printed newsletters!

Q. HOW WILL I FIND READERS FOR MY NEWSLETTER?

A. That's partly dependent on your subject matter of course,
but if you're trying to attract readers via the web, then
there are a whole host of tactics that you should employ.
Subscriber buttons, popups and exitpops are just some of
them, but all the most sought after newsletters actually
offer a gift to new subscribers too. This can be a free
report or something else of value.

Q. SHOULD I ACCEPT ADVERTISING FROM DAY ONE?

A. Advertisers are usually looking for a good subscriber
base, before they'll pay you to advertise in your Ezine.
So concentrate on getting the basics right before you
consider opening up advertising space. Remember to put
your reader first at all times.

Q. CAN I RECOMMEND ITEMS THAT I'M AFFILIATED TO?

A. Yes. But don't do this unless you really are in LOVE with
the product you are recommending. Check it out for
yourself first and be faithful to the needs of your
readership, by only recommending relevant items.

Q. WILL I NEED A LICENSE TO PUBLISH MY NEWSLETTER OR EZINE?

A. Absolutely not in most parts of the world. It's good old
free speech and you can write what you like!

Best withes with your own Newsletter or Ezine,

Michael Green

© Michael Green – How To Corp – All Rights Reserved

Michael Green is known as THE newsletter guru. He's created
two toolkits to help YOU create your own newsletter or Ezine
http://www.howtoWRITEaNEWSLETTER.com and…
http://www.EasyEzineToolkit.com
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Instablogs is a blog network that publishes more than 200 posts a day on 136 blogs spanning 16 niche channels, including luxury gadgets blog Bornrich and technology blog Gizmowatch. With 200+ bloggers blogging from all over the world, Instablogs has around 2 million unique visitors per month.

Instablogs co-founder Ankit Maheshwari tells us that AdSense works well with each blog’s unique content. “Since our blogs are very niche-oriented, it’s tough for us to sell our inventory directly to advertisers on blogs with less than 30,000 page views per month,” he says. “AdSense’s high CPC offering and huge advertiser database can help monetize the page views on any site irrespective of its size.”

Recently Ankit began to experiment with AdSense optimization. Although he was doubtful of the results, he tried a few minor tweaks on his site, such as opting in to displaying image ads and adding link units to the top of his pages. He also used information from his custom channels to determine the ad unit with the highest CTR on his pages – he then placed this ad unit first in the HTML source of each page. After a week of testing these changes, Ankit found that revenue nearly doubled. While AdSense revenue used to comprise 15% of the company’s advertising revenue, since optimizing it’s increased to 25%.

Despite the success of his first optimization, Ankit has found that there isn’t one standard layout or ad format that is optimal for all of his pages. He says, “We’ve seen in many blogs that a few ad types perform better in different sections. For example, the large rectangle performs 70% better on the permalink pages of our Tattoo blog, while skyscrapers perform best on all other pages. At the same time, banner ads have performed really well on our Parenting blog.”

Today, Ankit continues to make small changes and frequently tests new layouts based on his custom channel data. He feels that “custom channels are not only a useful feature, but also the most important feature in the entire AdSense program for publishers.”

Over the past couple of years you’ve met a number of AdWords experts on our blog — and, in that spirit, we’d like to introduce Fred Vallaeys, the Product Evangelist for AdWords. You may have met Fred in person, or heard him speak at recent industry events. If you’re someone who attends these types of events keep your eye out for him: he loves to hear feedback from our advertisers firsthand.Today, we begin a new series on a subject that is key to advertiser success: Return on Investment (ROI). In this series, Fred will cover why ROI matters, how to track it using tools available from AdWords or other sources, and how to optimize AdWords advertising for ROI.

Now that the stage is set, let’s get started. Here’s Fred:

I’ve heard it said at conferences that online advertising is the most cost-effective way for businesses to attract new customers — but how exactly is such a claim measured? Well, one of the beauties of AdWords is that results are easily measured. Not only do advertisers get reports about clicks and impressions within their account, they can also track conversions of visitors to their site. One possible downside of having all that data, however, is that advertisers may become distracted by tracking lots of metrics at the expense of losing focus on the ones that matter the most.

On the other hand, many advertisers don’t spend much time at all monitoring their campaigns. They might check only one metric, such as impressions, clicks, CTR, or their overall spend — and so long as they don’t see anything obviously amiss, they don’t make any changes to their ads, maximum CPCs, etc.

Regardless of how much or how little an advertiser measures results, it’s possible to miss out on potential profit if close attention isn’t paid to the one metric that almost certainly matters the most: ROI. And while impressions, clicks, CTR and costs are all important components that contribute to the ROI, these metrics only show part of the picture.

The ROI metric can be defined in two ways: the revenue generated for every dollar spent on ads, or the amount of profit generated from every dollar spent on ads. I’m going to focus on profit here, since that’s what most advertisers inquire about.

The formula for ROI is as follows (keeping in mind that the “revenue minus cost” in the top line equals profit):

For any campaign where the advertiser’s goal is to get a conversion, whether it be a sign-up, a sale, or something else, the ROI should be greater than 100% — which simply means that for every dollar spent on AdWords, they’ve made a profit. The greater the ROI number, the greater their profit.

Here’s an example — let’s say an advertiser has two keywords (‘flower delivery’ and ‘fresh flowers’) and spends $50 on each. For the same $50, the advertiser receives 50 clicks for ‘flower delivery’ and 100 clicks for ‘fresh flowers’:

flower delivery	1,000	50	$50	$1.00	5	?	?
fresh flowers	1,000	100	$50	$0.50	10	?	?

Based on the data in the table, the keyword ‘fresh flowers’ seems like the better of the two because it has a lower average CPC and it leads to more conversions (sales). But without tracking the ROI on both keywords, an advertiser would have to guess whether it makes sense to change the bids for these keywords. If they were only looking at the average CPC or the conversions per keyword, they may be making assumptions that could end up costing them money.

Now, here’s that table again — but with figures added for ROI:

Keyword	Impressions	Clicks	Cost	Average CPC	Conversions	Profit	ROI
flower delivery	1,000	50	$50	$1.00	5	$100	200%
fresh flowers	1,000	100	$50	$0.50	10	$50	100%

Notice that the keyword ‘flower delivery’ has a much better ROI, even though it generated fewer conversions and fewer clicks for the same advertising cost. This could be the case for a variety of reasons — for example, users who clicked on the ‘flower delivery’ ad may tend to buy products with a higher profit margin. The average profit per sale on the keyword ‘flower delivery’ is much higher ($20) than ‘fresh flowers’ ($5), which justifies the higher CPC for the keyword ‘flower delivery’, even in light of fact that it receives fewer conversions.

When an advertiser tracks and monitors their ROI, they are seeing the complete picture. This allows them to make smarter decisions about their online ads and, ultimately, make their business more profitable.

Now that you’ve seen why ROI matters and how it can help you to make more informed decisions, Fred will tell you how to track and monitor your ROI in part two of the series. Then, in part three, he’ll take a close look at some tools and strategies for optimizing ROI. We hope you’ll stay with us for the entire series — and as always, please feel free to comment along the way.

Over the past several years, Google has encouraged academic research and participation in the area of click fraud detection. Our Ad Traffic Quality team is excited to continue this support and recently participated in the AdFraud 2007 workshop at Stanford University. The workshop was attended by more than one hundred participants from academia and industry, and provided an open forum for discussing the technical and social aspects of fighting click fraud.

Dr. Kourosh Gharachorloo, who leads Google’s Ad Traffic Quality engineering team, presented the opening talk at the workshop. Kourosh’s talk focused primarily on the economics of online advertising and click fraud. The talk presented two frameworks modeling advertiser spend against Google’s incentives to help advertisers achieve better ROI. The first framework illustrates how Google’s incentives are aligned with those of our advertisers – i.e. our click fraud detection techniques improve advertiser ROI, which then leads to increased advertiser success with AdWords. The second framework shows how low-quality sources of traffic in the Google Network directly reduce Google’s revenue along with the revenue of our content partners. The combined frameworks demonstrate that Google has strong economic incentives to fight click fraud, in addition to the extremely important goal of earning and maintaining advertiser trust.

Kourosh’s talk also included an overview of Google’s approach to detecting invalid clicks. In addition, he described the limitations of the metrics used by the click fraud detection industry to evaluate the impact of click fraud. He concluded the talk by discussing the additional data that Google discloses to advertisers, which uniquely enables AdWords users to reconcile their web server logs with the statistics in their AdWords accounts.

The Ad Traffic Quality team will continue to collaborate with the academic community on research projects and events such as the Stanford AdFraud workshop. For the latest on what this team is up to, please visit the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center where you’ll find Kourosh’s presentation [PDF] and a 70-minute video of his talk.

Im continually impressed with the effects Google is putting towards click fraud, being the largest PPC search engine, its good to know that they are doing something to combat this. Ive been lucky in my campaign’s not have any or much click fraud. But I have seen and read about how it has literately destroyed companies and bankrupted smaller business. Its good news for all of us when the advertising company is working on a solution for this.

Google I salute you on your effects.

Back in July, we made Google Print Ads available to AdWords advertisers in the U.S. Today, we’re happy to introduce a free tool that will make newspaper advertising even easier: an ad creation tool that lets anyone design a customized and professional-looking newspaper ad in minutes.

Simply plug the text of your ad, image, and contact details into pre-designed ad templates, and the tool will automatically generate multiple designs you can choose from. If you need to change your messaging or resize your image, you can edit individual ads directly in the interface. And any ad you create using this tool can be reused as many times as you need in future print campaigns.

This tool currently supports six ad sizes, ranging from 1 col. x 1 in. to 2 col. x 7 in. Below are some examples of different types and sizes of ads that might appear in your Print Ads account:

(Please click on the image to see the full size.)

If you are interested in Print Ads, you can read more details on this new ads creation tool here.

Google has come a long way from the norm with PPC (pay per click) ads. Google can now offer the little guy many ways to advertise there website or products that just wasn’t available in the past. Im personally a HUGE fan of using adwords because of this.

Today we launched Google Gadget Ads, customized “mini-sites” that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites. These ads are interactive, engaging, and will appeal to your users, simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site. The end result is that advertisers get more engaged users, users have a richer ad experience, and publishers opted in to image ads may see increased competition for their ad space.

What does a gadget ad look like? We’re glad you asked. Below is a gadget ad that we’ve built to advertise our AdSense program.

Gadget ads can take a number of shapes, sizes, and formats. If you’re interested in seeing other cool gadget ads, you can check out our Google Gadget Ad Center. Also, please rest assured that gadget ads must adhere to our editorial policies, so there won’t be any distracting “punch the monkey” ads.

Ready to start displaying gadget ads on your website? While there’s no guarantee that they’ll appear on your site, you can increase the chances that they’ll be shown by making sure you’re opted in to image ads and using one of the image ad formats. Please note that the most popular sizes for gadget ads are the rectangle, leaderboard, and skyscraper formats.

Also, keep in mind that there are a few things advertisers look for when targeting their ads to specific sites.

Got questions about gadget ads? We’ve got answers — check out our Help Center.

Here is some more infomation on Google Gadget Ads

What are Google Gadget Ads? Gadget ads enable advertisers and agencies to engage audiences on the Internet’s largest ad network with a rich and interactive new ad format.

• Beyond Rich Media Advertising with “Websites within Websites”
  Think of gadget ads as mini versions of your website in any AdSense ad size.
• Dynamic and Creative Advertising
  Truly useful applications incorporating data feeds, maps, images, audio, video, Flash, HTML or JavaScript in a single creative.
• Largest Global Advertising Network
  Reach over 75% of unique Internet users in more than 20 languages and over 100 countries with no serving or hosting costs.
• Community of Engaged Users Around Your Brand
  Users can post and share your gadget ads anywhere.
• Full Interaction Reporting
  Receive site-by-site interaction reports tracking dozens of actions.

Welcome..

Do you realize how valuable you are? Advertisers, search providers and online retailers are paying billions to reach you while you surf. How much of that money are you making? NONE!

AGLOCO makes money for its Members in many ways:

* Search: Every time you use the Viewbarâ„¢ to do an Internet search, AGLOCO earns money from the search engine providers. (For example, Google pays as much as $0.10 on average for each search that is directed to its search engine.)

* Advertising: The Viewbar™ itself displays ads that are targeted based upon the websites you’re visiting. When you click on an ad and make a purchase, AGLOCO receives a referral fee, which we pass on to our Members. (Please note: Individual members do not receive any compensation for clicking on ads in the Viewbar™, and the Viewbar™ can detect if someone is clicking ads in a fraudulent manner.)

* Transaction commissions: Many major retailers pay commissions when you refer customers who make a purchase. AGLOCO collects that commission and passes it on to our members. (For example, Amazon pays an 8.5% commission to most websites who refer customers, and has cut deals for even larger percentages. The bigger the AGLOCO community, the better commission we can negotiate for our Members.)

* Software distribution: Numerous software companies pay websites to encourage the download of new software releases (for example, Adobe’s Flash and Acrobat Reader software), and trial versions of new programs. AGLOCO members not only get access to the latest and coolest software, they get paid for it.

* Service distribution: Many online service providers will look to the AGLOCO community as a source of new and active users for their services. (For example, eBay, Skype, and PayPal, among others, all pay fees to people who help them recruit new active users to their services)

* Product distribution: When Members agree to use a product, such as cell phones, high-tech gadgets, office supplies, new credit cards or financial services, AGLOCO can collect referral fees. Some companies even offer special rebate and cash-back programs.

AGLOCO Members make money in four ways.

* Members earn a monthly share of the AGLOCO revenue based on the use of the AGLOCO Viewbarâ„¢ that month.
* Members earn part of the company based on the use of the AGLOCO Viewbarâ„¢ that month (currently a maximum of five hours are rewarded). Click here for details.
* Members who use our referral system to help build the AGLOCO network will earn more. (AGLOCO only has significant value as a large network and people who help build it should be rewarded. – We also feel that the early users who told friends about YouTube or MySpace or even Google probably deserved something too, but no referral system was available to record their work).
* Members will also get a share of any commissions AGLOCO gets when a Member purchases a product or service from an AGLOCO Sponsor company.

To join please go to http://www.earnmoneywhilesurfing.com/

For a financial breakdown on the money to be made from joining AGLOCO, please see http://simmonsreport.spaces.live.com/

See a video of the Viewbar – http://www.johnchow.com/15000-agloco-sign-ups See all AGLOCO Updates at the company blog : http://blog.agloco.com.

AGLOCO FAQ
http://www.agloco.com/web/guest/faq