FeedBurner has just announced on its blog that, starting next week, a small number of its users will be able to have “Ads by Gooooogle” displayed on their FeedBurner-enabled RSS/Atom feeds. (This comes just over 3 years after they opened a limited beta test of “AdSense for Feeds“, a program started before their acquisition of FeedBurner). For publishers that understand the value of syndicating their content but that have bemoaned the inability to monetize syndicated content, this will be a welcome boon.

The fact that Google owns both AdSense and FeedBurner makes this process one that we all could have anticipated. The fact that AdSense also recently announced that it would support a host of third-party ad networks on its “platform” suggests that Google is integrating its publisher solutions to the benefit of both its publishers, anxious to monetize all of their content, as well as publishers, similarly interested in seeking inventory.

Other blogs reporting on this announcement:

• Allen Stern, CenterNetworks (incl video)
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch
• Adam Ostrow, Mashable
• Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration
• Arnold Zafra, Search Engine Journal

Google recently announced that it would support a number of qualified ad networks to serve ads through AdSense. This is a game-changing announcement, because it signals an evolution from the AdSense we all know, the contextual ad network with its own relationships with advertisers and publishers, to a platform where ad networks can access any and all publishers using AdSense to monetize their online properties.

As this evolution unfolds, AdSense will become less a simple text ad network, and more a full-service platform for buying and selling display and brand ads.  Opening up the platform to large display and brand advertisers is probably just the beginning.  The goal is to increase the value of their publisher inventory, and courting brand dollars is the best way to do that. 

With Google’s deep pricing knowledge, targeting technology and huge reach, we suspect that they will continue to add transparency and build trust with brand advertisers while increasing the yields for publishers. Google has the exact strength in terms of scale and metrics that have until now made the transition to online a slow and hesitant process for the largest advertisers.

The next step will be opening up AdSense for third party developers to build on top of it – once this happens, AdSense will be the platform. At this point, opening up AdSense, both technologically and with respect to the breadth of their advertiser and publisher relationships, can only be better served by releasing some control. As some have noticed, Google still hasn’t been able to accommodate the big player in this space, aQuantive’s Atlas, probably because it is owned by Microsoft.

For publishers: You will have to do three things (if you haven’t done so already) to allow third-party display (image) ads to be served on your site (the following is true whether or not you are a YieldBuild client):

1. enable image ads - current third-party networks will not deliver text ads
2. allow advertisers to target your AdSense channels - since many display ad networks are likely to use placement-targeting rather than keyword-targeting, allowing placement-targeting will open your site up to broader reach by advertisers
3. allow placement targeting on your site – this allows advertisers to specifically choose to display ads on your site; again, popular among display/image advertisers

We’ve compiled the following information and advice on choosing AdSense formats, formatting their background color and border styles, and other tips and caveats. Naturally, every site is different and there likely to be substantial opportunities for AdSense optimization even after applying these guidelines, but based on our experience working across a large number of sites, these should get you pretty far (although you should consider using YieldBuild to do a more rigorous optimization automatically).

AdSense Sizes

Google offers a wide variety of AdSense ad unit sizes, shapes and formats: Google AdSense Sizes.

However, you’re generally going to want to concern yourself with the three most popular format sizes:

• 300 x 250 (“medium rectangle”)
• 160 x 600 (“wide skyscraper”)
• 728 x 90 (“leaderboard”)

Since you are limited to 3 ad units per page anyway, you might as well go with these three. Why? First, all three sizes can display text, image and video ads, giving Google more room to find which of these three formats will work best. Second, they’re popular so there is more ad inventory, among advertisers that use “placement-targeted” (site) buys. Third, they simply tend to perform well–YieldBuild, which tests all ad unit types that can fit on the page, often hones in on these three across disparate sites and page templates.

Where should they go? We’ll delve into that more deeply in another post, but in short:

• 300 x 250  – embedded in content (as in flush left or right next to the page content, between blog posts, etc.)
• 160 x 600 – either to the left or right of your content, where you have room (typically to the right for this reason, but performs well if flush against your navigation column if that’s in your left rail)
• 728 x 90 – either right below the header (preferably near navigation) or embedded in content right above the fold; the latter tends to work great, but can require a little finesse to make sure it doesn’t get pushed below the fold on your visitors’ screens

AdSense Background and Border Colors

The general rule here (and there are many exceptions) is to blend in with your surroundings. So:

• if your page background is white, try a white-background ad; if your background is dark blue, try a dark-blue background ad
• you can also try a slight variation on the background color, just a shade darker, so a very light gray or pale yellow for white-background pages, or a slightly darker blue on a page with a light-blue background
• for embedded ad units (most typically a rectangular unit like a 300 x 250), the ad unit above the fold should blend, while any embedded ad units below the fold should use highly contrasting colors.

AdSense Border Styles and Colors

• two types tend to work better here – either “borderless” or rounded borders. Rounded borders tend to perform better than those with right-angle corners.
• for ad units that perform better by blending, choose a borderless border style.
• for ad units that have a different color than the page (either a subtle difference or a highly-contrasting one), try a border color that either matches the background (making it look borderless), or is just a shade darker

AdSense Text/Font Format

Again, the key is blending into your site. Currently, most publishers can not select a font or choose whether the link is underlined or not, but you can choose the font color.

Whatever font color you use generally on the page should be used here, unless the ad unit is in a highly-contrastive color, in which case you should choose a color that is highly readable against that background.

Final AdSense Format Tips

• try to get all of your AdSense units “above the fold” (above the viewing area on most of your visitors’ screens). This might require you delving into your visitors stats to see what platform and browser they’re using, but the general rule is to get your ad units visible for most of your visitors before they begin scrolling (mostly because some of them don’t!)
• make sure to enable all 3 ad formats (text, image and video). Google will optimize on its own and determine which performs best for your site from among available inventory.
• consider changing your navigation buttons and columns to match your ads units in border and color; putting an ad unit that is green and has rounded corners will probably do better if it is flush against navigation buttons that are also the same shade of green and have the same green corners.

Many thanks to Chris Gathright and Jay Reitz for contributing to this article.

A recent study on changes in eCPMs among differently-sized online publishers shows the poorest performance among its large-volume sample (read: social networks). Jason Calacanis drew a quick but clear conclusion: “social networks are great for traffic but horrible for advertising.”

It’s not difficult to understand why. The largest social networks, at the most basic level, group users on a contextless basis: simply that they know each other. If you look at your own Facebook friends list, you’ll see a few friends with whom you have lots of interests in common, and many more that you know through work, school or some other broad social vein. Most of your interaction with the latter is simple, fun banter and games online, and similarly fun banter and games offline. And the market for local online advertising is just starting to heat up.

You might have friends in which you have specific interests in common, whether it be cycling, international travel or chess, but there are themed social networks for just about everything nowadays. And, naturally, they have far stronger vertical contextual strength with which to demand higher CPMs (something Chris Anderson recently affirmed). 

So what can large, general social networks do?

1. Funnel users into vertical common-interest groups. Facebook’s unrestricted policy towards group creation has led to thousands of groups with memberships in the hundreds of thousands to those with a handful of members. Each has a comment interest that provides greater contextual richness for targeted advertising and higher CPMs.

2. Assess topical interest and buying process stage from behavior. Facebook already does this through SocialAds–allowing advertisers to target topical interest–although more rich targeting is probably possible if a more granular assessment is made of where the user might be in a particular product/service’s buying process.

3. Track browsing behavior beyond the site’s walls. If the social network can not assess a user’s topical interests itself, it can work with services like Revenue Science with broad enough reach across the browseable Web to know a user’s interests and buying intent.

4. Provide advertisers with a platform to interact with current and potential customers. Service-intensive and high-ticket purchases could benefit from the human touch and personalized attention from the likes currently provided by Get Satisfaction and others.

5. Harvest recommendations from users and collate on searchable pages. Allow users to ask for recommendations, and recommenders to allow their suggestions to be public (i.e. not restricted to their friends). A large social networking site could collate all publicly-available recommendations on heavily-searched items into context-rich pages. (the Berkeley Parents Network–possibly inadvertently, considering the lack of ads–has done it here)

They key for social networks is to carve, parse and segment its user base according to interests through group and application functionality, behavior analysis, and better use of crowdsourced content. But we expect plenty of innovation to come as traffic continues to flood into social media.

Long before social networks started becoming the new portal, the primary communication tools (email, chat) of portals struggled to monetize users. But, services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail offer a sticky service that keeps users coming back over and over again. $.25 CPMs for domestic traffic may be considered pretty good in these environments which is similar to what social networks earn today. The value in the communication service is the ability to offer high value editorial content to the huge audiences these services attract. Think of email as a funnel and the programming around it as a science to heard users into high value context like search, financial tools, shopping, and researching cars.

Social networks are largely communication platforms that are similar to email. My belief, the key to monetize the users and increase the value of the visitor is to create context around the actions beyond communicating (email). This is where advertisers will pay premium CPMs and where applications built on top of the social networks have huge opportunities to create experiences with valuable context.

The next thing social networks need to realize is that they have the opportunity to control the “start” experience of an internet visitor. This means becoming the homepage for every visitor. There are three hugely valuable things that happen when you become the starting point at scale. One is the ability to direct traffic at scale via editorial programming. This needs to be done at a personalized level, but will still offer scale in reach to advertisers. The second thing is the massive scale that advertisers get when they purchase ads like on the homepage of Yahoo or MSN. There aren’t many places this reach can be purchased and it’s expensive inventory that is sold out quickly. Lastly is search. As social networking sites get better at combining social search with general search this will lead in a shift from people heading to Google to people searching within the social networks. By making search a more prominent feature, this will lead to dramatic increases in monetization.

-From CEO, Paul Edmondson’s blog, trainthoughts.com