Date: Thurs, Feb 7 2008 12:55 pm
From: Inside AdSense Team
http://groups.google.com/group/Inside-AdSense/browse_thread/thread/9af66f1204b755ec?hl=en
Carsurvey.org is a car review website published by CSDO Media Limited.
Initially inspired by some of the earliest experiments in
user-generated reviews, the site now hosts almost 100,000
English-language car reviews submitted by visitors from across the
globe.From 1997 to 2000, founder Steven Jackson ran the site as a
hobby. However, the growing hosting costs became significant, so Steven
opted to run ads to cover them. He joined the AdSense program and was
impressed with the initial results, which were further improved by
carefully optimising the location, colour and size of the ads. By 2005,
the time demands of running a popular website while holding down a day
job were no longer sustainable. The steady revenue from AdSense was a
major factor in Steven's decision to leave his old career and devote
himself full-time to running
Carsurvey.org.AdSense offered Steven many
advantages. Its global reach matched
Carsurvey.org's diverse user base,
and the fact that it separated the selling of ad space from the
management of the site was very important to maintaining the sites'
independence and credibility. Steven says, "AdSense allows me to focus
on running Carsurvey.org for visitors. As long as Carsurvey.org
provides a useful service, AdSense helps pay the bills."Ad placementsAs
a regular reader of Inside AdSense, Steven was quick to pick up on
improvements to the custom channel feature, which allows advertisers to
target specific site areas using ad placements. He updated his AdSense
HTML code to highlight his site via ad placements and focused on the
most important pages and locations within Carsurvey.org. This made the
site more appealing to advertisers, as they could begin to target
specific page locations and sections. In addition, it gave more
prominence to Carsurvey.org in the AdWords site tool, as you can see in
the image below.Medium rectanglesIn addition to implementing the ad
placements, Steven also tried another AdSense optimisation tip and
added more image-enabled 300x250 medium rectangle units to his site.
Though initially skeptical, as using those units would mean both
changing the page layout for all of Carsurvey.org and displaying fewer
ads per page, Steven decided to give the change a try.Accelerating
revenueThe improvements were gradual at first, but soon Steven's
revenue climbed as advertisers began targeting specific ad placements
on Carsurvey.org, namely the new 300x250 units in prime locations.
Within a few months, Steven saw his placement targeting revenue grow up
to six times its previous level; it now represents 60-80% of his
overall earnings."I can definitely recommend experimenting with the ad
placements and image enabled ads, especially in the 300x250 and
skyscraper formats recommended by Google. I thought Carsurvey.org was
pretty well optimised, but this just shows that experimenting with
AdSense ad placements and testing out new features can really pay off,"
says Steven.Posted by Colm O'Muire - AdSense UK Optimisation Team
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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/07/2008 12:55:00 PM