I would be loath to take advice from Google about how to monetize a small website. Not just because of the conflict of interest (of course they want people to run ads), but because it's not their area of expertise.
I'd think Google knows more than any organization in the world how to best monetize a website. In fact uniquely positioned as the only company to know. Look at all the data they have access to. A lot of these people run g analytics too not just adsense. They give up their website data to g for free. If any organization has the hard data on what's effective and not, they do. Now, take their advice? That's a different story. I'll check industry standards if they say 3$ cpm and I'm getting 10 already, I don't need their advise necessarily.
I think traditionally that is something that rings true. Ads aren't the only answer and this is just the first step in a more comprehensive area that we are planning. I would say that one area that we get a lot of requests for from web developers is strong guidance on how to build forms that convert well. We have data on this, we just haven't formalized the guidance on this.
