Redirecting your feed to maximize revenue potential

One of the most popular (and recurring) questions our publishers ask is, "How do I maximize revenue for AdSense for feeds and ensure my subscriber stats are as accurate as possible?" Some of you can recite the answers to these questions backwards and forwards (though we find typing it backwards is quite difficult, so we'll leave you to say that aloud). But for our many new publishers that are just tuning in, here's the recap.


Just setting up AdSense for feeds ad units in your AdSense account is not enough to start seeing traffic and revenue to your feeds. It's critical that 100% of your feed traffic be directed to the feed(s) you created in AdSense for feeds or your FeedBurner account. Luckily, this is fairly easy to do via two standard methods.

1. Redirect your original feed. This is the recommended option for all publishers, but especially if you have an already established blog or feed that already has subscribers. This option ensures that all traffic gets funneled to the version that has both advertising and subscriber tracking enabled. We've detailed this process in this Help Center entry.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   An added bonus: a plugin for self-hosted WordPress installations and feed-specific features within Blogger and TypePad make redirection much easier on these two publishing platforms.
   
   


2. Promote your feeds.feedburner.com feed. This is recommended only in the cases where you are setting up a new blog, or have an existing blog or feed that has no traffic. For example, if your feed is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/toastforbreakfast, you would change your blog template to link only to this version of the feed. Note you have to make sure to change it not only where you promote your feed directly, but also everywhere you have feed autodiscovery links in your template. (One other place to keep in mind: BrowserFriendly.)
   

Hopefully, this reminder will help everyone get on firm ground with how to maximize traffic to their feed and revenue from it, too. In future posts, we will be covering how to increase traffic and subscribers to your feed, so hang on to your hat!


Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

New features for advertisers targeting feeds

Along with the clarification regarding the doubleclick.net domain we posted a few weeks ago over at Inside AdSense, we thought we would mention that we have made similar changes to the AdSense for feeds ad tags that are being placed in feeds. By changing our ad serving to the doubleclick.net domain, we are now allowing advertisers to more easily create campaigns that span all media platform types on the Google Content Network, including sites, feeds, and mobile.

In addition to being able to target feeds with Placement Targeting and Contextual Targeting, which have always been supported, this change will soon allow advertisers to target feed users using Interest Based Advertising across both sites and feeds.

By making it easier for advertisers to buy ads in your feeds, and by supporting the exact same features and ad formats that are accepted on websites, the competition for your ad space should increase to help ensure that you're maximizing your earnings potential.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds