Google Ad Planner
It has been a long time since I have last written about advertising opportunities. Mainly because of the lack of changes in the advertising setup here at Ghacks. Some things have changed in the last few months and I would like to kick of an advertising mini series with the article about Google's Ad Planner, a service for Adsense Publishers to make their websites more attractive to potential Adwords customers. While Google Adsense is still the leading ppc (pay per click) provider it does have several faults that might annoy webmasters.
One of them was the non-existing option to pick site categories and provide information to potential advertisers. Google now has introduced the Google Ad Planner which changes this slightly. The service seems to be in a testing phase with webmasters being invited by email. Every website that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools can be added to Google Ad Planner which then offers a basic interface to add information about the website.
This includes a small 250 character description, the selection of an advertising url directly on the website, up to five categories that describe the website's contents (Computer & Electronics category alone has dozens of subcategories to choose from, the accepted advertising forms and the option to share Google Analytics data with Google Ad Planner (only unique visitors and pageviews which are estimated by Ad Planner).
It is obviously to early to tell if these information will make any difference at all as they only seem to affect so called placement ads on a website. Placement ads are ads that are placed by Adwords customers directly on the website. This stands in contrast to contextual ads that are placed globally on websites. Contextual ads usually make up the bulk of ad placements on a website whereas placement ads pay better.
Interested webmasters can take a look at how their website is displayed by visiting the Google Publisher Center.
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It is interesting option and widely reported lately. But I am thinking about how releveant it is to smaller sites.
To advertisers it is probably good option if they want targeted campaign on specific large resource. But who of them will bother with picking among small to mid size blogs?
Well it largely depends on the advertiser. It is always a better option to select specific blogs that match the product or niche than to select the display all option. A blog that gets 100 visitors a day but produces 10 clicks (because ads match site niche) which produce 2 signups is usually better than a site with 10k visitors that produces 250 clicks and only 20 signups.