Most of the Google services have some form of blog to accompany them. The quality of the information / tips tends to vary quite a bit across them, but that’s only natural when you consider that they are produced by a wide variety of people.
The Adsense blog has proven itself time and again to be a fantastic resource, as it combines tips “from the horse’s mouth” with valuable insights that publishers’ feedback have supplied.
Today’s post is really fantastic, as it focusses on an area that a lot of us probably forget – striking the balance between your needs as a publisher (earn money) and your readers’ needs (enjoy the content or service).
The introductory paragraph sums it all up:
You build a site to attract visitors, but the more visitors you get, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the site. So, like many other publishers, you turn to online advertisements for revenue. But if your visitors don’t find the ads useful (or worse, find them obtrusive), you could potentially end up losing both users and your revenue stream.
A classic “catch 22” scenario!
The first part of the post covers “User Behavior” (sic) and provides some interesting tips into ad placement based on how users interact and view webpages.
The second part takes into consideration how readers / users react – which is probably easy to overlook.
Definitely a post for your bookmarks!
Nice post
About time I looked at SEM (ringtones got me thinking :D)
The Adesnse blog is absolutely excellent… but of course it’s in Google’s interests to ensure we all maximise our revenue! I love the line “emember: white spaces don’t make you money!” They are truely trying to galvinise us into making them/us more money with that one!
Richard – I can see a lot of people thinking along similar lines 🙂
Ciaran – Yes 🙂
I soon hope that Google starts using video on iys blogs so that it become more and more clearer to the newbie who wishes to use Google products. Now that Google has acquired YouTube, that day may not be far away.
-Aditya