Thread: Do you harness the full potential of placement targeting?

Hello

Today (2010/10/02) I made a big change to my website that hopefully
will increase my earnings a lot over time.

I run a medical forum for patients to ask medical questions.
My forum has several medical categories with different topics.

So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately.

I also activated "placement targeting" for the best performing ad placements.

However I did not realize the full potential of "placement targeting" until yesterday after I talked to my direct advertising marketer.

Q: What is the main goal of an advertiser?
A: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert

Q: Is wider or narrower targeting more effective?
A: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform

Just as info to you:
CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about "cough" or "skin rash" are 40-50$ (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs)
Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM.
Yes, it makes that much of a difference.

So what did I do?

I have several AD Placements on my forum but I did this change to the best performing AD which is the large rectangle above the fold next to the welcome message.
((login for URL))

What I did is I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc.
Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown.

Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before.

Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum.

Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best.
For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum "alternative medicine" and his ads are only shown to people interested in "alternative medicine".
This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings.

What are your thoughts on this topic?
How do you handle placement targeting?

For anyone who is not familiar with Adsense Channels should read my thread ((login for URL)) first.

Kind regards

StarBuG

I would suggest that anyone who is using placement targeting should claim his/her site on Googles ((login for URL)).
I did this 3 years ago and totally forgot until I read the new Adsense Blog post:
((login for URL))


StarBuG

Since it's a few weeks later, did you notice any changes? I also tried to open up my adsense placements for google adwords advertisers, but I did not recognize any difference. It also might hurt your earnings if they book you via adsense and not via a high-cpm-ad-company.

My AdSense earnings increase every month so I can't really tell.
Currently I did not had the time to dig deep into my stats to see if
my AdSense Placement Targeting had an effect.

It is more of a long run change anyways.
It will pay off in the future, I am sure of that.

An easy way to see if it's working is looking at the eCPM instead of the gross earnings.
If you see eCPM increasing it probably means what you did is working as it has increased either CTR or CPC or both.
In your case, you use placement targeting for the purpose of increasing the eCPM by having better paid ads, even if paid by CPM it doesn't matter to you.
The end goal is to see an increase in eCPM, so you can tell if it's working or not.

Here are some statistics on the effect of placement targeting:

September 2010: 3,07% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
October 2010: 3,74% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
November 2010: 4,89% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted

Compared to September 2010 in November 2010 the placement targeted Ad impressions raised about 154%

September 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 92,3% the CPM of contextual Ads
October 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 96,3% the CPM of contextual Ads
November 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 101,6% the CPM of contextual Ads

Compared to September 2010 in November 2010 the placement targeted CPM raised about 153%

Seems promising so far.

Do you see the placement orders from adword advertisers on ((login for URL)) ?

These are placement targeted Ads, yes.

Google told me the same thing on a conference call, I went in on my forum and started separating each sub-forum up and giving them their own channel and style to begin the placement targeting. It's been a couple of months now and I've noticed a substantial increase in revenue.

You can view the statistics about how much of your revenue is
coming from placement targeted Ads and which from content Ads.

In your AdSense Performance report select last month,
and then select display by "Targeting types".

I published my stats in this thread ((login for URL)) about the increase in placement targeting.

Care to show us your stats?