Controlling Your Reports

One important feature to note is that you can add an “annotation” to any line graph by double clicking on a certain date and then entering a note into the pop-up text box.  This can be very useful if multiple people are viewing this profile and you want to indicate that a significant editorial or technical event happened on a certain day that could account for significant changes in metrics.

When viewing a report in the standard table mode, you can change the column that it sorts by, by clicking on the column label. The arrow beside the metric name will indicate which variable it is sorting on.

Standard reports automatically select a primary dimension, but in some cases it is possible to change the primary dimension, and usually it is also possible to add a secondary dimension. For example, click on Demographics > Location. By default, the primary dimension of this report is Country / Territory.  Across the top you can change this to City, Continent, etc. You can also add in a secondary dimension to further break down your metrics. For example, we could choose Medium. This would result in each row representing a combination of the country and medium the visitor came from.

When viewing a report, the default view is usually a line graph or map at the top, and a table of values at the bottom. These views can also be changed.

For example, with some reports, such as New vs. Returning, you can switch the graph view to a motion bubble chart by clicking on the toggle button at the top of the graph. This could be useful if you wanted to view a graph with more than 2 variables, since you can include size of the bubble as one of the metrics.  You can also “play” the graph to see how the values change over time.

More powerful, though, is if you scroll down to the table on the top left hand side, beside the link “advanced”, you can switch the view.

If you click the second button you will see a pie chart beside the table. You can change what the pie chart shows your report relative to. In this example, it shows each Source/Medium as a percentage of the total visits, but you can change that to a percentage of the total Pageviews, Bounces, etc.

The third button shows you a performance bar chart, which simply adds a horizontal histogram to your metrics. The fourth button is very useful – it gives you a bar chart comparing each value to the site average. You can also change which metric it graphs.

The last button shows you a pivot table of the report. In the pivot view, the primary dimension will appear as row headers. You can select different columns by selecting the drop-down beside “Pivot by”. You can also select what metrics appear in the table. In this example, I’ve shown the number of visits for each Source/Medium, based on the language of the visitor:

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments are a critical tool to be able to use Google Analytics effectively.  Often you want to observe, or compare, what specific types of users are doing on your website. At the top of a report, beneath the date selection, click the button Advanced Segments.

Here you see a list of default segments to select from. For example, we can select “Direct traffic” and “Search traffic” if we want to see how they differ in their interactions with your website. Now, any report you select will show a comparison between the behaviour of direct traffic and search traffic.

To get rid of the segmenting, simply click the x’s beside the segments at the top of your report.

Even more powerful, is the ability to create custom segments. Let’s say we want to see the behaviour of all the people that searched for some version of our website. First click the Advanced Segment button, and then click “+New Custom Segment” in the bottom right-hand corner. My website is called Ganesha’s Scarf so I want to include people who came to the site by searching “Ganesha” or “Scarf”

First create a name for the segment. Then, under the first option, make sure “Include” is selected.  Find Keyword from the Dimension dropdown, which refers to the search keyword. And then we can use “Contains” Ganesha. We could also use exact match if we wanted those that searched just for “Ganesha”.

Then, under OR, select to add another option.  Repeat the same steps as the statement, but this time use contains “Scarf”. Now we will be including anyone who’s searched anything with the word Ganesha in it, or the word Scarf.  You can test or preview the segment before you save it.

Now whenever you click “Advanced Segment”, on the Custom Segments side you will see the segment you just created.  Selecting this will show us whether people who are searching for our website are actually finding what they were looking for, or is their bounce rate high.

Custom Reports

Lastly, for reports, we will look at custom reports. You may often find that the standard reports are not including the metrics you are interested in. In those cases, you can easily build a custom report. Click on the Custom Report heading, and then the “+New Custom Report” button. In this example, let’s say we want to know how many unique visitors visit our website from different countries. The standard Location report gives us the number of visits, but not the number of unique visitors.

First name your report. Then name your report tab – a custom report can have multiple tabs.  Add in the metrics we would like to see in our report. In this case, we want to include “Unique visitors”. You can include multiple metrics to that particular group such as visits, pageviews, etc. We can also create a second metrics group which will appear as a toggle link on the top of our report and could contain a different set of metrics.  Lastly, select the dimension – in this case “Country”.

Once you’ve saved your custom report, it will always appear when you click the “Custom Reports” button on the menu, as well as in the sidebar when you are viewing any Custom Reports.

Enabling AdSense

AdSense is the Google Ad network that allows you to get revenue on your website by showing your users relevant ads and being paid each time they click on them. It’s important to maximize your revenue by understanding when, where, and why users click on your ads and, over time, optimize the way you display ads. The best way to do that is to incorporate your AdSense data into your Google Analytics account.

To connect your existing AdSense account to your Google Analytics, first go to the Admin panel and select the account you want to connect.

Next, click the Data Sources tab.

Click the AdSense tab and click to Link Accounts.

You will be asked which property in that account is the primary one that contains your AdSense ads. Once you select the appropriate web property, your AdSense statistics starting that day will be available in your Google Analytics reports.

In brief, you can see your AdSense report summary under the standard reports in Content > AdSense. You will also now see that in any of the standard Demographics report, there is a toggle link to see AdSense for the report. For example, if you click on Location, and then click the AdSense link at the top of your location report, you can see what country’s visitors brought you the most Ad revenue.

Enabling AdWords

AdWords is the opposite end of the ad network spectrum – it allows you to display ads on other websites which are part of the Google ad network.

To enable AdWords in your Google Analytics account, you need to first login to your Google AdWords account. Note that the Google AdWords account must be setup with the same login as your Google Analytics account.

Under “Tools and Analysis” select “Google Analytics”.

This will bring you to a list of Accounts in your Google Analytics account.  Click the Admin button in the top left corner.

Select the Account you want to link to AdWords – the one you are using AdWords to drive traffic to.

Click on the Data Sources tab. You will see the sentence: “The AdWords account for xxxxx@gmail.com (601-133-1259) will be linked to www.youraccount.com” and below that a button to “Link Accounts”.

Click Link Accounts, and make sure to select “Auto-tag my links”. Select the drop down and select which profiles you want to link AdWords to.

Then you will see all the linked profiles in the table.

In Google Analytics, you can now see several standard reports under Advertising > AdWords. You can get an in-depth analysis of what ad word campaigns are working for you by seeing not only who is clicking onto your site, but their bounce rate, the pages they visit, etc. This will help you understand whether the money you are spending is resulting in quality visitors, as opposed to just an increase in traffic. For example, if you find the bounce rate is very high, then it might mean your ad needs to be reworded, or perhaps you should be linking to a different landing page.

EXERCISES

• Compared to the average, what percentage of visits to your site were from your target region/country?
• Show a pie chart of what Medium people came to your site from who were using mobile devices.
• What are the top 5 landing pages for people that came through your site through a search, but who did not search directly for the name of your website or news organization?
• Create a custom report that shows you the number of unique visitors that visited different pages on your site.
• Create a word cloud view of search terms that people come to your site using. Now create the same word cloud, but removing the top 3 search terms.
• If you have AdWords – see what times of the day people are most likely to come to your website.
• If you have AdWords – see what the bounce rate is like for people that come to your site through your campaign, and are new visitors.
• If you have AdSense – what pages on your site resulted in the most AdSense ads viewed? The highest revenue?
• If you have AdSense – show a pie chart showing the amount of revenue that new visitors result in versus returning visitors and another for the country visitors come from.

When a site is just getting off the ground, publishers often turn to ad networks because it allows them to generate revenue without investing in a sales force. As you grow and after you make the necessary investment in an ad sales force, ad networks still can help you reach advertisers that your sales force might not reach and sell areas of your site you cannot sell. Ad networks will help you set a baseline, a floor, for ad rates in your market. This will help you know how to price the advertising you sell directly. Armed with this information, you can calculate your market’s potential for digital advertising at an early stage, letting you know how much revenue you can expect in the early days of your site and helping you to generate revenue to pay for the resources you’ll need to create content and build your audience. As your site develops, revenue from ad networks might decline as a percentage of your overall advertising revenue, but it is likely to remain an important foundation to build on.

Choosing the right network

Competition is fierce amongst ad networks with a myriad of regional and global players. One online directory lists 380 networks. Out of the hundreds of ad networks available, many publishers start with those from search engines such as Google and Yandex, the dominant search engine for the Russian language. The search engines have built their ad networks using the powerful text processing services they use for their search services to deliver contextually relevant advertising based on your content.

Google AdSense and Yandex Direct are also easy to set up, and we’ve created guides on how to get started with AdSense if you aren’t already using it as well as a guide on how to measure and maximise revenue when using AdSense. We will be writing a similar guide for Yandex Direct in the near future. However, as we said, there are hundreds of ad networks. To help decide which ad network or networks is the best for you, you’ll want to consider:

• How easy is the network going to be to implement and manage?
• How large an advertising base will the ad network deliver? Major ad networks such as AdSense run ads for hundreds of thousands of advertisers, and that helps drive up ad rates and your returns.
• Which network delivers the most relevant advertising for my audience? You will have to balance the potential volume the ad network can deliver versus the targeting it can deliver. The higher the volume of advertisers the more likely that there will be an ad for your page, and the bidding for the ad spot will drive generally higher prices than if there is no market for the spot.  But you have to balance that with the click through. No click, no cash. Many ad networks are targeted in some way, either by advertiser target, geographic target, or platform target, such as mobile versus desktop. For instance, if your site is very specific to health-related issues, then the ads from a vertical ad network targeting healthcare ads might generate more revenue since they are more specific and likely to get a higher click through.
• How much are you likely to earn from ads placed on the ad network based on your current traffic or traffic projections on a new product?
• How consistent is the ad network with your editorial identity?

Building traffic and building revenue

For Mediazavod.ru, the website of MDLF client Chelyabinski Rabochiy, Yandex seemed to be the easiest way for the site to get started with digital advertising back in May 2010, said editor Dmitry Konoplev, adding that another appeal of Yandex Direct is that it delivers 45% of the revenue per click to the publisher.

The red line is traffic, and the blue line is income per month in roubles from Yandex Direct. The left vertical axis is income from Yandex Direct, and the right vertical axis is traffic.

Revenue from Yandex Direct has risen in line with traffic. As Mediazavod’s experience shows, one positive thing about ad networks is that even as traffic rises, it does not dilute the return, and Yandex Direct now provides 16% of advertising for the site. Building traffic is key to building revenue, both in terms of driving higher revenue from ad networks but also in making your site attractive to premium advertisers.

Apart from working to grow the traffic to your site, Knopolev says that it is important to develop content that will perform well, using the contextual advertising service provided by Yandex Direct.

“Articles about real estate, technology, music and cinema are much more attractive for ads than publication about (news) and social ills,” he said. Of course, content that works well for ad networks must be balanced with news content because news attracts the greatest numbers of readers and therefore the most traffic, he added.

One criticism of ad networks is that they don’t deliver relevant ads or in the worst case place ads that could be seen as being in bad taste. Knopolev gave the example of funeral services advertising being placed alongside a story about the death of an ex-governor, or worse yet if weapons ads were placed next to a story about a shooting.

Sometimes it stirs up our readers and they write angry posts on Twitter, he said. It is not always possible to change the context settings, however, both Yandex  Direct and Google AdSense have words you can eliminate from being used in delivering advertising – words such as death, funeral, gun, disease, drugs and sex.

Moving beyond ad networks

Once you’ve built traffic to the point where your site can attract advertising agencies and your sales staff can sell premium advertising on your site, ad networks won’t be as high of a priority. As the revenue mix at Mediazavod also shows, classified advertising can be an important source of digital advertising revenue.

At independent news website Malaysiakini, another MDLF client, ad network revenue only represents 10% of overall advertising revenue, according to senior advertising manager Chia Ting Ting.

The site is focused on growing its already substantial premium advertising revenue, and ad networks cannot match the return they are getting from this type of advertising.

Chia also says that it is important to view your advertising as part of your content. Readers judge your site based on the quality of the content you produce and also the quality of your ads.

Seeing ads that are clearly from Google AdSense detract from the premium image she is trying to create for the site to attract high value advertisers, she said, and in their use of AdSense, they take care to use the ad format that less clearly marks the ad as coming from AdSense.

They also use other ad networks such as Malaysia’s Innity and Indian ad network Komli, which have ad formats that are less easily identified by readers.

With the site now well established, they also make sure that any ad network ads are given less prominent placement on the site, which frees up the most valuable ad slots for their premium advertisers.

However, even for a well established site, ad networks can still play an important role for an independent news site like Malaysiakini. In Malaysia, many of the biggest brands and advertisers are GLCs – “government linked companies”. GLCs and other major corporate brands might hesitate to advertise with an independent news site like Malaysiakini which can be critical of the authorities, but the site was able to have advertising from major brands like the state-owned oil company Petronas via an ad network.

Although Malaysiakini has graduated from relying on using ad networks to attract premium advertisers, she says they can still play a role, especially for sites just starting out. Now, Malaysiakini earns ten times more with its own sold ads above the rate paid for ad networks, and it has been able to double its advertising revenue in the past year.

Next month, we’ll look at how to move up the value chain and use more advanced advertising techniques to increase advertising performance.

Understanding advertisers, ad auctions and types of ads

First, it is important to understand how an ad gets selected for display on your website and how much the advertiser will pay.  Usually this is done through the real-time ad auction, which automatically matches advertisers who have signed up to place their ads with Google AdWords with websites looking to host advertisements through Google AdSense.  The ad auction consists of a pool of relevant ads that are bidding for your space, and based on their bid and their likely performance one ad will win.

To determine who wins the auction, Google assigns a quality score for each ad based on a few factors including the ad’s past performance. Google creates an AdRank which takes into account the quality score and the maximum CPC (cost per click) that the ad is willing to pay.  The advertiser with the highest AdRank wins that spot on your site, but what they pay is based on their quality score, and the AdRank of the other bidders.  This rate, which is not necessarily their maximum bid, is therefore heavily impacted by the amount of bidders in the auction pool.

Watch this 5-minute video for all you need to know about Ad Auctions (and remember that in YouTube you can always click the CC button to close caption into another language).

Advertisers who are part of AdWords also choose one of three types of ways that they want to target their ads:

• Contextual targeting is when the advertisement’s keywords (entered by the advertiser) are matched against words used on the webpage.
• Placement targeting (or managed placements) is when the advertiser hand-picks websites they want to advertise on.
• Interest-based advertising is when ads are shown to specific audiences based on the advertiser choosing from 1,600 interest categories, and matching them to a specific audience based on a combination of your website’s keywords and the users’ cookies (small files that contain information on other sites they tend to visit, demographic information they may have entered on other websites or social networks, etc.)

Measuring performance

To get an overview of how well your ads are performing, click on the Performance Reports tab in your AdSense interface. Here you can see your estimated earnings, page views, clicks, PCR (page-clickthrough-rate), CPC (cost-per-click), and page RPM (average amount of money made per 1,000 pageviews) for any date range you choose.

You can also compare two date ranges. This can be useful if you made a change to your ads or site layout and want to see how that might have impacted the performance of your ads.

One thing to note is that currently all the AdSense reports are based on the United States Pacific Time (PT) time zone and a day is considered to start at 12:00 am PT and end at 11:59 pm PT. There is no option as of yet to change this.

Measuring performance: Reports

Under the Performance Report tab, the left sidebar provides you with a variety of report types.

• Ad units – displays performance reports based on an ad unit (an individual or a set of ads displayed based on the results of one piece of AdSense code repeated in different spaces on your website).
• Ad sizes – displays performance reports based on the different ad sizes you have used on your site.
• Ad types – displays performance reports based on the different types of ads ultimately displayed, including images, text, rich media, flash, etc.  This is especially useful if you have allowed all ad types, and want to see if some do better than others.
• Targeting types – displays performance reports based on contextual targeting, placement targeting, and interest-based advertising.
• Bid types – displays performance reports based on ads that are paid by CPC (cost per click) or by CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

To makes sense of the reports, you’ll want to familiarise yourself with common digital advertising terms such as ad click-through-rate, matched revenue per thousand impressions (matched RPM) and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM). Google has a comprehensive glossary for the terms that are used in its AdSense reports. In addition to the glossary, Google also has this 2-minute video that provides a step-by-step explanation of how to use advanced reports.

Custom channels

A custom channel is a group of ad units defined by you for reporting purposes.  For example, you might create one custom channel for your homepage, and one for a section front and another for a layout that you are trying out at the top of a page.

When creating a custom channel, you can also check the option for “Show this custom channel to advertisers as a targetable ad placement”.  This important option allows you to optimize placement targeted ads by creating a channel which groups ad placements by topic, ad format, or location on a page – all important distinctions for advertisers looking to buy a specific location or reach a particular audience.  Once you check this option, you will be asked for more information:

• Ads appear on: Note where ads in this placement appear on your site – on the homepage, or on other types of pages.
• Ad location: Select the location on the page where ads in this placement appear. For example, you might make a placement featuring ads in the top right of your pages.
• Description: This is what an advertiser will probably use to decide whether to place the ad or not so be very specific.  Even go so far as to suggest an audience type who will likely view these ads.
• Site language: The primary language of your site content.

URL channels

These are custom channels for reporting on your ads based on the directory structure of your site. By entering a top-level domain name or main web address of your site, you can track all the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL, which would allow you to track ad performance on a particular section on your site.

Google Analytics

If you are using Google Analytics for your website, you can also link your AdSense data with your Google Analytics account, which will give you even more information about who is clicking on your ads. For example, you can see the geographic region where they’re coming from, what referring site sent them to your site, and how long they stay on your page before clicking an ad.

To see your AdSense data, either click on the Content section in the Google Analytics navigation sidebar for your AdSense reports, or click the AdSense Revenue tab for a breakdown of your traffic by AdSense impressions, clicks and revenue in many other reports.

Google has a tutorial on how to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts.

Optimising your ad performance

Linking AdSense to Google Analytics is just one way to measure the performance of your ads so that you evolve your strategy to get the highest possible returns from your ads. You’ll want to interpret your data and make small, informed changes to improve your advertising strategy. There are several different ways to optimise the performance of your ad network advertising. According to Google:

• Wider ad sizes tend to perform the best because of how much easier they are to read. AdSense suggests a few sizes that work best when you create your ad unit, but it is important to keep in mind your own website’s layout.
• Customise the colours of text, links and the ad background to integrate better with your site.
• In general, ads located above the scroll tend to perform better than those that require users to scroll to see.
• Ads placed near navigational aids and other engaging content also perform well due to high visibility.

Google has a number of suggestions for the best layouts to drive ad performance.

Limiting ads through blocking

Of course, the best way to optimize the amount of money you get for ads is to allow as many advertisers as possible to enter the ad auction, simply and easily.  However, you could have ads placed on your site that are offensive or ads for your competitors that you would want to block from advertising on your page. To block or limit ads, you can click the Allow & Block Ads tab to include specific URLs, topics, sensitive categories, or even specific ad networks.

You also do have the option, on your settings page, to hold all ads for a 24-hour review period before they show up on your site.  However, the default is to run ads immediately which will maximize your potential revenue by opening up the competition to more ads.

Other Google ad services

Connect with high-quality advertisers

The Google Affiliate Network is a free service to connect accepted publishers to high-quality advertisers, currently supporting websites from 80 countries.  It allows for a more flexible pricing scheme, determined between you and the affiliate.  But it also requires more pro-activity to keep up your relationship with the affiliate advertisers. See the publisher optimisation checklist for an overview of how to stay on top of things.
Learn more about the Affiliate Network.

Keeping up-to-date information in DoubleClick Ad Planner

The DoubleClick Ad Planner is a free service that allows advertisers to quickly find websites that match their target audience.  So it is important to make sure that your website information is complete and up-to-date so the right advertisers will find you.  In your DoubleClick Ad Planner publisher profile, you can include a 250 character description of your site, the URL of a page on your site that describes how to advertise with you, up to five categories reflecting the content of your site, the different advertising types, formats and sizes that your site supports and whether you would like to share your Google Analytics data with DoubleClick Ad Planner.

The first step to create your profile is to claim your website in the Ad Planner.  See instructions for how to claim your site.

Find more information on DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Test different designs and pages

This new service allows you to do some advanced A/B testing on your website. You can create up to five different versions of a webpage and when someone visits the site, they will be shown one of these options.  Then you can report on these different webpage options against your Google Analytic goals to understand how different layouts impact your click-through rate (see future issues of the Digital Briefing for more about Google Analytics and goals).  Learn more about the Google Content Experiment, or get an overview on how to setup a content experiment.

Special service for small business

DoubleClick for Small Businesses is free service (if you serve less than 90 million monthly ad impressions, not including AdSense ads) provides you with several features to take greater advantage of your AdSense account.  If you are at a point where you have begun to receive requests from advertisers, or you manage multiple ad networks, or you just need greater control over your ad delivery, the service will help you to do all of that.  For example, you can limit the amount of times a user sees the same ad within a given period, or enable real-time competition between Google AdSense, Affiliates and third party ad-networks, or you can create mobile-specific targeting options.  See a full list of features.

Other AdSense products

• Link Units: display a short list of related topics that the user clicks on to get even more targeted ads.  This is a smaller display and can be useful in spots where an ad unit wouldn’t fit into the layout.
• AdSense for search: Create a Google search on your site and if a user clicks on one of the ads in the search result you will earn revenue.  The search can be just for your site, for a collection of sites, or for the whole web.  You can also prioritise or restrict the search to a section of your webpage.
• AdSense for mobile content: Google ads on your mobile webpages
• AdSense for feeds: Google ads in your feeds
• AdSense for video: InVideo overlay and text overlay ads for your video content
• AdSense for games: advertising specifically for games played within the browser
• AdSense for domains: links, search results, advertisements and other content for your unused domains
• AdMob: Google ads for your mobile applications

To get a more in-depth view of AdSense, you can go through the thorough online lessons at the AdSense Academy.

Warning: How not to increase revenue

AdSense has fairly strict policies against certain practices that would encourage fake click-throughs.  A big one is masking ads – you cannot make it difficult to distinguish ads from your content.  You also cannot use any language to encourage people to click on the ads, or place misleading labels above ad units such as “Favourite Sites” or “Today’s Top Offers”.  Google advises to avoid partnering with untrusted or low-quality ad networks, search engines or directory sites in an effort to increase traffic. Lastly, there is a strict rule against clicking on your own ads – even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL. Instead of clicking on the ad on your site, Google advises you to use a search engine to find the URL for that company.

Creating your account

1. If you already have a business Google account, you can use your existing username and password to sign up for AdSense. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to sign up for one first.

2. Choose the primary website for your AdSense account.  This will generate a code that you can use not only for the primary site you used for registration but your other sites as well.

At this point, you’ll also be asked the primary language for your site. AdSense has complete support for some 30, mostly European and major Asian, languages. For a handful of other languages such as Slovenian and Estonian, AdSense will serve ads in those languages but the user interface is available only in one of the main languages. Although you have to choose a primary language for your site, the service will serve ads in other languages on pages in those languages on your site.

3. You’ll next be asked to read and agree to some simplified terms and conditions to use the service. You must agree:

• Not to click on ads on your site nor encourage others to do so.
• Not to place ads on sites which include adult content.
• Not to place ads on sites that distribute content for copyright that you do not own.
• That you do not already have a Google AdSense account.

4. Enter your business details.  Note that the screenshot before is assuming personal details, so you will additionally need to enter the name and address of your business, making sure that the contact name and address are the same that you use on the bank account for your business. You will also be asked how you found out about AdSense and also if you want to receive email updates from AdSense, some of which promote new services and others that provide you with information on how to get the most out of your digital advertising.

After you click the button marked “Submit my application”, you’ll see a thank you message that also explains that you will receive an update on the status of your application in about a week. While you’re waiting for approval of your site, as Google suggests, it is useful to familiarise yourself with the service using their Newbie Central site for new users of AdSense.

5. A couple of days after you submit your application you should receive a follow-up email from Google letting you know that they have completed their partial review of your website.  In Google’s words, “after a new application is submitted, we’ll begin with preliminary checks on the site and the applicant’s submitted details”.

Adding AdSense to your website

Once you pass the partial review, you will need to set up your ad account and put an “ad unit” on your website for Google to complete the full approval process. An ad unit is an ad of a specific size, design and ad type. The e-mail you received about your successful partial review will contain instructions to log on to your AdSense Interface and get started.

1. Terms and Conditions. After you log in the first time, you’ll need to read and agree to the full terms and conditions for the service.

2. After agreeing to the terms and conditions, you’ll be taken to the AdSense interface, which at the moment is blank because you have not added any ads.  Click on Ad Units and the button “+New Ad unit”

3.  Now you will create the first ad unit for your website.  Each ad unit will have its own tracking code.  You can use this code on multiple places on your website to show multiple ads of the same format, but keep in mind that for reporting purposes they will all be grouped together making reporting much more difficult.

Type a name for this ad unit.  Under Ad size you will see a long list of options, starting with the sizes that Google determined to be optimal for click-throughs. Ad type has several options  – Text & image/rich media ads, Text ads only, Image/rich media ads only. For ad type, it is best that you select the option “text & image/rich media ads”, if possible.  This will allow the most ads to bid for your space, thus optimizing your revenue.  For now, you can ignore the option to create Custom channels as that is for advanced users.  For AdStyle, it will be important to pick Custom, which will allow you to choose colours that are appropriate for your site.

4. Once you’ve created your ad unit, click the button to get the ad code.  A window will pop up with code for you to copy into your website.

5. Now you need to put the ad unit code on your website so that Google can complete the approval process.  Here is an example of how it could be very simply added to the sidebar of a WordPress website. Many content-management systems, including WordPress, have plug-ins that allow you to easily incorporate AdSense ads or other ad networks into your site. Whether your CMS supports such plug-ins or not, it is important to consider the type of ads and ad units you will use when designing your site.

For the time being, your website will have a blank AdSense unit that blends in seamlessly with your site.  Within about 4 days after you add the ad unit, Google should finalise approval for your site – and the blank units will begin to display ads.  In the meantime, there will be dead space on your site but it should match in color and style to your website so there will be minimal disruption.

If you find an issue with adding the code, check Google’s a guide to troubleshooting common AdSense problems.

Setting up payment and finances

You won’t be able to set up payment options until after your AdSense account has been given final approval. Once that happens, you can add or edit your payment contact information by selecting Account settings under the Home tab on the AdSense management site. Here, you can also enter appropriate tax information, if required.  Usually tax information fields will not be available until you’ve met a minimum threshold of payments.

After you reach the equivalent of US$10 in ad sales, you can choose how you want to be paid.  After you make that selection, you will be mailed through the post a PIN which you will use to verify your physical address.

Lastly, once you reach US$100 in ad sales, and each time you reach US$100 thereafter, your payments will be processed.  Note that receiving your payments could take up to 1-2 months.

The business seminar focused specifically on the unique aspects of building an online outlet for a radio station or network. The training included:

• “Developing a Strategic Plan”. A framework for building a strategic plan for an online media business. Special emphasis was given to presenting different models for an audio-driven online site.
• “Building Audience”. A broad overview of the techniques needed to build an online audience including streaming audio directories, iTunes submission, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.
• “Revenue Opportunities”. A discussion of different revenue opportunities including donation campaigns and fund drives, advertising including Google Adsense, and content sales and syndication.
• “Measurement”. A hands-on demonstration of the fundamentals of Google Analytics.

The goal of the seminar was to provide radio stations, radio producers, and radio networks with the foundation to develop sustainable online web sites for their radio operations.

Location: Siem Reap, Cambodia

Dates: 2 -3 May 2012

Attending:  Affiliate Members of the Asia Calling Network, representing radio broadcasters and online media from Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan.