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Exploring Standard Ad Unit Sizes: Google AdSense 120×600 Skyscraper

February 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Examples of standard web advert sizes, from th...

Next up in the series of posts on Google AdSense ad sizes are the ads in the Google Adsense “Other – Vertical” banner category, starting with the 120×600 skyscraper. The reason the ad unit is called a skyscraper is because it is tall and thin and can dominate the space, like an actual, physical skyscraper. This ad unit is not in the AdSense top 4 recommended sizes and is listed in the Delisted Standard Ad Units category of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Ad Unit Guidelines. Microsoft Advertising, however, continues to list the 120 x 600 – Skyscraper as part of its standard ad unit sizes, both for marketers and agencies, as well for small and medium businesses.

The original skyscraper was thinner than the current commonly used version of the skyscraper, to accommodate the small side rails in the layouts of many web sites. As site design has changed and elements, including sidebars, of site layouts have gotten larger, the Google AdSense 160×600 Wide Skyscraper has become the more prominently used ad unit.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing
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Moderator:
Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing

Speakers:
Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch
Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & President, Page Zero Media
Kevin Lee, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Didit.com

Kevin Lee

The good news is that if you follow the rules, you can pull off all sorts of site architecture pandemonium. They had a scenario where they had to simultaneously change subdomain and 301 redirect 16 million URLs and were able to pull it off successfully.

Google’s algorithm is tweaked almost daily. Once or twice a year the changes are significant and get a name, like “Panda”.

Panda was a zero-sum game. For each site that lost rank and free organic position, another site took its place. The business directory site that is a Didit subsidiary doubled in traffic, then dropped and came back. Be patient and take all also changes with a grain of salt. Changes can occur from day to day.

Read the rest of Navigating “The Dip”: Planning a Successful Site Re-launch

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Strategic Use of User- Generated Content for SEO

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Michael DeHaven, Group Product Manager, SEO, for Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice manages User-Generated Content (UGC) for over 1300 brands.

Compared user reviews from the audience for a chocolate caramel square to the marketing text on the package. Some negative and positive reviews.

User-generated content

80%-90% of UGC on major brand web sites is actually written by users.

Language styles – the words that you typically think of (or marketers think of) are totally different than what actual users write when writing reviews.

7 Principles of User Generated SEO

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  1. Don’t forget the fundamentals of SEO – UGC will not fix a site with poor SEO
  2. Search engines get bored – they want new stuff. By leveraging UGC, you can keep content fresh.
  3. The Primanti Principle – a primanti sandwich has French fries in it. You want to have the right amount of fries. The same applies to search.
Filed Under: SEO
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Information Architecture for Great Websites

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive

Information Architecture & SEO

information architecture is the art and science of organizing and labeling website content to support usability and find ability. This is not technical architecture (301 redirects, canonical tags, robots.txt,meta.)

Why should we care about IA?

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  • lost customers
  • brand value – even if your site is # 1, if they can’t find the information they’re looking for they go to the next link in the results and they don’t go back to your site, even if you fix it, because they don’t know you fixed it
  • design and development costs – if you mess up the IA on launch, you have to start from scratch on a redesign. Use wireframes. You should never code a web site unless you’ve done wireframes or prototypes. It’s too expensive to go back and redo it.
Filed Under: Web Development
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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

May 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

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Filed Under: User Interface / User Experience Design
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Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

May 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Facebook likes the start-up culture. They believe in small teams: photos, engagement, etc. Each team is treated like a small company with a product designer, researcher, engineers & a product manager.

Facebook uses data to form a lot of the decisions that are made. Data helps understand how users use product and how they can be optimized.

Facebook had great ideas, built products and then left them to move on to the next thing.

Photos

Were using an old photo uploader tool built in Java, didn’t work well and was poorly designed. Built their own tool, which required a plugin. Tested it and only 34% users successfully uploaded photos. Went back to the drawing board. Research showed that people were bailing at the plugin install step.

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Filed Under: User Interface / User Experience Design

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