Review - Google Adsense

A few months ago Google started distributing their AdWords advertisements that are normally found at the right side of their search results (for more on AdWords see http://adwords.google.com or our AdWords Review). This distribution was based on CPM rates and was limited to sites serving more than 20 million impressions a month or to ad networks like Burst!Media, TribalFusion, and Fastclick. Last week Google launched a new service called AdSense that expanded on this distribution program and made it more accessible to smaller publishers.

This new program differs from what is now "AdSense Premium" in that it is CPC based and for the time being there is less flexibility offered as far as creative sizes go with only banners and skyscrapers being offered currently. Publishers can apply for an account, or if you have an AdWords account already you can simply apply using that account, and you will be notified, usually within a day, if you have been accepted or not. They don't have any really strict criteria for site acceptance, unlike other ad networks they do not have minimum traffic requirements. The only real requirements are standard acceptable content requirements you'll find just about everywhere. They also of course want quality content sites. They will only allow you to serve one ad per page, so you can't use Google for both banners and skyscrapers.

Once you have been accepted you will be able to run AdSense advertisements on any site you own using the same ad code, so long as you obey the guidelines. Reporting is not done in real time, but is updated regularly throughout the day. You also cannot currently view reports based on domain or site if you're running ads on more than one site. Google included a very length and detailed FAQ on their AdSense site, if you're thinking about signing up I suggest you read it.

How Does the Targeting Work?

Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. For instance on a webmaster site an article about Flash might show ads for Macromedia products and an article about web hosting might show ads from different web hosting companies. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances.

This targeting isn't perfect though. One issue is that Google seems to be doing very little in the way of ad rotation. If a certain ad is highly targeted to your content it might be shown every time. This means that if you have a lot of return visitors or a high number of page views per visitor you may experience declining click-through rates.

Another issue is that Google targets ads based on your site's content, not based on your visitor's desires. The difference between the two might not be readily apparently, but it can be very significant. For instance one of the sites I run is a literature site with information on classic books and their authors. Google will analyze my content and serve appropriate advertisements, for example on my Shakespeare page you may see ads for Shakespeare audio books or limited edition prints. The problem with this is that while those ads fit my content they do not fit my visitors. Most of my visitors are students doing research and they simply aren't interested in buying those types of things. In contrast advertisements for essay sites or other homework helping services do very well on that site. However, unless an essay site owner specifically selects a keyword like "Shakespeare" in their AdWords account then visitors to my site will not see any essay advertisements.

In pondering this situation I was reminded of a company called TeknoSurf Adwave, you might remember them - they eventually turned into Advertising.com. Their original claim to fame was that they were a CPC only ad network yet what they would do is they would analyze what banners performed well on your site and then optimize what ads they were serving in such a way that even though you were serving CPC ads your CTR would be high enough that you would make an effective CPM comparable or better than CPM rates offered by other ad networks.

If Google could implement such a system as TeknoSurf had they could greatly increase the effectiveness of their AdSense program. One glaring problem though is that currently AdWords advertisers specifically select which keywords they want to be served under. For Google to do this they would have to provide an option to AdWords advertisers which would allow them to opt into a program where Google would try to place your ad on the most effective keywords.

So going back to my literature site example, if one advertiser tries serving essay advertisements on the "Shakespeare" keyword and the ads did very well on my site Google would remember this and compare the text of the ad to the text of other AdWords ads and would run similar ads on my site and see how they did. In this way Google would be constantly learning what performs well on your site and what does not. After you have been with them for a while they would be serving ads that should be tailored to your visitors, and not your content. Thus CTR rates would improve, both Google and the publisher would make more money, and the advertiser would get more targeted traffic.

Google is as of yet doing none of this, but the program is still very new. I can only hope someone from Google reads this and takes my suggestions to heart.

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Review - AdBrite.com

While I had heard of Phillip Kaplan and F**kedCompany.com before, I hadn’t heard of AdBrite until Pubcon in Las Vegas where Phillip spoke one morning. I spoke with the nice folks at the booth and decided to give it a shot a few months later.

Signing up for an account is fairly easy and painless, they ask you the standard typical questions like name address, payee tax information, and so on. You are then asked to input your site details and give some information about your website. The information meant to help your website get listed in the proper area, and help potential advertisers locate it. The most difficult part of the entire procedure is determining your prices. As a publisher you want to get the highest price possible for your advertising space. As the customer purchasing the ad you want to pay the lowest price possible. You can set various pricing models such as 7 day advertising, 1 month advertising, or any other time fame you want to create. I’d suggest keeping it simple and offering some sort of discount for monthly advertisers, but that’s just my opinion. You can also set up a pay per click model if you desire. The difficult thing is getting the price right. I’d suggest setting the price a little high and slowly working down until you start to get customers. Now you could go back and raise the price afterward, but unless things have changed that’s a dangerous path to start down. Once you get pricing worked out, it’s all down hill, a few simple lines of code that work via javascript and you’re in business. It may take a day or so for you get in the system so be patient, your ads will start to appear.

Once someone decides to advertise on your website you’ll get an email from the system alerting you there is a new ad up for review. As the site owner you have the ability to review and approve or reject ads, nothing will appear unless you approve it. Once approved it takes a few hours for advertising to start to appear on your site, so again be patient. Another thing you’ll notice is AdBrite starts to gather stats about your website, including things like Alexa Rank, page views per day, unique users per day, repurchase rate, and some estimated click through data. This information is available not only to potential advertising customers, but anyone who wants to look, so this program is best suited for websites you are comfortable with revealing some data about. Something to be aware of is, if you list more than one site in your AdBrite account, anyone who checks the stats will see the connection between the two websites. Personally that’s something I would like to see changed, but there are ways around the system for those who would like to remain anonymous.

So is Adbrite worth it? Well looking at my rates and stats you can see I’m not making a heck of a lot of money. However my intent here was experimentation not profitability. Looking at some other sites who use Adbrite like Friendster, Gawker, and NHL.com and you can see the prices jump up considerably. AdBrite does take a percentage of your advertising income. Looking around I can’t find the actual percentage listed on the site (they only give a vague reference to taking a percentage, and that’s something they should fix). Looking at my earnings report it looks to be about 25%. If you’re a small person and don’t mind doing the legwork of selling and billing advertisers yourself, you could probably do better on your own. If you don’t want the hassle it’s probably worth using a service like AdBrite. Additionally if you’d like to sell advertising on your site but don’t want to get involved with the hornets nest surrounding text links, this may be a very attractive solution for you. (For the record I fully support straight text link advertising, not only do I think it’s a viable and effective solution, I am customer of Text-Link-Ads.com).

Sixty days after you’ve hit your minimum payout (the lowest payout is $20) you’ll get a report via email telling you a check has been sent listing the amount and statistics for the pay period. You can also log into your account and see future payments and dates.

Is AdBrite for everyone, no. In my opinion AdBrite is a good solution for people who have sites with reasonable traffic that would be attractive to advertisers, and who want to focus on running the site and not selling and maintaining adverting placement, and billing. While the percentage they take may be a little high, it will give you one less thing to worry about, and let’s you focus on things like adding content and running your website. If you think you’d like to sign-up for Adbrite I have two links below one with an affiliate id one without, use whichever one you prefer.

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