Roger Montti (martinibuster) was up first to talk about AdSense Integration. He broke up the different types of Web sites that have AdSense on them. When is an AdSense optimized site created to induce clicks versus presenting relevant content? He shows an example of a blog with AdSense outside on bottom left. He said if you move it to the middle, it will increase CTR. What is relevant information? On average bounce rates are up to 50%. AdSense Ads are content too, well, kinda... You need to treat them as blocks of content, integrate your ads using the same blending you would to other content, and monetize the 30 - 50% who bounce away without alienating visitors who are there for your content. Tips: Use the same color background and text and think of your ads as part of your content but don't overdue it. He said he is experimenting using CSS to embed AdSense to float AdSense ads to any area of the page, he noticed a 13% CTR on those.
Jennifer Slegg from JenSense (aka JenStar) was up next to talk about increasing your AdSense earnings with testing. She says it is one of the easiest ways to increase your earnings is by testing. Testing variations of colors, placement, ad unit sizes and more can make a difference in your earnings. There is a sweet spot on one site that might not be a sweet spot on the same site (different content or template can dictate the sweet spot), so you must test. What can testing do for you? (1) Increase earnings, (2) you can apply what you learn and (3) it will help on other sites. Tools for testing AdSense, office google tools (custom channels, url channels), AdSense Preview Tool and The only way to get specific earnings data is from Google's Official Tools. Third party tools; know what specific ads are being clicks on, what page they are located on and what IP clicked. Get CTR color data on a title, description, URL, border and background level, does not have any earnings data, and download .csv data from control panel and graph earning trends. Start your testing, keep track of those results, timing is everything, avoid holiday weeks in the country of your primary traffic. She goes over the pros and cons of Custom and URL channels (she prefers custom channels for doing testing). What Should you Test? Ad Unit colors; test border-less techniques, size and placement, above the fold, right column placement even above fold is the worse place to put it. Final thoughts, test on regular basis, try all variables, keep track of those changes.
Venkat Kolluri Chitika was next up, he will be giving the inside story from the contextual ad company perspective. There are online publishers and online audience, and there are lots of merchants/advertisers with products and services (connecting them the right way and at right time is important). How do you turn page views into profits? First they need to turn the content, keywords, topics and categories into "Currency Tokens" to be used for the ad program. How do they do this? (1) They need a really good, real time spidering system to extract the content. (2) Text mining to quickly identify the meat of the content on the page. (3) Info extraction (currency tokens), (4) ad selection (maximize revenue) and (5)feedback loop. The challenges and how online publishers can help the contextual ad providers? They love spider friendly pages, iframes confuse the spiders, spiders are text hungry (give them text). Text minding, they are primary english focused, structure of pages (titles, headings, etc.), Information extraction (currency token), did you say Spears or Brittany Spears? Stick to one topic so they can figure it out. Advertising is not a one way street. Customer is the king, demand more flexibility and control. Browsers or clickers or shoppers (so experiment with multiple models (CPM, CPC, CPA). Advertising vs. Product Merchandising (you need to test these).
