'Tis the Season for AdSense Placement Targeting

 With the holiday season fast approaching, everyone is spending more online. As consumers start shopping for gifts, searching for holiday activities, and booking vacations, advertisers are putting more of their marketing dollars online to reach these potential customers. This means there is an increased demand for the ad space on your site and an opportunity for you to earn more. To help you capitalize on this trend, we recommend you try Google AdSense, and specifically take advantage of placement targeting. 

As Google Affiliate Network publishers, you all currently have an AdSense account that you may or may not use. By utilizing AdSense, and specifically placement targeting, during this time of year you can capture more revenue by capitalizing on the increased demand for ad space. 99% of Google’s 1000 largest advertisers run display campaigns and focus a lot of their budget during the holiday season. As a result, you can take advantage of this holiday increase in advertiser spend, and help advertisers placement target specific sections of your site using a feature called ad placements. By creating an ad placement, you’ll make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by AdWords advertisers.

Using Google AdSense in combination with the Google Affiliate Network will allow you to have two revenue streams that will be housed in the same AdSense account. Our technology and vast network of advertisers ensures that only the highest paying and most relevant ads are delivered to your users. Additionally, with Google AdSense you have a high degree of flexibility and control as you dictate where and when Google ads appear on your site. Enabling placement targeting within your AdSense account further allows you to provide written descriptions of your site, general demographic segment / audience information, and indicate where ads will appear on your site, all of which encourages advertisers to spend more of their marketing dollars on your site, as they have more insight into your traffic. 

Check out this video to learn more about placement targeting and how you can get started. The sooner you do so, the sooner advertisers can see your ad placements and potentially include you in their holiday campaigns!

One important note if you decide to run Google AdSense ads in addition to your Google Affiliate Network ads, please make sure to review the AdSense program policies before you get started, to understand some of the important differences between these policies and the Google Affiliate Network program policies.  For example, publishers running AdSense ads may not click on their own AdSense ads (or encourage users to click on their AdSense ads.) On the other hand, publishers may encourage users to convert through their Google Affiliate Network ads (and this is what many affiliates do best!).

Posted by Kristin Hall at the request of the AdSense team