PublisherForums Group Effort: AdSense Review

[Tyler]

The idea just came to me literally 43-seconds ago and so I thought i'd give it a try.

As you may or may not know, PublisherForums has a sister site called PublisherSpot at www.publisherspot.com (http://www.publisherspot.com).

"PublisherSpot.com caters to internet web publishers by providing informative reviews and summaries of the various internet ad network companies.

Aside from presenting detailed reviews and specific information such as what ad network media packages contain and what forms of payment they accept, PublisherSpot.com allows visitors to search dynamically for network companies via an in-house search engine.

Some examples of search features include searching for ad networks that serve pop-ups, ad networks with a rating of 90% or better, or searching for contextual ad networks.

The site has enormous potential and is currently reviewing and analyzing networks."

Now, I've been having quite a difficult time obtaining the quality of reviews I've been seeking. So, how about this?

How about PublisherForums members write the article together? Basically we'd edit, append, etc. to it here, and then when complete, I'll add it to the site.

Aside from that, I'm looking for the following guidelines:


Length: The longer the better. You can use this review (http://www.publisherspot.com/reviews/reviewme) as an approximate acceptable length, although they really shouldn't be any smaller.
Quality: Grammar and writing should be of very high quality and written as objectively and fair as possible.
Actual experience with the network is a must, and specific details such as what creatives are offered (468x60, Interstitials, etc.) need to be stated as well as how well their rates (CPM/CPC/etc) fare to the rest of the industry.I see, anything else?

Just a few notes:

The review must be custom written for PublisherSpot and we retain sole ownership of the review, and therefore it can't be used by author for anything else.

[Tyler]

Now then... who wants to start? :)

[boron]

May I ask - Article about what?

[Tyler]

Hmm? An objective and comprehensive review of AdSense.

[Chris369]

I'll start.

The AdSense team don't know what they are doing with the ban button :)

Feel free to edit/append :p:

[camuk19]

Draft of possible introduction?

Adsense is Google PLC's very own advertising network. Google may be well known for its famous search engine, but the company’s real profit is made from advertising, in the last quarter, they made over 754$ million from it’s advertising program . Adsense is one of the most well known advertising programs, mainly due to the fact that it is relatively easy to set up, can fit in with your current website, and the ads delivered to your sites are relevant to the content of your site. This is proving increasingly popular with mainstream sites looking to monetize, or bloggers looking to make some spare change from their readers.

[Submerge]

You may want to inform the reader on what PLC stands for, I'd be pretty confused if I was a newbie looking at it, actually I'm still confused on what it means.

[Tyler]

I'm looking for more of a review which summarizes the network, only not summarize at all. Confused? Heh.

I'm thinking something more along the lines of...


Google's AdSense is very likely the most popular and widely used ad network on the Internet. The first network to really popularize contextual advertising, AdSense is now used by millions of webmasters and makes up for around 70% of Google's profits.

As stated above, AdSense is a contextual ad network. If accepted into the network, publishers may choose from a wide selection of ad formats...

[camuk19]

Yeah, sounds alot better than what i whipped up with.

[sar420]

Google's Adsense is a contextual Cost per Click (CPC) internet advertising program that brings publishers and advertisers together on a common platform. Advertisers join the Google Adwords program and pay Google to put their advertisements on related sites, while publishers join the Adsense program to monetize their site traffic with the CPC and CPM ads offered by Google Adsense.

In this sense, Google actually acts as a broker between the advertisers and the publishers. Google never discloses the share of revenue it cuts from the publishers, though some speculate that it could be as high as 70%. Publishers are warned not to contact any Adwords advertiser directly for advertising/monetzing purposes, and the publisher could be banned if found out violating this TOS.

Talking of TOS (Terms of Service for the uninitiated), Adsense has quite an impressive collection of TOS. First and foremost, is about invalid clicks of course - the reason given to the maximum publishers banned by adsense. In bold letters you shall see the line, "Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited." Even if you encourage your friends and family to click on ads, you'll be caught pretty soon and be banned without even getting time o say "what the hec..." Other TOS include that content should be clean, i.e. no pornography, adult and mature content, hacking/cracking content, llicit drugs, casino, gambling sites and so on. A recently updated TOS that caused quite a furore was the ads near images placement. Earlier, webmasters were allowed to place ads next to images as long as they were show separated by a thin border. However, blatant misuse of this allowance to increase CTR by many publishers encouraged Google to make it a TOS violation to place ads near images. The most recent TOS update (Jan 2007) is about competitive ads and services:

"In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads."

Already, it was against TOS to put contextual advertising from other networks (YPN, Kontera, bidsvertiser etc) on the same page as adsense. This new rule actually makes it impossible for even non-contextual advertising with similar layouts or colors as of Adsense ads to be displayed on Publisher websites. As long as you're not violating on the TOS you're playing safe and do not need to be worried about getting banned. Just concentrate on increasing traffic, ad placement and optimization and SEO.

When I talk of traffic, I mean targeted traffic. Any amount of ad optimization is useless you get targetted traffic, and this I can say from personal experience. I just have one ad unit and one link unit on one of my education related to blogs, and yet its CTR is the highest (double digit actually!) compared to my other sites. The reason - ads are very contextual and the targeted visitor does click on it thinking they might find it useful. If the traffic is not targeted, your ads will mostly be ignored, however contextual they might be to your content.

Hope this was useful...

[camuk19]

Very nice sar420. :)

[sar420]

thanks buddy :)

[Tyler]

Thanks guys and sar420, but I actually finally found somebody to write the reviews now :)