There are plenty of ways to make sure your AdSense performs as best as possible for you, putting as much money in your bank account without violating Google’s Terms of Service. Take a look at our best rules of thumb, tactics and strategies, keeping in mind, naturally, that YieldBuild can optimize your AdSense extremely effectively without the guesswork and ongoing fuss.

AdSense Formats

• You can place, at a maximum, 3 ad units and, additionally, 2 text link units, on any given page. If you’re skittish about placing so many ads on a page, start with a smaller number and ramp up slowly, making sure traffic changes don’t bely disruptions to user experience.
• We suggest using the following three, most popularly-supported ad unit sizes:
  300 x 250 (”medium rectangle”)
  160 x 600 (”wide skyscraper”)
  728 x 90 (”leaderboard”)
  Their popularity leads to more competition among advertisers, for wider topical breadth and better payouts.
• Make sure you maintain the default ad unit settings for your ad units, allowing display (image) and video ads to be tested by Google. Google will determine which formats will perform best.
• Keep abreast of new formats introduced by AdSense (by checking your dashboard frequently). The YouTube video unit is an example of an ad unit type that might work great on your site, but, unless you’re using YieldBuild, you’d have to find out about its availability and know to generate the ad code for it, in order to use it. (Keep in mind Google tends to roll these out by geography, so make sure you’re up to date with which features are supported for your geography)

AdSense Formatting (Background Colors, Border Styles & Colors)

• the basic rule of thumb (with plenty of exceptions - read on) is to blend your ads; this means you should first try background colors that match or are a shade darker or lighter than your page template background
• exception: if an ad unit is below the fold (below the initial viewable area in most browsers), also try bright, contrastive colors
• exception: if you are placing ad units near site navigation sections (a good idea), you should blend your ad units with the navigation; i.e. if your page background is white, but the left-rail navigation is bright orange and you have a skyscraper embedded in the left rail, you should make it bright orange as well
• exception: for dark backgrounds, try contrastive, even bright color-background ad units, not only similarly dark-hued ads
• for border color: test both ”borderless” (the color is the same as your background color), and just a shade darker.
• for border style: be sure to test rounded borders (both “slightly” and “very” variants), since they tend to perform better than square corners.

Read more on AdSense formats and formatting.

AdSense Layout/Placement

• Try to place all ads above the fold (within the frame of visibility for most browsers, before scrolling down), unless you have strong reason to believe that a substantial portion of your viewers really do read all the way down to the bottom of each page (most don’t).
• Have ad units abut each other (as closely as possible). In other words, have a horizontally-oriented leaderboard or banner run up against a vertically-oriented skyscraper, or right above a medium rectangle embedded in your content. This is called “the L” (Rule #2)
• Embed ads wherever user eyes are. This means adjacent to content, and next to frequently-used navigation. The shorter the distance between the content the viewer is reading/viewing and the ads, the better.

Read more on AdSense placement (and for blogs and discussion forums)

General AdSense Tips

• follow a testing protocol and be consistent. Your intuition and gut-feeling might be wrong, and the more wrong you are, the more money you leave on the table. (Our advice on AdSense optimization)
• although it can feel like a tedious process, take the time to set up AdSense ad placements from your custom channels (how to do that) for your site. These will allow advertisers to find target advertising to specific parts of your site. Use it as a marketing opportunity, and make your channel names descriptive: share demographic information, typical content, etc. So few sites do this, so you’ll have an edge with advertisers interested in targeting if you do.
• make sure your testing process is fair and rigorous; don’t get sloppy! A good protocol will tease out the effects of seasonality, time of day, and other effects that interfere with a correct reading of your testing results. Even if you want to avoid true multivariate or A/B testing, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples: keep everything about your testing protocol the same except those variables you are testing.
• a final “tip” is to not forget about your users’ experience on your site. Although just about everyone is comfortable with advertising these days, it’s always a good idea to not do anything that could be widely perceived as deceptive, or unduly disruptive to user experience. Roll out changes slowly, to give your viewers ample time to adjust.

Many thanks to Chris Gathright for contributing to this post.

In January, AdSense scaled back its referral payouts to publishers, particularly those outside the US and Japan. Now, it’s terminating the entire program, shuttling US-based publishers to its Performics-run Google Affiliate Network (which, similarly, pays out to publishers for advertiser-defined actions, like signups and purchases).

The referral program terminates at the end of August; publishers are advised to make the necessary changes (removing the referral code from their sites, and saving locally any reporting data they wish to retain) within the next 2 months.

Google’s AdSense network is apparently great for something other than distributing targeted advertising across a wide swathe of Web publishers: it’s great for distributing targeted, ad-supported video across a wide swathe of Web publishers. Or, at least it should be. Its current experiment, a series of about 50 two-minute webisodes produced by “The Family Guy” creator Seth McFarlane, will put that to the test.

Why is Google getting in the business of video syndication? You could do worse than start with YouTube as a starting point. The online video behemoth has just begun to experiment with advertising formats, including overlays and adjoining text units, on YouTube. But YouTube relies on site visits and blog/site embedding for syndication. AdWords offers a way for advertisers to push video ads; it’s not too large a leap to imagine it as a platform for content producers to push their content and recoup the ad cost and then some through the same mechanism (or Google could offer the service for free to premium content producers in order to entice them to use YouTube).

Since AdWords offers demographic and geographic targeting, content producers can distribute videos to the sites that are likely to be the most receptive viewers. Advertisers interested in moving from television commercials to online speak the language of demographics and target markets more than they do engagement and calls-to-action, so this is likely a smart move by Google. Seth McFarlane is a great referenceable customer.

The series, “Cavalcade”, will be targeted for young males, and will likely display on placement-targeted AdSense publishers that have 300×250 ad units enabled. (For YieldBuild clients: as long as you have a zone at least 300×250 in size, you should conceivably be able to show it, although the targeting is left up to the advertiser at any rate).

Back in January, I blogged on Proximic, a contextual ad network that used “word shape” to determine the context of a page, purportedly a better determinant for accurate ad matching than simple keyword-density algorithms (for example, it would do a better job of not showing ads for Mrs Field’s cookies on an article on how to clear cookies from your browser cache).

Today, Peer39, a contextual ad network, has announced its second round of funding ($8 million, led by Canaan Partners), and the release of is SemanticMatch product, which, similarly, aims to provide significantly better matching to the actual topical context of a page. The technology is clearly geared towards social media, where topical context is much more subtle, and where contextual advertising has been underperforming.

How does semantic matching work? Peer39 is vague about how their technology works (something that we at YieldBuild understand - when you have a really cool technology that works, you want to protect it), but it says that it targets the “intent and meaning” of pages rather than looking for preselected keywords.

Contextual matching, however, can look at the presence of clusters of words instead of the presence and density of any one targeted keyword. For instance, ads for antivirus software would look for not only the word virus, but spyware, computer, hacked, malware, etc, and while the presence of other words like inflammation, bacteria, immune, and sickness, would suggest an entirely different semantic grouping and presumably a different sort of ad.

Yahoo researchers have proposed syntactic-semantic matching in a research paper released last year, that looked at both syntactic (keyword) and semantic (categorical) ad matching vs a simple syntactic/keyword match. Their research demonstrated that the semantic component added relevance to ads, more strikingly when the page quality was high (i.e. enough natural language surrounding the topic was available).

Here are some other online advertising companies that tout semantic matching:

• ad pepper media’s iSense
• Aduna
• Healthline HealthSTAT

Update (6/30/08): Amiad Solomon, Peer39’s CEO, explains a bit how it works to TechCrunch’s Roi Carthy.

Forums (discussion boards, discussion groups, bulletin boards, etc) are a natural fit for AdSense since both heavily rely on text to convey information, but are punctuated judiciously by images (display) and videos. Although an automated solution like YieldBuild will consistently give you the best ad performance, if you want to try optimizing AdSense on your own, you should consider taking the following advice.

Read our primers

Start off by familiarizing yourself with the basics, to get a proper grounding in AdSense format and layout basics:

• AdSense Formats & Formatting - selection of colors, border styles and ad unit sizes
• AdSense Placement - selection of optimum layout and positions for your ad units
• AdSense Optimization - selection of a testing protocol and optimization methodology

The fundamentals for forums

Formats: Most vBulletin (to use one of the most popular forum platforms) AdSense implementations shows a 728×90 leaderboard being installed at the top and bottom of the thread list. We’ve found the following tends to perform better:

Either:

• a text link unit (468×15) in the navbar
• a leaderboard (728×90) or banner (468×60) below the navbar, before the threads
• a medium rectangle (300×250) embedded in the top thread (or top post)

Or:

• two medium rectangles (300×250) set side-by-side below the navbar, before the threads
• a medium rectangle (300×250) embedded in the top thread (or top post)

A/B testing should tell you which variant performs better for your forum.

Be sure to enable display (image) and video ads for the ad unit sizes that support them, to give AdSense the opportunity to identify which formats will perform best.

Colors: Review our suggestions on how to choose colors - which is largely dependent on your forum’s color palette and the ad units’ layout (i.e. whether they are above or below the fold).

Embedding Code

Here is how to embedding of four AdSense unit: two in the navbar (navbar_1 - 468×15 text link unit, navbar_2 - 728×90), and two in the forum display (at the start & end of the threads, both 468×60) [hat tip: NeutralizeR]

1. Open your navbar template: vBulletin AdminCP > Styles & Templates > Edit Templates > Navigation / Breadcrumb Templates > navbar
2. Find:
<div class=”navbar” style=”font-size:10pt”><a href=”$vboptions[forumhome].php$session[sessionurl_q]” accesskey=”1″><img class=”inlineimg” src=”$stylevar[imgdir_misc]/navbits_start.gif” alt=”" border=”0″ /></a> <strong>$vboptions[bbtitle]</strong></div>
</if>
3. Insert your AdSense code (navbar_1) right below that
4. Find:
<!– / PAGENAV POPUP –>
</if>
5. Insert the following right below that:
<table class=”tborder” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ border=”0″ width=”100%” align=”center”>
<tr>
<td class=”alt1″ align=”center”>
[Your AdSense code – navbar_2]
</td>
</tr>
</table><br />
6. Save.
7. Open your FORUMDISPLAY template: vBulletin AdminCP > Styles & Templates > Edit Templates > Forum Display Templates > FORUMDISPLAY
8. Find:
<if condition=”$show[’threads’]”>
9. Insert the following right below that:
<tr>
<td align=”center” class=”alt1″>-</td>
<td align=”center” class=”alt2″>-</td>
<td class=”alt1″>
<div>
[Your AdSense code – start_thread]
</div>
</td>
<td class=”alt2 smallfont” align=”center”>Sponsored Links</td>
<td class=”alt1″ align=”center”>-</td>
<td class=”alt2″ align=”center”>-</td>
<if condition=”$show[’inlinemod’]”><td class=”alt1″ align=”center”>-</td></if>
</tr>
10. Find:
<!– end show threads –>
11. Insert the following right below that:
<tr>
<td align=”center” class=”alt1″>-</td>
<td align=”center” class=”alt2″>-</td>
<td class=”alt1″>
<div>
[Your AdSense code – end_thread]
</div>
</td>
<td class=”alt2 smallfont” align=”center”>Sponsored Links</td>
<td class=”alt1″ align=”center”>-</td>
<td class=”alt2″ align=”center”>-</td>
<if condition=”$show[’inlinemod’]”><td class=”alt1″ align=”center”>-</td></if>
</tr>
12. Save.

Thanks to Chris Gathright for contributing to this article.

YieldBuild is holding its first open house next month here at our office in downtown San Francisco, and we’re holding an additional 25 spots for YieldBuild Blog readers who will be in the area then.

Details:

Where: YieldBuild Office @ 95 Minna St, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

When: Wednesday, July 23rd, 5:30-9:30

What: Mix and mingle with other interesting folks in the industry. Refreshments will be provided.

Please email us at eve…@yieldbuild.com if you’re interested and we’ll add you to our guestlist!

Technorati, which keeps a pulse on the state of the blogosphere, has joined the blog advertising market with Technorati Media. Frenzied activity in the blog ad space continues, because the blogosphere is still tremendous in size (with over 110 million blogs tracked) and it’s arguably ill-served by the current batch of blog ad networks.

But, as competition heats up, there are opportunities for bloggers to shop around for the best deal (or, better yet, combination).

Here’s a rundown on blog ad networks:

Google AdSense

Type: Contextual, CPC (beta-testing CPA), Text/Display/Video

AdSense is the largest and most well-developed contextual ad network. Popular on blogs for its ease of installation, contextual matching, and relatively high payout among its peers (largely due to the level of competition among advertisers), AdSense has access to a broad swathe of advertisers

Yahoo Publisher Network

Type: Contextual, CPC, Text

YPN is a challenger to AdSense, but doesn’t have its reach. You must apply to be in its beta program, and only U.S.-based applicants are currently accepted. Similar contextual matching and installation through javascript snippets. Under an upcoming agreement, YPN will also begin to serve Google ads as well.

Federated Media

Type: Topical (Automotive, Business & Marketing, Entertainment, Gadgets, Graphic Arts, Green, Lifestyle, Mobile, News, Parenting, Sports, Tech, Video gaming), Text/Banner; ~$10-30 CPM

FM serves ads for larger blogs and other online publishers, often assuming (sometimes partial) ownership of sites or guaranteeing revenue in order to land its larger “authors”. Interested bloggers can apply to be an FM author on a form that hints at the traffic levels and topic areas that would be a better fit.

Technorati Media

Type: Display, CPM

TM, unlike Federated Media and Glam, will accept all applicants, and based on its early advertisers, seems to be targeting technology, communications, entertainment, automotive and gadgets. Technorati Media will also negotiate the revenue split between the network and publisher, saying that it will pay better than its competitors.

Glam Media

Type: Topical (fashion, beauty, entertainment), Display, CPM

Glam Media is the advertising network arm of the Glam network of sites (both internally-owned and partner sites) geared towards women. Publishers must have a primarily female audience, more than 100,000 monthly pageviews, and be in existence for more than 3 months, among other qualification criteria.

Six Apart

Type: Display, CPM

The blog platform for TypePad, Movable Type and Vox has begun its own blog ad network from the ground up, and, like Technorati Media, it accepts all comers. It’s leveraging the breadth of its own network of blogs to develop relationships with advertisers.

Adify

Type: Display, CPM

Adify groups publishers in various vertical networks, such as Gamer’s Media and Sportsyndicator. You must apply to each network, and get accepted by each network’s administrators, in order to begin participation.

Blog Ads

Type: Display, CPM (guaranteed $2 CPM)

Blog Ads guarantees a minimum $2 CPM by using its network, but also claims its average user earns $50 per month using its service. They take a 30% cut of advertiser spend.

Links to the networks:

• AdSense
• Yahoo Publisher Network
• Federated Media
• Technorati Media
• Glam Media
• Six Apart
• Adify
• Blog Ads

Whether you’re publishing on Wordpress, Blogger or TypePad (or one of the rarer platforms like TextPattern, Joomla, or Drupal), you might wonder how you can make your Google AdSense ads perform better. Although it’s easiest and most effective to use YieldBuild, if you enjoy a little code-wrangling and testing, it’s not terribly difficult to set yourself up for relative success by following these rules and making these basic tweaks to your templates.

Read our primers

First read the basics, so you understand the fundamentals on AdSense format and layout. It will put the rest of the advice in this post in proper context:

• AdSense Formats & Formatting - choosing colors, border styles and ad unit sizes
• AdSense Placement - choosing the optimum layout and positions for your ad units
• AdSense Optimization - choosing a testing protocol and optimization methodology

The basics

Formats: Follow our advice on how to choose colors - which is largely dependent on the color palette of your blog and the position of the ad units (i.e. whether they are above or below the fold).

Sizes: Stick to the most popular three (350×250, 160×600, 728×90) unless you have a narrow-format blog template, in which case you should swap out the last in favor of 468×60. (For Blogger, we suggest a link unit above the title, since this is relatively easy to implement)

Blogger (Blogspot)

Since both Blogger and AdSense are owned by Google, installation and tweaking AdSense isn’t too difficult.

For tweaking color, made simple in Blogger’s AdSense interface, use this web color picker to determine the hex value (#123456) to deviate from any of the standard colors Blogger preselects for you.

Position: This is fairly easy to implement, using Blogger’s Edit Layout feature. Add Page Elements, choose AdSense, and add:

• a five link unit above the blog title (at a width that your template can accommodate)
• a banner or leaderboard between the blog title and blog post
• a skyscraper in top position in your left- or right-rail

Click on this thumbnail to see how these will be represented in the Blogger Edit Layout interface.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a little trickier, but the process is made a great deal easier using a plugin, which also allows you to automatically embed ad units at the top or bottom of your post. This obviates the need to get into your Theme Editor and muck up your php in order to get ad units to install contextually.

For your header (banner or leaderboard) and left- or right-rail (skyscraper), you’ll have to pull up your Theme Editor (under Presentation for versions 2.3 and earlier, under Design 2.5 and beyond), and, depending on your particular theme, install your code here (which you should have grabbed from your AdSense account):

Header (header.php)

near the bottom of this template:

<div id="container">

<div id="header">  

[Your Header]  

[insert AdSense code here]  

</div>  

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Sidebar (obar.php)

<div class="sidebar">

<ul>

<li>

[insert your AdSense code here]  

</li>  

[other list elements for blogroll, categories, syndication, etc.]  

</ul>  

</div>

Single Post (single.php)

(make sure to place the code in red right after the code landmark in black; feel free to change float:left to float:right to serve up your ads to the right)

<div class="entrytext">

<div style=”float:left;”>

[insert your YieldBuild code here]

</div>

Main index template (index.php)

(make sure to place the code in red right before or right after the code landmarks in black)

<?php $count = 1; ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

[...]

<div class="entry">

<?php if ($count == 1) : ?>

[insert your YieldBuild code here]

<?php endif; $count++; ?>

TypePad

TypePad makes it fairly easy to embed AdSense ad units via a TypeList in your navigation columns. Add a TypeList, choose Note, and enter your ad unit code in the Note field (the Label field is optional). Position this TypeList at the top of your navigation column (left-rail or right-rail); having it above the fold will improve performance.

With more coding finesse, you can embed AdSense between posts (only available to Pro, Premium and Business Class users). Please follow these instructions on how to do so.

One of YieldBuild’s engineers, Tim Connor, has written this short guide on how to install AdSense in your Facebook app.

As a way to secure 3rd-party application development, but still allow for Web 2.0/Ajax style apps, Facebook came up with their own subset of Javascript: FBJS. Basically as an app developer you write your JavaScript as FBJS and when you serve the FBML over to Facebook, they parse it, checking for security violations, invalid syntax, etc. They then wrap it in a unique namespace—to not interfere with any of the other Javascript on the page—by prepending a random string of digits to all the variables and function names.

The end result of this is that you cannot access objects such as window, document, or any other JS built-in directly, since they will be serving up, as a hypothetical example, 123456789_window instead of window. Instead, they have created wrappers for many of the useful functions, such as a Ajax, object, and custom versions of many of the common DOM operations. While this is not too onerous if you are doing green-field development, it does not lend itself well to simply recycling either a large Javascript application, or more importantly, a 3rd party Javascript file you have no direct control over, such as AdSense.

Thus, to run AdSense in a FBML app, you need to insert a iframe for each ad (for example, a fb:iframe tag), and have a simple page with just the basic HTML/body/etc tags, and the AdSense script tag. This sub-frame will be served directly from your domain, so have no script-level access to the upper level facebook page. Luckily, for tasks such as having the iframe resize to the height of the ad, Facebook allows some crossdomain-crossframe workarounds.

Beware, though, if you are trying to dynamically generate your AdSense iframes with FBJS (which YieldBuild does), it is going to requires some fancy footwork to work within the restrictions and undocumented features of FBJS. Things such as creating DOM obects, setting name and id and src are all possible, but not explained well in the documentation. I suggest firing up Firebug and grabbing a reference to a dom node to examine what functions are available that meet your specific needs. You may eventually run up against hard-limits, though, such as not being able to dynamically create crossbrowser resizable iframes (the way Facebook handles the crossframe communication currently requires the iframe to exist, with the same name, at load time).

Or you could just use YieldBuild and let us worry about all those parts.

One of the difficulties that publishers face when trying to take advantage of the growth in online social media is knowing what to measure. Sure, there’s always Google Analytics, ClickTracks, HitBox, WebTrends, and other more traditional Web analytics services, but social media ad campaigns and applications work a little differently because you often don’t host the content or have a whole lot of control over its distribution/syndication. But, tight integration with social networking platforms through opt-in information sharing often gives publishers much richer demographic data than site analytics, which could be valuable in growing the campaign and selling advertising. A growing set of companies are helping advertisers wade through the metrics meaningful in assessing campaign performance.

Sometrics

[Free] Billing itself as the first company to provide analytics for social networks, Sometrics provides its users (primarily application developers) with the traffic, conversion and demographic data necessary for campaign optimization. The service is free for the currently-available standard account, and it has focused on providing analytics to app developers for Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Requires tracking code installation; live chat support is available. Sometrics was launched at the end of 2007.

Tracked:

• Pageviews and unique visits
• Installs/uninstalls
• Age
• Gender
• Number of friends
• Geo (state-level for US)

Refresh Analytics

[Free for app developers] Running as a Facebook app itself, Refresh Analytics monitors the activity of developers’ apps, providing deep demographic and traffic information. The service is free.

Tracked:

• Geo
• Age
• Gender
• Political and religious views
• Marital status
• Education
• Number of friends

Developer Analytics

[Free] Much like Adonomics (below), dA offers rich traffic and demographic data across the network of Facebook applications. The service is also private beta testing a direct measurement analytic tool suite for Facebook developers (signup).  Even without participation in the analytics tool beta, signup gives access to rich traffic & demographic data for popular Facebook apps.

 

Adonomics (formerly Appaholic)

[Free] Adonomics doesn’t provide individualized private statistical and analytical reporting for developers, but it does provide a leaderboard of popular and active apps, similar to dA (above), but with a twist: it estimates the value of an app, should the developer be interested in selling it.

In addition, the most popular widget development platforms provide their own tracking/analytics solutions. Here are some links to the biggest widget developers’ analytics offerings:

• Widgetbox
• Clearspring
• MuseStorm