‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Don’t forget to optimize

We’d like to share a final holiday reminder about our placement targeting series and summarize the tips we’ve shared over the past few weeks.

1. Make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by AdWords advertisers with ad placements. These easy-to-implement changes will make your website and channels more marketable to advertisers, which in turn will increase your overall earning potential.

2. Market your website with DoubleClick Ad Planner so advertisers can easily locate sites like yours that match their target audiences.

3. Optimize your ad units by enabling both text and image ads, using top-performing ad unit sizes, and placing ads ‘above the fold’ so that they’re immediately visible to your users.

We hope you enjoyed our placement targeting series. Check out the Help Center or watch the video below to learn more.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Charise Wong - Inside AdSense team

‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Display advertising

Over the past several weeks, we’ve given you tips about how to take advantage of placement targeting as advertiser spend increases during the holiday season. In this final post of our “‘Tis the season for placement targeting” series, we’ll take a step back to talk about a popular topic that's generated buzz around Google and the online advertising industry: display advertising. This is especially relevant to this series, as the goal of placement targeting is to offer premium space to advertisers so they can effectively reach their audiences. And these days, when you're talking about premium space, you're usually talking about space that's devoted to display ads.

Advertising on Google started out with four lines of text. In addition to the original text ads, you’re probably familiar with the image, video, and rich media ads we now offer. Did you know that, other than ads shown with search results, more than 40 percent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads? More and more advertisers are creating display ad campaigns as an interactive and engaging means to reach users. To take full advantage of these ads, refer to our last post on enabling ad units to show text and image ads.

Display advertising is a big area of focus for Google. We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can make another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

To learn more about Google’s position on display advertising and the steps we’re taking to push the thinking to the next level, read our recent blog post on the Official Google Blog.

This wraps up our “‘Tis the Season for placement targeting” series. We hope you learned a bit more about the impact of placement targeting and how you can take advantage of this feature to earn more from your online content

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

‘Tis the Season for Placement Targeting: Optimize Your Ad Units

Last week, we discussed DoubleClick Ad Planner, a media planning tool to help you improve your placement targeting. Now that you’ve made your website visible to advertisers with Ad Planner and ad placements, we want to help you ensure that your ad units are also visible to advertisers and ready to be targeted. Here’s how to take advantage of advertiser spend with your ad units:

1. Implement your ad units above the fold and near your content, where users are already engaging with your site. “Above the fold” refers to the area on a page that a user can see without scrolling down.

2. Where possible, use top-performing ad sizes like the medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), leaderboard (728x90), and wide skyscraper (160x600).

3. Enable your ad units to show text and image ads, so that all relevant, available ad inventory is competing to appear on your site. Many advertiser campaigns are made up of image ads, so we highly recommend activating this feature to take full advantage.

Once you've made the changes, not only will your ad placements be ready for this holiday season, but they’ll also be targetable by advertisers in future ad campaigns.

To learn more about these topics, check out our YouTube videos on image ads and high performing ad units, or read more in our Help Center.

Check back next week for more ‘Tis the Season for Placement Targeting tips!

Posted by Charise Wong - Inside AdSense team

‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Market your site with DoubleClick Ad Planner

Last week, we introduced you to placement targeting as a great way to capitalize on the increase in advertiser spend during the holiday season. This week, we’re kicking off our three-part optimization series to help you maximize your earnings by taking advantage of DoubleClick Ad Planner. Ad Planner can help you market your site, make it easier for advertisers to search for you, and improve the data that these advertisers can see.

As you may recall from last week’s post, the first step to enabling placement-targeted ads to appear on your pages is to set up your custom channels as ad placements. Ad placements are specific groups of ad units where an advertiser can choose to place their ads using placement targeting. This enables advertisers to better identify websites that reach their target audiences based on the descriptions publishers provide about their sites, describing the content of their pages or the type of users who visit them. Turning custom channels into ad placements is simple. To learn more, check out our YouTube video and visit our Help Center.

Once you’ve set up your ad placements, we encourage you to try out DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool that helps advertisers find the sites their audiences are likely to visit and helps publishers make their sites easier to target.

In Ad Planner, you can claim the sites you own and customize their descriptions. For each site, you can also add up to five categories that describe your site's content, and the types, sizes, and formats of ads that your site supports. Doing this allows advertisers to easily find ad placement descriptions that match the interests of their target audiences. More targeted ads leads to a better user experience on your site and a greater opportunity to increase your earnings. For more information on how to get started, watch this brief introduction to DoubleClick Ad Planner and sign up today.

Check back next week for more ‘tis the season for placement targeting tips!

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

‘Tis the season for placement targeting

With the holiday season fast approaching, everyone is spending more online. As consumers start shopping for gifts, searching for holiday activities, and booking vacations, advertisers are putting more of their marketing dollars online to reach these potential customers. This means there is an increased demand for the ad space on your site and an opportunity for you to earn more. To help you capitalize on this trend, we recommend you take advantage of placement targeting.

Many advertisers create targeted brand campaigns at this time of year that are shown on AdSense sites in the Google Display Network. In fact, 99% of Google’s 1000 largest advertisers run campaigns on the Display Network. To ensure their brand is noticed by the right shoppers, advertisers will often use placement targeting to show their ads on websites in the Display Network that cater to their target audiences.

You can take advantage of this holiday increase in advertiser spend, and help advertisers placement target specific sections of your site using a feature called ad placements. By creating an ad placement, you’ll make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by AdWords advertisers.

Imagine a sport shoe manufacturer. To ensure his shoes get to the right consumers for the holidays, he may want to select sites within the Display Network that appeal to 25- to 34-year-old athletic males looking to purchase athletic shoes. As a publisher with a sports site, you can create ad placements for specific segments of your site so that the sport shoe manufacturer can find you based on these criteria. You can provide descriptions of your site, general demographic segment / audience information, and where the ads appear on your site. Placement targeting connects you directly to the advertisers who want to reach your readers, and are ready to spend their holiday budgets to do just that.

In the coming weeks, we’ll post more tips on how to make the most of placement targeting. In the meantime, check out the Help Center and this video to learn more about placement targeting and how you can get started. The sooner you do so, the sooner advertisers can see your ad placements and potentially include you in their holiday campaigns!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team