GoogleBlog just posted official tips for bloggers to maximize their revenues by better placement of adsense ads on blogs.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/blogtimize.html
Read the rest of this entry »So I got this invitation for MSN adCenter to try out their new advertiser service which is in beta to start with. With this new program MSN is opening up the ads space available on MSN network sites (mainly MSN search pages) for advertisers to place their ads. With adCenter MSN is entering in direct competition with more established programs like Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture.
In my experience the overall process of creating campaign and ads was simple (may be because I am used to adwords and overture) enough to be able create ads within few minutes. However comparing to Overture and AdWords there is no way to see the min bid required to get top ad position. There is other way around, advertiser has to specify a price and adCenter shows the estimated position, so this way I had to start with arbitrary high bid and then work it down till I was able to maintain the first estimated position, kinda tacky!
In research section (similar to overture bid selector and google keyword tool) it was surprising to see that for very competitive keywords adCenter was giving me first position for the bid of 0.05$, which was difficult to believe. Upon selecting the same bid and actually creating ads, I got position 7th. However adCenter has a cool side bar contained keyword research facility available which lists the number of times given keyword or key phrase was searched for last and current month. To get price/position estimates, user has to leave the order creation page to Research section (thus loosing the half entered order/campaign), I would say poor in terms of usability.
Read the rest of this entry »Yahoo YPN (program similar to Google AdSense) is planning to roll out major feature release this spring. This includes new features like direct deposits into the partners bank account (as of now Yahoo sends out checks through normal post), search box placement.
One of major update will be introduction of contextual match engine. Publishers have been complaining about lack of relevant ads from Yahoo YPN. Yahoo introduced category targeting but that doesn’t really address the contextual relevancy problem. As per common opinion the CTR of Yahoo YPN ads is low because of poor ads relevancy resulting into loss of revenues by publishers.
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