This is off-topic, but still of interest to some AdSense publishers, so I hope you'll excuse me for posting this here. I've been thinking about laptops and air travel. As you know, British authorities have banned all carry-on luggage as well as all electronic devices from airplanes leaving the UK. This includes notebook computers, of course. And who knows, these restrictions may spread to other countries. So if you're used to traveling with a laptop — and a lot of online business owners do this — these restrictions can make your life a lot harder. Here are the options as I see them:

1. Use video or audio conferencing. Instead of going there in person, consider using a video/audio conferencing solution to hold a virtual meeting. The technology's come a long way in recent years.
2. Use alternate transportation. Try driving or going by train instead of flying. Not always possible or practical, of course.
3. Check the laptop in with your regular luggage. Given the rampant theft that occurs in airport baggage facilities, especially international ones, this is a risky move. Make sure to do these things before your flight:
   • Backup your computer. Do a full backup of everything critical.
   • Password-protect the computer. Your laptop will at a minimum have a boot-up password. The hard drive itself can often be protected with a password.
   • Encrypt the data. Password protection doesn't protect the data on your hard drive, so use encryption programs to protect the critical stuff.
   • Separate the laptop and the data. If you have two or more suitcases, remove the hard drive from the laptop and pack it in a different suitcase.
   • Bury the laptop. Don't make it obvious that there's a laptop in the bag. For one thing, don't check a laptop bag, always check in normal suitcases. For another, don't place it on top of the other contents of the suitcase, bury it deep inside.
4. Bring the data only. Store the data you need on some kind of portable memory device — an external hard drive, a memory key, whatever. You might be able to take a CF card or an SD card on board with you, otherwise bury the data device in your luggage. Password-protect and encrypt it, too.
5. Remotely access the computer. There are many different ways to remotely access and control a computer, from free solutions like VNC to paid solutions like Timbuktu to GoToMyPC. Ideally you'll connect to your computer over a secure line or a VPN connection, so you might have to bring along a token card, which you'll have to stash in the luggage.
6. Remotely access the data. Data storage solutions like JungleDisk (based on Amazon's S3 service) make it possible to access your data from anywhere.
7. Leave it all behind. If you're traveling for pleasure, maybe you should just forget about bringing a computer along. If you're worried about click fraud and other issues, create a free email account somewhere and figure out how to forward your daily AdSense earnings reports to it, as well as any other mail that is potentially important (avoid forwarding everything, the point is to handle just the critical stuff). Occasionally check that email account from Internet cafes. Stop using the account when you get back home. Or if you have a BlackBerry or some other handheld wireless device, get your mail forwarded to it. (But you'll still have to check the device in your luggage, so be sure it's well-hidden.)

There's no doubt that air travel is getting more complicated and these if these rules spread outside the UK a lot of people are going to be dissuaded from traveling. Even the more relaxed rules forbidding liquids and gels from carry-on luggage are probably going to cause some people to think twice about air travel.

We live in troubled times. But our lives are worth infinitely more than our computers, so if this is what we have to do to be safe then we shouldn't complain.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

This post is an offshoot of my ongoing series on using AdSense with WordPress and yesterday's post on ProductWiki AdSense optimization. The topic is ad relevance and it's not specific to either WordPress or ProductWiki, hence this separate post.

Bloggers often complain about irrelevant AdSense ads on their blogs, but you hear fewer relevancy complaints from non-blog site owners. Why is this? You have look at how AdSense works to see what might be causing those problems.

If you analyze the AdSense patent you'll see that a number of factors come into play when AdSense tries to determine what the page is about:

• The URL of the page
• The page title
• The anchor text of links on the page to other pages
• The anchor text of links to the page from other pages
• The content of the other pages the page links to or that link to the page
• The keywords that appear most frequently within the page
• The keywords on the page that appear less frequently across the entire site
• Search engine queries that lead to the page or to another page that links to the page

Sometimes all it takes is one word or phrase to trigger different ads. Look at these two examples I've concocted (the links open new windows): here and here. The pages differ in only two ways: the URLs are slightly different (abcde-1.html vs. abcde-2.html) and one phrase has been changed. Otherwise, they're identical. But you see different ads on them, don't you?

This is why section targeting is useful. Here are the same two pages with section targeting used to exclude the bolded phrase: here and here. The pages now show the same ads or none at all — use the AdSense preview tool to test different geographies. We've taken out some trigger words and there's not much else left in the content that corresponds to keywords that advertisers are bidding on. We could fix this by changing the URLs to include some descriptive keywords. Here are the same pages with meaningful URLs: here and here. See how important the URL is if there's no biddable content?

So if you're having trouble with ad relevancy, look objectively at your page and see what's on it that might be throwing AdSense off track. Do you have lots of links to feeds and other blog-specific stuff? Try excluding them with section targeting. Are your titles up to snuff? Make sure to include a keyword or two whenever possible. Do you have proper headings instead of plain text made to look like a heading via CSS? If not, fix it. Does the URL structure lend itself to giving AdSense good clues about your content? Fix it if it doesn't.

Remember that to do your testing you'll need to cause the AdSense crawler to visit a page so you can see what it thinks of the content by the ads it displays. The only way to guarantee that a crawl will occur when you want it is to use a new URL for the content. But you don't have to create new pages, you can just use the change the query parameter trick to quickly test changes to pages.

Hopefully this helps!

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

So yesterday I discover (through a newspaper article) that ProductWiki is based here in Waterloo, where I live and work. Then today they post a note in their blog titled Don't settle for Google AdSense about their experiences with Google AdSense versus Shopping.com and how they prefer the latter. As you might imagine, I have a few comments about their post and how they're using AdSense and what they can do to increase their AdSense earnings.

But first, let me reiterate that every site is different and AdSense isn't necessarily the best ad program for your site. And there are other ways to monetize content, such as affiliate links, that are often complementary to AdSense. You have the find the mix of ad programs that is right for you. AdSense is dead easy to use (especially if you read this book) and has (as the ProductWiki folks state) a very large inventory of ads to draw from. So maybe AdSense isn't the best program for ProductWiki. Or maybe they can do things better. Let's focus on the latter and see what we can come up with.

The Heat Map Is Not Always Right

Let's look at a typical page on ProductWiki, the Nikon D80 digital camera. Using my handy-dandy highlight Google ads Greasemonkey script makes it very easy to pinpoint the AdSense ads on this page. Here's the screenshot: [Click on it to see it full size]

Hey, that looks like optimal ad placement according to the AdSense heat map:

Yes, but I don't think it's optimal for this site. The heat map is a general guideline, not the gospel truth. You have to consider the heat map in the context of the page you're trying to optimize.

The problem is that the ads aren't where the visitor focuses his or her attention. If you're surfing through the ProductWiki, you're probably looking for advice on something you're looking to buy. After reading the product description at the top (above the ad), you focus your attention immediately to the Community area of the page, where the user reviews are found. In other words, you skip right over the ad unit. There's nothing in the ad unit to grab your attention because it's just text, and in fact when you land on the page your eye probably wanders naturally over to the camera image in the right hand corner before looking at the text.

The point I'm making is that I think that the text ads would be better placed after or within the reviews. There are a number of approaches you could take here. One is to put a vertical ad unit to the left of the community section. Or you could put the ads immediately after the last review. It needs to be somewhere noticeable.

Use Multiple Ad Units

Why have just one ad unit on the page? AdSense currently allows you to have three ad units per page. So blend them into strategic locations. Put one beside the reviews and one after the reviews. Do some testing to see what works best.

Use Horizontal Link Units

There is no link unit on this page. A horizontal (728 by 15) link unit could be integrated into the top of the page. It's surprising how well those link units can work, especially if they're close to navigational bread crumbs.

Place Images Near Ads

This is a tricky one to get right, but it works well: place one or more images near the ads. Google wants a clean separation between the two, but our eyes are naturally attracted to images and so the ads that are close to those images are more noticeable. In fact, it may be the images in the Shopping.com ads that are making them perform so much better than the AdSense ads. Take out those images and I bet the Shopping.com CTR will plummet.

For example, you could move the image of the product from the righthand corner to be immediately to the left of the “Where to buy” block, thereby bringing attention to the ad. Or maybe you would place a different image there, since moving the image would leave the voting wheel by itself.

Speaking of “Where to buy”, unless ProductWiki is a premium AdSense publisher (and if they are, why isn't their AdSense rep helping them out with these issues?) then they should really change that label to “Advertisements” or “Sponsored Links”. Of course, they may have received permission to label the ads the way they do.

(Psst. While we're talking about things that don't mesh with the AdSense Terms & Conditions… the AdSense code is obviously server-side generated because it's got blank lines in it… it needs to be tightened up to look identical to what the AdSense console would generate…)

Use Section Targeting For Better Relevance

One of the complaints ProductWiki has is that the AdSense ads aren't always very relevant. Well my answer to that is to use section targeting to highlight the important parts of the page, such as the description, the feature set, and the individual reviews/comments. If you run a simple keyword density test on the page you'll see that words and phrases like “2 hours ago”, “last edited by”, and so on are featured more prominently than the more important keywords. In fact, they should probably use section targeting to exclude those useless phrases around the comments (blogs have similar problems — that's why you often see a lot of “RSS” and “blogging” ads on blogs).

Also, it looks like there's only one heading tag (an <h1>) used on the page, and very little bolding or italicizing. These are are clues that AdSense uses to figure out what's important and what's not. I'm going to send them a free copy of my analysis of the AdSense patent, which explains these things in great detail.

Conclusion

There are some more things that could be done, but I think I've hit on the major points. I hope they'll listen to my advice — I normally charge big bucks for this kind of detailed help! Really, it sounds like they should find a happy medium of integrating AdSense ads and Shopping.com ads together on the same page. As long as the Shopping.com ads aren't contextual — and they shouldn't be, since ProductWiki can feed Shopping.com a hardcoded list of keywords — then the two can co-exist.

As for ProductWiki's wishes for more control of the ads shown, I'd like to see that, too, because it would make it easier to fine-tune the ads than playing with keyword density, the wording of the content, and the inclusion/exclusion of parts of a page.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?