In my previous post about Google Adsense Placement Ads vs Contextual Ads I mentioned that I had added channels to each of my ads on some of my sites, and I set them to be available for placement ads. From what I understand, placement ads are where an advertiser has specifically approved their ads to run on your website and possibly even specified which place on your website the ads can run.
It has now been a little over a month since I made this change and so far I’m seeing some mixed results. People have said it can take 4 weeks before the channels will be made available to advertisers, but I already saw an increase in placement ads over the past month. It seems like some areas of the site got an increase in placement ads about 1 week after I made the changes.
For one of my websites, the number of placement ads increase from around 3% of the ads to around 6.5% of the ads. The income from placement ads increased on that site from 5% to 15% of the overall income from adsense for that site. Not only did I have a significant increase in placement ads, but the new ads were also even higher paying than previous placement ads (at least that is how I interpret that data). This is what I had hoped to see and it’s nice that it has worked out.
On one of my other websites, however, the results have not been as good. The placement ads increased from 6.6% of the ads to 9.2% of the ads. That seems like a good thing. Unfortunately, the percentage of income from placement ads on that site DECREASED from 17.6% to 8.0%. In other words, for the past 30 days the placement ads have generated less money than the contextual ads. The ad eCPM on this site for placement ads dropped to about 30% of what it had been the previous month. I’m not sure why that happened, but I’m guessing the placement ads were not a good match for my website. Over time, I would expect those ads to be removed from the rotation automatically by Google.
All in all, I find it interesting seeing where the ads are performing well by having each particular area set to a unique channel. The results are excellent for one website and not so good for another. I am expecting that with time, I should get a better fit between advertisers and my site. Time will tell.