Google has sent out a few invites to Adsense advertisers about a new service. The service allows an advertiser to specify an ad placement on your pages in a pre-defined ad spot.

“Hello,

We’re excited to let you know that your account is one of a select few for which we’ve enabled a new feature called ad placements. Ad placements are groups of ad units that you can define and highlight to advertisers. Creating an ad placement is as easy as creating a custom channel, and ad placements will help you generate more revenue by increasing the visibility of your ad spaces to advertisers.

To help you learn more and take advantage of this new feature, we’d like to invite you to an AdSense webinar where members of the AdSense and AdWords Product Management Team will walk you through ad placements as well as provide you with valuable insight into what advertisers want to see from publishers. We’ll also leave time for the team to answer any questions you may have on these topics.

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AdSense Webinar: Increase your visibility to advertisers Wednesday November 29, 11:00AM PST / 2:00PM EST.

To register, click on the link below or paste it into a new browser window: *Link removed*

Once you register, instructions for participation will be sent to you via email from WebEx.
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Please note that space is limited and registration will taken on a first-come basis. Participation is by invitation only, so we ask that you please keep the registration details to yourself. We’ll be recording the webinar, so if you’re unable to attend, you can view it after the event.

We look forward to having you join us!

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team“

Screenshots over here…

Google Reader have released a new version. Upates include expanded view and list view, simplified sharing, improved read-state management, infinite scrolling, unread counts, mark all as read and more. I had a quick look through. Quite nice, but I think I still prefer Bloglines.

Facebook, the hugely popular social site, is now open to all. It’s a lot neater than MySpace, which tends to suffer from teenage auditory and visual overload.

What happens when you mix Kurt Cobains suicide note with Google Adsense. Quite accurate, really.

Eric Schmidt disusses Google’s philosophy.

Here’s an interesting bit:

“Schmidt also quoted Larry Page’s belief that “ads have value in and of themselves.”

I think that’s true, and why so much criticism of supposed “made-for-adsense” sites is way off. In my view, if an ad answers a users question, that is better than content which doesn’t answer the question. The mere fact that content was hand written by a webmaster does not make it more valuable to the user than an advertisment.

Ultimately, that is up to the user to decide.

Dave Winer has posted a thought-provoking piece on the future of advertising. According to Dave:

“When they finish the process of better and better targeted advertising, that’s when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it’s perfectly targeted, it isn’t advertising, it’s information”

Which jives nicely with Google’s thinking, and switched-on Adsense advertisers: Adsense IS content, and it is good content if it provides information at the point the user wants it. A shame, really, that Google won’t give us webmasters more control over that content.

But Dave doesn’t think that we’re quite there yet.

“Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you. How? 1. Find out what they want, and 2. Make it for them and 3. Go back to where you found out about it, and tell them it’s available.”

Ah – you don’t need me to contextialize it Read it now. I’d be really interested to hear your comments.

Google appears to have changed their Adwords landing page criteria, as announced late last week. It has been widely speculated that this was done to reduce the opportunities for arbitrage within the system.

There’s a lot of fuming, mixed with no-reaction-whatsoever, depending on which discussion board you frequent. (TW)

The thing about arbitrage markets is that they don’t stay open for long – they must move towards efficiency. That is, the price in one market is the same as the price in another. This is especially true of an arbitrage market owned entirely by one vendor – Google. They will, naturally, want to force the bid price up, and pay out less. They will want to close those gaps, and, presumably, they have the real time data in order to make that happen very quickly. Those that survive will be those that can operate on the narrowest margins, and/or produce worthwhile billing figures.

It was never going to last forever.

Going forward, the opportunities for arbitrage will be between keyword markets – i.e. buying on Google, sending to Yahoo!, or another vendor. Also, a new field will surely emerge – PPC landing page optimization – as the unwritten rules just got that much more cryptic.

Some make the argument that Google is feeding the spam problem simply by having an Adsense program. Is this a simplistic argument?

I think so.

The problem isn’t that junk content exists, or that is being generated in huge quantities. The problem is that junk content (as judged by the user) shows up when we don’t want to see it. If junk Adsense content sinks to the bottom of the longtail (to mix metaphors), and is never seen again, except by the author, then is it spam?

Google, and other search engines, need to ensure that search results return the answers the users require. Google can’t favour Adsense content, and I don’t think they do, but if the searcher is best served by Page X, then it shouldn’t matter if Page X has Adsense on it or not.

In other words, Google must always reward content that users want, and let the rest sink without trace.

Integrating photos into your Adsense ads is a great way of boosting click-thru rates, and it appears that Google is now offering this format as an option.

Jensense is reporting:

“AdSense has launched a new beta test called Vertical Images, where an image would take the place of an ad within an AdSense ad unit. These images – which are generic, and not company-specific – act similar to an ad link unit, linking to a page related to the ads and image that appeared in the ad unit“

I’ve had a few requests (ok, three) for more Adsense strategy.

Obviously, one of the most important areas to get right is keyword selection. So what are some of the most profitable Adsense areas?

There are plenty of research tools around, but if you’re stuck for topics, you may want to look at these keyword areas to start you off. These are not in any particular order, but are all potentially lucrative in that they have a) reasonably high bid prices ($10+, on average) and b) reasonable search volume:

• Accounting – especially accounting software.
• Merchant Accounts
• Acne
• Laser Hair Removal
• Cell phones. Also look into Satellite Cell Phones.
• Direct TV
• Credit Card Consolidation
• Tax – tax software, tax returns, help with tax
• Advertising – advertising agencies
• Business Cards – free is good
• Anti-spyware
• CRM
• Business Management – Process Management
• Business Opportunities – Home Business
• Health Insurance
• Insurance Quotes – Auto, Home
• Medical Malpractice
• Dental Insuarance – Care
• Digital Photo Processing
• Desktop Computers

Also, keep in mind competition levels when evaluating keyword areas.

If you can find a niche within those areas, with good traffic, then you can funnel that traffic to pages that feature the highest paying Adsense terms.

I’ll publish more keyword lists and data over the next few weeks….

The big news around the searchblogosphere is that Google may add a CPA component to Adsense. The rumour is based, from what I can tell, on this post at Seeking Alpha:

“The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis. These ads are very different in that you will be able to choose amongst a selection and you will also have more flexibility in promoting them…”

If true, then many affiliate networks may about to get “disrupted”. Well, those networks that offer good affiliate support and have solid advertiser relationships will probably be ok. It really depends on how Google approaches this. As usual, the devil is in the details, and there are very few details available.

Google can provide publishers with CPC, CPM and now CPA. It will be really interesting to see what control and choices publishers will have over the CPA network. It will be even more interesting for advertisers. Hopefully Google will reduce the barriers to entry involved in CPA programs.

There’s no official word from Google, as yet.

Push the “Generate” button. Wait a few days.

This post on Monetize explains how:

“Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD.”

Of course, the site and subdomains appear to be dropping straight back out again, persumably because Google have sent in the humans to give Big Daddy a slap.

Makes you wonder why the search engines couldn’t spot these domains in the first place? How many legit sites publish millions, let alone billions, of pages? In the space of 18 days?

I somehow doubt the Adsense checks will be paid out…