Use the 300 by 250 Ad Unit: How to Make Your AdSense Sites Appealing to "Conversion-Driven" vs. "Brand Building" Advertisers

The first part of today's AdSense webinar about the new AdSense ad placement feature was about how to make your AdSense site(s) more appealing to AdWords advertisers. It was actually the most interesting part for me. Here's my summary of what the AdWords product marketing manager said about the Google advertisers who target AdSense sites with their ads.

The Two Types of Advertisers

AdWords sees two primary types of advertisers using AdWords to place ads on the Google Content Network (us AdSense publishers):

• Conversion-driven advertisers are looking to drive sales, so they want their ads to convert into a monetizable event, such as having the clicker buy one of their products. They tend to buy CPC (cost-per-click) ads.
• Brand builders are looking to build brand awareness. They often use site targeting to place ads on specific sites, where they bid for their ad space on a CPM (cost-per-thousand-impression) basis.

Google then proceeded to list what each group of advertisers wanted from AdSense publishers.

Conversion-Driven AdSense Needs

The conversion-driven advertisers want the following from AdSense publishers:

• Unique, quality content on the site
• Monitoring of user-generated content
• Ad placements embedded within the site content
• Image-enabled ad units whenever possible, because
  advertisers like to put calls to action in their image ads

The point about monitoring user-generated content may surprise you, but if advertisers find questionable content (racist, sexist, pornography, etc.) on your site they will either exclude your site from their advertising or else opt-out of the Google Content Network entirely.

Brand Builder AdSense Needs

The brand builders have different needs from AdSense publishers:

• Image and video ad placements, particularly the larger sizes. The 300 by 250 size is current the most-wanted video ad unit, in particular.
• Prominent, above-the-fold placements for their ads.
• High-quality content for positive brand association.
• Policing of user-generated content.

Brand builders tend to primarily run image and video ads. The video ad inventory at Google is expected to increase significantly over the next few months.

What It All Means

Your goal as an AdSense publisher is to make your sites as appealing to advertisers as possible, except of course where it interferes with your site's usability. The visitor experience is very important to Google, and if you do something that you think will annoy your visitors you should reconsider your actions.

In general, though, you should strive to:

• Create unique/original/fresh content with blended advertisements
• Enable image and video ads wherever possible
• Offer a prominent above-the-fold ad unit for brand builders to target

The most interesting thing to me was the recommendation to use the 300 by 250 ad format (with image and text ads enabled) in order to target video advertisers. A lot of AdSense publishers have been using the larger 336 by 280 format, so they might want to try switching to the slightly-smaller 300 by 250 format to see if their earnings go up. This will likely become more important as video ads move into the mainstream.

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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

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