Those of you who have been following the various AdSense forums -- and that's everyone, right? -- will have noticed that Google has been making a couple of little changes: Four ads are back in the ad units instead of two; and the latest themed ad unit (the one with the cute dogs for the Chinese New Year) didn't override our ad settings and put borders back where there shouldn't be any, like the previous themes did. That's all good news. Having four ads in my ad units was driving me crazy. It wasn't that I saw any significant drop in overall revenues but having spent hours optimizing my sites to show four-ad units, to see the layout of my pages changed by Google without a heads-up was pretty frustrating. I just wish that Google would let us know what they were thinking. Even if we couldn't change their decision, it would certainly help us to prepare so that we can make the most of it. That's it as far as my complaints go though, because I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the way Google responded to our comments. A lot of people had been complaining about only receiving two ads instead of the four they'd planned for. And many publishers had pointed out that the borders in their themed ads and the loss of their optimization had hit their CTR. It's good to see that the folks at Google follow what we're saying and act on it. In fact, I really think that these forums are one of the greatest things about building up AdSense. (Yeah, I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I think it's worth saying.) I talk a lot in my books and presentations about the different ways to optimize a site for AdSense, but these forums are really some of the best resources for new ideas. Everyone who uses AdSense should be reading them on a regular basis, checking out what other people are saying, implementing the recommendations made by people who have been there and done that, and at the very least getting moral support for the times when things don't go quite the way you planned. These AdSense forums really work... they certainly worked on Google. |
