Jennifer Slegg was first up and asks some questions on who was using Adsense and YPN. She goes into comparing the two publisher networks. Both have large pools of advertisers. Offer similar ad formats & advertising in RSS feeds. Both has real time stats with identical metrics measures. Neither reveals the cut of revenue earned. The networks differ in that Google allows nearly all international publishers and YPN only US publishers currently. Adsense has smart pricing, and YPN hasn’t acknowledged any type of smart pricing. She moves fast, and next throws up a list of available companies offering contextual publishing options.
She moves in Chitika as a new form of advertising that gained recent popularity. It is compatible with YPN & Adsense when using keywords instead of contextual targeting. MSN will jump into the game? Yes, will do some in the future possibly.
Next consider the placement of your ads. You want to make sure that if you run multiple ad units, that the 2nd or 3rd units make you money. She has tested a lot of this and found that when the 2nd or 3rd ad unit was removed you can make more money. Always place ads in best more visible spot. Avoid ad spots, this is where users are accustom to blocking out ads. Don’t use what is rumored to be the best ad unit. Adsense released a list of top performing ad units. Try these. She is talking too fast. The majority of publishers have found that making the border of the ad the same of the background increase revenue. Geo-targeting for highest paying ads is also possible and figure out what makes you the most money.
Sweet spot on one site does not equal the sweet spot on another site. There can be significant difference in the sites and use of ads. She recommends using custom channels instead of URL channels. There are a couple third party tools such as Google analytics hack for tracking adsense & YPN. Know what specific ads are being clicked, what page they are located on and so on. Keep track of changes and results. Note what you are testing and changes you have made. Wait to do testing on “non-holiday” times as you will get the best data. She also recommends to test image ads to see how they work and can be quite profitable.
Some questions she gets often is about 2nd or 3rd ad units sometimes the ads don’t show up. Wait till they do. She also adds watch out for people that are framing your page. People surfing with javascript turned off may not be able to see your ad. Great presentation, but way to fast.
Next up is Will Johnson from Yahoo! Publisher Network. So what is Yahoo Publisher Network. For many years they have had relationships with larger quality publishers. Now allow smaller publishers to make some money. He explains you need a website to put ads on. You can buy a domain at Yahoo Small Business (don’t buy your domain here). Next you need to build content such as access product information and Yahoo maps (?). Now you need to acquire traffic (RSS My Yahoo!) or Sponsored Search. Then he goes into how to monetize the traffic you are getting. Put text links on your site, or ads in your RSS. He mentions Search Engine Roundtable blog as an example of a site using YPN!
Who is going to provide the most revenue? What control will you have over ad layout, placement, and targeting? What other valued added content and pucducts will be offered to make your site more valuable? How will your account be serviced? So in terms of revenue, Yahoo will provide competitive revenue against the industry. They have a very large advertising network, over 100,000 advertisers. They bring in new targeting methodologies. Will explains they just released a way to add ads into an RSS feed. Nice.
He goes into how ads are targeted, such as crawling your page and the presenting relevant ads to your users. They have a feature called Ad Targeting. You can select a category or subcategory to present to your users. Yahoo has approximately 3000 publishers are participating in the YPN program, expanding and lots of good stuff ahead.
Satya Patel from Google with a few reminders. He helped create the Adsense system. He presents a slide of the Internet Ecosystem, it’s a fragile place and at Google they want to make sure that all parts are thriving. There are Advertisers <->Publishers <-> Users <-> Advertisers. The explains that the Adsense helps publishers make money from there traffic which gives them a lot of time to spend on quality content.
So how does Google help you meet your objectives? They help you monetize traffic, and it occurs one of two ways. Adsense for Content and also Adsense for Search. Overall Adsense for content is a good platform. Uses combination of contextual targeting and site targeting to deliver the best ad for a page. Uses click feedback to deliver high performing ads. Large, comprehensive base of advertiser. Maximizes revenue by displaying relevant ads. A lot of Adsense is all automated, there are people of course but the bulk for the system is automated. Adsense technology understand the content of each page and dynamically matches ads to it. An important part of the Adsense program is site targeting, whether its target by affinities, flexible bidding options, and creative control.
Patel also talks about a new feature called Onsite Advertisers Sign-up, allowing you to generate advertiser bids for your site. It means great revenue. Allowing to your to promote your brand to advertisers and leverage Google’s. Promote site with a customized message to advertisers. He also talks about link units, which is a 2 stage process. Once a user clicks on the link unit it takes to a larger page of ads that people can click on. He says there is a good benefit from using these. Adsense for Search is also another program they offer. It’s a way for search imbedded on your site, but also include advertising in those searches.
