Adsense and Adwords Content Placement Reports

As an Adsense publisher it is important that you keep up to date with Adwords developments. Why? Because any development that effects the way advertisers target their adverts can potentially have a significant influence on you income from Adsense.

Google recently announced that it was moving out of Beta testing to implement new Content Placement Reports for Advertisers. In this post we will look at what the content placement reports provide for Adwords advertisers and how this impacts on your Adsense efforts and your Adsense income.

Googles official AdWords Blog gave the low down on new Content placement reports. Googles announcement states that the new content placement reports;

enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more insight into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives

This of course means that advertisers can use the site targeting feature to get more exposure from sites that are performing well for their adverts . Conversely they can also use site exclusion to reduce or stop their ad exposure in those domains or URLs which are giving them poor quality traffic.

At the moment these reports are only being made available to Adwords advertisers in the US but according to Google they will be available in other places in the coming weeks.

The new Content Placement Reports don't yet put advertisers fully in control because as has been noted in some discussion forums there are still problems sometimes when Adwords advertisers try to exclude some sites.

Nevertheless it is clear what direction things are moving in. Advertisers will start to have increasingly detailed information about the performance of their ads site by site and increasingly detailed control over where their ads are shown.

So how does this effect you as an Adsense publisher. Well if you want particular advertisers to remain committed to advertising on your site in the future you will need to think not only about how your content relates to the adverts but also whether users clicking through those Ads are likely to convert for the advertisers. Don't forget that for the advertisers the issue starts at the point the user clicks through to them it is conversions that really count for the advertiser whereas for the publisher the concern has mainly been about click through.

Now you cant control what users do after they click through from your Ads but you should at least be aware that the pattern of Ads which are shown on your site might be effected in the future by advertisers who are monitoring how those click throughs convert for them