Increase Blog Revenues With Google Ad Manager: Part I Introduction

This site has been in existence since 2005 and since around 2007 I’ve used it and other sites like Windows 7 News to make money online.  This has gone so well that October 09 I’ve been working full-time online, leaving behind a good traditional job.  So far, it’s gone well and I’m enjoying the extra freedom I have everyday to work when I went on things that interest me the most.

One of the areas I’ve focussed on over the last couple of weeks is trying to improve the level of monitisation of my existing traffic by trying out new ad networks and making ad pitches directly to companies.  Increasing the number of networks and advertisers I’m working with has required me to use a ad management service to schedule and serve my campaigns, as I now have more ad networks and campaigns than I do have slots.  The first ad server that I used was the free OpenX service, but this week I’ve switched to the free Google Ad Manager service.  If you use more than one ad network or serve more than one type of ad on your site e.g. Adsense & affiliate banners, or Adsense & tribal fusion or Adsense & direct ads then my guide will help you increase the amount you make per ad slot on your site and allow you to work with multiple partners at once.

I believe that all websites that feature advertising will be able to increase their income if they use Google Ad Manager, and I’m going to go into as much detail as I can to share what I have done as I think these will probably be the most important tips I will ever share on making money online.  By using Google Ad Manager I’ve managed to increase my eCPMs by over 30% in under a week.

Optimising Ad Slots

Google Ad Manager allows you to create code to insert on your site wherever you are displaying an ad, so that you can then use Google Ad Manager to control which banners are displayed in that Ad Slot.  Once the code is inserted, Google Ad Manager will then track the number of page views of that Ad Slot as well as the CTR.  For each Ad Slot, multiple campaigns, or Orders, can be targeted and Google Ad Manager will aim to serve the best performing ad in terms of revenue for each Ad Slot, subject to any conditions you might have set such as geotargeting (e.g. only show this Order if the pageview is from the UK), or frequency capping (e.g. only show ad x times per day) or show ad min/max xx times per day.

For each slot you can also choose to serve a Google Adsense banner if Google Ad Manager thinks it can serve a Google Adsense banner that will deliver a higher eCPM than your own CPM banners and campaigns.  The best way to illustrate the benefits of this is through an example.

Example 1

Site 1 has 1x 160×600, 1×728x90 and 1x 300×250 banner slots.  Imagine the site has 3 campaigns, 1,000 page views per day, 500 visitors per day and 50% US traffic:

1. Campaign 1: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $1 for all 3 sizes
2. Campaign 2: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $1.5 for 300×250 banners but capped at 1 view per visitor/day
3. Campaign 3: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $2 for 728×90 banners but only for US traffic

With Google Ad Manager you could do the following:

1. Create 3 Ad Slots (160×600, 728×90, 300×250) and add the HTML to your website
2. Add Campaign 1 and target it to all Ad Slots : Ad Slot 1 160×600, Ad Slot 2 728×90 and Ad Slot 3 300×250
3. Add Campaign 2 and target it to Ad Slot 3 only and add the freq cap of 1 view per day
4. Add Campaign 3 and target it to Ad Slot 2 only and target it to only US traffic

Once completed Google Ad Manager will do the following:

1. Ad Slot 1: serve campaign 1 1000 times = $1 in total revenue
2. Ad slot 2: serve Campaign 3 for the 50% of traffic that is US based=500 views x $2CPM=$1 revenue, and serve Campaign 1 for the 50% of traffic that is not US based=500 views x $1CPM=$0.5 revenue.  $1.5 total revenue
3. Ad slot 3: Average pageviews per visitor is 2, so it will serve Campaign 2for the first view per visitor=500 views x $1.5CPM=$0.75 revenue, and serve Campaign 1 for the other 500 views=500 views x $1CPM=$0.5. $1.25 total revenue

Total Revenue:  $3.75

Without Google Ad Manager it would have been impossible to serve campaign 2 as nothing would be shown for the 2nd page view, and similarly Campaign 3 couldn’t be shown as nothing would be shown to non US network.  Hence only Campaign 1 could be safely used, so total revenue would be 1,000 views x $1CPM = $3 i.e using Google Ad Manager would have increased total revenue by $0.75 or 25%.

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