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Google Ad Manager

How does Ad Manager work?

Ad Manager helps you to define and sell advertising opportunities on your site.

Defining your site's inventory (defining advertising opportunities)

Imagine printing a hard copy of your home page and cutting out all of the ads. Each empty space is an opportunity to advertise. Ad Manager defines each space as an ad slot, which includes a name, description, and ad dimensions.

Each empty space in the page above represents an ad slot.

An ad slot defined within Ad Manager doesn't do anything until you link it with your site using an ad tag. When a user views a page on your site, the ad tag, which is just a snippet of JavaScript, makes a call to Ad Manager and fetches an ad for display within the ad slot.

Your site might include hundreds or even thousands of ad slots. It would prove tedious, to say the least, to have to sell individual ad slots to advertisers, so the next step is to group logically associated ad slots into placements. A placement is a group of related ad slots that might interest advertisers.

Each bucket represents a placement; the first related
to sports and the second defined by ad size.

Imagine your site is structured like a traditional newspaper with sections for sports, finance, and weather.

Sports placement: You might define a placement that includes all ad slots from your sports section, a placement that would likely interest an advertiser promoting athletic shoes, for example.
Banner placement: You might also choose to define a placement that associates all 728x90 banner ad slots on your site. A different advertiser might wish to promote a new soda and would find a run- of-site banner placement ideal for their needs.

You may choose to organize your placements anyway you wish, but your choice should reflect how you intend to sell your inventory. Different ways to organize placements include:

All ad slots on your site (ROS or Run of Site)
A single ad slot that appears as a banner on your homepage
All skyscraper ad slots across your entire site
All skyscraper ad slots across your sports section
All ad slots in the sports section of your site

The table below provides a simple example of how you might structure your inventory:

Selling your site's inventory

Once defined, you may start selling parts of your inventory by creating an order, an agreement between you and an advertiser that includes an invoice number (optional), start and end dates, and contact information.

Each order includes one or more line items. A line item specifies the advertiser's commitment to purchase a specific number of impressions (CPM), clicks (CPC), or time (CPD) on certain dates at a certain price. Each line item also includes where an advertiser's ads will appear and, optionally, when (during the week) and to whom an ad will get displayed.

This order includes two line items. Each line item defines inventory (placements),
targeting criteria, price, and delivery dates.

Imagine that you maintain a site structured like a traditional newspaper, with sections for business, news, weather, and sports. Suppose a bank wants to advertise on your site in order to promote a new savings account offer as well as home loans. An order with this advertiser might include two line items:

With an order signed, the last step is to go into a line item and upload the advertiser's creatives (ads) to Ad Manager so that they'll get called when a user views your site's pages. In other words, you should upload one (or more) creative per line item unique to an ad campaign.

For example, in the scenario above, in which a bank wants to purchase your inventory for their saving account and home loan advertising campaigns, you would likely upload 728x90, 160x600, and 300x250 savings account creatives to line item 1 (GBank Savings Account - ROS), since the line item is targeting multiple placements that contain ad slots of these sizes.

AdSense for Domains

Step 1: Add a new domain to your account

You can add domains to your account in one of two ways: by adding them into the text box line-by-line or by uploading a CSV spreadsheet. Remember to specify the language of your domains as well, and note that you can upload a maximum of 1500 domains.

After the domains are added, they'll appear under the Pending subtab of the AdSense for domains page. All domains submitted are subject to Google's approval per our program policies.

Step 2: Modify your domain registrar settings

In order to allow Google to display ads on your domains, you'll need to modify some settings at your domain registrar. This is necessary to ensure ads show up correctly on your domain. We've provided a step-by-step guide to assist with pointing your domain to Google's server. If you've registered your domain with a common domain registrar like GoDaddy, Enom, Moniker, or others, customized step-by-step instructions are available. We've also provided generic instructions in case your specific registrar isn't listed in our guide.

After you've modified your registrar's settings, your domains should automatically move from the Pending subtab to the Active subtab as soon as the records validate (usually 48 hours or less). If your domain remains in the Pending subtab after this time, check our validation status information page to determine why. If your domain has moved to the Disapproved subtab, learn why this may have happened.

Step 3: Customize using colors

You can customize your domains by adding colors and keyword hints by editing your domain settings. To get to the settings page, click on the domain(s) that you'd like to edit, select the drop-down menu labeled Actions..., and click the Edit Settings option.

As you change the colors on the right-hand side, you can view how your page will look on the left-hand side of the page.

Step 4: Add keyword hints

Also found on the the Edit Settings page is the option to add keyword hints to your selected domain(s). Keywords entered into this field assist ad targeting for potentially ambiguous domains. For more information, visit our entry on keyword hints.

Step 5: Define channels

It's a good idea to use channels to track your domains, especially if you have a large portfolio. If you're new to using channels, you can find more information in our channels guide.

Step 6: Track your performance

AdSense for domains stats can be found along with the rest of your AdSense reports by visiting the Reports tab, then the Advanced Reports page. You can also break down your earnings by domain or by channel by selecting the radio buttons on the right-hand side of the page. Learn more about the types of stats you'll see when viewing your AdSense for domains reports.

Inside AdSense

AskDaveTaylor.com offers tech support Q&A on subjects ranging from mp3 players to Linux to AdSense. We recently chatted with founder Dave Taylor about his site and his AdSense experience.

Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?

Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.

Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story!).

Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.

IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?

DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.

In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck. Then it started to grow...

That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.

IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?

Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.

Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.

Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.

IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?

Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.

Optimisation Essentials (Part III)

Position for performance - be noticed

This is the final video installment in our three-part series on Optimisation Essentials for AdSense for content. We've covered the best-performing ad unit sizes and taken a look at how to design your ad units for good-looking ads. However, even if you have large, well-designed ad units, they won't perform for you unless your users can see them!

So what can you do to ensure your ad units get noticed? Place your ads where users are likely to look.

We've also made a heatmap to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:

Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
At the end of an article
Aligned with content

But don't just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements. Position your ads so that they're visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site's visitors. Most of all, think like a user and you'll be able to balance your website's content with a successful ad strategy.

Optimisation Essentials (Part II)

Dress for success - impressing your audience

The video below is the second in our "Optimisation Essentials" series, demonstrating our top three tips for maximising your AdSense for Content performance. Last week, we reinforced the importance of bigger ad units. This week, we're showcasing how a better ad unit design can result in improved AdSense performance.

*Please note that no leopards were harmed in the making of this video!

Over the years, we've seen some colourful ad unit designs. Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we've found that ad units that match your site's design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate. Users are more likely to read ads when they're well integrated into your site.

When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:

Use colours that either blend with or complement your site's colours. Make the ads a part of your site.
Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.
Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.

So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you'll notice the difference!

Optimisation Essentials (Part I)

Bigger is better - for AdSense ad units

AdSense for content is the bread and butter of many of our publishers, and we often receive requests to recommend strategies to improve AdSense performance on publisher sites. While we refer to this as 'optimisation', we understand that this term can make the process sound more difficult than it really is. In response, we're releasing a three-part video series that demonstrates, in plain English, our top tips for increasing your AdSense earnings.

This week, we're recommending you think big - big ad units, that is:

Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site's design, and we always point them to these three:

300x250 medium rectangle
728x90 leaderboard
160x600 skyscraper

These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've receiving all ad types, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.

When you're considering how to design your site, our testing has shown that displaying at least one of these ad formats on your page can increase your AdSense earnings potential. So remember, sometimes bigger is better!

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.

Perfect layout with AdSense for search

AdSense publisher Next Small Things has long understood that search is the entry point for users to find what they're looking for on the web. In fact, the idea for CoolChaser.com, a MySpace layout creation and customization site (and Next Small Things's largest business to date), came from the observation that many web surfers were using the company's search engine to find instructions to change their MySpace backgrounds. The observation and ensuing business idea has paid off, and in just one year CoolChaser.com has gained a loyal user base: over 200,000 users are now finding or creating layouts on the site every day. "CoolChaser has become a one-stop-shop for layouts because of the ease of use and the choice and ability for users to express what they feel at the time," says founder Chao Lam.

With over 20 million user-submitted layouts (and 3,000 created every hour), it was becoming increasingly difficult for users to find the layouts they were looking for. "We were getting a lot of requests from users to provide some sort of search mechanism so that they could easily find what they were looking for," developer Sachiko Kwan says. As an existing AdSense publisher, Kwan decided to try AdSense for search and was immediately impressed by the quick setup process and the accuracy of the results. With the new SiteSearch feature, Kwan was able to restrict the searches so users didn't have to leave the site to find what they were looking for. In addition, the new watermark feature allowed Kwan to add the search box without any rearrangement in the navigation bar.

Most recently, Lam and Kwan began optimizing their search for better performance and user experience. If a user wasn't creating a layout, they were looking for one. So Kwan moved the search box from the upper right corner of each page to the center of the header and also added a second search box to the bottom of every page, in case users who were done browsing needed to search again. On the search results page, she changed the ad borders to a lighter color to better blend in with the site's pages.

Within a week of making these changes, Lam and Kwan saw their daily search queries on CoolChaser increase by 40% and earnings more than double. Since implementing AdSense for search on CoolChaser, search has become the second most popular functionality behind creating layouts. Lam and Kwan continue to focus on user experience, and they are now working to refine search results using keywords and labels. "There's such an enormous variety of things people search for," Lam says. "AdSense for search is really working for us."

Optimizing your search box

Following on the five tips on AdSense for content optimization our Sydney team presented a couple weeks back, now let's turn to AdSense for search. As you may know, we recently integrated Custom Search Engine into AdSense for search to provide additional customization options and improved targeting. Whether you've already implemented an AdSense for search box on your site or you're just getting started with this feature, we recommend these five optimization tips:

Place your search boxes in visible locations.

Integrate your search boxes in easy-to-find locations, such as under the header or in your left navigation. Also, keep the placement of your search boxes consistent on all your pages, so users will know where to look if they need help finding something.
Add two search boxes to content-rich pages.

For pages with a lot of content or which require scrolling, try placing one search box at the top of the page and another at the bottom. A box at the top of the page will allow users to perform a search immediately, and a box at the bottom will provide a search option to users who've just finished reading your content. You can also track and compare the performance of each search box by creating custom channels.
Host your search results on your own site.

To keep users on your pages, you can host your search results and ads within your own pages. If your users don't find what they're looking for in the search results or ads, they'll still be able to to navigate to other sections of your site using your site's template. In addition, you can further integrate your search results into your site by customizing the colors of the results page.
Add a search box to your search results pages.

Similar to #3, try placing a search box on your search results pages so users can perform additional searches from your site.
Customize your ad locations.

Place ads at the top and right sidebar of your search results pages. This layout offers added visibility, and our tests have shown that these ad locations can improve monetization.

After you've optimized where search boxes are placed on your site, don't forget to try new targeting options such as keyword refinements and vertical search. To generate AdSense for search code and take advantage of these features, sign in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Five steps to optimising your AdSense performance

We hear you. The myriad of optimisation tools and options AdSense offers can be a bit overwhelming. Colors, placements, channels, ad sizes -- there are more options to choose from than you can poke a mouse cursor at! Ideally, we wish you could just click a button and have a fully optimised webpage published to the Internet. But until that magical day comes, we have a solution for you.

The Australian AdSense team has put together a short video that takes the confusion out of optimising. The video goes through a step by step guide to optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and tracking your results. We also cover our most popular tips to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your page.

So if it's been a while since you've refreshed your AdSense ad units, or if you're confused on how to use channels to optimise, invest ten minutes into the video. It's the closest thing you'll get to that magic button.