Hello Today I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time. I run a medical forum for patients to ask medical questions. My forum has several medical categories with different topics. So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately. I also activated "placement targeting" for the best performing ad placements. However I did not realize the full potential of "placement targeting" until yesterday after I talked to my direct advertising marketer. Q: What is the main goal of an advertiser? A: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert Q: Is wider or narrower targeting more effective? A: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform Just as info to you: CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about "cough" or "skin rash" are 40-50$ (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs) Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM. Yes, it makes that much of a difference. So what did I do? I have several AD Placements on my forum but I did this change to the best performing AD which is the large rectangle above the fold next to the welcome message. Have a look if you want What I did is I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc. Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown. Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before. Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum. Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best. For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum "alternative medicine" and his ads are only shown to people interested in "alternative medicine". This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings. What are your thoughts on this topic? How do you handle placement targeting? For anyone who is not familiar with Adsense Channels should read my thread Google Adsense - The Secret to using Channels first. Kind regards StarBuG
Why does every thread that talks about 5cent clicks gets jumped on and if you post something "groundbreaking" that is not common knowledge it gets nearly no recognition? Everyone asks for "new" adsense tricks and if you post one but don't name it that way it gets ignored? You are all strange folks
It's just that it is over the head of most threads jumpers You're talking about something that is working for those who master already the basics, that is placing ads, getting traffic, having genuine content, etc. With that being said, your tip would have been more interesting in a 2 weeks time with reports of increase in earnings / eCPM. On another note, I think on your site the average response time for each sub forum is such a novel idea for me, it must be the first time or so that I see such a feature. I hope and assume it is really calculated and that is such a cool feature for a forum or question/answer script. eg. "The average time for a response is 21 hours and 14 minutes"
Yes it is calculated. I had that idea a few years back and had one coder program it for me And I think too that the idea is worth more to more advanced publishers but hey, they are here too. At least a lot of the guys bitching in beginners threads try to sound that way. However when it comes to the more advanced stuff no one really recognizes the potential. And yes again I will provide more data when available. So far, 2 days gone by and my eCPM went up quite a bit, however this can be due to normal fluctuation. The channels will take a few weeks to appear on Adwords so the increase has more to do with increased CTR in certain sub forums and not with the placement targeting itself.
I am waiting for some figures then. To be honest I'm a bit lazy doing it, but we never know sometimes I get motivation and this placement targeting can be done in less than half an hour for a dozen categories on a site. As for the forum, there should maybe also be a small note calculated, like this: "The average time for a response is 21 hours and 14 minutes but X% of questions never get answered. (read tips on asking questions)"
If you click on the subforum you get a note: The average time for a response rate of 17 hours and 32 minutes Note: These times are an average. We do not guarantee that you will receive a response in the indicated period. I like the idea about the "read tips on asking questions" part. On my forum however only very few users hit the homepage. Over 90% reach my forum via google and directly land on my thread pages.
wwwSENSERELYcom sent me this way after posting a similar question at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1956982#post15069044 I was asking the same questions as I saw a google blog post about naming your channels for advertisers to target easier. I would love if you could share any data you find, and starting in November I will be trying this on my site using car models. I'll share my findings.
And I agree with wwwSENSERELYcom, As it seems 90%+ of web marketers want the quick buck without the work (No need to look any further than MFA sites everywhere), I think this is just overlooked by most. Just my opinion.
First is this is a very good post for Adsense Advertisers who keeps on forgetting to go back to basic with regards to details. Here is my thought about this topic someone told me before that "Details are the Devil", basically this applies to everything and I guess everyone knows that if you want to make money online, the easiest way to go is through Adsense but the problem most of these people are facing is the reality that this is not easy as it seems. I honestly believe that if you put details in your work then everything will be easy, and most adsense advertisers do not work on this, Google included the Channel Name to help you analyze how effective the placement of the ads are, but just as what you have said this has always been overlooked by others. With my own campaigns, I do regular tweaks of placement of ads, color use, fonts and font sizes, it is usually every 2 months I made this changes, and I am guilty as well of not regularly documenting my work
At some level details begin to matter, you are right. And believe me, the really successful people all tend to care for details
Just for you to know. It seems that each new channel for placement targeting needs around 50.000+ AIs before it shows in Adwords.
Can you expand on this "AI" thing? I have never heard of it, and googling it does not bring much up but some spammy blogs.
Holy smokes, ok thanks. I guess I can wait awhile before I create all those unique channels as I need some more visitors to reach that.
DaStarBug didn't say the 50,000 AIs needed to be done in a day or in a month, perhaps it's just they appear AFTER 50,000 AIs have been recorded by AdSense so they can dindicate to advertizers how many impressions per day/month this specific channel gets.
I cam back to this thread wondering about this myself. DaStarBug, can you elaborate on this a bit more and share how you came to this conclusion? Thanks!
I am talking about the time that is needed for channels to get listed for placement targeting on Adwords. One of my new channels which receives the most impressions is listed in Adwords (60k+ AIs), the other 10 channels with much less impressions are not yet listed. This is why I think maybe it is a combination between time and AIs which ever comes first. For example one month for low traffic channel (to have enough statistical data for advertisers) and 50k+ AIs for High Traffic channel. I'll keep you updated as soon as I see my other channels appear on Adwords. Ah and @tyler: create them now
During all the discussion about placement targeting I forgot to mention that if you use it you really should claim your website on google ad planer. Here is a google post about placement targeting and google ad planer. I had my site on ad planer set up 3 years ago that is why I forgot to mention it. http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/10/tis-season-for-placement-targeting_12.html