AdWords and AdSense: a perfect pair

We recently caught up with Peter Clee, a publisher who has seen success with both AdSense and AdWords. Peter's main site, LondonNet.co.uk, was launched in the summer of 1996 and offers a guide to arts, entertainment, city info, and news about London. Peter also runs www.hotelgenie.com and www.myflatincannes.com. We'd like to share some of Peter's insights with you about monetising his sites with AdSense and his experience using AdWords to attract visitors.

Inside AdSense: How does AdSense impact your business?
Peter Clee: It has reinforced our view that creating good, relevant content is what we, as publishers, should be all about. AdSense is a stress-free and rapid way to support new sections and features on your site, ensuring you have a degree of monetisation before you even consider additional revenue streams. If a section works well with AdSense you quickly learn it is worth investing more time and energy into expanding its content. Additionally, with future redesigns of the site we will be thinking of how to incorporate AdSense-friendly ad positioning from the get-go.

IA: What problems have you faced in the past in monetising your site?
PC: Over the last eleven years we have had time to build up a portfolio of revenue streams across the site. I guess the important thing is not to get too disheartened when a new method flops. I’d say about one in ten of our ‘really great ideas’ actually pays off, one in five really flops, and the rest do somewhere in the middle. The key is to nurture your winners and improve your near things, while quietly disposing of the failures. Thankfully, AdSense has proved to be a winner from the moment we implemented it onto our sites.

IA: What has been your overall experience with AdWords?
PC: It’s particularly useful for supporting new, smaller sites such as www.myflatincannes.com to create a web presence and readership. With a more established site such as LondonNet.co.uk, it's great at boosting strategic parts of the site and attracting new readers to key revenue generating areas. Also, the system is easy to set up and operate. To maximise your returns you need to make regular checks to ensure your bid positions and keywords are working effectively.

IA: How exactly do you use AdWords to achieve your goals?
PC: We research a cluster of relevant keywords and test the predicted and actual bid ranges. Then we spend time to fine-tune their effectiveness, where appropriate, using the conversion measures. Like most things it takes a little time to fine tune and maximise your returns.

IA: Would you recommend AdWords to other publishers?
PC: Absolutely. It’s a major weapon in the web marketer’s arsenal.

If you'd like to learn more about advertising with Google AdWords, visit the AdWords homepage to get started.

Posted by Alan Carbery – AdSense UK Optimisation Team

Promote your feeds and gadgets with iGoogle

Have you heard of iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage? Well, tens of millions of users have, and with a just a little bit of effort you can share that traffic.

iGoogle allows users to bring together their favorite content and services from around the web by adding feeds and gadgets to their Google homepage. Let's start with the basics of what feeds and gadgets are, and how you can create them for your own site:

• A feed is a format that allows your content to be delivered (and subscribed to) on the Web. This allows users to preview your content wherever they go, making it easier for them to find out whats new on your site and reminding them to come back. To learn more about feeds, check out Feedburner for everything you need from basic set-up to advanced performance tracking and monetization tools.
  
  
• Gadgets are mini-applications created using simple HTML and JavaScript. You can present more complex information in a gadget, such as a calendar, and also help users interact with your content, for example through search. To find out more about gadgets, check out the Google Gadget Center.
  
  

Once you have a feed or gadget -- and for those of you who already do -- you can start promoting it. As a first step, make sure to submit your feed or gadget to the iGoogle directory. Promotion can help new readers find your content and deepen engagement with your existing readers every time they visit their iGoogle page -- all of which can lead to more traffic for you site.

Don't stop there, though. Gadgets and feeds are ranked in the directory according to popularity, so make sure to feature your gadget or feed prominently on your site. One easy way to do so is with the ‘Add to Google’ button. Simply fill out some basic information, insert a small snippet of HTML into your site, and you’ll be ready to go.

Want to find out more about how to raise awareness of your feed or gadget? Take a look at our step-by-step guide.

Posted by Matt Ghering - iGoogle Product Marketing

Creating a live survey for your site

Have you ever wanted to poll your website visitors on their interests or ask them for feedback on your site content? Now, using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can create a simple form, collect responses from your visitors in an online spreadsheet, and publish the results on your website -- in a few easy steps. All of the data will be kept in your secure, password-protected spreadsheet.


Here's how it works:

Create a new spreadsheet, build your survey form, and invite users to fill out the form. You can send out an email to people you'd like to fill out the survey (maybe to a mailing list you have), or generate some HTML code that allows you to embed the survey directly on your web page.


Your visitors won't need to sign in to Google Docs to fill out the form. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet, and you can receive notifications by email when submissions occur. You can even keep a closer eye on responses by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Finally, in your spreadsheet, you can create graphs and charts showing the results, and then publish those charts back on your site as gadgets. As the responses trickle in, the published charts will update automatically.


Check out the Google Docs Help Center for more detailed instructions on how to create your own live survey. I hope you'll be better able to get feedback from visitors to your site using this tool.

Posted by Andrew Chang - Google Docs Marketing Manager

Announcing Google Chrome

Today, we're happy to announce the release of the beta version of a new open-source browser: Google Chrome. We encourage you to download it and give it a try.

Google Chrome features a simple and intuitive user interface and an entirely new architecture designed for speed, security, and stability. You can find out more about other Google Chrome features here.

For publishers, you should see the ads on your pages continue to appear as normal in Google Chrome; we built Google Chrome so that most webmasters and site owners shouldn't have to make changes to their sites. If your site is compatible with Safari, it should also be compatible with Google Chrome, as they are both built using WebKit. If you have any questions regarding compatibility with your site, feel free to refer to our webmaster site.

To learn more about why we built Google Chrome, see our official Google blog.

Posted by Brian Rakowski - Google Chrome Product Manager

Maximizing revenue by exposing your channels to the right advertisers

As you may know, you can set up your custom channels so that they're targetable by advertisers - these targetable custom channels are known as ad placements. By selecting the 'Allow advertisers to target this channel' checkbox on the channel creation page, you can enable brand advertisers to target their content to your audience directly on a CPM or CPC basis.

Creating ad placements allows them to show up in AdWords, so that advertisers who create placement-targeted campaigns can include your content directly. What many publishers don't know is that this also makes your content available to Google's internal sales teams, who work closely with many advertisers looking to target a certain audience or type of content. With this in mind, we thought it would be important to mention a few best practices which will help advertisers and our internal sales teams target your content to help you maximize revenue:

First, take time to make sure your channel names and descriptions accurately describe your content and audience. By including descriptions that closely reflect your content, you'll also attract advertisers from those areas. Naming and descriptions are important.

On that note, our second tip: be very careful about changing the name of an ad placement. If an advertiser has already targeted one of your specific channels, the channel will become unavailable to the advertiser once you change its name. If you wish to rename a channel, we recommend creating a second channel with the new name, and then attaching both channels to your ad unit. Remember, you can attach up to five custom channels to an ad unit.

Third, use the 300x250 medium rectangle, opted in to both text and image ads. This is one type of targetable ad unit that's in high demand by Google's CPM advertisers. We recommend placing these units in line with your content, and describing them as they relate to the content. This combination of format and placement enables advertisers to use image, text, or rich media (including gadget ads) effectively. In feeds, we recommend opting in to both image and text in all ad units, as many of these advertisers only target with image ads into feeds.

Finally, as always, the most important tip for maximizing revenue from your ad placements is to create quality content that is visually appealing and attracts a quality audience. Many brand advertisers look at all placements before placing an advertising order to make sure the destination sites are in line with their brand and attract the type of audience they wish to target for a particular campaign.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - AdSense Product Manager

Make a date with data in Google Analytics

Here in AdSense, we’re big on data. From spreadsheets and graphs to weekly reports and metrics, we constantly turn to numbers when running our business. In a similar vein, we've heard your requests for more data to help you run your AdSense websites, which is why we’re excited to announce the integration of one of our personal favorite reporting tools, Google Analytics, with AdSense. We're gradually rolling out this functionality to publishers, and you'll see an invitation link at the top of your 'Overview' and 'Advanced Reports' pages when it's been enabled for your account.

By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you'll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.

We've highlighted a few ways to use the integrated metrics below, but we encourage you to be creative! Come up with your own to discover how useful (and fun) new data can be:

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
  
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the 'Referring sites' report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
  
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site's AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.
  

Again, this feature is not yet available to all our publishers, but please keep checking your account for an invitation. In the meantime, you can take a look at our demo to learn more about the reports you'll have access to:

Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support