Your Channel Names

12.6 Your Channel Names — How To Keep Your Channels Secret And Win Channel Targeted Ads

Channels are extremely useful tools. You won’t be able to make the most of your site unless you’re using Channels to track the performance of your ad units — and acting on what you find.

But there is one small problem with using Channels: the Channel name appears in your source code.

That’s unlikely to cause you any serious problems but it is something you need to know. There are two reasons for that.

First, you always want to maintain your privacy and create a professional impression. If you’re making your site available to the public — which is the only way it’s going to make money — you don’t want anything on there that you wouldn’t want the world to know. That includes the terms you’ve used for your Custom Channels.

But the second reason is that when you create your channels, you’ll also be asked to mark a checkbox that says: “Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement.” If you mark that box — and you should — advertisers will be able to try to place their ads across that channel. (They’ll still have to bid in the usual way but if the advertisers are keen enough to choose your site by Channel, there’s a good chance that they’ll also be keen enough to bid high enough to win.)

So if you’ve created a Channel for all of the ad units placed at the top of your Web pages, then an advertiser who chose to advertise across that Channel could be sure that his ads would get prime placement.

That mean your Channel names should be clear not just to yourself but to anyone else looking in too. If a Channel that tracks the ad units embedded in articles about Toyota cars for example, is called “Toy_art,” an advertiser could get the wrong idea... if he has any idea at all. If the Channel were called “Toyota_articles” though, he’d know exactly where his ads would appear.

But getting the name right isn’t the only thing you should do to tempt advertisers to bid on Channel-targeted ad placements. You should also add a description that makes it both clear to advertisers what exactly they’ll be getting when they bid and attractive for them to do so. Something like: “Ads will appear in our top-performing units: above the fold and embedded in our main article.”

That should help to encourage users to place your ads.

Of course, you also want to make your approach as attractive as possible. Advertisers aren’t going to be too interested in trying to get their ads into a leaderboard that you’ve put at the bottom of the page. Let them try to get into the best positions on your page — and raise the overall price of your clicks too. You do that by targeting your highest-performing ad units for Channel-based advertising.

And finally, you should use ad placement invitations on Channels you’ve created for different topics. That will make it clear to advertisers that their ads will only appear on relevant pages.