UpTake.com Raises its revenue to new heights with AdSense

UpTake uses the new AdSense interface to perform 10 times more analysis in the same amount of time.

UpTake.com is a search engine designed to take the time and guesswork out of the travel decision process by organizing, filtering, and tailoring recommendations on destinations, hotels, restaurants, and attractions from thousands of travel websites to individual consumer needs. UpTake’s Director of Online Marketing, Brian Piepgrass, recently shared the site’s story and gave us some tips on how using the new interface has helped the UpTake team save time managing their AdSense performance.

Inside AdSense: How did your site come about?
UpTake: We wanted to create a new kind of website for helping travelers find information they need, and take a lot less time doing it. We’ve become one of the web’s largest independent travel research sites, averaging 3 million unique users each month. Today, our vision is rapidly expanding to include family travel, international travel as well as pre-trip planning.

IA: What role does AdSense play in your business?
UpTake: UpTake started using AdSense about two years ago, and the revenue generated from AdSense plays a key role in helping us grow. AdSense has the ability to deliver relevant ads in many more destinations for us, including in dozens of small- and medium-sized markets such as Modesto and Fresno. AdSense also picks up on the semantics of individual travel pages. On romance-specific pages, for instance, AdSense might include ads for hotels with Jacuzzi suites or honeymoon packages. Without AdSense, a lot of pages wouldn’t have ads and the pages would not be as relevant. We’d have to have our own sales force go out and sell all these ads.”

IA: I understand you’ve recently started using the new AdSense interface. What do you like about it?
UpTake: The new AdSense interface has been a key time-saver. It used to take a half-hour to pull the kind of report that now we can pull in a matter of 30 seconds. We feel way more in touch with how things are trending. If revenue goes down we can much more easily figure out why and where and then go fix it. One of our favorite features is the ability to take out-of-the-box reports and tailor them specifically to our customers. We can just click on the name of a report and update to today. The system is also smart enough to know we want to see what happened last month, and we can save 20-30 reports.

IA: If you had to sum it up, what would you tell other publishers about the new interface?
Uptake: We can do 10 times more analysis than we ever used to be able to do in the same amount of time.

If you’d like to see how the new AdSense interface can help reduce time spent managing and monitoring your account, sign in to your account and switch to the new interface (you can get there from the link in the upper corner that says “Try the new AdSense interface”). To learn more about the new reporting functionality, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Nate Deoms - Inside AdSense team