AdSense have today announced a new type of ad – Expandable Ad Units.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen these ads being tested on one of my sites (although bizarrely I am not able to use the ads as I’m not located in a country that they are available for – see below) and they are basically an ad that looks like a normal image ad but which expands when a reader interacts with it (by clicking it).

AdSense say that these ads are served on both a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression) basis (advertisers choice). If they are CPC you only get paid if people click the ad and visit the advertiser (I have a bit of a problem with this – see below).

Ads will only be available to publishers meeting all of three criteria:

• If they’re located in North America or Europe, with a website in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish
• If they’ve added the AdSense code directly into their site’s source code
• If they’ve enabled image ads

OK – interesting. On one hand I think this is cool, while AdSense don’t say it I suspect these ads could pay more than normal ads. They’re rich media and in general advertisers wanting to use these sorts of technologies are willing to pay a premium and are generally top tier advertisers with recognizable brands and good budgets.

On the other hand a couple of concerns come to mind:

1. Why do AdSense keep offering new things to publishers in certain parts of the world?

Come on AdSense – we’re a global economy. While I’m an Aussie my sites are read by less than 4% Australians. The vast majority of my readers are in North America and the rest are largely European. I’ve ranted on this more times than I can remember. I can understand not wanting to run ads on sites where READERS are not in your target markets, but as a publisher whose blog is read by your target market, hosted by your target market and attracts other direct sponsors from your target market I would have thought you’d love to have these ads on my sites. All this does is drive me to put more and more emphasis on cutting you out of the equation and finding my own sponsors directly – something I’m having more and more success with (thanks to Lenovo this month for their sponsorship of DPS).

2. The ads are more interruptive – but don’t always generate revenue.

Some publishers will be annoyed that these ads are more interruptive than normal image ads. While AdSense say that they’ve got strict guidelines in place around what kinds of ads can be shown – when clicked they will cover parts of the publishers website. More than that, a click on the ad might not generate any revenue if the advertiser is using CPC ads. This means that an advertiser gets the benefit of someone noticing their ad and interacting with it (good for their branding) while the publisher has part of the rest of their site covered over…. and gets nothing for that.

3. Opting out of these ads is not easy.

So what if you don’t want expandable ads on your site?

AdSense makes clear in their announcement that there are ways to stop these ads appearing on your site. They give two methods – neither of which are satisfactory in my mind:

• You can block advertisers using the Competitive Ad Filter – this means going in an blocking advertisers domains from having their ads appear on your blog. This is only effective if you notice the ads and also means you’re blocking any other ads from that advertiser from appearing on your site.
• You can use the Ad Review Center – this allows you to log into the back end of your AdSense account and view all ads being targeted to your site. OK, this could work, but last time I checked my Ad Review Center (and I rarely do it because of the number of ads and the slowness of using it) to see what ads were being targeted to DPS I saw literally thousands of ads. AdSense say you can narrow it down by just viewing ‘Rich Media’ ads which is helpful – but I just checked my account and still saw hundreds of such ads on my own account. I don’t know how many were there exactly because I had to close down my browser – something about viewing 100 rich media ads on a page didn’t agree with Firefox on my computer).

OK – so my headline is a little exaggerated, you can opt out of them, but at the very least it is a chore and for some sites that get a lot of ads targeted at them it could be impossible to keep them off their site.

Note: there is a 3rd way of opting out of these ads – disable image ads. Of course this means you only will ever get text ads on your site which means less potential income.

Last Thoughts

IF I was a publisher living in one of the ‘lucky lands’ where these ads are relevant for I’d let them show on my blog. While I have some reservations I think they’re a good idea and don’t think my readers would mind them – however I wouldn’t be happy at virtually being forced to show them or for them bringing value to advertisers brands without compensation.

What do you think of them?

If you have a comment – I’d love to see it below but I’m sure the team at AdSense would love to hear it to – they have comments open on the post on their blog and there’s some good feedback for them already appearing there.

Update: I’ve asked AdSense for comment on this post and they have quickly responded with:

“Google AdSense is really excited to launch our new format of expandable ads, and we’re currently clarifying our statement regarding the eligibility for serving expandable ads based on publisher’s location.”

I’m expecting further comment in the coming hours.

Update 2: OK – AdSense have come back to me with a full response. Looks like they made a mistake in their announcement post. I’ve included their full respond below.

====

Thanks for your feedback on AdSense’s new format of Expandable Ads. We’re really excited to launch this new format, as it brings variety and choice in our ad products for users, advertisers, and publishers.

We made a mistake in our blog post regarding publisher eligibility for expandable ads, leading readers to believe that only US and European-based publishers could serve them. We’re glad to inform the ProBlogger readership that all publishers can accept expandable ads regardless of location. However only select US advertisers are testing expandable ads at this time. We hope to be able to extend this offering to advertisers located outside the US in the future. This has been updated on our Inside AdSense blog post.

Publishers generate earnings from a CPC-priced expandable ad when a user visits the advertiser’s landing page, rather than when a user clicks to
expand the ad. Advertisers have different goals, and we encourage them to achieve them on the Content Network with options to bid via a CPC or CPM
model for all rich media formats. Publishers benefit from our auction technology that optimises their yield from our wide range of ads. CPC expandable ads still compete with other ads to automatically maximise your return from AdSense.

We’re also constantly working to improve publisher controls, and between the Competitive Filter and the Ad Review Center, publishers have two comprehensive ways of blocking expandable ads. Google has designed this ad format to enhance the user experience with ads. Users are given complete
control over ad expansion – expandable ads are initiated with a click rather than a mouseover, and users can easily close the ad at any time.
Expandable ads do not interfere with the page’s layout, and if publishers have opted into accepting all ad formats, it takes no extra effort to
accept them. It’s an exciting ad product that will bring mutual benefit to publishers, users, and advertisers.

======

So – the expandable ads will appear on sites owned by publishers from all locations (after the initial test). The CPC issue is still an issue to me but the auction system that Google have in place to decide which ad to show should help to keep ads profitable. If an ad is not converting on a site then it tends not to be shown. I still have some concern with the ways to opt out for those publishers who don’t want them but I guess we have to live with that.

Thanks to the team at AdSense for responding!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

AdSense ‘Force’ Expandable Ad Units on Some Publishers and Exclude Others

Since activating them I’ve had around 1 email a day from readers telling me that they are seeing ‘strange’ ads. The feedback is that some readers are seeing ads for scammy ‘make money online’ products (relevant but not really what I’d want to associate my brand with) or irrelevant ads.

Last night a reader (Pawel from SEOblogr) emailed to tell me that he was seeing ads for a Gay Chubby Dating service. He sent me this screenshot (click to enlarge).

Now I’m sure ProBlogger has its fair share of Gay Chubby reader who are looking for dates – but it’s not the most relevant ad in the world – certainly not ‘contextual’ as the post it appeared under was about the names that people leave comments under on blogs.

I’m wondering if this ‘irrelevant’ AdSense for RSS feeds is impacting others? I do know that irrelevant ads impact normal AdSense ad units from time to time but it seems I’ve had a lot more complaints about them in my feed than any other ad unit.

PS: I took a few minutes to scan through other b5media blogs to see how relevant the AdSense ads are on them. In most cases they are pretty good. The only other explanation I can think of is that perhaps because the ads are geotargetted that in some parts of the world there are less ads in the system and that relevancy suffers in these places.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

AdSense for RSS Feeds – How Contextual Are the Ads?

Well it seems that the time is coming soon where you’ll be able to read AdSense stats in your Analytics reports. The kinds of stuff you’ll be able to see:

• Which pages on your blog get the most AdSense clicks
• Which pages have the highest CPM
• Which pages have the highest CTR
• AdSense graphs/trends
• Which traffic sources generate the highest income

Digital Inspiration has just published some screenshots of the new reports that we’ll hopefully be able to find in Google Analytics soon.

For example this ‘Top AdSense Content’ page looks at your different pages of content and how they perform (click to enlarge):

This is the ‘AdSense Overview’ page:

The AdSense Revenue Page (which gives a graph of AdSense earnings over time)

‘AdSense Content’ Page

AdSense Referring Sites Page:

This kind of reporting is something that AdSense publishers have been asking for years. It is going to open up some amazing possibilities for optimizing your content for AdSense. The only question is – when will it become available???

Interestingly the AdSense blog is saying that AdSense will be down for maintenance this Saturday (13th) between 10am to 2pm PDT. Perhaps what they’re doing is getting this new launch ready?

Update

I’ve asked Google for comment on this and they responded with a ‘no comment’. However I’ve been hearing from a number of services that the maintenance this weekend is NOT to put this new functionality in place and that it’s probably a couple of weeks away before we’ll see this released.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Google AdSense Reports to Appear in Google Analytics – [Screenshots]

AdSense for feeds is similar to most AdSense ads in that the ads served in your feeds are a mixture of CPM and CPC ads.

Publishers setting up AdSense for feeds have a number of options when it comes to ad formats (text alone, text and image and just image ads), design (colors) and how often ads are displayed (you can have ads appear every 1,2,3 posts or only on posts over a certain amount of words).

If you’re a Feedburner Ad Network publisher you now need to set up AdSense for feeds to keep monetizing your feeds.

For more information see the AdSense Blog announcement.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

AdSense for Feeds Goes Live

Long time readers of ProBlogger know that Darren is a big fan of split testing ads to improve your earnings. I took this advice to heart, and wanted to show you some real world results that I got on my own blog.

Feel free to take these results and apply them to your own site. Or better yet, do some of our own testing and improve on them even more!

I split tested 3 separate regions of my site and looked mostly at eCPM to compare them. If you aren’t sure what eCPM is click here. I think it’s better to use eCPM than click through rate (CTR) because it incorporates not just how often it’s clicked, but also how much you make per click.

Right Aligned vs. Left Aligned Ad In Post Body

This ad region makes the most money for me, and was smack dab at the top of each individual post page (but not on the homepage).

• The right aligned ad got a 0.78% CTR and $1.41 eCPM
• The left aligned ad got a 1.30% CTR and $5.31 eCPM

Clear winner: left aligned (276% improvement)

It’s hard to say why this is exactly. Maybe the left aligned ad looks more like it’s actual content instead of an ad. Whatever the reason, the difference was substantial.

Top Right: image vs. text

This ad resides at the very top right of every page. I had been running it with image ads for a while and decided to test it against text ads (with some appropriate color choices).

• The image ads got a 0.35% CTR and $1.74 eCPM
• The text ads got a 0.33% CTR and $2.15 eCPM

Interesting to note here that although the CTR went down slightly, the eCPM went up. This seems to indicate that the text ads were paying more per click. So even though it was clicked slightly less often it still made more money overall.

Winner: text ads (narrowly)

Under Posts: image vs. text

This ad was placed at the bottom of each post page and also on the homepage under the excerpts. I again decided to test some text ads against the incumbent image ads.

• The image ads got a 0.58% CTR and $1.86 eCPM
• The text ads got a 0.43% CTR and $2.27 eCPM

Again here the CTR went down and the eCPM went up. Also worth noting is that the color scheme I used on the text ad block is consistent with my site. “Blockquote” tags on my site use a similar color scheme.

Winner: text ads

Conclusions & Next Steps

For those who are curious, here is the actual data from an excel spreadsheet. You can pull this out of Adsense under the “reports” tab if you use different channels to compare different ads.

Overall these results were impressive. The site-wide eCPM from these three ads went up overall from $5.01 to $9.73 which is a 94% improvement.

I could just convert all ads to the better performing version and call it a day, but what I’ll do instead is continue testing….forever.

There are plenty of other things to test, such as…

• Trying text ads in the post body (since they performed better elsewhere)
• Left aligning ads under the posts
• Trying different color schemes
• Trying other types of ads (Amazon, Performancing Ads, Text-Link-Ads, etc)

Most people focus on growing their blog’s readership to boost earnings. This is a critical component, but don’t forget about the other major tool in your arsenal: split testing.

What ad formats and placements have worked best for you? Leave us a comment below.

To get more tips like these, check out my blog at StartBreakingFree.com. It’s is a blog for people who’d like to quit their 9-to-5 jobs, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. I’ll even give you 3 of the top 10 books on building wealth for FREE when you subscribe, instantly delivered to your inbox! Check it out.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Split Testing: How To Increase Your Adsense Earnings 94% Overnight