Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Inside AdSense: Accidents happen

Due to an annoyingly high volume of people accidentally clicking on their own links, Google has asked that folks stop reporting it to them. Google feels sufficiently confident in their click fraud detection algorithms to catch occasional publisher-generated blips and not bill advertisers. It’s still worthwhile if in doubt to let Google know, as they often cut publishers off without payment, resource or explanation.

Shoemoney from webmasterradio.fm has a great interview with Brian Axe of AdSense. I was really amazed and impressed with the interview and with Brian.

(edit: I realize this crosses the line from commentary to rant… you’ve been warned)
My experience with adsense hasn’t been a good one from a customer service standpoint. I’ve worked with sites who have been banned without recourse and are left with dealing with under trained Google customer service types who make the Bush’s military tribunals looks like shining examples of defendant rights by comparison.

So in short, my experience with AdSense is that it is a great way to monetize a site, but they are arrogant, monopolistic and tend to stonewall if they suspect you of crossing them. In their defense, they likely deal with people all day trying to defraud them. The question they need to answer is, How many innocents should be punished to catch an offender? Is it better to err on the side of letting people defraud you, or is it better to err on the side of protecting advertising and never being defrauded? I don’t know for sure, but in my small-time, limited sample, Google appears Hitler-like in their treatment of small sites. I’m certain that one innocent was banned and pretty sure that 2 others are being truthful. Notice that Google would never ban anyone with the clout or Soap Box to fight back. My experience is with smallish, niche sites with no option.

All of that aside, the Podcast with AdSense manager Brian Axe was helpful. He discusses these trade offs and talks about changes to adsense policies here (MP3 Link).

My take aways:
- images beside ads tend to increase clicks but not ROI for advertisers and until Google has a way to protect advertisers from that, they will disallow the process
- Google is working on some process to allow publishers to click on their own ads to better understand their visitors experience (I’m very pleased and impressed that Google is addressing this. Axe’s perspective was perfect. In short: we know this should happen; we’re working on it; Until we get it, don’t click the ads)
- from Google’s perspective, the appeals process works great
- smartpricing is probably a good thing (they’re trying to differentiate between quality and low quality clicks… many advertisers avoid the publishers altogether because smartpricing doesn’t work. it should get better)

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Google says don’t. They provide a couple of bad examples too. I will say that the examples are pretty obvious. They don’t provide any acceptable examples but they tell you what you can do, as in change the ad colors or put a full border around your ads.

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/10/match-google-adsense-font-type-and-size-to-increase-ctr/

Great blog about matching Adsense fonts. The post doesn’t discuss whether it’s ethical or acceptable under Google’s guideline to do so. I guess it depends… the old, I’ll know it when I see it rule. But it’s a good tip:

In Firefox - Right click the ad, Select “This Frame” then “View Frame Source”. A new window shows you the whole source code with the CSS code too.
In Internet Explorer - Just right click the ad, select View Source.

For the leaderboard
Title
line-height: 12px; font-size: 11px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 12px; font-size: 10px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;

For the large rectangle
Title
line-height: 14px;font-size: 11px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 14px;font-size: 10px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;

Are your Google Ads Targeting incorrectly?  Try this tip from Google’s Adsense FAQs to tell Google which part of your page to target:

 

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>
 

A good example of a poorly targeting page is here: http://xlife.zuavra.net/curse/ 

The page is about technical problems he’d had.  Rather than showing software ads, all the ads are targeting religious seekers.  The author jokingly wrote that he was cursed in the title and later says that the Linux errors must be “God’s wrath”.  Google decided that the overall topic of the page must be religious and serves ads as such.  I will say though that I was more tempted by those ads than I am by ads on a typical page, but the Adsense targeting may be helpful for some.