Google must realize that owners of sites with hundred, thousands, or even more pages want to optimize their AdSense formats, but it’s impractical to tweak code and continually redeploy it on the site (even if that’s semiautomated through includes). AdSense has just launched an ad format customization console to its service, giving publishers the ability to change their ad formats without having to touch code already installed on their sites.

While this will certainly help those who would like to test appearance variants with substantially less effort, there are a couple of limitations: you can not switch ad sizes and formats, and you can not delete ads. And, naturally, the console-responsive code must be newly generated and deployed; old code will retain the old functionality only. However, being able to see changes reflected on your site within 10 minutes without getting mired in code gives publishers greater freedom to test visual characteristic variants at will.

I would expect Google will build functionality to support testing size, formats and placement from its console in time, since they are very important in optimizing a page’s AdSense revenue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.