Optimization Month, Week 2: Designing Your Ads

What if I told you that by making some simple changes to your ads, you could increase your revenue tenfold? And what if I said that by making some small adjustments to where you place the ads, to your colour schemes, and to the type of ads you use, you could even increase your revenue by a factor of 100?

Before you say anything, imagine you're a website owner in the mid-1990s. You own a large web property, and you've decided to increase your revenue stream through online advertising. Advertisers pay you each time their ads show, on a per-thousand basis. You need to place the ads somewhere people will see them. Looking at your site, you think, where? How about along the top, and down the right-hand side? Yes, that's where you've seen them on other sites, so they must be the best places.

Now, let's try that scenario today. You own a large web property, and you've decided to increase your revenue stream through Google AdSense. Advertisers pay you each time their ads show through site targeting, and also on a per-click basis. You need to place the ads somewhere people will see and interact with them. But where?

That's what we'll help you with this week. Did you know placing a traditional banner at the top of your site can be less than ideal for AdSense cost-per-click ads, but great for site-targeted CPM ads? Or that colour schemes designed to make your ads stand out will often make your users ignore those ads. What's more, by having AdSense integrated with quality content, users will stop seeing AdSense ads as advertising, and instead see them as relevant links to something they're interested in.

After having worked on optimisation in AdSense for a long time, we've amassed much learning through test after test. Even more important, we've learned from our failures at least as much as our successes. And now all of this is available to you, our publishers.

So go on. Spend 15 minutes reading this week's posts. Then with the recommendations in mind, spend another 15 minutes making the changes you and your users feel most comfortable with. Here's hoping it'll be the best (and most profitable) 30 minutes you'll have ever spent!

UPDATED with picture

Posted by Ivan Heneghan - AdSense UK Optimization Team

We want to meet YOU!

What better way to start Optimization Month off on the right foot than by having an in-person consultation? We'd like to remind you that the AdSense optimization team will be at SES San Jose on Tuesday, Aug. 8th and Wednesday, Aug. 9th, ready to offer you tips and suggestions on optimizing your site. Got a great success story based on how you've optimized your site? We'd love for you to share it with our video crew, who'll be on hand both days. Whether you're looking to learn more about optimization strategies or tell us your own, be sure to come by the Google booth at SES!

Posted by Susan Taing - AdSense Product Marketing

Bryan's Tips for Testing and Tracking Optimization

As mentioned on Tuesday by Mike Gutner, we'll be finishing off this week with the top 3 tips for testing and tracking. This'll be a recurring theme for Optimization Month -- the end of each week will feature top 3 tips from the Optimization team. With that, I'm honored to be able to share 3 tips that I commonly suggest to publishers. It's always rewarding to hear reactions from publishers about how helpful these suggestions are -- it's almost as if I can see a lightbulb go on in their heads..."Ah-HA!"

Over the last few months, we've doubled the number of channels and added several new reporting features. Here are my tips on how to use these channels and features to the fullest:

1. Search, don't scroll: I always encourage publishers to do a lot of testing and to use a lot of channels. At times, though, it can be tedious to scroll through a list of channels (up to 200!) to select the few you want to look at. I recommend using a standardized naming convention that puts as much information as possible into your custom channel names so you can group them by searching. For example, by using longer names like HomeRightWideSkyOpenAir, you can easily search and group the channels by page (in this case, Home), location on the page (Right), ad format (Wide Skyscraper), or color scheme (Open Air).

2. Save time with custom reports: With the advent of custom reports, publishers should rarely need to use the Advanced Reports tab. Instead of taking time to specify the channel(s), date range, and data type every time you want to get a stats update, you can use custom reports to preconfigure those views. This enables you to quickly click through reports directly from the Overview page. The faster you can see your data, the easier it is to test and find patterns that increase performance.

3. Stay in sync with emailable reports: Many publishers have more than one person working on various aspects of their AdSense implementation. But it's common for only one person to have the login information for the AdSense account (and therefore the ability to see stats and performance). With emailable reports you can add everyone to a mailing list and keep the whole team up to date with a daily, weekly, or monthly email about your AdSense earnings.

Stay tuned for Week 2 of Optimization Month-- Designing Your Ads!

Posted by Bryan Vu - AdSense Optimization Team

The ABCs of A/B Testing

If you’ve ever wondered how your earnings would change if you swapped a banner ad for a leaderboard or if you changed your color palette to Open Air, now you can find out by using A/B testing. In this brief tutorial, we'll review the fundamentals of completing an A/B test.

Tutorial

Let's say you’ve got a gut feeling that a leaderboard ad would double your revenue compared to a banner. To prove it, you'll need some evidence, so you decide to perform an A/B Test.

First, you'll need to create two custom channels, one for each ad unit you're going to be testing. Then, create a leaderboard ad unit and a banner ad unit with identical settings, except for the ad format. Be sure to assign each ad unit the appropriate channel created above.

You can decide how you want to run your A/B test; for example, you can choose to run the test on only 5% of your traffic or only on your home page. No matter what you choose, you'll need to run both of your ad units at the same time. But how can you easily alternate between your two ad formats? The simplest way to do this is to use the JavaScript template below - it will rotate between the two ad units, showing each 50% of the time.

<script type="text/javascript">
    var random_number = Math.random();
    if (random_number < .5){
        //your first ad unit code goes here
    } else {
        //your second ad unit code goes here
    }
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"     src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>

When using this template, remember to replace “//your first ad unit goes here” with your ad code inside the first set of <script></script> tags.

Keep in mind that generally, modifying your ad code is against AdSense program policies. However, we've checked with our policy folks and they've given our publishers permission to modify the code for use with this specific script for the purposes of A/B testing. Please be aware that the AdSense team isn't able to provide any support or troubleshooting help for this script or this sort of testing.

Once you’ve implemented the A/B testing code on your page, you'll be able to view the experiment results in your channel reports and compare the figures from the custom channels you created.

If you notice that one ad configuration clearly performs better over time, you can replace the testing script with the ad code for that ad unit to display it on a permanent basis. Or, update the script to test the performance of that ad unit against another ad configuration.

A few important things to remember when designing and running an A/B test:

1. One of the ad configurations in your test should be the configuration you're currently displaying. In order to understand the effects of each ad configuration, you need to compare the experimental results to a baseline. This baseline, also called the control, should be the ad configuration you are currently using.

2. You should only make one change to the ad configuration in each A/B experiment. The goal of A/B testing is to isolate the revenue impact or CTR change of one particular modification, so that you know exactly which change affected your revenue. By modifying the baseline ad code in only one way, you can be assured of this.

3. For one A/B test, all configurations must be running simultaneously. Since we need to ensure that all ad configurations are subject to the same conditions such as the same traffic patterns, all configurations must be running at the same time. The JavaScript template above is one way of implementing this.

If you’d like to read more about A/B testing, please visit our Help Center .

UPDATED template for accuracy

Posted by Tom Tunguz - AdSense Optimization Team

Choosing the channel

Before you begin optimizing your pages, it’s important to have channels in place so you can track the effectiveness of any changes you make. But what’s the difference between URL channels and custom channels -- and when should you choose one or the other? Let’s look at the benefits of each, and which type of channel is appropriate for which situations.

URL Channels

URL channels provide an effective way to track your ad performance on different sections of your site or on different domains. Since you don’t need to change your code at all, they're easy to use. If for example you have a blog about cars and another one about boats, you can create a URL channel for each one. Then, when you optimize, you can use your channel reports to determine how your changes affected the success of the ads on each blog.

Custom Channels

Custom channels are great for pages with multiple ad units, since you can use them to track different ad units on the same page. To implement them, you’ll need to generate new channel-specific ad code. Let’s say you have a page with two ad units – one on the left side and one on the right. You can create a custom channel for each one, giving them distinct names such as ‘Left_Ad’ and ‘Right_Ad’. After you’ve regenerated the ad code for each ad unit and pasted it back into your HTML source, you can view reports for each ad unit separately. You’ll be able to see which ad unit performs better, and whether a change like removing the borders affects your earnings.

If you’d like more details about using channels, there's a lot of useful information in our Optimizing with Channels guide. We hope that setting up channels will make it much easier to see the results of your optimization efforts right away.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Optimization Team

'Tis the season to "Augtomize"

Inspired by the launch of the new and improved Optimization Tips page, our renewed enthusiasm for helping publishers optimize their sites has led us to deem August Optimization Month! Each week, we'll share insights and tips along with our best-kept secrets to optimize all aspects of your site. Whether you're looking to find better ad placement or formats, struggling to understand who your visitors are, or in need of ideas for making your content more engaging, we hope you'll get some answers here.

To follow along, we recommend checking the blog daily or subscribing to receive the posts by email. You can also stay on top of the optimization schedule by subscribing to the AdSense Calendar. Have an optimization success story? Share it with us! Or, if you're more comfortable with optimierung, optimalisatie, or optimización, follow along on our German, Dutch, or Spanish blogs.

On that note, I'm happy to kick off Week 1 of Optimization Month: testing and tracking optimization effectively. When you decide to experiment with a new ad format or color palette, you want to know just how much impact the changes have had. Get back to the basics and learn about the importance of channels and A/B testing when you optimize your site. We'll finish off the week with a favorite of mine, the top 3 tips for testing and tracking.

We're really excited about Optimization Month, and we hope you are too!

Posted by Mike Gutner - AdSense Optimization Team

!أهلا وسهلا و مرحبا

Since we launched AdSense for search in Bulgarian and Greek, we’ve been working hard to keep expanding our language support. That’s why we’re excited to announce that AdSense for search is now available in Arabic!

To celebrate, we thought we'd enlighten you with some interesting facts about the language and the Arabic-speaking world:

Arabic is spoken by over 323 million people worldwide as a first language, which is about the same as the number of native English speakers.

Classical Arabic is the official language of over 20 countries and is the only form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages. Each country also has its own local dialect (such as Egyptian, Syrian, and Algerian), and these dialects are used in day-to-day spoken language.

Many of the English words you might use on a daily basis are of Arabic origin, such as coffee (‘qahwah’), sugar (‘sukkar’), and cotton (‘qutn’).

Checks were introduced in Arab countries as written agreements to provide payment at a later date.

Welcome to our Arabic publishers!

Posted by Nada Faridane (Arabic) – AdSense Publisher Support