Contextual Ads

AdSense Smart Pricing, One Bad Placement Can Devalue All Clicks

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 06:06:26 GMT

JenSense has an interesting piece on the inside workings of Google AdSense's Smart Pricing, which rewards publishers with higher or lower payouts based on quality of conversions.

One of the most notable revelations gleaned from an AdSense support member is that:

Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.

Which means you should be careful about where you stick your AdSense code, it could be counter productive and actually lose you money across your entire account if placed anywhere it performs poorly in the eyes of Smart Pricing.

AdSense Placement Heat-map for Forums

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 03:15:27 GMT

Sandra, of the official Google Adsense blog has published some optimization tips for forums' serving AdSense, most notably a AdSense Placement map (pictured right) indicating the best place to position AdSense for highest earnings (red being highest, yellow lowest).

A few people, including Nick W at threadwatch question the map's accuracy:

Left hand column is best? It rather looks like they just guessed that map hehe.. best place is the left column? Not only does that not fit my experience, on a tech savvy site and on a very NON tech savvy site, but it goes against all common sense!

Optimize AdSense for Faster Load Times

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:15:31 GMT

If you serve AdSense on your website, you may have noticed some annoying delays whilst the browser retrieves and renders the AdSense code. Search Engine Roundtable reports a thread on WebmasterWorld discussing several ways to address this issue:

Pack your ad units into a div, and give that div a fixed size in pixels (the same size as the ad unit, of course). This allows the browser to position that div and to immediately continue with the rest of the layout.

AdSense vs. YPN

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:26:43 GMT

The Search Engine Roundtable has a report comparing AdSense and YPN performance.

Spoiler: YPN has the lead, with 81% higher earnings according to the report. If or not YPN's high payout will persist or is simply a short-term incentive to convert AdSense publishers remains to be seen.