Australian webinar for AdSense publishers

A YouTube video containing the entire seminar

[james007]

Earlier - promoted at 1.30pm AEST (but actually airing an hour earlier, at 1.30pm AEDT) was a webinar run by Google AdSense with two AdSense partner companies presenting.

The topic was viewability, which I found quite interesting. You should strive for at least 50% viewability to get the bigger advertisers, apparently; and viewability is directly related to your earnings.

There's some interesting data in the middle, showing a few tests relating to ad placement. If you have a good-performing ad in the right place, it's better in terms of revenue than a few poorly-performing ads in different places. The best way to earn from mobile, it seems, is a medium-rectangle that displays on the page fold. Very interesting to see; I've changed my ad placements as a result. We'll see how they work.

The full webinar is here: [youtube.com...]

[IanTurner]

Interesting on the medium rectangle - given the stricture on displaying a 300x250 above the fold.

[james007]

Also interesting that the first thing they told us to do was to futz around with 'sticky ads' - something that you need permission for (and something that, when I asked, was told "no, no, no.")

Very early days on data from doing it "this way", but am seeing, not surprisingly, quite a large drop. I need to go and check I've done everything right...

[james007]

...a week later, thought I'd report back. I had done something wrong. Have fixed that now. Revenue is almost identical to where I was a month ago, but with one less ad on the page. Pages load faster as a result and they look better. So that's nice.

[Dimitri]

Yes, sticky ads seem to be cleary forbidden by the Adsense placement policy. So I am surprised they encourage using it?! Or may be it's considered acceptable now? Could be great to have more official words on this. Also, I never understood why it was forbidden, certainly that some were abusing it in a way.

(On mobile, there is an option to have sticky ads at the bottom, but it's Adsense doing it itself.)

[james007]

Sticky ads are acceptable if you ask first, and Google have specific implementation rules for them.

[Dimitri]

>> You should strive for at least 50% viewability to get the bigger advertisers <<

In your opinion, is that at the level of an account (all sites, all ad slots), at the level of a site (all ad slots of a site) , or at the level of each individual ad slots ?

[james007]

I am hoping it is per slot, since I am at 46% currently per-site.

I am suspecting it is per targetable channel, and in which case one of mine is 56%, and one 41%. We will see...

[Dimitri]

By the way, thank you james007 from sharing this webinar video.

[NickMNS]

I don't know how I missed this. Awesome video thanks James007. There is lot of ideas to mull over.

[ken_b]

I wonder what it takes to get approved for the "sticky ads" they talked about.

I'm not real fond of that concept, and don't much appreciate it when I come across it on a site.

I was a bit surprised they only mentioned the 320x100 more or less in passing.

[NickMNS]

@ken_b a really nice implementation IMO is wired.com. It stickies the ad in the right side bar so that it follows down the page as you scroll. But only until you reach the half way point when it meets a stationary ad unit. Then when you scroll past the stationary ad, a new ad-unit appears and it follows you to the end of the article. Three units, per page, but they are always viewable. It is not too intrusive since it is off to the side but an ad is always visible.