"I want to improve my AdSense performance, but I don't know how to get started!" The Google Australian AdSense team has just put together an 11-minute introductory tutorial for anyone who is approaching AdSense optimization for the first time. The video provides some very basic concepts and suggest simple strategic approaches to general AdSense optimization that, as far as I can tell, are all right on the mark. These are again, all basic concepts of AdSense optimization and they are definitely targeted at those exposing themselves for the first time to this type of work. What you should expect to find in it, are fundamental references for optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and to how you should best monitor and track your results. Also included, some general advice and tips on how to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your web site pages. This introductory video guide covers the following topics: 1. Analysing your webpage 2. Creating custom channels 3. Determining best ad design and placement 4. Maximizing ad units on a page 5. Tracking and measuring your results Here the video and full text transcript:

Google AdSense Steps to Success

The Australian Google AdSense Team introduces the basic of AdSense video optimization

Full English Text Transcription Welcome to a step-by-step guide to making the most out of AdSense. My name is Mel Ann and I am an account manager on the AdSense team in Sidney Australia. Together with my colleague Tim we'll be running through a guide to successful AdSense optimization. One of the great things that Mel Ann and I we love about our job , is helping publishers maximize their Adsense performance via the optimization program. The two aims of the program are: 1) Increase your AdSense revenue and 2) Improve your community's experience on your web site. The optimization guide that follows is all about these two goals.

The Five Steps To Optimizing AdSense On Your Web Pages

Mel Ann: Let's go through the steps for optimizing your web pages. These five steps will take you through a complete optimization. And they are a good starting point for you to improve your AdSense performance. As optimization specialists,Tim and I go through these steps when looking at all our publishers accounts.

• Firstly we analyze the content of a web page and determine how your users view the content.
• By using custom channels we also find out which ad units are performing or underperforming, by looking at the channel data available.
• Then we determine the optimum ad formats and placements of your ads such as color, position and size.
• We also make sure that you are getting the most out of having multiple ad units on a page.
• And by checking and measuring the results from when you implement it you will be able to say whether your optimization have made a difference to your AdSense performance.

1) Analyze Your Web Pages

People read pages in different ways and their interaction with ads will depend on a few factors. Ask yourself these questions: a) What type of content do you have on your pages? Some will interact with an article page differently than from a forum. And differently again with a video site. b) Where is their attention likely to be focused? If you have your most interesting content at the top of the page the best ad placement will be next to that content. You should place ads where your users are most likely to look and not hide them away at the corner of your page. c) Ask yourself how you can integrate ads into this area without getting into your users way. You want to protect your community experience with your web page and not clutter it with ads.

The AdSense Heatmap

This heatmap highlights the areas on a web page where ads perform well. Ads are ideally placed above the fold and close to your primary content. You should place ads where your users are most likely to look and not hide them away. At the end of the day, your knowledge about how your community interacts with your page will guide you on how to best apply these optimization techniques. When analyzing your pages it's also important to think about how advertisers will like to appear on your site. A great way to potentially increase your earnings is by making your site more appealing to advertisers. Earnings, or effective CPM (eCPM) can be increased by advertisers targeting your site in a placement targeting campaign. In a placement targeting campaign an advertiser bids more than all the ads in an ad unit to take up that entire unit with their ad. This is most often an image ad. But it could be video, Flash, or a text ad.

Is Your Site Advertiser Friendly?

The top three ways to ensure that your site is advertiser friendly are: 1) To opt-in to showing text as well as image ads 2) To have well designed and presented content 3) To use large ad units such as the 300x250 medium rectangle.

2) Set Up Custom Channels

Custom channels allow you to categorize or group different ad units across your site for reporting purposes. They give you a better insight into how individual ad units are performing, and so that you can make decisions about placement, color and style and maximize your user engagement with the ads. You can manage your custom channels in the "Channels" section, under the AdSense Setup tab. So after analyzing your pages and determining the way you would like to place your ads make sure you also create a channel for individual ad unit placements. You will be able to compare performance between ad units. For example by creating a custom channel to track all fo your leaderboard ad units as well as your medium rectangle ad units you will be able to say which ad sizes perform better, in terms of clickthrough rate or revenue. Tracking individual ad unit metrics ensures that you have the best information possible for maximiming your AdSense performance.

3) Optimize Your Ad Units Design and Performance

Advertisers love to use these formats in placement targetig campaigns as they are common industry standards. The three most popular are: a) The medium rectangle (300x250)
b) Wide skyscraper (160x600)
c) Leaderboard (720x90) If you opted in to show image ads, you will be able to see also rich medi ads, including Flash and video. I encourage you to at least put in one of these formats in a consistent manner across your site as they have proven not only to be the most desirable to advertisers but also to be the best performing in terms of clickthrough rate and effective CPM.

Appropriate Use of Colors

Colors play an important part in keeping your ads looking professional and a relevant part of your site. As text ads show approximately 70 to 80% of the time it is essential that they complement your site. There are several ways you can do this: Simple things like blending in the background of the ads with the color of your site and removing borders have proven in the past to have a significant impact upon clickthrough rate. Just be careful of not blending the ads too much so that they look like your site content. You can also try to highlight the links in the URL with shades that complement your site colors. Remember that tricking your audience to click on ads does not work in the long run and Google penalizes publishers whose users are not interacting properly with ads on page.

So let's summarize the key learnings from looking at ad design and placement.

• We have found that doing an analysis of how your users view information and enjoy the content on your site is absolutely essential to how you choose where to place your ads.
• It's important not to hide your Google ads. As users will actually find them useful if they can see them.
• Integrate your ads with your content and place them where they are visible. You will find that your actual clickthrough rate will actually improve.
• Choose colors for your ads so that they are easily distinguishable from content but still look like they belong to your site.

We see so many instances where ads look like a copy and paste job. To take advantage of the flexibility that AdSense offers, consider customizing your color palette. We offer now rounded corners for your ads.

4) Maximize Revenue From Multiple Units

Now we will move on to how to maximize revenue from the existing ad units on a page. Of course the AdSense team is very wary to suggest you to plaster your pages with ads, so to maximize the yeld from multiple units, we recommend finding ut which unit is performing best on your page. You can do this by setting up custom channels to determine which ad format is outperfoming the rest in terms of having the highest clickthrough rate and eCPM. The first ad unit on a page always shows the highest paying ads. The ones that won the ad auction. These ads pay you the most per click. The first unit on the page is defined as the first instance of HTML code on your page. Place that ad unit first in your HTML so that it will receive the highest paying ads. This will maximize the yield that you can receive from multiple ad units on a page. So for example if you have a leaderboard at the top of your page but a mdeium rectangle that is placed half-way down outperfoms it, then the higher paying ads are better being placed in that medium rectangle where your users click more. If you are comfortable with HTML and JavaScript you probably can figure out a way to place the medium rectangle first in your HTML. However a good result can also be gained by removing the leaderboard from the top and placing it somewhere else on a page so that the medium rectangle appears first in your pages source code.

5) Track and Measure Your Results

Let's go over the best ways of tracking and measuring your optimization results. As I have mentioned previously, using AdSense channels is a great way to track AdSense performance at the individual ad unit level. This next section will detail how to use methods best. I am sure everyone is familiar with the "Reports" tab in your AdSense account. To generate a report on your custom channels click on the Advanced Reports subtab. Select the "channel data" radio button and the channels that you would like to compare. You also have the option of showing your results by date, channel, or both. Below you'll see your results. In this example (see video) we have grouped results by date. This gives results for each day for all the custom channels you have selected. Even more useful is grouping your results by channels. This allows you to compare different ad units based on placement, color or format. Success in using this feature depends on whether you have set up custom channels to track these ads in the first place. In this example we are comparing the performance of your 160x600 skyscraper against the 300x250 medium rectangle. If we were to run these reports over a monthly time frame and see that the 300x250 medium rectangle is performing better, we may try first ad unit optimization, as discussed by Tim. Generating "placement targeting reports" is done within the same panel. Simply select the "Show Data by" option and change it to individual ad units. This allows you to see which ad units are receiving placement targeted ads and whether your optimization has effectively improved your eCPM.

Resources for AdSense Optimization

Let's look through some of the great resources available for AdSense optimization. In the AdSense Help Center you'll find the answers to our most common questions as well as more techniques to help you improve your AdSense performance. Try searching for "optimizing AdSense" in the Help Center and walk through the easy to implement solutions for getting the most out of AdSense. Google AdSense Help Forum is a place for you to learn and share the optimization techniques with other AdSense publishers. You can browser previous threads and comments or post a new conversation on how to approach your Adsense optimization on your site. If you have any questions about AdSense or if you would like more detail on AdSense optimization in general please feel free to contact the AdSense team by emailing adsense-support@google.com or go to the Help Center guide

Video by the Australian Google AdSense Team - "Five steps to optimising your AdSense performance" - YouTube link - Formatting, illustrations and full English text transcription by Robin Good.

If you want tocreate a slick, highly visual, interactive magazine to publish and distribute online, Calameo, has recently launched a web-based service that allows one-click conversion of all most popular document formats into highly customizable and very attractive full-screen flip-page magazines. Photo credit: Ophelia Cherry So, whether you have a PDF file a .doc report or an OpenOffice presentation you can easily create high-impact interactive visual magazines that can be distributed via email, social news sites and via an embeddable snippet of code allowing any Calameo based magazine to be republished on any web site or blog. Here more details:

Overview

Calaméo is a web-based service which creates glossy, highly visual versions of most any document you submit in order to provide a richer and more comfortable reading experience. Online publications created with Calameo can be downloaded, shared / embedded on other sites, and sent as a link to be viewed to any number of recipients and independently of the operating system, or browser type being used. In other words, Calameo is a tool capable of producing slick-looking interactive documents with little effort and no tech know-how required on the part of the publisher. These interactive documents are particularly interesting as they offer multiple navigation and browsing options, a good search functionality, easy zooming and scrolling through the document and a simple and intuitive user interface. Personalization also plays an important roleinside Calameo, allowing you, the publisher, to easily characterize your publication through a wide choice of personalization options (background image, music, interactive links, etc.). Calameo-generated documents can be published and shared publicly or can be kept under secure access for your restricted team of colleagues. Calaméo allows you to share your publications with the people of your choice, in complete safety. Calameo also allows you to organize multiple types of documents you want to publish into separate "subscriptions" allowing the actual creation of different publication channels. Social features are well integrated into this online publishing tool allowing for readers to comment and start discussions on any document you have configured for open social interaction.

Key Features

Document Conversion - Files Type Supported

Calameo can easily convert most type of documents and files with no additional help. Files can be as large as 100MB each, and here are the specific document formats supported.

Player Features - Navigation Controls

Once a document has been converted into Calameo, it is displayed within a custom Flash player. To navigate the newly created document a navigation toolbar is available on the top left area of the Calameo player. Key navigation options from left to right include: a) Publication Switch back to main publication mode from any other of the available viewing modes. b) Subscriptions Allow readers to discover and access your other content channels, magazines or publications. c) Thumbnail view of all pages View the whole publication as a series of thumbnails. d) Full screen view Launch the viewer in full screen mode. e) Bookmarking Bookmark specific pages or sections for later review. f) Zoom-In Zoom-Out Easily zoom in and out of the document for maximum readability. g) Audio volume Control or mute audio volume for multimedia publications which contain audio as well.

Delivery and Distribution

With Calameo all of your documents can be easily shared either as fully viewable embedded documents, or via a small mini-Calameo player. At the moment of publication you can also immediately invite selected contacts as well as post your doc to some of the most popular social news sites. Publications created with Calameo can be easily distributed, shared, republished, subscribed to in multiple ways. Converted documents can in fact be set for open download by readers, as well as for open republication via the Calameo mini-embeddable player you see above this paragraph. An RSS feed is also available. Social news and bookmarking facilities also allow anyone to easily repost any Calameo publication to some of the most popular social news sites such Facebook, Digg or Reddit.

Community Features

Calameo sports the standard set of social and community features allowing you to invite as many people as you want to watch, comment and discuss around your publications directly from within the Calameo interface.

Search

The Calameo search facility module doesn't get a prize for its UI, but it does deliver solid results, that are visually navigable and immediately accessible. It appears to be also very fast.

Customization

Calameo offers a nice set of interesting customization features for your own publications. These range from integrating your own image or logo in the player, to the addition of background music and more.

Multimedia Editing

One of the coolest features of Calameo allows you to edit your uploaded document and add to it links to other web sites, links to specific pages inside the document, MP3 sounds, video clips in FLV format and animation s in SWF file format.

Licensing

All documents published with Calameo must be files for which you do have full publishing and distribution rights. You cannot just take any electronic version of a magazine and re-publish it through this service. If you do, you may run into some serious penal issues. If you are the originator of your own documents to be published via Calameo you have also the nice option of being able to select the type of Creative Commons licence that you want to use for each publication.

Other Cool Features

A number of other valuable features is available when you create a new publication and includes options to share the document and to make it easy for others to access it. Advanced conversion options allow you to set whether original fonts should be integrated in the final converted publication doc (this will make it larger in size and therefore slower to load) or if Calameo will try to approximate itself the closest available font to the layout specs. Quality of compressed images can also be converted from these conversion options.

Plans & Pricing

The basic service, which is fully free, has lots to offer without asking anything in return. The PRO version, which costs €149/year (apx. $190 ) provides you with greater ability to customize your publication, tools to manage directly your mailing list, traffic and viewing stats, no ads. The PRO version has also added access to the Calameo API, allowing your programmers to tap right into the Calameo engine and data output elements.

In Summary

Pros - Key Strengths

Support for a wide variety of popular file formats Web-based - works with all browsers and operating systems Free - all of the basic core functionalities are available for free Slick, interactive document player Cool navigation and browsing tools Customization options Editable - links, videos and animations can be added to your original document Embeddable on other sites Downloadable - original document can be made available for download if desired Privacy - any document can be set to be published as fully "public" or as "private" Community features Social news sites support RSS support

Cons - To Improve

Help and documentation - very sparse and thin - badly organized - difficult to navigate AdSense ads - AdSense ads are present on almost every public page of this service site. While I understand the basic needs for bringing in any possible extra revenue during these early phases I find the presence of ads distracting and discrediting for the site prestige and credibility. They should not be there. The "action" buttons used to edit or save information inside Calameo all use strange and non-standard terms for functions. Distracting and confusing. Somewhat confusing navigation inside Calameo web-based account. Not intuitive path to find mini-player and sharing functionalities.

Editor's Comments

Here is an innovative online publishing tool which raises the bar for quality of results (final page layouts) as well as for speed and ease of use. Targeted at those wanting to distribute their contents online in a more prestigious, slick and interactive format, Europe-based Calameo has created a useful service, which similarly to Scribd or Docstoc allows you to easily publish and distribute any document online. Calameo key strengths are the wide support for a variety of popular document formats, a cool and highly usable distribution interface, alongside some nifty customization features, RSS support, publication embedding, as well as full downloading (if allowed) of original documents. Although still in beta, Calameo looks like a promising service for online publishers, especially for those who want to extract higher value from the distribution medium Calameo puts at their disposal. From the viewpoint of professional online publishers, the opportunity is in creating premium options that serve directly the needs of those wanting to use this platform as a way to market and sell their know-how, services or physical products. In this light, potential integration of ecommerce payments, squeeze page features, list building and similar marketing tools could further characterize Calameo from its competitors, while addressing aggressively one of the most rapidly moving segments on the net. I believe that there is ample market opportunities for online publishing tools like this one, as long as they are courageous and shrewd enough to address very specific needs and applications. Doing something cool that tries to satisfy many different needs and audience types is generally bound to have much harder chances of survival.

Learn More

About Calameo Calameo Help (very cumbersome to navigate and rather sparse in contents) Press Release - April 21st 2008

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on Tuesday June 24th 2008 as "Create An Online Interactive Magazine From Any Document With Calameo"

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has sanctioned Clifford Shoemaker, a Virginia attorney, for abusing the legal process by issuing a subpoena to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes sought to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. (For more on her statements about the lawsuit, see my previous post: Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation.)

On March 24, 2008, Shoemaker, an attorney for the Sykes, served Seidel with a subpoena in connection with the Sykes v. Bayer lawsuit. The subpoena demanded that Seidel appear for a deposition on April 30, 2008, and that she produce a shockingly broad collection of information, including her bank statements, tax returns, communications with religious organizations, and personal correspondence with other bloggers.

On April 21, magistrate judge Muirhead granted Seidel's well argued motion to quash the subpoena. The judge also ordered Shoemaker to show cause why he should not be sanctioned under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 for issuing the subpoena.  In response, Shoemaker filed a rambling opposition to potential sanctions in which he asserted that Seidel was engaged in a conspiracy with Bayer and others to harass him, his client, and various witnesses.  (With the help of Paul Levy from Public Citizen, Seidel filed a restrained response that made Shoemaker's outlandish claims seem all the more, well, outlandish.)

Not surprisingly, the judge didn't buy any of Shoemaker's conspiracy theories and in a strongly worded opinion, made it clear that the subpoena was an abuse of the legal process:

Mr. Shoemaker made no attempt to avoid imposing an undue burden or expense on Ms. Seidel. To the contrary, I find that he sought to burden her by requiring production of every scrap of paper related to autism, her web site, her tax returns, and her communications with the government. He improperly imposes a requirement to create documents, e.g., a list of “names of persons helping, paying or facilitating . . . these endeavors.” The documentation sought is exhaustive. . . .

Shoemaker has not offered a shred of evidence to support his speculations. He has, he says, had his suspicions aroused because she has so much information. Clearly he is unfamiliar with the extent of the information which a highly-competent librarian like Ms. Seidel can, and did, accumulate. If Shoemaker wanted to know if Ms. Seidel was in part supported by or provided information by Bayer, he could have inquired of Bayer or limited the Seidel subpoena to that information. Instead he issued the subpoena calling for production of documents and a deposition on the day before he stipulated to dismiss the underlying suit with prejudice. His failure to withdraw the subpoena when he clearly knew that suit was over is telling about his motives. His efforts to vilify and demean Ms. Seidel are unwarranted and unseemly.

In the end, the judge didn't order Shoemaker to pay a monetary sanction, but he did order the Virginia lawyer to attend ethics training and directed his court clerk to notify the Virginia State Bar so that it could consider disciplinary action on its own. 

Shoemaker and his client have a right to disagree with Seidel and, if they think they've been the victims of a conspiracy, to sue her.  But they don't have a right to misuse the legal system to coerce a critic to "shut up."  As I've noted before, we all lose when we allow that to happen.

(You can read more about the case in our Legal Threats Database entry: Sykes v. Seidel.)

CC Salon LA is back NEXT WEEK (6/26/08) with an awesome lineup to get your summer CC brain cells churning at warp speed!

Joining us will be Curt Smith, solo-artist and co-founder of Tears for Fears, who will be discussing the decision to release his most recent album Halfway, Pleased under a CC license. Also presenting will be Monk Turner, an LA-based multi-instrumentalist (and former Featured Commoner) who has been using a combination of CC licences and archive.org to release numerous concept albums that are unique not only in distribution but music style and aesthetic. Both will talk about musicians in general, their personal decision to use CC licences, and how using CC licences can have promotional, ethical, and artistic impact beyond traditional copyright.

The Salon will be taking place at the wonderful FOUND LA Gallery (Google map) from 7:30PM - 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, but most importantly don’t miss out on what is bound to be a great conversation on how CC licensees work on a practical level for musicians in particular but content creators in general.