Hello
I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time.
I run a medical forum for patients to ask medical questions. My forum has several medical categories with different topics.
So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately.
I also activated “placement targeting” for the best performing ad placements.
However I did not realize the full potential of “placement targeting” until yesterday after I talked to my direct advertising marketer:
What is the main goal of an advertiser?
Answer: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert.
Is wider or narrower ad targeting more effective?
Answer: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform.
Just as info to you
CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about “cough” or “skin rash” are 40-50$. (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs)
Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM.
Yes, it makes that much of a difference.
What did I do?
I have several AD Placements on my forum but I did this change to the best performing AD which is the large rectangle above the fold next to the welcome message.
What I did is I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc.
Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown.
Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before.
Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum.
Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best.
For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum “alternative medicine” and his ads are only shown to people interested in “alternative medicine”.
This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
How do you handle placement targeting?
For anyone who is not familiar with Adsense Channels should read my thread The Secret to using Channels first.
Kind regards
admin
I did this 3 years ago and totally forgot until I read the new Adsense Blog post:
DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace
admin
Currently I did not had the time to dig deep into my stats to see if my AdSense Placement Targeting had an effect.
It is more of a long run change anyways.
It will pay off in the future, I am sure of that.
If you see eCPM increasing it probably means what you did is working as it has increased either CTR or CPC or both.
In your case, you use placement targeting for the purpose of increasing the eCPM by having better paid ads, even if paid by CPM it doesn't matter to you.
The end goal is to see an increase in eCPM, so you can tell if it's working or not.
Targeted Ad Placement:
- September: 3,07% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
- October: 3,74% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
- November: 4,89% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
Compared to September in November the placement targeted Ad impressions raised about 154%.Placement targeted Ads (PTA) earnings vcompared to Contextual Ads (CA) Earnings:
- September: PTA earned on average 92,3% the CPM of CA.
- October: PTA earned on average 96,3% the CPM of CA
- November: PTA earned on average 101,6% the CPM of CA
Compared to September in November the placement targeted CPM raised about 153%.Seems promising so far.
In your AdSense Performance report select last month,
and then select display by "Targeting types".
I published my stats in this thread here about the increase in placement targeting.
Care to show us your stats?
What Ad formats did you made available for Placement targeting? Did you put up a good description for your placement targeting channels? What about Ad Planer, did you claim your site in Google Ad Planer and added a good description as well as making Analytics stats available?
Normally standard Ad formats like 300x250px, 468x60px and 728x90px tend to work better for placement targeting than Ad formats that are not market standard. This is due to more Ad inventory being available for standard Ad formats.
But this is where 50:50 split tests utilizing an Ad Server come into play.
You can only be sure what works best if you constantly test new things on your site.
I for one have always tests running to increase my revenue.
I am using the formats you mentioned and put in a good description on the target channels even siting analytic numbers in there along with the common language "this section gets the most traffic, etc."
https://www.google.com/adplanner/
I think I "claimed" my site a long time ago but am just going to check now, and will also check on how I specified my placements and the descriptions I used, to see if there is anything I can improve before deleting the lot of them!