Like ten million other publishers, I got an email from Google last month. In the email, Google suggested I place 300×250 Adsense units on my site. In exchange, they would include my site in their custom placement packs program. Custom placement packs are selections of individually reviewed sites designed for Google's largest brand advertisers. In other words, they want to show more video ads. I doubt video ads will work well on my site and I'm not too fond of running such a big ad in the content area. But I decided to do a test run on three of my sites. All three sites use the same theme (with different colors).

The results below are based on the first 16 days of January and February. In February, I ran 300×250 ads (top right of content) in place of 468×60 banners (above content in January). So "28%" for the 300×250 stat in the first table means the 300×250 ad resulted in an eCPM increase of 28% compared to the 468×60 ad I ran in January. Keep in mind I'm comparing stats from two different months.

As you can see, the 300×250 ads resulted in an overall increase for two of my sites. However, the medium rectangle ad resulted in a slight decrease for the third site, which happens to be my main site. I'm not going to pull the new ad size yet. I'm going to let it run a little longer to see if being included in Google's custom placement packs program makes a difference.

I was playing with the Adsense data today and stumbled on this little stat:

According to Adsense, someone has been targeting my link units from August 10th to November 22nd. I'm assuming it's some sort of glitch because as far as I know, advertisers can't target link units. It's possible I entered the wrong channel code in the Adsense script, but I would expect more than 15 impressions if I miscopied the Adsense code.

And take a look at this ad on my site. It's for the bird flu. What the heck is that ad doing on my site?

Jensense has a post about a new feature in AdSense for Search. Previously, the search results were displayed on a page outside of your site. As a result, visitors were led off of your site. With Google's new feature, the search results can be displayed on your site.

The new feature was not hard to implement. However, I noticed two problems. First, the width of the results page is set at 650. For some sites, especially sites that have side columns, the 650 width is too wide and messes up the layout of the page. I was tempted to change the width, but that would have violated Google's terms about not changing their code.

The other problem I encountered was with WordPress. The Javascript provided by Google works just fine on non-WordPress pages, but do not seem to work on WordPress-powered sites. On the results page, the search box is displayed but there are no search results. At the bottom of the page is an icon indicating a Javascript error. The error message, as usual, was of no help. If you are using WordPress, my recommendation is to test it during a slow period or on a test page your visitors will not see.

I have noticed for the past two weeks, Adsense occassionally displays text ads without the title. I'm not sure if the missing ad title is yet another Adsense test or a glitch. My guess is it's just a glitch. However, I have seen the titleless ad on at least three sites (two were my sites) in both the 160×600 and 468×60 ad unit. Below are some screen shots of the titleless ads. Has anyone else seen the titleless Adsense ads?