If you haven’t noticed, I’m entering a phase where I look at advertising ROI, since so much of marketing ROI hinges on measuring advertising.  I came across Google AdPlanner recently, and want to understand how it can help a marketer with their online ad planning to maximize returns.

The first thing I noticed is that as a Publisher, I can offer information that is pertinent to potential advertisers for my blog.  Clicking on the Publisher tab, I entered my site’s description, relevant categories, and what type and size advertising I accept.  I then allowed it to pull from Google Analytics my number of unique visitors, page views, total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on the site.  At bottom of the Publisher page, it gives you the option to post a “badge” on your site.  I copied the generated code for the badge, went into my blog’s current Ads generated by the WordPress Advertising Manager plugin (see my previous post for details) and edited the Google AdSense ad.   There is a space to enter code either before or after the ad; I put it after.  I also entered a break (<br>) before the code to push it down one line.  You can see the results on my blog, under Google AdSense, the button that says Google AdPlanner. This now allows someone who may be interested in conducting advertising to view my site’s information.

Back in AdPlanner, I clicked on the tab Research.  From here, there are two tabs, Search by Site and Search by Audience.  Search by Site allows you to search on specific websites that you are interested in advertising on.  If they are in the AdPlanner system, the basics entered about the site–description, categories, what ads they accept–show up.  What is different about this page than the one generated from linking through the badge, however, is the button “Add to Media Plan.”  It won’t do anything, however, until I create a Media Plan.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I click Create Media Plan, and entered a name for it.  Clicking back on Research, I can now hit the “Add to Media Plan” button and it shows up as a line item on my plan.  I could keep doing this website by website, but I want to  Search by Audience.  Here I see 50 of the top websites, with the option at bottom to change the view to see as many as 250 at once.  They order by largest number of unique visitors – Yahoo shows up first on the list with 130 million unique visitors, then Facebook (110M), MSN (56M), Myspace (50M – still?!), and it goes on from there.

There are options next to Audience where at each step the sites shown are reloading to match what is entered.  The first is by Geography (down to metro and then city level).  In interest of my friend’s hair styling business as previously discussed (see two posts ago for details), I selected Venice, Santa Monica, Inglewood, Los Angeles and Marina del Rey.  Under language, I selected English and Spanish.  Under demographics, I entered the target my friend and I decided upon – women 25-54, with at minimum a high school degree, earning $25,000+.  The next, Sites Visited, is interesting as my friend wants to do styling for weddings, so I could choose to enter here that they have visited certain sites such as theknot.com.  For my purposes today, I’ll leave this alone. The next, Keywords Searched, I could enter keywords such as “wedding planning,” “wedding dress,” and so on.  Again, for my purposes today I will leave this blank.  The next, Load Audience, holds predefined audiences to help you out, such as “Affluent $100k+,” “Auto Buyers,” Baby Boomers,” and so on.  Oh good, “Bride to Be” is in there – I will keep that in mind but left this blank for now.

The resulting list of websites from my filters are shown in order of largest percentage reach.  The top 5 are: Yahoo at 76% reach,  Facebook at 62%, MSN at 35.3%, Live (which is now Bing) at 31.9%, and Amazon at 31.4%.

Under the Filter section, I can choose to rank them instead by Composition Index. If you don’t know, an Index is a way of looking the data where the result shows the number of times that a website delivers an audience, for example, the first on the list, LAmag, shows an index of 4000.  Divide 4000 by 100, and the resulting figure, 40, means that you are 40 times more likely to hit the audience that you are intending.  The next four on the list are LApublichealth.org at 3700 (who would have thought?!), themls at 3700 (the real estate directory), discoverlosangeles at 3300, and losangelesrestaurants at 3100.  IMHO (in my honest opinion), I feel that the use of indices is better than the use of percentage reach.  In the case of my friend’s hair styling business, I feel I would throw out the themls and losangelesrestaurants, including instead the next two on the list, LA411 at 3000 and losangeles at 2800.

A third way of looking at the results is to choose to Filter > Best Match, which says “Displays a balance of large and small sites.”  The top five are themls, LAmag, discoverlosangeles, ralphs, and losangeles.  IMSO (in my subjective opinion), I will go with the Composition Index results.  I am only selecting six, as my friend doesn’t have a ton of money to spend.  With my background in advertising, I know that my friend can’t spread her money too thin.  I may cut it down once I see the cost and ROI on each site, but six seems a good place to start.

Under Filters > Add Items, I can choose to also view Subdomains, Ad Placements, and whether the site is “In Google Content Network,” in addition to those items already selected for you: Domains and Accepts Advertising.  I selected Ad Placements.  This now changes my Composition Index view so I can see the indices for each of the placements, so now my top six sites are: LAmag (4400), LA411 (3700), themls – skipping, MyFoxLA.CityVoter (3700), LAlife (3400), daytrippen (3400), LAeater – skipping, and discoverlosangeles (3300).

Under Filters > Category I can further refine the results.  Here I can select Beauty & Personal Care > Beauty Magazines, Hair Care & Products, Spas & Beauty Services.  My top sites have changed again, and my top six are now Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), bellasugar (310), womenshealthmag (280), totalbeauty (280), fitsugar (280), and hairboutique (280).  Although my indices are now smaller figures, my friend doesn’t have a lot of money to spend so these may prove adequate as far as value – reach vs. cost.

Under filters, ad specs, I can select the type of ad she will run and the size.  From my prior experience at AOL, I know that 728×90′s (aka leaderboards) and 160×600′s (aka skyscrapers), tend to perform best.  I’ll select Flash ads since I know how to develop in Flash.  Once again, my top six sites have changed: Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), totalbeauty (260), elle (210), hairfinder (210), beauty.about (210), and dailymakeover (180).  I will now accept these and Add Selected to the plan I made earlier.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I can see now these line items and the expected impressions per day for three out of five.

From here, I can now export the plan to a CSV file or to a MediaVisor CSV.  MediaVisor is a system put out by Doubleclick that lets media planners research, plan and host ads for their advertisers.

Under Media Plan > Profile, I can also look at who this particular ad plan reaches.

Good stuff, right?  As for actually placing the media buy, AdPlanner does not yet support this ability.  I would now have to contact each of the online publications, providing my specs and filters, to find out what they would charge.   Unfortunately it also doesn’t allow you to export the filters you chose along with the media plan, so I submitted this to Google as a feature request.

Frankly, I never would have guessed those sites suggested by AdPlanner would be most beneficial to my friend’s styling business.  I hope this helps you understand how you too can benefit from using AdPlanner to plan your online advertising campaigns.

I will be sharing specifically how to setup Google AdSense and AdManager for a WordPress blog such as this one, but many of the steps are the same no matter what type of site you are managing.

1. Log into Google AdSense using a Google Account (if you do not have a Google Account, create one first).
2. Click on the My Account tab and make sure your contact information is accurate.  Here you can also specify payment details, but Google won’t let you change where to receive it or provide tax information until you’ve accumulated $10 in earnings.
3. Hopefully you’ve already setup Google Analytics on your domain and have been gathering visitor data.  If not, go do so now and return to Google AdSense.  On the Reports tab, click on Link to Your Google Analytics account and follow instructions.
4. Click on AdSense setup tab, then AdSense for Content.  You have a choice here whether you want an Ad Unit or Link Unit.  If you like me prefer Ad Units, hit Continue, and Select the Size Ad you want to display.  A tip – originally I chose a 250×250 ad but Google AdPlanner called this size a “Square Pop-Up” for some reason, so I switched to a 200×200 “Small Square” so as not to confuse potential advertisers that I’m willing to serve pop-ups (more on AdPlanner in a future post).  Make any other changes you desire for colors, corners, etc., and hit Continue.
   
5. Setup any desired Channels for your site, such as Business, News, Sports, etc. or ignore this and hit Continue.
6. Choose a name for your AdSense ad or accept the one provided and hit Submit and Get Code.
7. Now that we have the code to display the ads on your site, we need to add the functionality to the site to accept it.  For a WordPress Blog, I found a plugin called Advertising Manager that works great.  I simply downloaded it, unpacked it,  uploaded it into my Plugins folder, and Activated it.  If you are not using WordPress, watch this video on how to add AdSense for a website and then skip to the section on AdManager.
8. In WordPress I now have a new drop-down menu in my left side column in Admin called Ads.  Clicking on Create New Ad, I now have a field to paste the code given in AdSense.  Click Import.  I did not do anything on the next page except under Max Ads Per Page I put 1.  I allowed it to display All Ad Types including text, image and video ads but you can change this.  Click Save.  Now we want to place the ad on the page.
9. Click on Widgets under Appearance, and you will now see a widget called Advertisement.  Drag and drop the widget where you want it on the sidebar and change the drop-down menu under Select an ad to #Google Adsense.
   
10. Hit Save and you’re done.  It may take about an hour for Google to begin loading ads, as it first will crawl your site to determine the best types of ads to display given your content.

Since it would be nice to not only display AdSense ads but also to sell advertisements, I then accessed Google AdManager, which helps you to manage and sell your online inventory.  I found it helpful to watch this video on how to get around in it.

1. The first step you do is to setup your Ad Slots on the Inventory tab.  I setup two opportunities, the Homepage and Content pages.
2. I then setup my Placements on the same Inventory tab.  Again, I setup the Homepage (select Adds Appear On: Homepage button) and where the ad is located, middle right.  And then the Content pages (select Adds Appear On: Other button – type in Content), middle right.
3. Also on the Inventory tab, click on Network Settings and make sure you’ve enabled “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense” so if there is no ad to serve, you will serve AdSense ads.
   
4. I then click on the Order tab.  Here I can Check Inventory on particular Ad Slots, including defining Geography.  You have to wait to do this step, however, as it won’t work right away after setting up a new account.
5. Going back to the Order tab, I can setup a New Order, list the advertiser, start/end of the campaign (called a “flight”), and billing information and click Save.
6. Now we want to add line items to the campaign.  Clicking on New line item, we can name it (e.g. Homepage 200×200), select the inventory to be used, and put in the CPM (cost per thousand – tip:  M means 1,000 and MM means 1,000,000 when using abbreviations) or CPC (cost per click).  We can also add targeting criteria such as Geography, select Delivery Priority, and Delivery Options.
7. For Delivery Options, you will typically use Even delivery to allow the system to space ads out over the lifetime of the campaign.  However, if you have multiple campaigns going at once you may find that another advertiser’s ad is delivering more often because they purchased at a higher CPM (rate determines priority).  Therefore, you do have to monitor delivery of all campaigns to make sure that they are delivering at the appropriate rate.   You do this by clicking on the campaign’s line item.  Review the delivery bar under the ‘Delivery’ column:  If the line item is on schedule, the delivery bar is green.  If there’s a moderate risk of overdelivery or underdelivery, the delivery bar is orange.  If there’s a high risk of overdelivery or underdelivery, the delivery bar is red.  If you find you are risking underdelivery, you may choose to override the system and deliver “As fast as possible.”  However, if you do this keep watch on it daily because it can deliver so fast that you will run out of impressions before the end of the campaign and your advertiser won’t be happy.  As soon as the campaign is on schedule, turn Deliver fast as possible off.
8. You may get an advertiser who wants to pay a premium to take over your site’s ads for a particular promotion, in which case you can also select under Deliver Creatives to “Takeover (fill all possible slots).”  This will override the delivery system to not deliver any of your other advertiser’s ads.  Of course, this also means you have to keep close eye on delivery of your other campaigns that you fulfill the number of promised impressions in those contracts.  The system should adjust for a Takeover to fulfill the other advertiser’s contracts, but you may have to employ Deliver as fast as possible towards the end of the campaign to help it along.
9. Also Under Deliver Creatives you can select a Frequency cap, meaning, you won’t keep delivering the same ad more than the specified amount to the same person.
10. Under Deliver Creatives, you can optimize campaign creative delivery.  If an advertiser is running several versions of an ad, you can deliver them Evenly, you can Optimize them to deliver the creative that is garnering the best click through rate more often, or you can override the system with Manual Weights, for example 50%/50%.   Using Manual Weights is helpful if the advertiser wants to test two or more creatives throughout the entire campaign and wants to compare results equally over that time period, or if they predetermine to run one more often than another you can do that also.
11. Now we want to upload the Creatives associated with each line item in the campaign.  Clicking on a particular line item, we select Upload Creatives, fill out the needed info, upload a test image, and enter a test click-through URL (under Creative Type select hosted – redirect means that the ad resides on an advertiser’s server).  When doing this for real, be sure to look at advertiser provided click-through URLs to make sure they are correct.  Here you can also provide a fall-back static image if the ad is a Flash ad and the user’s browser doesn’t support them.
12. If the line item has rotating ads, click on Upload more creatives.  When done with this process, you will Approve and Activate the line item as ready-to-go.  Upload creatives for any additional line items, Approve and Activate.  If the line item status now says Ready, that means it is Activated but not yet delivering ads.
13. The last step that AdManager will direct you to do is to generate Ad Slot Tags, the code that makes the ad display on your site.  Click on the Inventory tab, then Generate Sample HTML, select “Add” Homepage, hit Generate Sample HTML.  For WordPress blogs – copy the SCRIPT ONLY between <head> </head> then in your blog under Advertising Manager hit Create New, paste the code.  Go back to the code in AdManager and copy the SCRIPT ONLY between <body> </body>, go back to the blog and paste it under the previous code.  Hit Import.  On the next page,  name the ad (e.g. HTML Homepage) and change the default ad size to whatever it is.   Under Website Display Options > By Page Type select the pages you want the ad to show up on (in this case, Homepage).  Save.
14. Return to AdManager, “Remove” Homepage and “Add” Content Pages, hit Generate Sample HTML.  For WordPress blogs only – copy the SCRIPTS ONLY between the <head> and <body> tags into a New Ad.  Hit Import.  On the next page,  name the ad (e.g. HTML Content) change the default ad size to whatever it is.   Under Website Display Options > By Page Type select the pages you want the ad to show up on (in this case, all except Homepage).  Save.
15. Click on Widgets under Appearance, drag and drop the Advertisement widget under the first we created earlier, change the drop-down menu under Select an ad to #HTML Homepage. Hit Save.
    
16. Add another Advertisement widget under the second, change the drop-down menu to #HTML Content.  Hit Save.
17. You should now be able to test the widgets and see your ads show up.  In my test, I uploaded a lotus flower to my homepage and a water lily to my content pages.  Check it out – my “flower campaign” runs through November 22.  Once you see it’s working, you can remove the first AdSense Advertisement widget as the ads will replace AdSense for as long as the flight is running (I’ll leave mine up so my readers can see it in action).

Lastly, you may also notice under my Google AdSense box a button that says “Google AdPlanner.”  In my next post, I will delve into AdPlanner – what it is, how to use it, and how to add that nifty button.

I hope you have enjoyed learning how to setup your blog/website for Google AdSense and AdManager.  Now do me a favor and click on my AdSense ads!  Haha.