Google Targets Ads by Site, Sells by CPM

[dave owen]

It will be interesting to see how Google will pay publishers for CPM campaigns.

From Google's letter to publishers today:
"This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site."

[Chromate222]

They sent out an email? Wonder why I didn't get one. I'm quite a high adsense earner. Enough to have received 2 Google radios anyway lol

[jackburton]

I welcome the changes with the belief that G will do anything to increase its profits (and for no other reason) and thus mine. Of course I could be wrong but G has never let me down before.

[WackyChicken]

They sent out an email? Wonder why I didn't get one. I'm quite a high adsense earner. Enough to have received 2 Google radios anyway lol

CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.

For every eligible impression, both pay-per-impression ads and pay-per-click ads compete in the same auction. Our technology will automatically display the highest performing ads on your pages.

Gotta love cpm - i can't wait untill this is released... i should be earning double with adsense.

[techmonkey]

I'm fairly certain now that Google has been running a CPM campaign on my site for the last 5 days. My revenue increases steadily throughout the day even if clicks don't change at all. I like it

[oalhajjar]

From a publishers POV this is great. The $2 min CPM is also a nice floor! Great job Google!

[Martin64]

This might be the reason my eCPM has doubled the last 10 days for some of my sites, well I'm not complaining.

[Polo]

and google keeps amusing me...

[helioaug]

I didn't get the e-mail form Google about the new cpm ads. Would anyone that received it post a copy here?

[Digitalman]

I didn't get the e-mail form Google about the new cpm ads. Would anyone that received it post a copy here?

Hello,
We've made many recent improvements to Google AdSense. Read on to find out more.

Increasing monetization through new forms of advertising

As part of our goal to improve the monetization of your sites, Google has introduced a number of new features for advertisers, which will directly impact you as an AdSense publisher.

We anticipate that these features will introduce new advertising dollars into the content network by giving advertisers additional ways to reach their objectives.

We're currently testing these new features with a select group of advertisers, and expect to make the features more widely available in the near future.

Site targeting: focusing on the audience

The keyword-targeted ads that you're used to seeing on your pages will now be joined by a new type of site-targeted advertisement. Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites.

We believe that advertisers will leverage both our traditional keyword-targeted advertising which runs across the entire AdSense network, and our new site-targeted advertising, bringing more ad dollars to publishers.

CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.

For every eligible impression, both pay-per-impression ads and pay-per-click ads compete in the same auction. Our technology will automatically display the highest performing ads on your pages.

Expanded text ads: testing new formats

We are also running a test with text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit. At this time, this test will only apply to text ads in a site-targeted campaign and to ad formats banner-sized or larger. The expanded pay-per-impression text ad will have to beat out all of the competing ads before it can appear, so publishers can be assured that any expanded text ad is a highly competitive ad. These ads will be served to any text-enabled ad unit and will abide by your text ad color settings.

More image ads

Because of these new features available for advertisers, the number of image ads in the Google advertising network will grow. To take advantage of these ads, and the increased earnings potential that they offer, we encourage you to review your image ads preference in your AdSense Account Settings page.

You can also choose your image ads preference on a format-by-format basis when generating your ad code. For publishers who want to fully leverage image ads, we now provide an image ads only selection.

Your image ad inventory will also include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers. These new ads will adhere to the 50KB size limit for image ads, and will be reviewed according to our content guidelines.

Finally, we've added the wide skyscraper (160x600) format to make a total of 5 ad formats supporting image ads. If you're opted in to image ads, be sure to use one of these formats so that we can send image ads to your pages.

Contact us

You can always contact an AdSense specialist with your questions or comments, using the contact form in the AdSense Support center. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

[AlpineZone]

CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.

I wonder if the CPM bid will be per ad unit, per link (e.g. 2 ads per 468 banner), or per page. If per link, throwing up three large AdSense ad units could be pretty lucrative...

[jtrotta]

A smart advertiser would need to know more than what the site looks like if they are unfamiliar, but if you really know your industry, this is a great way to pick one or two sites you want to be associated with. If I advertise an ESL site, I know my ads are going on lots of garbage sites unless I goet out of the content entirely (which I did). Now I can get back in (on the sites I like).

This is going to take some time for advertisers to get used to. What tools will Google provide advertisers to help them select sites that they want their ads to appear on? If all an advertiser can do is search for sites by keyword / url or whatever, with no other information provided, then this isn't a good thing. Advertisers will be forced to use trial and error, which will obviously waste money.

Most advertisers will probably just look for attractive sites to place their ads on. That's not always a good move. The ugliest sites can quite often have great CTRs and high quality traffic. How will the advertiser choose a site based on those factors.

Even a lot of the publisher community fail to realise that sites created purely for adsense are very valuable for advertisers (and obviously publishers). But with google having been automatically selecting sites to display ads on up until now, this has always been hidden from the advertiser. It's going to take time for advertisers to get the hang of selecting the right sites to advertise on, particularly as they'll be paying on a CPM basis.

It would be good if Google could help them out by publishing stats along with the sites that can be selected, ie, average impressions / average CTR etc.

[quiddity]

What a great idea!

[GeorgeB.]

Down with the ugly sites!! LOL

This is PERFECT.

1) Those ugly sites built just for adsense will now have to either fix their design or try and apply for other ad networks which will probably reject them as well. Bye bye Mesothelioma type sites

2) $2 minimum CPM pwnz. I mean of course google will rob us blind and take their cut without telling us how much. But it's still gonna be able to compete with a lot of the major CPM networks like Fastclick, burst, casale, etc. This should be interesting.

I think this is a wake up message for publishers. Build quality sites to attract advertisers or fall by the way side.

[hurricane_sh]

Seems you all are advertisers or major adsense publishers.

[kananga]

thats a very cool feature.

[Erikina]

I agree with GeorgeB. it's going to put huge pressure on webmasters to improve their site to something that advertisers would want to advertise on. As an advertiser and publisher - this should be great.

I know I will be adding some content, and working a bit on the design of my site to make it a bit more attractive to advertisers.

Hopefully this will improve the overall quality of websites in general.

[clasione]

Anther good point to this is that advertisers that are worried about click fraud can run this program.

[codejunkie]

I wonder if the CPM bid will be per ad unit, per link (e.g. 2 ads per 468 banner), or per page. If per link, throwing up three large AdSense ad units could be pretty lucrative...

Yeah, I don't get that either. I'm assuming Google won't join the CPM crowd and do image banners. so I wonder what the banners will be like.

[kingjoe]

Great!!!

[epiphone]

With the new CPM program, should publishers start to fear fraudulent page impressions? Will Google allow the website owners to browse their own websites?

[HPin]

This seems like an excellent idea!

[Erikina]

With the new CPM program, should publishers start to fear fraudulent page impressions? Will Google allow the website owners to browse their own websites?

Very interesting question, I wonder what they are going to do about fraudulent page surfing. I imagine that no IP address will be allowed to see above a certain amount of PPV ads (or at least be counted).

[Lars-Christian]

With the new CPM program, should publishers start to fear fraudulent page impressions? Will Google allow the website owners to browse their own websites?

I can not even in my wildest dreams imagine that Google would punish/ban sites for having a high pageview/unique ratio, or in other words, quality content! As for webmaster not being able to browse their own sites, well then I guess I'll have to get myself an ad block, since I constantly browse my own sites, thoroughly, every day, to go through everything and improve and maintain it.

Another thing is, will advertisers be able to target certain CHANNELS, since many obviously use AdSense on forums?

[bigduke]

Seems to be a good idea, you get paid even if your rival (if he does choose) tries a stunt by displaying his ads on your site.
However, what happens to the sites which aren't shosen by anyone? No ads for them at all even though that earns them little revenue? I remember earning just $14 off adsense on my previous site, but then again there were lots of other reasons for the low income.
But this makes one thing certain, niched ads, If I were offering my web dev services, it would make more sense to display my ads where my target clients would flock rather then have my ad displayed on another web dev company's site just because the content matched. The content matching idea would have worked better to diaplay cached search results rather than advertisements.
Just one thing I couldn't understand, what is CPM (cost per something?) and how does it affect advertisers?