You're invited to an AdSense Phone Consultation

AdSense Phone Consultation

[kd454]

Got a message when I logged into adsense just a sec ago.. "You're invited to an AdSense Phone Consultation" give a reps email to contact..

Anyone else get this?

This should be interesting..

[rros]

Obviously, I would love to see this in my panel.

I spent much of the last 10 years monetizing traffic but never devoted effort to adsense. Now, started on this three months ago and feel like am running inside a hamster wheel. Going nowhere fast.

Lucky you.

[ember]

I got the invitation, too. Worries me a bit....

[kd454]

I am going to do it, I am thinking it is not going to help but it is only for a 2 week commitment.. Hope it helps the site is already doing good I was not going to get greedy.

[HuskyPup]

Just what is the selection criteria for one of these consultations or a rep? In 7 years I've never been contacted by anyone about anything or is it possible someone's taken a look at my site and said "Nothing we can recommend here"?

[timmNY]

I also got this message in my adsense account center. I'm leaning towards taking them up on it because it's only for 2 weeks anyways. I would imagine it is because when you make decent money with them(for them) they want to help maximize your/their profits.

Anyways, to the other people who received this message...do you use adsense behind password protected pages? Has your adsense revenue recently increased greatly?

Just curious as to why they are sending out these messages to certain people.

[Lame_Wolf]

Just curious as to why they are sending out these messages to certain people.

I remember a few years back when the FBI sent out letters to offenders they could not catch. They told them they had won a TV set etc. then waited for you to turn up, and bust you.

Seriously, there must be something in common with the people receiving one. May be it is the amount of visitors, the income may be within a certain range, you may have the same niche, who knows.

Good luck to those who receive one.

[timmNY]

I'm not worried that I've done anything wrong because I know I haven't. That doesn't mean I trust 100% any company to do the right thing.

However, my adsense earnings are in the thousands per month...perhaps that's the reason...I'm hoping so...otherwise it would be a very very misleading email to send out to the people who make them the most money.

[timmNY]

I would also like to add that my page views are in the millions per month as well. I'm just trying to find the common thread between those that received this email. Although it may be obvious.

[netmeg]

Last year AdSense sent me an email asking if I'd be willing to have a rep look over my site and make some suggestions for better performance. I said sure, why not, and he did and sent me a JPG of how he thought the ads should be laid out. Surprisingly, he did NOT suggest I make use of all available ad blocks. I think I had to commit to trying it for 30 days. It was off season, and I did. Gathered up the data, and after 30 days, made a sort of hybrid between his ideas and my own. Having a great year. No complaints from me.

I suspect this is a wider scale of the same thing. Google has a lot of data. If all they're asking is two weeks, I would sure give it a try.

[sid786]

Lucky.

Had an 'unexpected' phone conversation with Adsense team last year, and it was really helpful. Earnings picked up by 20-30% after implementing those tips.

I guess they are back now, monitoring adsense account so that 'we' could mint moolahs..

[ember]

My adsense earnings are in the thousands per month, too, and I only use one ad block per page. Maybe they want me to add more. I suppose I will talk to them.

[sid786]

Yep. From adsense point of view: implementing more ad blocks guarantees a better 'overall' income.

Also, they did suggest me to use Google admanager, which is not a piece of cake to learn.

Keep us in the loop, ember :)

[kd454]

I am not sure of how they are picking adsense accounts, I pretty much have all my sites adsense set up the same way.

The site they want to go over is my #2 site, my #1 site doubles the income of #2.

I to make multiple thousands per month with adsense, guess they want to help me make more in turn helping them make more.

I will report back after I have implemented and tested there advise.

[snickles121]

I didnt get one of those. Obviously they probably couldnt send those all out at once or maybe they just goto certain people.

[iNetGiant]

It has been a while since we replied back to them, no one called yet.

[FrostyMug]

I got an email, and then a follow up call! Guy left me a vm, with his info, email addy. I'm not sure I should call back, maybe better stay neutral? He did say the consultation helped increase earnings for other sites.

I'm not a big site though, less than $2k/month, half a million page views.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Thanks for all of your feedback on this topic. I just wanted to confirm that we're testing out different ways to reach out to groups of AdSense publishers to optimize their AdSense implementations. While I can't guarantee that everyone will receive an offer at this time, I hope that those who do will give our suggestions a try. In the meantime, I encourage you to ensure that you're opted in to receiving 'Performance Suggestion' emails from our team so that you can be included in any future emails our team sends out.

If you've received an message with an offer and aren't sure of its legitimacy, there are a few ways to verify that it came from the AdSense team:

1. Any communications you receive through the Message Center in your AdSense account will always be from the AdSense team.

2. If you receive an email that asks you to reply, the reply-to address should be to an "@google.com" email address

3. We'll never ask you to reply with sensitive information like your AdSense password, or ask you to download login forms to fill in and return to us.

ASA

[ember]

I talked with the rep this morning for about 45 minutes. He gave some suggestions that had not occurred to me and asked that I stay in touch as I implement them. He said he's never had anyone tell him the suggestions didn't help, so we shall see. Most of all it was nice to talk to a Google human and be reassured that we are well within Adsense TOS. I enjoyed talking with him.

[Lame_Wolf]

Welcome ASA,
Nice to see someone stand up and take up the gauntlet :)

[Swanny007]

I have not seen that message but that's OK... ;-)

So what suggestions are they offering up? Anything besides "enable image ads" and "experiment with placement"? Curious minds want to know....

I guess the real benefits here are:
a) you find out there are humans behind AdSense
b) you get customized suggestions for your site rather than the generic suggestions

Sound about right?

[nickreynolds]

Anyone reply to this?
Anything worth sharing here?

[Edge]

2 week commitment

I got the same notification, the commitment stopped me.

Thier recommendations are always the same - more and bigger ads above the fold and in the middle of content.

If I thought they could ever tell me something I don't or can't know - they would get my listen.

I have spent thousands of hours qweeking my site over the years - and I still try diffent things.

I don't need a coach nor a driver - I need backend competitive information and/or a premium account..

[bcc1234]

2 week commitment

I had this phone chat two days ago. The two week thing is not a strict requirement. The person I talked to simply asked me to implement the changes, let them run enough to gather enough stats and get back to her with any feedback I have. I guess they ask for it to make sure they are not wasting time with those consultations. After all, if you are not even going to try, then what's the point of discussing anything.

Overall, she made some suggestions, but nothing was forced upon me. So I wouldn't worry about having to comply.

As a matter of fact, I turned down a few of the suggestions outright because it would be too distracting for my users.
I run a forum with 80% repeat traffic, so possible backlash against an increase in ads is a real issue for me.

She seemed to understand and respect that user experience has to be taken into account. So no problems there either.

As for the actual suggestions, most of them were pretty much what you would expect: more ads above the fold, blend ads with the background, use palettes that match the link colors of your site, left-justify ads when possible, surround ad blocks with content, make sure image ads and third party networks are enabled, etc.

I can't say I heard anything new, but what the consultation made me do is get off my ass and actually play around with changes. Something I've been planning to do for a long time, but always put away for later.

As a result, I'm seeing a 30% increase in eCPM. Not sure if it will hold (probably will go down once the users get user to the new palettes/locations), but nevertheless, I would say this phone chat was worth having.

[NickandSara]

I'd love a phone chat with Adsense today, maybe they could tell me exactly what is going on, because this is NOT funny anymore.

[FourDegreez]

When you accept the offer, how are you contacted? Do they call the phone number listed with your AdSense account? Is there an e-mail heads up, "Hey, I'm going to call you tomorrow around 3pm"?

Just wondering, because I recently replied to accept the offer.

[bcc1234]

The day before, they sent me an email asking if the phone number on file is correct and the time of the call would be good.

[ember]

I also implemented the changes suggested and earnings have jumped 30%. It's been six days, not long enough to be a real test, but it is looking good so far. The gentleman with whom I spoke said he's never had a webmaster who was unhappy after implementing the changes.

[Even_Steven]

I got a call a couple days ago from AdSense on this. A gal gave me some tips on increasing revenue. They weren't anything that I didn't already know about. But it was nice that AdSense could give us publishers a one-on-one consultation. At least I know there isn't any glaring AdSense issues on my end.

[bumpski]

I haven't been contacted by Adsense but I have a proven method (at least in the past) to increase earnings 40% on certain types of sites. So this is a tip Adsense. For smaller, niche, sites please allow Webmasters to disable CPM ads. We may all make a lot more earnings (Google included)

I still firmly believe that for smaller sites, say 50,000 page views a month, (niche type sites) Pay per clicks (PPC) ads produce substantially more earnings than CPM ads.

[webmasterworld.com ]

At the link above you can see my stats.
On August 16th, 2006 I asked Adsense to discontinue CPM ads for my account and they promptly did so. The change occurred on the 18th, And WOW:

For periods of 10, 30, and almost 60 days before and after this change, EARNINGS after Aug 18th are consistently UP approximately 40%.

Unfortunately for me when Adsense implemented "third party ads" a couple years back it appears at least for me the disabling of CPM ads has been removed. (You had to send Adsense an email request for this change) Since this was a phased in change I can't say whether I had a 40% decline after CPM ads were reinstated.

It does appear that sometime in the last two years or so Adsense managed to increase the eCPM of CPM ads substantially, but even today on low traffic pages PPC ads outperform CPM ads for overall earnings.

How can I tell. I have URL channels for many pages. I sort the results by eCPM. You will see eCPM amounts where there are no clicks at all for some pages. These URL channels are obviously only producing earnings due to CPM ads. If the earnings for CPM ads were competitive the URL channels showing clicks would be somewhat randomly interspersed with URL channels showing earnings without clicks. This is not the case, eCPM is almost always higher for the channels that received clicks! Oddly enough just for reference when you do this eCPM sort, the remaining channels that have no earnings whatsoever, but have impressions, are shown in reverse alphabetical order. Why is this oddity important to know? Because you will see URL channels with zero eCPM, but they are producing earnings! What? Yep, I'm whispering; using this knowledge one can detect eCPM's less than 0.33 cents. Yes that's 0.0033 dollars.
I will say however that somewhere in the last two years Adsense has made CPM ad rates more competitive so I don't know that I see rates this ridiculously low any more.

So I would love to have Adsense review my sites data 10,30,60 days before and after August 18th, 2006, THEN I would love to have Adsense perform the same 60 day test today (disabling CPM ads for 60 days or so) then review the site in question's earnings!

Why may CPM ads be a problem for some sites?

Adsense has a huge inventory of CPM ads to show and this is great for high traffic web pages. But these high traffic pages must dwarf the earnings data for the same CPM ad showing on a low traffic niche page. Why does this matter?
Because the CPM ads displace the better performing PPC ads (again for lower traffic, niche sites). If a CPM ad is showing, a PPC ad is not!
I have numerous low traffic, content intent, instructional pages that might not earn even a penny for a weeks CPM impressions. But if there are PPC ads, one click can be 1,2,3,4,5,6 even 7 dollars! It would takes thousands of CPM impressions to earn that much.
This is a statistical variance problem Adsense has not, and probably cannot account for; trying to compare bids for the same ad for a very high traffic page versus a low traffic page.
Only the test I describe can do it, and the test requires Adsense to stop CPM ads for a period of at least a month for many low traffic pages.

Wow well this got to be quite a post.
But dear Adsense wouldn't you like to be earning 20 to 40% more on low traffic niche sites?
To save a lot of work please think about a CPM ad on/off switch, restoring control to Webmasters. Adsense could then quickly acquire statistical data, monitoring Webmasters performing this experiment!

I doubt this will be done, only because major Advertisers want to blast "branding" ads all over the internet and Adsense still makes this service too cheap! It's not likely a person visiting a page about "repairing hot water heat widgets" is going to click on an Giant Insurance Company ad, but remember this ad is displacing the PPC ads! The earnings Adsense is missing is peanuts, but I'd like to have some of those peanuts Adsense is dropping!