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Takeaways from Adspace 2009 Conference

Adspace is a new publisher-oriented conference operated as part of Ad Tech in San Francisco.  I was there on Wednesday.  It had panel sessions focusing on monetization, Adsense, affiliate marketing.  If you missed it, there are others coming up in Chicago (Sept) and New York (Nov).

I really like attending these conferences.  I like the different environment for one thing, and I sit in the conference sessions with my laptop open, and my mind open, listening to concepts and thinking about new ideas, and refreshing old ideas.  While there, I got emails from two industry partners telling me that they were attending Adtech — I didn’t know they were there, and we were able to setup impromptu meetings.  The way I look at it, if any of the discussions or meetings spark even one idea that’s worth more than the conference fee + my time, then it was worth it, and 9 times out of 10 that’s the case.

Adsense Updates and Microsoft PubCenter via Yieldbuild

Google unveiled a couple of Adsense changes.  Google is testing category level blocking, not just individual URL blocking, so you can block undesirable advertisers.  You also may have heard about their behavioral targeting program dubbed by Google as Interest Based Targeting (IBT).  IBT works by anonymously following a user as they go from a sports car site to a basketweaving site and instead of showing the user a contextual basketweaving ad, they show a sports car ad (knowing that the user likes sports cars).  This IBT feature is being slowly rolled out to publishers - you may or may not be benefiting from it as yet.  I heard conflicting info as to how well it lifts CTR’s and CPM’s — the Google rep said that it lifts CPM’s substantially while another non-Google speaker said it was only mildly effective.  I tend to believe the Google rep in this case because he has direct knowledge, and I have seen the positive effects of behavioral targeting elsewhere.

Both Yieldbuild and Pubmatic were discussed.  These sites work to generate the most revenue for your pages by automatically testing different ad formats and ad networks.  Yieldbuild claims “up to a 200%” revenue increase.  The downside of these is that you have to give them your username/password for Adsense and your other ad networks to work.  Even just a/b testing alternate Adsense colors/formats is worthwhile: we found a significant improvement using red color Adsense links over blue, on our sites.

One cool note about Yieldbuild, is that they give you access to Microsoft PubCenter ads, before PubCenter has officially launched to publishers.  Early anecdotal reports indicate that PubCenter might outperform Adsense:

“Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content.” –techcrunch.com

We began testing Yieldbuild on our sites today and will report back with any results.

Site Performance

Chris Raimondi of FreePatentsOnline.com gave a talk about site performance.  What was particularly interesting is that he provided actual numbers to relate website sluggishness with traffic losses.  Here’s the low down:

• 100ms delay (1/10th second) = -1% sales (Amazon)
• 400ms delay (2/5th second) = -5-9% traffic (Yahoo)
• 500ms delay (1/2 second) = -20% fewer searches (Google — Marissa Mayer)

A half a second delay loading your pages could mean 20% less traffic, folks!  So what can you do?

-Enable gzip on your pages. Gzip compression happens behind the scenes on the fly automatically to shrink your page sizes. Test to see if your URLs are gzipped. If they aren’t, contact your host or server admin to enable it.  Don’t just test one URL and make sure your js and css pages are gzipped too, not just php or html.

-Get YSlow for Firebug/Firefox and figure out what is taking the most time on your pages to load.

-Get Smushit for Firefox to compress images

-If you run a database driven dynamic site with PHP, figure out how to implement caching with something like Cache Lite.  Having your scripts load the same data from the db on every page view is inefficient even if you use MySQL query caching.

Audience Segmentation

This tip is really best suited for large sites, perhaps with at least 1 Million monthly page views.  If you’re using Adsense, chances are, advertisers are using site-targeting to run ads on your site specifically.  But unless you use Adsense channels to segment your users by interest or by demographic, and then make those channels available in your Adsense panel for site-targeting, advertisers are only able to run site-wide site-targeted campaigns.  Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind realized that he needed to segment his 2B monthly page views by demographic — so, he setup Adsense channels by demographic: women, men, men 50-60, etc–he has a couple dozen channels setup.  That allowed advertisers to pinpoint their reach and target segments that would work best for their campaigns, and he saw his Adsense revenue shoot up.

If you run a forum, for instance, you could setup a different Adsense channel for each forum.  This would let advertisers target users on your tech forum site that were interested in monitors only, or printers only, etc, by running site-targeted ads in your monitors forum channel or printers forum channel.  This should allow you to command higher CPM’s.  The same is true for a site with different article categories, segment by category.  If you have profile data on your users (location, age), you can segment by those.

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Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.