Google AdSense Optimization Webinar
June 30, 2005 -- 4:45 p.m. PDT Coordinator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the AdSense Optimization Webinar conference call. My name is Cindy and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be a facilitating a question and answer session towards the end of the conference.
I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Kim Malone, Director of AdSense. Please proceed.
K. Malone
Hello, everybody. This is Kim Malone. I'm the Director of Operations for AdSense. It's a great pleasure to have you all with us. We've got over 100 new publishers on the line and our goal today is to help all of you start making more money as quickly as possible.
We also have three experienced publishers available to answer questions at the end of the call; Brad, Mauricio and Tim, who Phoebe will be introducing momentarily. So what I'm going to do now is turn it over to Phoebe Ho who is our Optimizer Extraordinaire and one of the superstars on this team. So over to you, Phoebe.
P Ho
Hello, everyone. Hope everyone's doing well today. So basically my name is Phoebe and I work on the Optimization Team here in Google AdSense. And our goal of this call is to relay some of the tips that we have and basically enable you to figure out how to maximize your revenue and give you the chance to optimize the ads and maybe spend more time giving you some tips and hopefully give you some suggestions along the way.
And so before I get into the exact details, I just wanted to add a little bit more administrative details. So in addition to Kim and me, we have another AdSense Optimizer, Mike Gutner, who is also online. And so he will be handling any questions that you might have during the presentation. So feel free to send us any questions during the program using the Web-X Q&A function. You can see the Q&A module on the lower right-hand corner of your screen.
And then following the presentation, you'll also have a chance to ask Tim, Mauricio and Brad questions over the phone.
And also, at the end of the program, I'm also going to launch a feedback survey in the lower right corner of the Web-X interface. Please fill that out before you log off of the program. Basically we want to make sure that we're continually improving our services and serving you well. So let us know what you think about the events.
So with the agenda, we're basically going to focus on a few different optimization tips ranging from ad position, format, color, the placement and some additional features that you may or may not be aware of. And then after the specific optimization tips, we're going to go into a few of our case studies from three of our experienced and successful AdSense publishers and that would be Brad Berman from HybridCars.com; Mauricio Freitas of GeekZone.Co.NZ; and Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com. So we're very grateful that they're able to share their experience with us.
Before going into specifics, I want to explain where our research comes from. We've done a lot of tests with various publishers and these tips come from those tests. But, since every site is different, every industry is different; you still want to make sure that you're experimenting on your site. So take some of these tips and maybe vary the optimization tips just a little bit to see what works the best for your site. Not all of these implementations will work for every site, so we want to make sure that you are implementing the best solutions for yourself.
Going into the exact optimization tips, we're going to start with ad position. What you see here is a heat map of the best ad positions. As you can see, the middle, above the fold location performs the bets, and that kind of makes sense. The idea is to think about what your user is looking at. Since most of the content is in the middle of most pages, the ads that are in the middle, near the content and towards the top of the page is the location that gets most of the attention.
However, make sure that you take a look at what users are doing on your site. You want to make sure that you're addressing how the users are actually looking at your pages. For example, if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful because they're reading the text and when they want more resources, they can take a look and see, oh, look. There are some ads. I can find out some more information about this particular topic. So definitely make sure that you keep in mind how your users are looking at your site.
The next optimization tip that I'd like to focus on is ad format. … You see our best performing ad format. It's the large rectangle, 336x280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.
So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper.
As I had mentioned before, because there's a lot of variety with different sites, you want to make sure that you're using the best format for your site. Don't try to squeeze in a format that doesn't fit your site just because we said so here today. I want to make sure that you fit in the right format that would fit into your site. But just to let you know that wider formats do tend to perform better.
Another important feature that I want to talk about is making sure that you are using the best colors for your site. Here you'll see a snapshot of Topics.net with the ads by Google. You can see with the colors that they've chosen that it blends well with their site. It matches the background and it looks like it provides additional content and compliments the site rather than contrasts against the site.
The reason the color palette is so important is because it adds to the content and not separate from the content and what happens is, something that we call ad blindness; so the more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur.
Another thing to decrease ad blindness is rotating your color palette. We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.
Another important tip is what pages you might want to place your ads on. And what's important is placing your ads throughout your site. As you can see here, Spine...com placed their ads on forum pages, reference pages and articles pages. And if you look closely, they actually chose different formats for different pages. So don't be afraid to try out placing the ads on different pages and seeing how it will do for you. As long as they fit into our program policy, you can place the ads on any page of your site, any domain that you have. So I would definitely recommend that to you to kind of give you another boost into your revenue.
Now that I've talked about all of these various different optimization tips, how do you find out what exactly will work for you? The best way is to use channels. Here is your account view, and by selecting the channels link, you will be able to get to the channels page where you can manage your channels. And what channels will allow you to do is to track all the experiments that you're doing.
For example, if you want to track how one location is doing versus another position, you can use channels to track that or track different colors or different formats. Basically, this is the best way to figure out which test and which experiment is the most successful for your sites. So I highly recommend, for any optimization and any experiment that you do, to use channels so that you are informed about any decision and any change that you make with your ads on your site.
There are a few other ads and features that I want to make sure that you're aware of. And here you see image ads, link units and AdSense for Search. And next to the link units, there's a little example of one of the formats that we have available for link units.
So I want to talk into a little bit more detail about each of these. Image ads are an alternative to the text-based ads and you want to make sure that in your account, you're opted in to image ads. And the reason for that is that you basically have the image ads competing with the text-based ads. So if you have more advertisers competing on your site, it basically means more opportunities for you to maximize your revenue. Especially since, in the last few weeks, we've launched CPM-based ads for images; we want to make sure that your ads will be able to support those images. So if advertisers want to select to show ads on your site, you will be able to take advantage of that additional CPM-based revenue.
Another feature that also provides an additional stream of revenue is the link units. And they're great because it actually compliments some of our existing ads. What the link units do is it allows the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.
Another great thing about link units that publishers love is the little space that it takes. So a lot of publishers place it in their menu bars, their navigation bars and it blends in well with the site. And the great thing is that you can place these link units in addition to the three ad units you can have on a page.
Another feature that we have that would be great for your users is AdSense for Search. It provides a service for your users and gives you an extra, a little additional stream of revenue as well. And what it does is, imagine the regular Google search, but instead of having your users go to Google.com, they can access all the results and the technology directly from your sites. And not only search Google.com but specify it to search directly within your site. And then, you also make a little bit of money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. So this is definitely something that you'd want to consider; AdSense for Search.
So now that I've had a chance to show you some of the best practices that we've learned here at Google, I want to spend some time focusing on a few publishers who've come to these conclusions on their own. So here you see Brad Berman from HybridCars.com.
Just a little bit of background on Brad. He launched HybridCars.com in 2003. And he has a background in technology marketing and has a long-standing interest in alternative energy sources and sustainable mobility. So because of his interest, his site began mostly as a hobby but it started to grow when he joined AdSense. Right now he gets about 25,000 page readers a day.
Here are some of the pages of HybridCars.com. As you can see, Brad has placed the ads on his homepage, the articles and the forum. But it wasn't always this way. Most publishers, or some publishers might be concerned that their users would reject the ads based on the content or that they would clutter the page.
But Brad has found that it actually worked very well. He started just by placing the ads on a handful of pages, and with just a few ads, he didn't really have very many impressions to earn a lot of revenue. However, when he put ads on over 90% of his bytes, his revenue shot up. It went from $80 and $90 days to $250 and $300 days. So imagine what that can do for your site. As he says, “on the first day, the ads tallied up $80 in revenue. I haven't looked back since.”
So here you see a little snapshot of the ads on one of the pages on Brad's site. Like I said, some publishers might think that the ads make the pages a little bit busier or distract users from the content. But this hasn't been a problem for Brad. In fact, he's noticed that the ads are really relevant to the content of the page they appear on and they're actually useful to the users.
And we actually pride ourselves on that here at Google so we're showing content-targeted ads that actually are relevant to the users and compliment your site instead of compete with it. As he said, “the targeting alleviates my concerns that the ads clutter the site.”
Not only are targeted ads more effective as a business model, but they're actually a service for people. So I'm glad that Brad has found that.
Here are some of the tips that Brad has for new publishers. The first thing is to put content first. Focus on making your site's content and your user experience the best on the Web for your content niche. If you are only interested in making money, visitors will know and they'll flee.
His other tip is to experiment. So experiment with the different formats and different colors as well as positions and what he says is, “it's very easy to add the code to a few pages and see what happens. Put the code on a few pages or every page and see if it works. You have nothing to lose.”
So our next case study is Mauricio Freitas from GeekZone.Co.NZ. And he's actually joining us today from Wellington, New Zealand. So thank you, Mauricio, for calling in early in the morning.
He's a long-term expert in mobile products and software and he launched the site in 2003 and actually, most of his readers are here in the US. And he ended up leaving his job to focus on GeekZone full-time. And so he's had the time to run a lot of the experiments with AdSense since he started with us.
His first tip is to experiment with ad position. As you can see on the left, his original ad position was up on top of the page. It's great above the fold, but it's not perfect. So on the right-hand side, you see him placing the ads a little bit closer to the content. Just by making those simple changes, he increased his revenue to about $20-$30 a day.
Another tip that he has, or because of his experiments is his experiments with color. So here you see a couple of his other pages and he originally had ads like the ones on the left; where the ads are contrasting with his site. Then he made the change to the ones on the right, and as you can see, the ads blend much better into his site. And so he went from $30 and $40 days to $90 and $100 days. So double the revenue by just a simple, little change like blending the colors.
So Mauricio's tips for new publishers are similar to Brad's. “Focus on content. Content is probably the most important thing to pay attention to and manage. With good content, traffic will come. Try not to change the site's layout to fit ads, but the other way around; making the ads fit the content.”
Another tip that Mauricio has is, “keep users on your site. You need to make it easy to get around the site and make sure the visitors see the ads as a viable exit route without asking them to click on the ads. You need to make sure that links within the site are clearly visible and that if people want more information about the same topic, they can find it.” So basically we want to make sure we're not competing with your site, but that we are complimenting your site.
So the last case study that we have today is AskTheBuilder.com by Tim Carter. Just a little background on Tim, he's a longtime lover of building and writing so he started his Website in 1995 and he's been running ad since on his site for more than a year.
AdSense has allowed him to spend less time selling ads to support the site and much more time on focusing what he loves to do, which is trading the content.
So one of the things that he did was experimenting with ad positions. Here you see his site, AskTheBuilder.com, and on the left-hand side, he has the ads in the middle of the page originally. But just by making a little change like the screen shot on the right, his click-through rate jumped by almost 60%. Just by that little change of position.
So as he says, “as soon as I moved them, it was like turning on a water faucet. And it makes sense if you think about the way we read through pages.”
Of course, another important thing to keep in mind is that some experiments don't work out so well, but you can always learn from them and figure out what works the best. Some experiments, like this one, may decrease your performance and decrease your revenue. So here on AskTheBuilder, you can see some ads on the left and some ads on the right.
He started out with the ads on the left where it blended in with the site. Then he wanted to experiment a little bit and tried to make the ads a light yellow color as you can see on the right. His click-throughs dropped off 65% just by that little change. So little changes can also be negative, so you also want to make sure that you're tracking all of these experiments and see what works and what doesn't. Because now he knows that blending with the site is better for his site.
So then he returned it back to the original site and here are a couple of tips that he has for new publishers. “Like you've already heard today, focus on content. If you want more ads, create more content. If you want AdSense to rock, create a Website that has 500-600 pages, not 20-30.” And, as he learned, experimenting is very important. As he said, “not all sites are the same. You have to experiment to figure out what works on your site.”
Here is the end of our formal presentation, but if you'd like more information on these implementation procedures, please check the links on the page. And we'll also send a follow-up e-mail to all of you to include these links if you don't get them all down now. If you don't scribble fast, don't worry about it.
Now I'm going to open the forum to questions from participants. We have a lot of people on the line so please be patient.
Coordinator
Your first question comes from the line of Brian Schmidt from BrianSchmidt.com. Please proceed with your question.
B. Schmidt
Hello. I was wondering if Mauricio could talk about how he's using channels on his site, please.
M. Freitas
Okay. Well, thanks for the question. Basically, I have a list of channels for each one of my content types. I have forums, I have content on articles and reviews and I have different channels for each one of the types of ads that I have on these pages. So I have a channel for the ads that show up on the top of the page on content; I have a channel for the ad links; and I have a channel for the box that I show of the bottom of the content. And each one of these content, then I can track and I can differentiate what is the performance for each one of them.
B. Schmidt
Great. Thank you.
Coordinator
(Instructions).
K. Malone
If you don't have a question, this is Kim Malone again, but perhaps you have a suggestion for us or want to give us some feedback, that's also welcome.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of Raja Diswanathan from Limestart.com. Please proceed with your question.
R. Diswanathan
Hello. I had created a site originally and I used AdSense about four months ago. I've seen a lot of revenue through impressions. Right now, I've created a second site and this site has been running for about three and a half months, but I notice that I'm only getting revenue on days when there are clicks. And I was just wondering what really differentiates when Google serves up CPC or CPMs?
P. Ho
Thanks for your question, Raja. So, as I understand it, your question is about basically how we serve up the ads. So how we figure out the ads to serve is kind of a complex process but we take it both on relevancy and how well it will do on your site. So we want to make sure that the best ads are serving and we're constantly learning.
So if one ad doesn't do so well on your site, we're going to update that and learn from that and show different ads on your site. So it's continually changing and continually improving.
R. Diswanathan
Okay.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of Edgar Lazar. Please proceed with your question.
E. Lazar
Hello. I have a little different question. Access for domains, is that handled by a different department, or do you guys do that?
K. Malone
Yes, it's a different department.
E. Lazar
Okay. And I have another question. This is with regards to high traffic forums and the question is basically, on the ads, because forums and people return – the same people return to the forums, do you have any specific suggestions for forums like that?
P. Ho
We want to make sure that a lot of repeat visitors don't get subjected to what I had mentioned called ad blindness. Sorry, this is Phoebe. So what we normally suggest for forum sites is to place the ads in a good location such as where your second post usually is. So it's smack-dab in the middle of your content so your readers will be looking at it.
Another little tip is that if you're placing the ads in the same position, you might want to rotate the color palette so that it looks slightly different from another page. You don't want it to contrast so much that it will cause ad blindness, but just a slight, maybe a different shade of the color; just make sure that the color palettes that you use still blend in with your sites but just make it slightly different so that it doesn't – basically your users don't get subjected to ad blindness.
K. Malone
Also, I'd maybe want to hand it over to Mauricio. Mauricio, you want to tell everybody a little bit about how forums work for you?
M. Freitas
Yes. I've used the forums and I've noticed that they're not as well performing as the content itself.
K. Malone
Right.
M. Freitas
I do have a 50/50 balance in between the number of the pages that are forums and content. But the content seems to always perform a little bit better.
K. Malone
So one of the things that we've done to help forums perform a little bit better, because we noticed the same thing, is site targeting; the CPM ads. And although that's a product that we just recently launched, we found that as advertisers begin to bid on forums, they do really, really well.
E. Lazar
Okay, thank you.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of John Olsen from LearnToHanglide.com. Please proceed with your question.
J. Olsen
Well, gosh, I have many, I suppose. But how do I change my ad format simply from a banner ad to a skyscraper? Do I just go back to the code that I've generated initially and regenerate it?
P. Ho
Exactly.
J. Olsen
Okay. I guess that's fine. Thank you.
P. Ho
Basically the change is just a little line. But the easiest way is to regenerate that ad from your account.
J. Olsen
Sure. Thank you.
K. Malone
It sounds like you would like for it to be easier. Do you have a product suggestion for us?
J. Olsen
Well, no. I guess I – I generated that code but one time and then sort of dealt with it. I guess I need to go get more familiar with the codes.
K. Malone
Great. Does anybody have questions for our panelists? It's a rare opportunity to get some feedback from experienced publishers?
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line from Hernand Rivera from JustSoaps.com. Please proceed with your question.
H. Rivera
Hello. As a new AdSense user, my biggest fear that customers that otherwise would have bought through my site would click out of it through the ad. What do your numbers tell you? What's been your experience?
P. Ho
Well, I think that would be a great question for Brad to answer because he found that the ads seemed to compliment his site. So Brad, do you want to–
B. Berman
Sure, I can give it a shot. My site is not an e-commerce site where I'm directly selling products but I do have other revenue-generating links on the site. And I suppose that could be a concern. However, I think given the nature of the Internet and people – if you have content that is desirable for people; if you have product or other kind of content that folks want to return to, I think the concern of cannibalizing some of your own traffic should really not be so important because it's just a different … offering. And you're going to click off this – there's really basically nothing you can do to click off and perhaps – I don't deal directly with this, but what makes sense to me, is placement.
If you're going to make more revenue off of your direct sales and that's your primary concern, then I think it gets back to experimentation again. It's hitting on the relationship and the location of the page between your primary let's say e-commerce offerings and the AdSense. If you play with the relationships with those, and use channels or figure out other ways to monitor the flow of traffic, then you'll have a good sense about whether or not that's really happening.
My hunch is, it's people that want to buy are going to buy and people that want to click around and look at ads and look at other offerings are going to do that regardless. But I think it gets back to experimentation and trying to study metrics; study the way that people are actually clicking and after you learn a little bit from that, make the modifications that are necessary so that you're not upstaging some of your other offerings with the ads.
K. Malone
Another example is actually Google.com and so the whole idea of Google.com is to send people to other Websites, right? But people come back and back and back to it because it's useful. So I think we found that our publishers who create sites that are really useful, have loyal users who tell their friends about it and the users would come back and back and if the ad offerings are useful to users, then that can contribute to the users coming back to the site in the future.
T. Carter
Phoebe, can I jump in here a second?
P. Ho
Yes.
T. Carter
Yes, this is Tim Carter, Hernand. Here's one thing I think you need to remember, too. And I think this is a point that a lot of publishers forget about. Is that you have to realize that visitors are going to leave your site. That's okay. If they don't buy your stuff, then let them leave the site through one of the Google AdSense ads, because every time they do that, you make money.
P. Ho
Thanks, Tim. That's exactly the great point that we definitely make sure that the users are basically given everything they want on the site that they're visiting. So if they can't find exactly what they want on a particular site, that they do have other options and it does add that extra additional revenue.
B. Berman
This is Brad. I'll add one other thing. When you're getting paid by the click, those conversion rates are going to just be naturally higher than what it would take for someone to get out their credit card and start making a purchase.
So like Tim said, people are going to leave anyhow; you might as well collect some kind of revenue based on that behavior.
P. Ho
Absolutely.
H. Rivera
Thank you.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of Vlad Spanyo from Moldova.org. Please proceed with your question.
V. Spanyo
Hello. Our Website is the … portal and we run in three languages; English, Romanian and Russian. So for English and Russian, we are okay because ads are recognized. We have a problem with Romanian. Do you have any plans to have in Romanian as well because a good portion of our visitors use this interface?
K. Malone
Well, our goal is to have AdSense in every language on earth. So we are – we try to launch a couple of languages every quarter. So I think it will be, unfortunately, a few quarters before we manage to launch it.
V. Spanyo
Okay. Thank you.
Coordinator
Your next question is a follow-up question from Edgar Lazar. Please proceed with your question.
E. Lazar
Hello. I have a question that's a two-part question. The first part is the page view counter. How accurate is it in comparison with the…? Sometimes my … and the page view counter, they don't match.
And the second part is the ads – the pubic ads. When Google AdSense doesn't find any relevant ads to show, it shows the public ads. Do those also count towards the page views?
P. Ho
Yes, for the page view counter – so for your second question, the public service ads do count towards the page impressions. And how we figure out what the page impressions are, there are a couple of different items that we take a look at.
So first, you want to make sure that if you have any other Web logs, that you're not counting any visits from robots and crawlers. And specifically what an ad impression is for how we define one is when the ad code actually gets fully executed. So what ends up happening sometimes is that if some of your users are using a browser that doesn't support JavaScript, or if they have some sort of ad blocker, or if they stop loading the page before the ad code can fully execute, that will cause the discrepancy between your Web logs and our page impression logs.
E. Lazar
And the alternative ads, they do count towards the impression counter, right?
P. Ho
Well, if a public service ad is shown, it will ad to the impression counter.
E. Lazar
No, the ones that we put – the alternatives. Let's say I don't want public service announcements and I put an alt.HTML and put my own code in there.
P. Ho
Those will be counted by our impression counter.
E. Lazar
Okay. So you count that –
P. Ho
Right.
E. Lazar
Okay, thank you.
P. Ho
You're welcome. And as a reminder, make sure that, please, please, please, answer some of the poll questions if you're on the phone and just kind of listening in. It's on the bottom right-hand corner of the Web-X screen.
Coordinator
Your next question is another follow-up question from John Olsen from LearnToHanglide.com. Please proceed with your question.
J. Olsen
Oh, gosh. I'm afraid I have to go flying right now. But do you think a skyscraper ad makes more sense on the right or the left of the page or do you think it matters? And thank you so much, I'm afraid I'll have to leave.
P. Ho
That's a great question. What we found is for more sites, that it kind of depends but I want to see if specifically if Tim, Mauricio or Brad, do you have specific advice from any of your experiments or things that you have tried?
T. Carter
I'll jump in first. John, I'll tell you what. I haven't been to your Website, but Google has a great optimization team that they'll help you work that out but I would absolutely just start experimenting. I mean, just because one position works for myself or Mauricio or Brad doesn't mean it's going to work for you. But I can tell you one thing, above the top fold and to the left is a really hot spot when people are coming to Websites because that's where the start to read at.
P. Ho
Thanks. That's a very good point, especially with the key map that I had shown in one of the earlier slides. It does look like a lot of readers who first visit a site kind of look towards that upper left corner first.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of Don Lashier from NewportNet.com. Please proceed.
D. Lashier
Hello. Actually, this is more of a suggestion. Our site, we're a tourist destination and about half of our traffic is local residents and the ads are irrelevant for them; in other words, they're hotels, motels, and so on. So I'm working out a scheme to basically determine whether a visitor is local or from out of the area and it would be nice to be able to pass a parameter to Google ads with different criteria.
P. Ho
That's a great suggestion. Thank you. I'll definitely note that.
K. Malone
Yes, local is definitely something that's very interesting for us at Google.
P. Ho
We definitely want to make sure that the ads are relevant to whoever your user base is and for a specific user as well. So thank you for that suggestion.
Coordinator
Your next question is a follow-up question from the line of Vlad Spanyo from Moldova.org. Please proceed.
V. Spanyo
Hello. I have a question for the panelists. Do you bother to block the competitors' ads through a filter or do you just ignore that and you've found more efficient time to focus on working with ads or optimizing them?
M. Freitas
Well, Mauricio here. There are two points on this; two aspects on this. A competitor's site could be a concern if you are an e-commerce site and you're selling a product and you're afraid of the other site upselling you. So that's one thing to consider.
If you are in the business of selling the content, which is what we are doing here with the sites that we have in the panel; basically you are presenting the content and people are pretty much always in the search mode. They will try to find more information about that somewhere else.
So in general, I don't block any advertisers from sites because anything that I can provide to compliment my content is something good for me, even if it goes to a site that I see as a competitor in my area.
M Brad, do you want to jump in?
B. Berman
Yes, yes. The only thing I would add to that is something that was mentioned in the presentation. I think if you focus on providing the best content, if people are coming to your site not with the forethought of clicking on the ads; they're coming to your site to learn about the topic that you're presenting.
And if you just simply beat out your competitors in terms of having the most thorough, the most well-researched, the most compelling, the most Web-friendly content, then people will return to your site and the fact that there may be an ad on there for a competitor and they go off to your competitor, if your content is compelling, they'll return back to your site eventually and it gets back to what Tim was saying earlier, people are going to leave your site and another site is just a click away regardless. So focus on content.
T. Carter
Yes, … that's a great question and I do block certain ads and I'll tell you why. I made a strategic decision that I want my visitors who come to my Website, because I write a syndicated column, I get this big trust factor going. And I find from the e-mails that I get, that people really trust what I say. And that also flows over into the products that people then buy directly or indirectly from my Website. And because I was in the industry for so many years, I happen to know certain products out there that are not very good. And so I don't want my Website visitors to get hurt by buying a product that just isn't that great; because bad companies, as much as I hate to say it, they can still become an advertiser and then those ads are going to show up on different publishers' sites.
So I'll take the hit of the lost income to get the long-term trust of my visitors. So that's a really tough decision you've got to make. But I don't block that many, and I'm on the constant prowl, looking through my pages to find companies that are really, really, bad. And there are some out there in my industry. That's the problem.
B. Berman
And I'll just add one thing to that – this is Brad again; is that every industry is different. I deal with hybrid cars and my competitors are other advocates for energy efficiency and for electric cars and things like that. So it's just – I think you – Tim's concern is real and he's trying to protect his users. And in my industry, it's less important to do that. So I think as long as you focus on what your users want and what's best for them, things will work out.
V. Spanyo
Thank you.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from Hernand Rivera from JustSoaps.com. Please proceed.
H. Rivera
I just wanted to make sure I understood correctly. If you switched from a regular accent ad to a Google search link, once it takes you to the Google search results, you get paid for every click?
P. Ho
I want to clarify the question. Is it, are you asking about the ad links or AdSense for search? So is it the search results or the link unit?
H. Rivera
AdSense for search.
P. Ho
Okay. Well, for both answers, actually, let me just address in case some of the other publishers on the phone have questions about both. So with AdSense for search, someone can do a search on either the Google Web or do a site search on your site. And the ads that will show up on the search results page, you will get paid for any click on any of those ads.
H. Rivera
Any click or every click?
P. Ho
Every click on the ads that would appear on the search results page. And then for the link units, you – when someone clicks on the link, it will bring up a page of ads. So you also will get paid for every click that is clicked on from that page of ads.
H. Rivera
Thank you.
P. Ho
Thank you.
Coordinator
You have a follow-up question from the line of Raja Diswanathan from LimeStart.com. Please proceed with your question.
R. Diswanathan
Hello. I work with a team of content editors; I'm the main technology guy behind the site. And one of the questions I constantly receive from them, because I was the one that brought the idea of AdSense, is to provide them with some kind of estimate to what kind of revenue the site can provide. And I was wondering, you throw out some figures; one of the case studies you said 25,000 visits a day produced something like $80 a day. And I was wondering if that – is that an above-average revenue? Is that the average? I'm just wondering if you can give me some kind of ballpark figures. I know it's kind of hard.
P. Ho
It varies so much between the different industries, how large your site is, how many visitors you get; those kinds of jumps are very difficult to predict. It really depends on your user base and how your site is laid out. And basically your site was about what kind of users are going to your site and how it's laid out and where the ad positions are in your site that determines what your revenue potential is and how far you are from reaching it.
K. Malone
It sounds like they would be interested in your point of view on this, but obviously, we could come up with averages and publish them. The reason why we don't is that we feel like it would be more frustrating than anything else for publishers because there's so many factors that it's not – the averages wouldn't be a guide to any sort of truth. It wouldn't be a meaningful number.
But if you disagree, we would love to hear about that.
R. Diswanathan
The reason I bring up this question is because our only way of revenue right now is through AdSense. And my other coworkers constantly question me as to whether this is the right path to go or should we be trying something else. And I'm just not able to give them any kind of answer as to what kind of revenue we can generate or how many visitors we need to get for a certain amount of revenue.
P. Ho
Right.
B. Berman
This is Brad. I'll just throw out something. The proof's in the pudding. You could speculate all you like, but like everyone was saying, there's so many factors that could sway the exact figures that the best thing to do is just to try it. If you want to try it – like I tried it on just – like in the presentation, I tried it on just a few pages and the revenue was very low; it was like $5 a day or less than $10 a day.
And then I totally stopped them entirely thinking it was not going to be worth my while. And then, over time, I said let me try this one more time and put it all on virtually every single page in the site and that's when, on the first day it was $80 and my eyes opened up to it. And the fact is, that there's really no harm in just trying it out. And that's the only thing that's going to give you some sense of what the possibilities are and I would say whatever those first figures are, especially if you put them on pretty widely throughout the site, I would think that it's only going to go up from there based on hopefully your traffic going up and also the fact that you're going to learn more and more about how to optimize it.
So you have to just start, that's basically what it is.
T. Carter
Raja, this is Tim Carter. I've got a couple of quick questions. Can you give me an idea of what these sites are about?
R. Diswanathan
Well, the site is basically an information portal for recent college graduates. And basically we're advertising through college newspapers, through alumni associations and we have ads on every single page.
And the issue is, like right now, I reviewed the last three months and I haven't been getting any per impression revenue. I've just been getting per click because I can see exactly when people click that I'm getting revenue. And I'm having a lot of days when I'm getting zero revenue. So it's still a low number of visitors. We just launched the site. But –
T. Carter
How many pages do you have?
R. Diswanathan
Totally, I think I have 40 pages.
T. Carter
So that's part of the problem there. And here's another clue. I think this is something, to me, that's pretty obvious. But it might not be to a lot of publishers out there. The key is to have content at your Website where the solution to the problem is both emotional and that the solution is usually pretty expensive meaning, if I went to site XYZ.com, whatever that might be, and there were a bunch of AdSense ads running there where the product that was being sold cost maybe eight bucks. Those advertisers are not going to be paying a lot of money per click on ad words and as a result, you're not going to get much money.
But ok, think of my situation. Somebody needs a new faucet for their powder room. So they go to my faucet column and there might be an ad there for a Kohler faucet, a St. George one that costs $1200. Okay, so what do you think that retailer is willing to bid in ad words to get that $1200 buy?
And also, there are a lot of topics out there that are emotionally driven. And when you plug emotion into that decision, sometimes the credit card comes out of the wallet very quickly.
R. Diswanathan
Okay. Yes.
B. Berman
And the other thing that I would add, the click has to be a logical progression. In other words, someone came to your site with a specific interest, right? And that page satisfies the interest that they have. And then the ad, or whatever – any other link on the page would be a natural progression of that. If it's far a field, right? If a ... comes and their ad doesn't really relate to something that they have a compelling need for, then they're not going to click it.
And 40 pages also, is probably a start. But I think that definitely is an issue. As Tim mentioned, a great strategy is to add a new page every day; add two pages every day. Add as much content as you can.
M. Freitas
It's Mauricio here. I might add a quick comment on that. Not every time do you see a high, huge traffic Website, it means that they are making money with AdSense. Because each person visiting has a different profile in the Website, we will have a different profile. You can make money on this program if you have a small site; but with good positioning, good color and have the right ads tied into the group that reads your site.
Just an example, last February, I had a day that my Website was on the Slashdot twice on the same day. I mean, it's not very usual to be on the Slashdot and being twice on the same day was a huge traffic. And I have to say, there was probably the lowest click rate that I had on the site. Because people went there, driven by Slashdot, to read an article and they really didn't want to read anything else about that. It's just like a bunch of lemmings. They go to a Website, look at a page and go away. So that was not my target audience.
So having the right site with the correct content to the right audience helps a lot. And then you have to play with your ads, make sure they are in the right position to attract attention; make sure that they have the right colors, they blend with content. Do what was discussed in the previous hour during this seminar.
B. Berman
Yes, it's funny. I had the same experience where the term hybrid cars was a sample term put into MSN's new search and I got tons of traffic in one day, but everyone gave a quick look-see and ran away. So I agree with you, too.
R. Diswanathan
Okay. Well, thank you very much.
Coordinator
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Joyce from RobesPlus.net. Please proceed with your question.
M. Joyce
Hello. I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you're not supposed to. And I don't remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads because they look interesting and I want to see what's at the site. So is that detrimental in some way?
K. Malone
You should never click on your own ads. Yes, that's sort of chief among the terms and conditions. And if it happens too often, we will catch it and many publishers have been terminated for that. So that's a big issue for us.
P. Ho
But I do want to mention that I don't know how many of you know about our preview tool. It works on Internet Explorer and on Windows Machines right now. And basically if you go to our FAQ and search for the preview tool, you can download that, and on any page, it's a right-click tool. You can find out what kind of ads would show up on your page and you'll probably see the ads that you're interested in showing up there.
So it doesn't mean that you can't find out information that is interesting to you, but we just kind of also want to make sure that we are kind of monitoring that situation. So we recommend using the preview tool to find out what the advertiser and that domain and then go from that preview tool.
K. Malone
The reason why clicking on your own ads is such a problem is that if all the publishers did that often, advertisers would cease to be interested and none of us would make any money. So I think one of the things that Google does really well is balance the interest of the advertisers, the publishers and the users to make sure that a virtuous cycle doesn't become a vicious cycle.
Do we have other questions on the line?
Coordinator
Your next question is another follow-up question. This comes from Edgar Lazar. Please proceed with your question.
E. Lazar
Hello. Going back to the forums again, one quick question. Are Google ads allowed to be placed on the login page, form registration page or forum FAQ page? And my last question would be, what is the advantage of joining the premium AdSense program? Provided that we meet the traffic standards, versus the regular AdSense?
P. Ho
For your first question, the login pages, registration pages, we don't allow ads on those pages, mostly because there isn't really any content on the pages for us to make sure that there are good, relevant ads.
And then for your second question regarding the premium program, they do have a few requirements that you kind of had mentioned. And they do have a few different features that are available to them.
Basically, there's a process of kind of agreeing from both parties in a contract and making an agreement both from your side and saying how much percentage of the site might have ads and also on our side.
E. Lazar
So I'm assuming that it's just a custom rev share contract? It changes the revenue. It would make a different amount of money than with regular AdSense because with regular AdSense we don't control the percentage of the rev share. So premium AdSense, from what I'm understanding from your answer, premium AdSense allows rev share negotiation?
P. Ho
Yes, that's correct.
E. Lazar
Thank you.
Coordinator
You have no further questions in the queue.
K. Malone
Okay. I want to thank you all very much for participating. It's a great pleasure to hear from all of you and we're looking forward to hearing more from you in the future and getting more great ideas.
Thank you very much.
P. Ho
Thanks.
Coordinator
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation and you may now disconnect. Have a great day.
