Do you harness the full potential of Adsense "placement targeting" ?

Hello

Today I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time.

I run a medical forum for patients to ask medical questions.
My forum has several medical categories with different topics.

So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately.

I also activated "placement targeting" for the best performing ad placements.

However I did not realize the full potential of "placement targeting" until yesterday after I talked to my direct advertising marketer.

Q: What is the main goal of an advertiser?
A: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert

Q: Is wider or narrower targeting more effective?
A: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform

Just as info to you:
CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about "cough" or "skin rash" are 40-50$ (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs)
Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM.
Yes, it makes that much of a difference.

So what did I do?

I have several AD Placements on my forum but I did this change to the best performing AD which is the large rectangle above the fold next to the welcome message.
Have a look if you want

What I did is I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc.
Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown.

Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before.

Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum.

Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best.
For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum "alternative medicine" and his ads are only shown to people interested in "alternative medicine".
This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings.

What are your thoughts on this topic?
How do you handle placement targeting?

For anyone who is not familiar with Adsense Channels should read my thread Google Adsense - The Secret to using Channels first.

Kind regards

StarBuG

Originally Posted by StarBuG

Today I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time.

What were the changes you made today? It looks very much the same as it did last week when I was investigating your ad placement threads from vbulletin.com.

*edit* Weirdly, I am not seeing any Adsense ads on your site at all..

*edit2* And they have finally decided to show themselves. Odd.

The changes were that I created a separate channel for each forum/topic to allow narrow placement targeting on my site.
No change on the visual front end.

Runs two days now and the eCPM went up about 3 Euro.
This can be normal fluctuation of course.

Why the ads did not show I can't tell.
Did you see the site waiting for a resource to load when you waited for the ads?

Hi StarBug,

Were you able to confirm via the Adsense control panel whether the increase you observed was a result of advertisers targeting your placements as opposed to normal fluctuation? What have your results been like in the days since your last update to this thread?

Thanks!

The new channels will show up in Adwords in approximately 2-4 weeks.
Enough time for the fourth season where most of the advertising money is going to be spend

The eCPM was normal fluctuation, I only had a slight increase the last few days which is the result of more unique visitors.
Like I always say, somehow Google loves my site

Bringing up an old thread, how are you finding this works for you now, StarBug?