Jaan Janes - SVP, Business Development, Pulse 360
Talks about Pulse 360 and what they do. Relvancy - Shows some good examples that his company does and some bad ones by Google.
Relevancy: Do your ads even matter? Alot of sites have unreasonable amount of ads and this hurts other sites. Sites have too many banners, buttons, widgets and so on - its just clutter
Sponsored Link Tips 1. Show the ads - usatoday, wallstreet journal, msnbc examples - clean design 2. Focus on the Audience first - Many advertisers will start blind and then learn to focus on certain audiences. Advertisers go on audience and general topics - they dont do 1:1, more Category level for a given topic. 3. Dont be afraid to try different colors - try colors and tinker with things. He encourages you to experiment 4. Try different placements and ad types - Move the placement around and see the shapes/sizes as well 5. Bottom of the page = bottom of the barrel. Please dont run sponsored linkes 4,567,890 pixels down the page!
Plugs a new Vertical Adnetwork.
Aaron Wall - Seo Book
Optimization vs Overkill - Depending on format it can be useless to the user. - build authority and monetize backfill content - dont float ads left at top in content area - site has to sel itself - if too aggressive the ads cost you links - perception of quality during se reviews - navigation needs to be useful
Short Tail Sites - few spots up in the organic rankings can make a diff in earnings - infest in SEO - make site easy to link to - site design - wait to monetize - supporting featured content
Long Tail Sites
- Keep core pages clean - blog readers dont click many ads - use ad channels to determine where the $ is - site structure - link equity push at top earning sections - less link equity at lower earning sections - deep link internally on popular articles - remove ads from exceptionally poor performers - when they rebound then put them back.
- if you do link bait - dont be afraid to add links to some of your better pages after the wave of traffic is over
On Page Optimization tools - analytics are your firned - ensure to mix up keyword usage - longer pages match many keywords - use a bariety of terms - www.quintura.com - goolge adwords has a tool that gives you what a page is relevant to - tools.seobook.com/yahoo-keywords/
Advanced Tips - Ad filtering - members can turn ads off - date based ad inclusion - Link Building - buy a few links pointing at the best earning pages - syndicate contetn and deep link to best pages - Own the best keywords - create a second page to get a double listing - create authoritative documents or - spin out sites - Create your own product
Plug for Seo Book
Matthew Daimler - founder/CEO of Seatguru.com
Airline seating
Shows 2001 Page with google Adsense on the page. Google adsense did 100-200 a day rather then the 100-200 a month that the old ads were doing.
Targeted:
"View Bids" tool to understand what the CPC buyers wanted and try to add content or keywords around those.
1. Networks use content of page to show ads 2. Only 1 Google Ad per page allowed, no wide skyscraper (yet)
Impressions over last 5 years
1 Wide Sky - shows some spikes
2004-2006 - a new design comes into play. New navigation and more content for the contextual advertising. The goal was to get the ads they wanted to show up on the site.
Goals:
1. Get keyword repetition 2. Google wide sky visible in 800x600 resolution 3. Google ad location right in the heart of website activity
Challenge: site was built around 1 Google ad per page. Design used all tables and thus had a poor keyword density.
1 Wide Sky, 1 Sky, 1 Half Banner - Sept 2004 - impressions goes WAY up. When they tripled the impressions the click-thru rate dropped by a lot. The eCPM dropped a lot as well. They saw a 80% drop.
Thoughts on Supply and Delivery
Shows list of 8 Advertisers and CPC.
Level 1 Publisher gets Level 1 Advertiser Level 2 gets the middle and Level 3 gets the bottom
With more ad units it changed. The Levels each drop with Level 3 getting a lot of PSA's.
Diversification Required - Added direct advertiser to replace some of the Google ad blocks. They went directly to the top advertisers and signed some of them up - and some even showed up twice (once in Google and once in Direct).
Adsense & Overall Daily Revenue - Chart shows that less Google Ads and being more diverse shows site revenue up.
There is a downside - Adsense impressions and revenue dropped. They went too far one way and had too much direct advertising.
To fix this they did a redesign in 2006.
Goals:
Moved to CSS New features, new menu, more content Used more popular Google ad types (med rectangle) Made sure at least 1 full ad was in 800x600 Made sure wide sky was seen in a 1024x768 Tried link units, integrated into Nav - had no success and never went back
Shows chart of Adsense Impressions - Result was a spike of 5x of impressions. - Click-thru rate did drop 20-30% - eCPM dropped but not a lot
As a small publisher they didnt have time to test and further optimize. Only used Google for 5 years and never tried any other network. Didnt get to change shapes, colors, and other different types. Ad Products - didnt get to test different types of products either.
PubMatic - it brings different ad networks together and optimizes it for you
Q&A
Q:Is there a type of ad for a type of content? Affiliate deals or Adsense work better on certain types of sites?
Matthew - Talks about different types and how forums are hard to monetize. Look at the site and think like a user. If you were a user would this type of ad or an ad here annoy you? Aaron - For informational sites he likes to have ads visible at the top of the site in navigation and at the end of content so that a user has something to do.
Q:When you started your direct ads, was there software you used?
Matthew - to validate data you can run surveys and such. The advertisers were using 3rd Party software and that was taken into account. Doubleclick "lost" 15-20% of traffic and was taken into account for pricing. Billing the client is a lot of work and hassle. They used a 2x multiple of the eCPM as a pricing model. With the loss of Doubleclick, getting the client to pay, and other hassles, its not as much as you would think.
Detlev jokes that he must of had a full time employee then. Matthew laughs.
Q: What does the panel think about MFA theory, and if going from 3 banners to 2 is good.
Matthew - saw difference when they ran 2 or 3 ads. Google still fills the ads in the order that they were processed. So if you have a bad location ad render first, the highest paying clicks are being lost. If you have a MFA that gets the traffic and gets the clicks - Google is going to want to be there and will serve the highest paying ads.
Q: Different niches get different click-thru? For a site with more new users get higher CTR then one with repeat visitors?
Aaron: Some of his sites show one thing and others show another. It just depends on the site Matthew: One ad was up for 2 years and had the same CTR the entire time. He also thinks that sites with less web savvy users will get a higher CTR on ads.
Contributed by Dave R.
