I spent a bunch of time today working on improving my channels in Adsense. I had received a note from Google in my account suggesting I allow advertisers to target my channels as that would improve revenue. They told me to do this in advance of the shopping season. I don’t really have any big seasonal items to sell, though, so I wasn’t in a big hurry to do this. Also, it appeared that some people had reported a drop in earnings when they activated channels and allowed them to be targeted by advertisement for placement ads.
Just to explain briefly, there are two types of ads that Adsense will show on websites. The first and most common ad is the contextual ad. This ad is based on Google’s analysis of your web page and targets ads to the content of your page. Google revolutionized website advertising in my opinion. I was reluctant to run adsense ads for a long time as I couldn’t believe that their targetted ads would pay me as much as well placed ads of other types, especially as Google takes a cut out of each ad click. Anyway – the contextual ad is all that I thought Google had.
After getting a message to look into making my channels available for advertiser targetting, I did a little bit of reading on “placement ads”. I didn’t do a ton of reading, so I may not have it 100% correct. Basically, placement ads occur when an advertiser choosed to advertise specifically on your site. There are ways to do this without making your channels available for targetted advertising, but it seems you can significantly increase the amount of placement ads by allowing your channels to be targetted by advertisers.
If you run an advanced report and selec to show ad data by “individual ad” you can then check a box to show contextual and placement ads separately in the report. I went ahead and looked at the data from last month, when I had no channels available for targetting.
For September, placement ads made up 2.26% of my total ads shown. These ads accounted for 3.62% of my income. Overall, this means that the placement ads performed about 50% better than the contextual ads. I’m not sure my math and assumptions are correct on making that conclusion, but it seems like I should have that correct.
I spent the day today setting up channels which can be targetted by advertisers in hopes that I can increase the amount of placement ads. I’ve heard it takes about 4 weeks before advertisers are able to start targetting channels once they are made available. I’ll see how things go in a few months and whether my percentage of placement ads increases over time. I’ll post an update in a few months.