Email from google about a new adsense feature

Ad Placements Overview

Ad placements increase your visibility to advertisers

Publishers now have the ability to make any custom channel into an ad placement. Ad placements are publisher-defined groups of ad units that advertisers will see when searching for places where they can target their ads. Creating an ad placement is as easy as creating a custom channel, and help you generate more revenue by increasing the number of advertisers who place ads on your site.

How ad placements work

You create and implement a custom channel just as you would before -- tracking the performance of your sports pages or your skyscraper ad units, for example. Only now, you can choose to make that custom channel visible to advertisers as an ad placement. When advertisers search for sites on which to place their ads, they'll see the ad placement you've created -- with your site's name and description -- and can decide to target their ads to your ad placement.

How ad placements can benefit you

Enabling more advertisers to find and target their ads to your pages should lead to positive results for you. Increasing the visibility of your pages can drive more competition for your ad space and, therefore, more revenue. The real benefit of making ad placements, however, is the opportunity you'll have to separate out the most valuable inventory on your pages -- the homepage or above the fold ad units, for example -- where advertisers will be willing to pay more to appear.

How to set up ad placements

You'll set up an ad placement just as you would a custom channel - by creating the channel within your account and then adding the channel-specific code to your pages. The only change is the additional step of providing attributes and a description for your ad placement. Advertisers will see this information when deciding which placements to target, so it's useful to include a detailed description that clearly represents the ads available through that placement.