I’m hearing tonight from a few bloggers that they’ve received an email from AdSense asking them if they’d like to be involved in a new program that they are running called ‘Custom Placement Packs’.
This seems to be a program that clusters similar sites together to be sold to advertisers as a package. It is based around 300 x 250 pixel rectangle image and text ad units.
To be involved publishers who receive these emails are asked to place the rectangle image/text ad units above the fold and utilize the new ‘ad placement feature’ which labels ad slots.
Update – more discussion on this at digital point and webmaster world.
Here’s the email AdSense have been approaching sites with:
Dear Publisher,
After a recent review of your site, we would like to include xxxx.com in our custom placement packs program. Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers.
We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300×250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit.
The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites. They require that the units be placed “above the fold” on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site’s visitors without scrolling down.
If you decide to add medium rectangle units to your site, please notify us by replying to this email so that we can begin featuring your site in more of our advertiser packages.
We also recommend you use the newly launched ad placements feature to define your ad slots to advertisers so they can bid on specific placements on your site. For instructions on how to create ad placements, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50691.
