It has only been several months since Google had announced and completed the “New Adsense” – a redesign of the familiar GUI, adding several features to impress the users. And here it is – they are already adding more attributes to the popular money-making feature. According to recent report, there will be now more things [...]]]>According to recent report, there will be now more things you could do in your Google Adsense account, such as creating and editing channels in Adsense for Games and Adsense for Video, blocking specific products by names and view the reports by page, and not only by unit.
There have also been some “renames” – the HTML is now “rich media” and Dynamic Images are called “Animated Images”. All those (as well as text, image and Flash) are included in the performance reports as “Ad types”. In addition, “Ad Requests” is the term that is now used instead of “Unit Impressions”, counting each time the request to show the ad is sent by the website towards Google service.
Google hopes these updates will be beneficial to Adsense users, making the popular “monetize you website” option preferable over Affiliate marketing, specific client banners and other possibilities.now
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Great news for local sites in Thailand. You can now benefit from better targeted ads with Google’s announcement of its support for Thai in Adsense for Content. Last year, it was already included in the Adsense for Search program, so this just comes as the next logical move. Hopefully, other languages will soon follow. I’m [...]]]>Let’s review the list of currently supported languages, which has grown considerably over the last few years:
Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
Greek
German
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
If your native language doesn’t appear on this list and you’d like to Google to do something about it, just head on over and post your thoughts on the Adsense Help Forum.
]]>A lot of bloggers use several ad services for their site, and sometimes, managing all of them can get pretty messy. Thanks to the awesome developer community, there are a number of available plugins for WordPress that can turn your dashboard into a control panel, to customize and control your ads from most of the [...]]]>Easy to install and use, the AdSense Manager comes with an extensive instruction on the process of installation, making it a breeze to have it up and running. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with the use of Widgets, within templates, or inside individual posts. You can do on-the-fly changes on your ads: change the color, size, layout and even the ad’s position and see the results with a single button click.
The latest version of the AdSense Manager released on April 2008 is compatible with WordPress versions 2.5 and higher. The plugin allows for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It supports ads from AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks. Take note, however, that not all available ad networks support the Ad Format/Dimension feature of AdSense Manager.
We all know how hard it is to insert your ad code in your every blog post. And if we are talking about hundreds or even thousands of posts, it turns into a gargantuan task. But with All in One Adsense and YPN, inserting an ad in each and every single one of your post is a cinch. It doesn’t matter if you have millions of posts. With this plugin, your ad is inserted automatically in every single one of your blog posts.
How the ad is displayed is customizable as well: you can specify the color as well as the position of the ad. And for an even higher degree of control, advanced can incorporate html and even CSS codes in your ads. The latest update of the All in One Adsense and YPN plugin was released August, 2008. The plugin is compatible up to WordPress 2.6.
Used to be known as Shylock AdSense, the WhyDoWork AdSense plugin can show different AdSense ads whenever they reach a certain “age.” For example, a newly created post will have a small banner ad placed at the bottom so that it wouldn’t annoy your regular readers. After a set period of time, this small banner will be replaced with a much bigger one and this time, it will be placed at the start of the article – all of this, done automatically. This way, visitors who found your site through the search engine will be seeing a more aggressive ad incorporated in your article (pretty smart). The plugin was last updated Oct 2007 and is compatible with WordPress 2.5.
]]>AdSense has always been ideal for small blogs as barrier to entry is so little. As long as you can get some traffic going, you can start making money right away, albeit probably not much in the beginning. However, there are changes in Google’s AdWords program that may tip the scales in favor of the [...]]]>“One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser’s keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you’ll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.”
Google contends that this will mean more relevant ads for your site’s visitors and increased advertiser confidence, resulting in greater ad spending. These may be true, but mostly for those sites that are already popular. It remains to be seen if this will lead to a major shift in advertiser preference (big sites vs long tail). I guess it will all depend on this new model’s effectiveness.
“In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.”
With this recent development, I see scraper-type sites nearing their extinction. As for blogs, they will now have to be more competitive with their site branding to get noticed, and targeting a lucrative niche will become even more important. Google’s certainly keeping us on our toes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have to look for a purple cow.
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The bulk of AdSense earnings for most people tend to come from AdSense for Content banners, and this is why they are the prime focus of optimization efforts – the right blend of colors, placement and ad sizes, among others. But I think it’s high time we also pay attention to the AdSense for Search [...]]]>Customize the look. You can always go with the default settings, but it will work much better if you change the colors to match your site’s background and text. The search box should look like it belongs to the page, blending well with the rest of the site yet still quickly recognizable to users. If you know a bit of HTML, you can even try to play with the configuration of the various elements.
Choose to open search results on your own site. While configuring the search box, AdSense with ask you whether you’d like the search results to be host by Google or within your own website. It’s better to choose the latter because it keeps the users on your site, and you have more control over the design. In addition, it’s not a bad idea to put a search box on the results page itself, for users who might want to make new searches.
Optimize results page ad placement. You can choose between three configurations as to where to place ads inside the results page, but Google suggests picking “Top and Right” as this has the best yield in their tests. Who are we to argue, right?
Use the targeting options. One of the fairly new things about AdSense for Search is that you can refine the results to make them more relevant to your audience. For example, if you run a site about Nokia, you can enter the keywords “mobile phones”, “Nokia” and “3G” so that the results and ads will both tend to feature Nokia phones with 3G capability.
Maximize search box visibility. Your AdSense search box must be placed where you can find it with a quick glance. Locations such as the left or right navigation column and below the header are good spots for this. It’s important to place it above the fold, which just means the reader shouldn’t have to scroll down just to see it. In order to avoid confusion, the search box must be placed uniformly across all pages. This should not be a problem if you’re using a CMS with templates such as WordPress and Joomla.
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