Most companies would not consider placing contextually-targeted ads on their commercial sites. An obvious reason is that these ads may make their sites look less professional and somehow diminish their online credibility. A more important reason, however, is that the ads that will be appearing on their sites will be for competing products and services.

Due to the rising costs of pay-per-click advertising, revenues from ads can help offset advertising costs. Plus, people who find your site by clicking on an ad are more likely to click on ads on your site.

As for displaying ads for competitors, I think people are inclined to do comparison shopping any way. So why not make a few bucks from their habit? If you have confidence about the product or service you’re selling, then there’s really no reason to fear.

Personally I have no qualms about placing contextual advertising on a commercial site. I don’t mind ads offering competing services. If you’re worried about your direct competitors’ ads appearing on your site, you could go into your Adsense account and filter them out so that only products and services that are complimentary to yours appear.

A lot of site owners are complaining that making less and less from Adsense nowadays. No matter how they play around with their ad size, position, color schemes, etc., they still see their revenues declining.

I think part of this is that people are learning to habitually ignore contextual ads. Sure these ads are relevant to the material they’re viewing, but they also know that they’re, well, advertisements by companies going after their pocketbooks.

When contextual ads first came out, I liked to click on them thinking that I’d find useful (and free) information on the landing pages. But once I had found out often enough that these sites are mostly trying sell me something, I learned to avoid them.

I’d figure that everyone else is probably the same way. Most people get on the internet to look for FREE things. They don’t necessary like sites where they’d have to pay.

So what’s next? What could be more effective than context ads?

Google had recently come out with its Custom Search Engine (CSE), which allows you to harness the power of Google’s search engine while enhancing the relevancy and integration of search for your visitors.

Custom Search Engine allows you to:

• Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
• Place a search box and search results on your website.
• Customize the look and feel to match your website.
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
• Make money from relevant ads in your search results.

That you can customize the look and feel of this tool can greatly enhance your Adsense earnings by attracting more visitors to the search engine on your site.

I know this feature has been on the wish lists of many webmasters, including myself, but I’m not sure how many have implemented it on their site.

For more info, visit:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-search-engine-your-way.html

Here is some bad news for publishers hoping improve click-through rates by placing images next to Google ads.

Google is setting the record straight on positioning Google ads with thumbnail images. In brief, they do not want publishers to place images next to ads in a way that might mislead visitors to associate the ads with the image.

Below is an example of a violation:

I’ve seen an Adsense “beautifier” plugin for Wordpress that separates the images from the ads with a dotted line. According to Google, and as apparent from the figure above, the dotted lines are not going to cut it. The idea is to avoid confusion in the minds of visitors. So long as the juxtaposition can mislead the visitor to associate the images with the ads, it’s a violation.

Although Google has been warning publishers against this practice for some time, this is the first time they’ve spelled out their policy in such clear and specific language.

Some For more details, see: Google’s Adsense blog