Flair for your ad units

Are your artistic talents limited to crayon drawings of stick figures? Good, looks like I'm not the only one. For those of us who peaked at a seven-year-old skill level, here's a holiday gift from a true artist: Google's Dennis Hwang.

Our new themed ad units incorporate elements from past Google logos created by Dennis, to give your pages a little extra flair during various holidays and special events. You can enable or disable themed ad units by logging into your account, visiting the My Account tab, and scrolling down to the Ad Type Preference section to click 'edit.' Check or uncheck the box marked 'enable themed ad units when available' - any changes you make will take effect within 24 hours.

If you've enabled themed ad units, users who visit your site may see themed ad units that are relevant to their geographic location (as determined by user IP address) and the date or season. Depending on your location, you should see the seasonally themed ad units for the winter holidays start appearing on your site soon and remain until December 26th. Here comes one now.

Queries and PageRank and Traffic – oh my!

As you may recall from previous posts, Google Sitemaps and Google Mobile Sitemaps are quick and easy ways for you to submit all your pages to the Google index and help improve your visibility on Google. But did you know that now with Google Sitemaps you can see which Google search queries are driving traffic to your website and what your PageRank distribution is for all your pages in Google? And, to help you make your site more bot-friendly, Sitemaps also shows you which pages returned errors (and which specific errors were returned) when the Googlebot tried to crawl them.

The best part? You don't even have to submit a sitemap to get all these stats - just create a Sitemaps account and add your site to it. Once you verify ownership of the site we'll show you these stats so that while you're working on creating your sitemap, you can already start getting valuable feedback on your Google traffic and crawl status.

Paramount site-targeting AdSense publishers

In a recent BusinessWeek article, "Grabbing The Grassroots" (BusinessWeek, November 21, 2005), David Kiley profiled Paramount Pictures' use of site targeting to reach a specific and relevant audience for three of their films: Hustle & Flow, Four Brothers and Aeon Flux.

Site targeting allowed Paramount to find many smaller, niche sites with users who they felt would have a particular interest in the films. Kiley describes these as "specialized networks of what are often small online sites and blogs," and notes that such sites "increasingly [soak] up Net surfers' attention," -- which means it's more possible than ever to reach an increasingly fragmented audience.

"With Hustle & Flow, Paramount had the ideal test case for this kind of advertising," Kiley explained. "The film is about an aspiring rap singer, specifically a performer of 'crunk,' 'a Dixie-originated hip-hop genre marked by lurching beats and bellowed choruses. Hustle & Flow was a blowout hit at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, but Paramount couldn't count on that industry buzz making it to the grass roots of crunk enthusiasts the movie studio wanted to reach."

By plugging terms like 'crunk', 'Memphis', and the names of some of the movie's stars into Google's Site Tool (a tool that automatically returns a list of sites related specific topics or categories), Paramount was able to identify and advertise on 170 different niche sites.

As the Hustle & Flow example demonstrates, when advertisers want to reach the audience that's most receptive to their message, they're interested in targeting not just the big sites, but content-rich smaller sites as well. To make it easier for advertisers to target ads to smaller sites, AdSense has added features like Onsite Advertiser Sign-up.

Thanks to all our publishers in the AdSense network for creating the kind of content that makes this type of targeted-reach possible for those of us on the advertising side.

A note from AdWords regarding your site-targeting concerns

When we launched site-targeting in June, we created a new way for AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers to benefit from each other. Advertisers use the Site Tool, a site-targeting feature, to choose specific sites from the Google content network on which to place their ads. This makes it possible for advertisers to spend more of their marketing budgets on specific sites. For publishers, it's a great way to increase coverage and eCPMs.

Many publishers have asked why we decided to lower the minimum CPM bid required for advertisers to run site-targeted campaigns. As you know, we're constantly working to improve the experience for our users, advertisers and publishers. To this end, the lowered minimum CPM for site-targeted ads allows advertisers to more accurately price their ad placements on a wider variety of sites.

Sounds like a bad deal for publishers, right? It's not. By lowering the minimum CPM we've increased adoption of the product and competition for placements on your site(s). This leads to higher payouts and better coverage. Remember, CPC and CPM ads compete against each other to display on your site, and we'll only show the ads with the highest eCPM. So you can be assured that increased competition will only help you improve monetization of your site.