MickMel SEO

Google has just announced the release of “Ad Manager” (in beta, of course), to help manage your ads.  This goes way beyond AdSense.  It allows you to manually ad advertisers, add other ad networks, and also integrate AdSense.  The system will help pick the highest paying and best performing ads for your site.

From the Ad Manager site:

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

• Simple, intuitive user interface: Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management.
• Google serving speed and reliability. Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies.
• Significant cost savings - it’s free!  Pay nothing for ad serving, feature upgrades, or system maintenance.

Right now the system is only open to invited beta testers, but you can apply here.

Google hosted a 30 minute “webinar” today, with a focus on site targeting — creating ways for advertisers to target areas of your site to advertise on.  I’ll probably post about that in a few days when Google releases their summary of the webinar.

However, one interesting bit of discussion popped up in the Q&A portion of the webinar.  Google advised webmasters to use the 300×250 ad unit, as that is preferred by advertisers (especially for image and video ads).  However, some of the attendees said that they get a higher CTR when they use the 336×280 unit.  Google agreed that it was often the case, but that you’d probably get a higher CPC if you used the smaller unit — especially for image ads.

Another user asked if 300×250 image/video ads could show up inside of the 336×280 ad unit.  Google gave a clear “no” to that.  They said that advertisers can build a creative in both sizes, but image/video ads only show in the size they were created for.  The text ads, of course, can float around to any of the ad units.

As a result of that, I’ve swapped out a few of my 336×280 units for 300×250’s.  I’ll track the channels and see how it goes.

Any of you have previous experiences comparing these two sizes?

Jennifer Slegg (often known as “JenSense”) has posted a nice piece about choosing the right “ad title” color for your AdSense ads.  She primarily gives two tips:

• Use ”hyperlink blue” (described below), or…
• Use the main link color on your site

She doesn’t mention suggestions for the other parts of the ad, but I’ve found the following works best:

• Background and border color the same as the site background color at that location, so the ads blend in.
• Black text for the text
• Gray text for the URL at the bottom

Jennifer didn’t say exactly what “hyperlink blue” is, but I’ve found that #000080 and #0000CC work quite well.  Again, if every other link on your site is a different color (such as the greenish links on here), then you’re probably better off making the ad titles use that color instead.  Be sure to use channels to track the CTR on the different colors and see what works best.

It’s been an ongoing struggle for me, but hopefully making the results public on this blog will help me to force the issue — I need to diversify.  The chart at left shows my revenue sources for February — nearly 90% came from AdSense!

Part of that is simply my love for AdSense, and the fact that it’s just so easy to use.  However, having it be 90% of the total revenue just isn’t very wise.  Jennifer Slegg (”JenSense” to many of you) had a post about this very subject a few days ago, which helped inspire me to post this.

To go along with “every egg in the AdSense basket”, my site portfolio isn’t very diversified.  I run a wide range of sites (around 20 in all), but one individual site earns about 80% of the revenue.  My goals by the end of 2008:

• Have AdSense contribute less than 50% of my total revenue, but not lose any money from them, thus raising the total revenue.
• Have no single site earn more than 50% of the total revenue.

I’ll post again each month with updates on how this progresses.

According to his blog, Jim Karter made about $55,000 in February — $31,000 from AdSense alone!

Granted, this is across a large number of sites and he has 16 employees. Still, that’s a phenomenal amount of income for a single month. The way he split things up has me wondering how best to start increasing the revenue on my sites. He has good things to say about both AdToll and Kontera, so I’ll probably start experimenting with those.