AdSense Direct: A new way to sell direct advertising on your blog

This article introduces AdSense Direct, a new way to use AdSense to manage advertising that you directly sell ads on your blog or website - and to fill those spaces with AdSense ads when there are no Direct ads running.

AdSense have announced a new feature called AdSense Direct, which will let AdSense publishers (ie people showing ads on their blogs or websites) manage directly-sold ads using their AdSense account.

"Management" means that after an advertisement and campaign details are set up and approved, the ads will show on your site without any changes to your site (apart from having AdSense ads in on it), and having all contracts, invoicing and payments handled through your AdSense account.

How to use AdSense Direct

• Arrange a direct deal with an advertiser -- this can be any advertiser, even one that doesn't currently use AdWords.

• Enter the details into your AdSense account; more details about this here.

• You will be given a link which you email (etc) to the advertiser.

• The advertiser logs in (possibly after creating a Google account), upload their ad "creative" (ie text and pictures), approve the terms you entered, and pays for the deal with Google Wallet.

• You - and Google - approve the ad creative (ie words and pictures).

After this, the ad runs during the time period that you set up for it.   And after it has finished, regular AdSense ads are shown instead.

Limitations

Bad news for now:

AdSense Direct is currently available to publishers and advertisers located in the U.S., and we hope to expand further in the coming months.

But my fingers are crossed that this will change soon.

There's no statement about how this works with AdSense's limits on the number of AdSense ad units shown: does an "AdSense Direct" ad count towards the three-per-type-per-page that non-premium AdSense advertisers are limited to? My guess is "yes" - because regular AdSense ads are shown if AdSenseDirect ones aren't available.

Possibly you can only have one direct advertising campaign at a time?  Google's announcement  also says "If you've already expanded to running multiple direct ad deals and ad networks on your pages alongside AdSense, try our ad serving solution DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP)." - and yes, AdSense Direct does seem to be a vastly simplified version of this, which will benefit Google by signing up more advertisers.

And AdSense-Direct will only work in places where you can put an AdSense ad unit.  For example it is possible to put ads right inside blog-posts.  But regular AdSense ads need Javascript to work, so people who read your blog by email subscription or RSS don't see them. It's likely that AdSense Direct ads will be the same.

I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that the standard AdSense rules will apply.   And this will mean that if your advertiser ticks any of Google's categroy boxes, their AdSense-served ad will not appear on your blog if you have blocked that category.

AdSense Direct is probably not available for Blogspot domains, or at least not for ones whose owner signed up for AdSense using the easier AdSense setups for hosted publishers.

Costs?

The $64m question!

I'm still looking for information about Google's charge or margin for using Direct. For regular AdSense (for non-premium publishers, anyway), its 42%, ie they pay out 58%. I guess it will be a lot lower - but still significant, as Google are providing tools to do some of the most troublesome bits of direct advertisign for us.

My (possibly hopeful!) guess is 20%. What's yours?

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How to show an AdSense ad inside a blogger post

Putting a picture on your blog as a Gadget

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

The Image gadget

Dry dock in Claddagh Basin

A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use an Image gadget (previously called a Picture gadget).

This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up on all screen and is linked to somewhere.

Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go in other places too (header, footer, etc).

Follow these steps to add a picture gadget in Blogger

1  Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet.
(This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's already stored in Google Album Archive. )

3  In Blogger, follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, and choose the Image gadget from the list of options (you may have to scroll down to find it in the list).

4  In the Configure-Image box, enter the options you want for your picture.   These include:

• The title for the Gadget,
• The caption for the picture
  (the small words that go underneath it, usually explaining it, or where it came from),
• What should happen when a reader clicks the picture - put this into the Link field
• Where to find the picture
  (ie the file-location that you copied in step 2)
• Whether to re-size (ie shrink) the picture to fix the space in the sidebar in your current template.

5 Press Save.

6  If necessary, drag-and-drop the new gadget to the place where you want the picture to go, and press Save.

What your visitors see

People who visit your blog in a web-browser, will see the picture, in the place where you put the gadget.  However pictures are not supported gadgets for dynamic view templates, so it won't be see if you use one of these.

Also, people who see your blog through an RSS reader, or by receiving emailed updates don't see any gadgets, so they will not see the picture.  

If you entered a value for Link, your visitor's browser leaves your blog and goes to the Link location:  with the Picture gadget, then there is no way to make this open a new window.   If you want to do so, then use an HTML gadget instead, get the code for the picture, and put target = "_blank"   into it:, so the code looks something like: 

<a href="YOUR LINK" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target = "_blank"><img border="0" src="YOUR PICTURE LOCATION" /></a>

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Google use Google-Sites, so we should too!

This QuickTip explains why I now feel happier about using elements from Google Sites in my blogs.

What is Google Sites, and why would a Blogger use it

Long ago (back in the late 2000's) there was a product called Google Pages, which people could use to make their own simple websites. It wasn't the greatest product that Google ever made (or purchased), and eventually it was retired, with websites made with Pages transferred over to the newer Google Sites.

Sites always seemed a bit clunky. It doesn't seem to have a huge number of users.   And there are vastly better products for building more-complex websites, and for building simple ones (eg using Blogger to make a "real" website).

Now, I did use a Sites filing cabinet as the document-store for one of my sites that makes lyrics of certain public domain songs available in PowerPoint format. I chose it before Google Drive had been released, and when Docs was not nearly as good as it is now. And SEO does matter for this blog, so I came to appreciate that the link to a file in sites includes the file-name.

But I've always had a nagging sense that one day Sites would be retired too, and I'd have to move my files and edit all my posts to re-set the links.

Why won't Google retire Google Sites

Despite my previous misgivings, I'm now feeling a lot more relaxed about Google Sites.  

Why?   Well I don't have a crystal ball.   But this recent post from the Google Testing blog talks about how they are into "dogfooding" and that Sites is one of the tools they do this with, to " host team pages, engineering docs and more"

Just to explain, "dogfooding" is corporate-jargon for using your own products. As in "eating your own dogfood".  It's sometimes called "drinking your own chapmpagne" in companies that see themselves as a bit more refined, or "eating your own cooking".

Google's post is telling us that they are using Sites for building tools that they use in their own work. Most likely, they have a website built in Sites, which manages their plans for future Blogger development, and available only to people inside the company and working on the Blogger project.

So that makes me feel reassured that most likely:

1. Sites won't be canned any time soon, or
2. If Sites is turned off, Google will have a replacement tool which will provide the same (and better) features, and they will convert items now built in Sites to this better tool.

Phew!

Maybe it's time to review my file-hosting approach again, or to re-visit Sites and look at their FAQs, home-page and support-community, to see what other Sites tools I might find useful.

How have you used Sites in conjunction with your blog?

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