AdSense Wants to Call Me on the Phone w/ Optimization Tips - Really?

I received an email from adsense today. They say they want to call me on the phone with some optimization tips.

Here's a screen shot:
http://i.imgur.com/k4Oo3.png

Question: Is this legit? Has anyone done this before? Are they going to give me more than basic tips?

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More background, for those who don't mind reading "the long version of the story."

I have a high-traffic website with other a million hits a month and I was doing very well with Google adsense. Several years ago, the adsense team emailed me an optimization plan - which I followed. They sent me screen shots and I put the ads where they told me. (I wish I still had this email as proof, but unfortuantely I don't - that was a few years ago.)

Last month - they emailed me a "warning" that my ad placement was in violation of their TOS. Mind you, I placed the ads where their optimization team recommended a few years earlier!

I wasn't being deceptive - but the ads were blended (link color, background) with the content. And they were placed above the main content and below the text header.

When I emailed them to ask what TOS I was violating, they gave me a vague answer and said my links were blended too well and users might get confused.

So I rolled my eyeballs... and moved the links to a new part of the page, wrote "sponsored links" above them, and used some horizontal lines to separate the links from the content.

And my CTR went from almost 5% to 1.4%. Income went down... and I grumbled to my family and moved on with my work.

Apparently Google noticed that my adsense revenue went down by several thousand dollars a month. And now I received this email from them, saying that their AdSense Optimization team wants to talk with me on the phone.

Of course I would LOVE to talk with them and tell them what I think about their optimization recommendations from a few years ago. But I fear they're going to give me basic tips and lecture me on the heat map, etc. And I'm afraid they'll just tell me to put ads on my homepage - which I have never done, and don't want to do. (I only put ads on internal pages - because I want to maintain a professional appearance and because I have my pride.) So I am afraid the call will be a waste of time.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

 

time has changed, google do want to help out their pubs now so talk to them

 

As long as they dont ask you for personal information I don't see why it would be a problem. Maybe they can give you some real good tips that you can share with us on here lol. I say let them call you.

 

Right... till they dont ask for any personal sensitive information all is good... you should goahead and share your experience here

 

Of course if they tell me any cool secrets I will share them here.... but I am a little skeptical that this will be much of an elightening experience.

 

LOL, it sucks that they actually made you change your working ad color/placement..
If you can't get your ad CTR up you might want to look for another network, there are plenty and
with your high-traffic website they will most likely be happy to have you on their side.

Also, I hope you learn something new and share it here, though I highly doubt it.
Good luck. =)

 

Aww, they never phone me. I only get half a million impressions and nowhere near thousands a month though

Let them phone you so you can roll your eyes at them. Or you might learn something, you never know.

 

Well they never called any of their reguler advertiser i have no idea about the premium.

 

why don't you try and let us know?

 

Yeah what Project Mobius said, i'd just take the call anyhow just to see what they had to offer and then report back.

 

Let them give you tips, but you don't have to really implement the one's you don't like.

Good luck!

 

Why not talk to them!
If you think the discussion was BASIC, then you might only loose 30 min of your time.

 

this is new for me,
I never heard about such thing,
but I will suggest you to talk b/c it does not seems to he harmful from email screen.

Also I will be waiting here to see your thoughts after discussion

I am glad - Google likes to talk with Publishers (Else what I heard is they never reply to publishers - Just send money if they like else ban account)

 

They like to talk to publishers who make them money. This guy obviously is with his millions of visitors per month.

 

Yes I agree!! If you give more business then only you have more value


Hey fireboat,

did you talk with google?
do not forget to post your experience and something more useful which may help to small publishers

Thank you.

 

Hi,

I've been lurking in the forums for a while, but this post made me finally decide to contribute something. I got this same notice a few months ago and took Google up on their offer. As some people suggested some of the feedback was normal things everyone had probably heard of regarding placement and colors, however there were some gems in there.

One thing that really stood out was never select image or text only, do a combination. Basically images/rich media ads only show if the image/rich ad will pay a higher amount than the lowest text ad that might have shown in its place, so by letting Google decide what to show you will always get the highest paying ad to display.

Another thing, which in retrospect seems obvious, was to increase the ad column size and swap a wide skyscraper (160x600) for 2 medium rectangles (300x250).

If you get one of these I think you'd be a fool not to at least hear them out, it's in their interest to make you more money, you're not under any obligation to actually change anything.

 

As AdSense earnings per visitor have dropped for many over the last couple of years, Google seems to be more interested in working more closely with publishers to get the best results for all. I didn't use to care for the way they seemed to treat people, but things have certainly gotten better. Make enough money for them and you'll get to talk to them as much as you want, basically!

 

I wanted to follow up on my original post, as many have requested.

Google called and we had our chat on Friday. They guy on the other end was very friendly, and I was rather surprised that he started the conversation by asking for my thoughts, what direction I was going with the sites, and what was and was not working for me in terms of adsense. It was nice to see Google was actually listening - and it was not a call where they just wanted to "tell me what to do."

He did recommend testing some new ad sizes. I was using pais of small 468x60 banner ads, but I have always tried to put the user experience first. He suggested I use pairs of 300x250s side-by-side. I suggested that it might look more spammy and he agreed, but encouraged me to test it on 5 to 10 pages of the site to see what happens. I agreed. (Sounds like the same thing they recommended for Mike81.) He made a few other recommendations as well, but this was his main one.

I told him about my recent problem with the adsense TOS team. (As you may recall, I had ad placements that were recommended by the Adsense optimization team several years ago - then a few months ago Google told me they were in violation of TOS because they were "blended too well." So I moved the ads and blocked them off with black horizontal lines.) He told me I can put them back to their original location, with lighter horizontal lines for separation this time - so that was a relief.

Then we chatted for awhile about the new adsense interface. Of course, since I am one of those people who doesn't like change, he asked if he could "give me a tour" and show me some new features that I might not know about. I actually learend quite a bit and saw many new features that I didn't know about in the new interface.

All in all, it was interesting to listen to their recommendations. The phone conversation was scheduled for 30 minutes, but we chatted for nearly an hour. I don't think it's going to result in any major changes in revenue, but it was overall an informative phone conference.

 

Go and talk with them and let us know the tips also

We should admire that they try to help not like other companies ...

 

What type of tips did they offer?

Don't be afraid to talk to them - if I remember correctly they still have premium adsense - for publishers generating millions of page views.