Earn More with Adsense: Tips & Layout Optimization Tricks for High CTR

Google Adsense is perhaps the easiest way to attract advertisers from across the globe to your blog. Just submit your blog or website to Google for approval and if their content team approves your content, you are ready to place contextual text ads on your websites. Every time a reader clicks an AdSense ad link, the AdWords advertiser pays Google a small fee and Google splits the revenue with you.

Now you know how to make money with Google Adsense but to help you improve AdSense performance (and advertising revenue), here are some of the best Google Adsense Tips and Tricks for making more money (profit) from the Google Adsense program.

About me: I have been using Google AdSense since 2004 and my technology blog was recently featured as an AdSense Case Study.

Update: Some of the AdSense tricks in the article are old so you may please check my latest article on AdSense Optimization Tips that includes a PowerPoint presentation as well.


Tips to Increase Google AdSense Earnings

a. Strictly follow the rules mentioned in Adsense policies. You will always earn more revenue from Adsense by playing it clean.

b. Never modify the Google Adsense HTML code. If have trouble embedding AdSense code in your WordPress or Blogger template, take help of the AdSense support forums or send an email to your AdSense account manager.

c. Never ask your friends or visitors to click on your Google ads. Google takes click fraud very seriously. Do not include incentives of any kind on your site for users to click on your ads. Don't label Google ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements.".

d. Don't click on your own ads - Google is much smarter than you think and can discover invalid clicks through IP addresses, site navigation patterns, etc. If you working on a new design for your site, avoid reloading your pages (with AdSense) excessively. You can turn off AdSense temporarily and avoid invalid CPM impressions. Or you can use the unofficial Google Adsense Sandbox Tool that is accessible from Firefox, IE and other browsers to see what kind of Google ads will be served based on content (website address URL) or keywords.

e. Don't place ads in pop-up windows, error pages or even empty pages. Update: With the new AdSense policy change, you can probably place ads on 404 pages. Check with the AdSense support team.

f. Don't start a "adsense asbestos" or "home equity loan rates" website merely to make money from accidental clicks. You will never make money out these Made for Adsense websites. Instead, write on topics what you are passionate about. Don't waste your money on high-paying adsense keywords lists. Stay away from AdSense Adwords arbitrage.

g. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content.

h. For long articles, CTR will improve if you place ads somewhere in middle of the content or just where the article ends - when visitors are done reading the article, they may be looking for related resources.

i. Use Text Ads instead of Image Ads as users get more options and the payout is often higher. If you still want to display image ads (for CPM), consider ad formats like the 300x250 medium rectangle or the 160x600 wide skyscraper as they support also support rich multimedia and the new gadget ads.

j. Google Ads with no background color and no borders will always perform better. Make the border color and background color same as your page background color.

k. Always put ads above the main fold. Make sure that the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in your HTML source. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

l. Try setting the ad link URL color to a lighter shade. If your text is black, you may make the adlink as light gray or something like #666.

m. Go Wide - The large rectangle (336x280) is the best paying Adsense format especially for text ads. Try using the 336x280 large rectangle, 300x250 medium rectangle, or 160x600 wide skyscraper.

n. Don't places images next to Google ads as that will invite a permanent ban to your AdSense account.

o. Blend AdLinks with other navigation links or place horizontal adlinks at the top of your webpage. AdSense publishers are permitted to click on link unit topics on their web pages, provided that they do not click on any Google ads on the resulting page.

p. You should try adding a unit near the comments senction of your blog. See more AdSense tweaks.

q. You can put upto 3 adsense units on a page. Try putting a large skyscraper on the right navigation sidebar of your website. That area is close to the browser scrollbar. You can also add 2 AdSense for search boxes and 3 adlink units.

r. The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your webpage. That's the right place to put keywords in bold (strong or tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).

s. Always select the setting to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window, so you won't lose your visitors. Click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox and this add target="google_window" to your form tag.

t. Maximum people think the search box is on the top right corner. So you know where to put it.

u. Always syndicate full text RSS feeds and then monetize your feeds with a 468x60 ad in RSS feeds.

v. Monitor the AdSense performance of individual web pages with Google Analytics

w. For low CTR pages, try changing titles or adding more relevant content to get better focused ads. Alse see: Get relevant Google Ads

x. Block low paying advertisers with Filters. Why to loose a visitor for an ad that will only pay you a cent. Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

y. Learn how to implement AdSense Revenue sharing if you run a site with multiple authors and need to pay your writers based on advertising revenue generated from their articles.

z. Experiment with color schemes and layouts using split testing. You are the best judge when it comes to choosing ad formats for your own website.

Even Google doesn't offer the best advise always. For instance, in the visual heat map, Google suggests that webmasters are best served by positioning ads on the upper left-hand side of a Web page but if you go to any search page on Google, the ads the mostly in the right.

Bonus Tip: Use the AdSense Preview tool to determine what ad campaigns are currently targeted for your site in different geographic regions of the world.

Enter any keywords or a website address (URL) and choose a geographic location of the visitors to see all the related related Google Ads.

Blogger tricks , Adsense Tricks


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Adsense Light Bulb Moment

was reading something from Seth Godin today and came across one of those things we all know, then forget, and need to be reminded of from time to time:

Most blogs have a center well of the “new stuff” and then links and ads along the sides. And it’s pretty sacrosanct that you put the repetitive stuff on the sides, while the center column is for the new, the stuff that people give you permission to say, the stuff that actually gets read.

A blogger in Switzerland reported that while her traffic keeps going up, her revenue from AdWords keeps going down. Why? Because she’s trained people to ignore the ads. The good stuff is in the center column, and we ignore the rest.

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Adsense Related Products Reviews

I’m working on a multi-part multi-day posting about adsense and adsense related products. If you or your company have one and would like it included let me know about it. I will be giving my honest opinion good or bad about anything I do review.



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Google Adsense

t seems every few days I’ve been reading about someone joining the Adsense UPS club (over $10k per month), or coming out with the latest website, book, or blog on how to make more money with Google’s Adsense. So I decided to gather up some tips from across the web and mix in a few of my own. I’ll compile some notable resources and mention a few helpful products relating to Google adsense. I’ll be publishing them over the next few days, so if you have anything to add be sure to let me know.


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Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets

by Michael Gray

 

I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.
If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).
Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.
I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com – 728 banner
• domain1.com – 336 block
• domain1.com – text link
• domain2.com – 728 banner
• domain2.com – image banner
• domain2.com – 336 block
• domain3.com – 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.
Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.
Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.
The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ‘secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.
As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.
Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ‘sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.
Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.
Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.
Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.
via:nuevojefe



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Google Adsense Forums, Blogs and Resources

Here is a list of notable resources if you want to find out, and stay on top off Google’s Adsense program. I’ve included some obvious links and some low volume forums as well, in an effort to be through. Be careful about what you read and try if you venture too far off the beaten path

Official Google Information

• Google Adsense : This is the main Google site where you apply for Adsense, log in to get your adsense code, and view your reports.
• Google Adsense Case Studies: If you’re looking to see examples of Google adsense in action these are a few sites google has profiled.

News or Blogs About Google Adsense

JenSense: Jenstar who publishes this blog is the moderator of the WMW and Search Engine Watch forums on Adsense. This blog covers all contextual advertising programs not just adsense, but is one of the best sources for information about the adsense program. Additionally when they make a change to the programs terms and conditions, this is the place I go for an explanation I can understand. She is also a regular speaker for contextual advertising programs at conferences and tradeshows.

• Problogger: This Blog is run by Darren Rowse who is part of the Breaking News Blog Network. You will get some good subjects brought up here on a regular basis. I’ve only been subscribed for a few weeks but this one is definitely a worthwhile read.
• Make Easy Money With Google Adsense Blog: This is the companion blog to the ‘Make Easy Money with Google‘ book. Not deep in coverage, but it is fairly new. See my ‘Make Easy Money With Google Adsense Review‘ for more information.

Adsense Related Forums or Newsgroups

• WMW Google Adsense Forum: There’s lot of information here, not too much in the ways of ‘tricks’ or ’secrets’. A major advantage of this forum is Adsense Advisor (Google’s Adsense representative) reads, answers questions, and posts news here. Check out the Adsense Library for archives of the top threads.
• Digital Point Google Adsense Forum: Much looser and less formal than webmaster world. This is an active fast growing forum, however there aren’t as many seasoned adsense professionals here as there are in other places. Members drop URL’s to their own sites looking for help, or advice. Makes it a great spot to see things in action.
• Search Engine Watch Google Adsense Forum: Again not as formal as WMW, but not quite as loose as Digital Point. If you read for a little while and use the reputation rankings you’ll get a feel for who knows what they are talking about and who’s just yakkin’. That said you will still see some good topics here on a regular basis from more seasoned adsense professionals.
• Google Adsense Blog: Nothing to speak of at the time of publication. http://adsense.blogspot.com requires a login, Adwords has a dedicated blog so we can only hope.
• Google Groups Adsense Publishers: Not a very active forum, and not much in the way of tips.
• WebProWorld Adsense Adwords Forum: Adwords and Adsense are lumped together here.
• SEOChat Adsense Forum: This one has Adsense mixed in with other affiliate programs.
• SEOGuy Adsense Forum:
• AssociateForums Adsense:

If you know of any other forums, blogs or news sites, let me know and I’ll add them in.


Copy wolf-howl

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In doing the research for my series of Adsense articles, two common ideas kept getting repeated:

• My Adsense ads are horrible, they only pay out (insert low dollar figure here)
• My Adsense CTR is horrible, I only get a (insert extremely low CTR here)

To be fair these comments weren’t coming just from bloggers, but bloggers did make up an overwhelmingly large percentage. I think this stems from a misconception on the part of the bloggers that they are entitled to high payout and CTR. I’d like to spend a little time to share my feelings on this subject. In the early days a blog may just have been an online diary or journal, but like the days of the Nehru jackets, they are gone. What a blog is now is Chronologically Structured Content Management System, as opposed to the classic web hierarchical structured implementation. Let’s be clear, you can still use a blog as your online diary or journal, but nowdays it’s just as likely to be used as a commercial blog. Yes, I did just say commercial blog, and no the earth didn’t open under my feet and swallow me whole for saying it. Let’s take some time to look at a your typical blog.
You may post about commercial related subjects like your job, what you like to buy, or even your hobbies. However these posts are all about your life, they are no more commercially viable or attractive than say Aunt Millie’s Holiday Newsletter. Yes we all have an Aunt Millie in our family, every year she sends out a finely crafted newsletter in a coordinating envelope she ordered from paperdirect.com telling us all about her family. We learn how hard her husband works, how many activities her kids are in and how good they are at them. We also read the details of how her scrapbooking business hasn’t taken off yet, but she promises to spend more time on it right after New Years. So if you were a business owner would you want to advertise anywhere on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Then why would a business want to pay you top dollar to advertise on your blog? What’s that, you say your blog gets (insert a high number here) of readers per day, surely that has to be worth something? Well did you know Aunt Millie sends out over 800 copies of her holiday newsletter to 17 countries, on 4 continents? Now before you get all fired up about it, understand that I don’t have a problem with you having a personal blog or sharing it with the public. However your expectation that it has value outside of your family/friends/community, is a serious misconception.
So what exactly is a commercially viable blog? Don’t think of it as publishing a blog, think of it as publishing an online magazine. You need to start out with good content or articles about a small area or niche topic. You will need lots of content, and unless you are well known, don’t expect much to happen until you’ve written at least 100 and more likely over 200 articles. Yes you will have to devote some time and effort to publicizing and marketing it as well. Once you’ve got a significant focused reader base, that’s the time to slowly ad in the advertising. Now here’s the one that causes lots of people to freak out. BE PREPARED TO GIVE UP SOME PRIME SCREEN REAL ESTATE, IN THE CENTER, ABOVE THE FOLD, TO ADVERTISING. If you’ve worked with print media at all you will know the middle of the right hand page is the most desirable spot inside of a magazine (excluding the cover pages). I’ve sat through meetings where people have said ” … you know we need more right hand pages …”. If you want people to click on your ads, you will need put them where they can see them, above the fold in the center of the screen, in a prominent location. Yes I can almost here the keys typing for the flame comments and emails now. Before you hit that send button though, ask yourself this, are you building a space sough after by advertisers, or are you working on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? No I don’t think your pages should be filled with ads, in fact quite the opposite, there should always be more content than advertising, ALWAYS!

Next thing, lose the fancy graphics and eye-candy from your template. Yes I know you may have paid for a fancy template, maybe you had your niece who’s a graphic artist design something for you, or you really like the way that spinning flaming platypus looks in your page header. Here’s the thing, it’s detracting from your content. Graphics should be simple, understated, and support the content, not overpower or compete with it. Now before some art student wearing a beret, corduroy jacket with elbow patches, and smoking a pipe or French cigarette, writes and calls me a Philistine, stop and think. Are you designing a commercially attractive and viable space, or are you designing an intricate macrame border for Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Remember keep it simple and to the point.
Yes I know you feel like I just ripped off the band-aid, and now it hurts. Sorry but someone had to do it. I know some of you are still out there reading saying ‘but can’t I still have this … do we have to get rid of this … I really like that …’. Well I’m not your second grade teacher who’s going to tell you everything’s all right, that you don’t have to change a thing, and put a scooby-doo sticker on your shirt to make you feel better. If you want a blog that makes you more money than you spend at Starbucks every Tuesday, you will need to get serious about what you’re doing.
If none of this sounds incredibly fun, and really sounds pretty close to actual work, here’s the way I see it, getting an Adsense check for $5 is fun, getting an Adsense check for $500 or $5000 is work.
Disclaimers:
I don’t actually have an Aunt Millie, she’s a fictional character. But like you, I do have relatives who send out holiday newsletters.
Yes I know the minimum Adsense payment is $100, so you never could get a $5 check, but I was just making a point, mmkay?


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Site Targeting and Niche Blogging

I’m not the first one to say this, and I surely won’t be the last but if you use AdSense on your blog you really need to pick a niche topic and stick with it. This point become especially important if you allow site targeting on your blog. I have advertisers who target this blog and I have absolutely no problem with that. However one drawback of that is the site targeted ads get placed before the contextual relevant ads. So for example, if you had a post where you talked about buying your new flat screen TV, the most relevant ads would be about flat screen TV’s, however site targeting comes first so flat screen TV’s may never appear. While it would be easy for me to point fingers at Google or the people who purchase targeted ad, the fault really lies with me (the blogger) for wandering into Aunt Millie’s Holiday Newsletter territory.

So remember for AdSense to be most effective stay on target.


Copy wolf-how

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AdSense Success in one Sentence

AdSense tends to work at it’s best when a blogger targets a narrower niche topic, especially when that topic has some sort of product or service associated with it.




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AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks and Secrets

by Michael Gray

If you frequent any of the AdSense forums chances are you’ve come across the phrase ‘AdSense Arbitrage‘, while it’s been around for a while a lot of people don’t understand what it is, or how it works. While I’m not a big player in the arbitrage model I’ve been doing it profitably for a few months, so I can explain how I do it and share a few tips I’ve picked up. In part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection I’ll take you through some real keyword options, and in part III AdSense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing I’ll go over some ideas for automating the process I learned recently.
To start let’s take a high level view of what AdSense arbitrage is and how it works. The basic principle is to pay for a low price for keyword in an advertising program like AdWords, Overture Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter and direct users to a page with AdSense or another contextual advertising program on it that has higher payout. You can either bid low on the same term, looking for keywords with a large bid gap (more on that later) or you can bid on very specific keywords with little competiton and drive them to page with ads for a more general and competitive term.
Sounds pretty simple you bid $1 for a keyword, direct the traffic to a landing page with ads that pay $2 sit back and watch the profits roll in right? Well there’s a little more to it than that, it’s not rocket science but the more familiar you are with how both Adwords and AdSense works the more likely you are to succeed. Up until fairly recently most publishers were getting a 60% cut of the adwords price, $0.03 on a $0.05 bid. However now that AdSense has factored in smart pricing it’s a little more complicated. Here’s a decent explanation of smart pricing from Jensense (One poorly converting site can “smart price” an entire AdSense account – JenSense.com)

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results – such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups – we reduce the price you pay for that click.

The role smart pricing plays in your account varies from one account to the next and is an unknow variable. To keep the math here simple I’m not going to include it, but it is something you should factor into your computations. To keep things simple lets assume you are bidding $1.00 for a keyword. Again to keep things simple lets assume the advertiser is paying $2.00 a keyword, so you’ll get $1.20 a click ($2.00 * 0.6). So you pay $1.00 a click but get $1.20 a click so you make $0.20 every click, not a lot but you’re not really doing any work after you get it running so you’ll make money slowly. The problem is you aren’t going to get a 100% click through rate on your AdSense ads. Lets run some numbers using 100 users coming to your page

Users	Cost Per Acuisition	Total Cost	$ Per Click	CTR	Income	Profit
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	100%	$120	$20
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	90%	$108	$8
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	80%	$96.	-$4
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	70%	$84	-$16
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	60%	$72	-$28
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	50%	$60	-$40
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	40%	$48	-$52
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	30%	$36	-$64
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	20%	$24	-$76
100	$1.00	$100	$1.2	10%	$12	-$88

So what did our little experiment tell us, unless we have a 90% CTR we are going to lose money. While I’m not going to say you can’t achieve a 90% ctr, I am going to say if you did it would be pretty phenomenal. Let’s take a much more realistic CTR of say 30%. If you were able to get the cost down so you were paying $0.25 per click you would be in much better shape
100 leads @ $0.25 = $25
30 clicks at $1.2 = $36
$11 profit
$11 Profit per day isn’t a lot, in fact it’s probably going to cover lunch at the diner and not much else. So you’re going to have to find something with a lot of volume per day or look for a wider bid gap. A bid gap is what occurs when there is a large gap in bid prices for a particular keyword for example:
Bidder 1 – $10.00
Bidder 2 – $9.75
Bidder 3 – $7.00
Bidder 4 – $3.00
Bidder 5 – $1.25
There $4.00 difference between bidder 3 and 4 is a sizeable bid gap, and these are the opportunities you are looking for when you play the arbitrage game. Adwords isn’t much help in revealing bid in fact the best you can get is a kinda close guestimate, using the Overture Bid tool you can get much more accurate bid prices. Let’s assume you are going to bid 1 penny more than bidder number 5 so it will cost you $1.26 for each bid. The top bid is $10.00 so you will get $6.00 per click, so lets run some number again
100 leads @ $1.26 = $126
30 clicks @ $6.00 = $180
$54 dollars profit
Ok $54 dollars is more like it, now you can take your significant other out to dinner. But let’s slow down let’s say you are running a popular sized adsense block, good old 300 x 250. Well that size block displays up to 4 ads. If the user clicks on advertisement #3 forget going out to eat it’s left over mac and cheese for you. If they click on advertisement #4 you’ve lost money, so you better call up mom and see if you can come over for dinner.
The point to here is it may not always be in your best interest to display as many ads as possible, in many cases you can actually make more money by showing less ads, imagine that! You may even want to use single ads like 125 x 125, 180 x 180, 234 x 60 or the double 468 x 60, and 120 x 240. In addition you want to make sure you have the ads in prominant clickable spots (see Maximizing Profits With Website Design and Layout: Part II :). You may also find you have a lot more success using a landing page with no external navigation. By eliminating options the only choices are clicking the advertisements or using the back button. This means your content is going to have to “add value” along the way just be careful how you add value. Lastly if you use multiple ad blocks give each of them their own channel. If one block consistantly gets a higher CTR, have it appear first in the code so it gets the highest priced ad. Position it where ever you want using CSS. Also remember many publishers bid lower prices for contextual ads than search ads, so this could affect your ability to turn a profit, just again another factor to be aware of.
There are some other points to remember as well like cash management. Let’s say you spend $1000 on Adwords, and get $2000 from AdSense, $1000 profit so what’s the problem? You won’t be getting your AdSense check until the end of the month, and chances are your credit card bill will come before your AdSense check arrives, so make sure you can cover the expense. Letting your bill run up and giving the credit card company 18%-22% of your profit just isn’t cool. If you can’t float the money find a 0% interest credit card.
Getting your first campaign up, running and making a profit is definitely the hardest part. You probably are going to have to micromanage it for a week or two. You may even ask yourself is this worth the time? Well remember you’re just on the learning curve, once you’ve learned how to do it for one the second one is easier, the third even easier and by the fourth one hopefully you’ve found your groove. AdSense arbitrage isn’t rocket science but you do have to be on the ball, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Next Part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection

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AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection

In part I AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets we went over the basics of how AdSense arbitrage works. In this part we’re going to roll up our sleeves and look at some actual keywords and see if we can find some areas where we might like to try some arbitrage.
While high paying keyword lists may be somewhat useful it’s important to understand how those lists are generated and some of their limitations (see Contextual Advertising with AdSense | High-Paying Keywords, Part 2 (series) for a more in depth discussion). I like to start with the Overture bid tool, and if things look OK then go into Google Adwords tool. It’s been my experience that with the AdWords keyword tool there is quite often a substantial difference between what they estimate I will pay and what I actually end up paying for a keyword. Now this could have something to do with the “quality score” variable Google doesn’t share with you, or any number of other factors, but I don’t put too much faith in the Google estimated prices I use them more as a reality check for what I see from Overture. Let’s look at the keyword [mortgage]


Click to Enlarge
Now depending on how close the time you are viewing this page to the time it was written there may be some variation in prices. At the time of writing the top 10 bids were ($4.58, $4.53, $4.10, $4.05, $4.05, $4.05, $4.04, $4.02, $4.01, $4.00) so there’s not a big bid gap there at all. Using Google we see the prices are estimated at $3.67 per click (I think you’d actually end up paying closer to the Overture price when all is said and done)


Click to Enlarge
OK these prices are much better ($7.95, $7.91, $6.25 etc), however there still isn’t a bid gap. What we really need is a way to get the [new york mortgage] ads to appear and pay the [mortgage] prices and still be contextually relevant enough that the advertisements will get clicked on. Can you think of a way? Remember in part I that I said knowing how the system works can be to your advantage? Here’s one solution, select the word mortgage in your advertising, but only target customers from New York. Write your ad so it’s more appealing for people in New York, then on your landing page write about mortgages for New York. It doesn’t always work but you can use section targeting to help ( see Section Targeting for AdSense allows you to ignore on-page content – JenSense.com for more information).
While I’m sure some of you feel I “tricked” the system I disagree, I just used the way the system worked to my advantage. I also don’t feel the advertiser buying [new york mortgage] got the wrong customer, so nobody got “cheated”. This is just one way to use the system to make a profit, there are many more if you’re willing to spend some time and be a little creative. What you want to do take advantage of inefficiencies that exist, they could be gaps that exist in the market or just using poor searching habits to your advantage. The takeaway here is try to find a way to better pre-qualify the customer for the advertiser, that way you’ve added value somewhere along the way.
Now you can see how this process can be fairly time consuming, in part III AdSense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing we’ll look at ways to search and identify keywords programatically.

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Adsense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing

As we saw in part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection, finding the right set of circumstances where AdSense Arbitrage is going to work requires a bit of work. You’ve got to get a large enough set of related keywords, get some prices, and then compare and look for the right opportunity. If you read Rae’s blog then you might remember her post on Legitimate Use of Mechanical Grunts, which is a perfect for this situation. However after you get the keywords, and prices you’re still going to have to sift through all that data. I was talking with Scott (aka Web Professor) last week and he pointed me in the direction of Standard deviation.
Ok there is going to be a little math here, and it may look really scary and look like it’s going to make your head hurt. Trust me it’s OK we can get through this really. I hate reading those long boring overly complicated search engine patents just as much as you do, so I’ll keep things simple. The big formula is coming brace yourself …

Ok I promise I won’t do that again. The formula comes from Wikipedia, but since most spammers aren’t interested in this kind of stuff we’re going to assume it’s reasonably accurate. We’re going to work with a sample of 4 bids for illustrative purposes, however I’d suggest a I wider sample range once you actually get going.
Bid 1: $4.58
Bid 2: $4.53
Bid 3: $4.10
Bid 4: $4.05
We are going to get the mean of these numbers (add them together and divide them by 1 over amount of numbers)
(1/4) * ($4.58+$4.53+$4.10+$4.05)
(1/4) * (17.26)
we end up with 4.315

Explaning the next part in words is too complicated so I’ll just show you the formula that funny thing is a square root
√[ (1/4) * [(4.58-4.315)² + (4.53-4.315)² + (4.10-4.315)² + (4.05-4.315)²]]
Inside of each of the parentheses we subtracted the mean from each of the individual numbers and squared the result.
√[ (1/4) * [(0.265)² + (0.215)² + (-0.215)² + (-0.265)²]]
√[ (1/4) * [(0.070225) + (0.046225) + (0.046225) + (0.070225)]]
√[ (1/4) * [0.2329]]
√[ 0.058225 ]
The end result is 0.241 (rounded to three significant digits). OK great your head hurts and 37 people how now unsubscribed from my blog because they had high school math flashbacks, but what the heck to you do with that number? Well the lower that number is the worse the situation actually is, here an example of four other bid prices for an actual keyword:
Bid 1: $16.99
Bid 2: $16.98
Bid 3: $12.00
Bid 4: $10.00
You can see the bid gap is larger by looking at it, but remember were trying do this without having to look at the numbers. I’ll save you the trouble and tell you result is 3.065. So a higher standard deviation will clue you in to a possibly favorable condition. Now I’m not going to recommend you turn your scraper on full tilt and let it make your decisions, what I am saying is get a scraper/number-cruncher to help you identify the best possible candidates. Let the machine do the grunt work, save you time and energy, and you do the thinking and decide if it’s worth pursuing or not. It’s not rocket science, but with a little programming, a little math, and a little creativity you may find a new way to build your income.

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Understanding Adsense Patent Review

Eric Giguère of Make Easy Money With Google Adsense published an Adsense Patent Review and sent me a copy to review. Now I’m not a big fan of overly technical documents or patents but they are something we have to deal with in this industry, so you’ve either got to learn to read them and slog through or wait for someone else to do the dirty work for you. This one is little different than most patent reviews, mainly because it’s not free, it costs $14.95 to download.

The document starts off with a high level overview and some expalantions. It then dives right in to the analysis. First you’ll read the actual text from the patent, then you’ll get the acomanying analysis immedeatly after (screen shot below)



The different blocks of text and typestyles make the document much easier to work with and help you establish the proper context for each part and what is being said. Once you start getting into the analysis there’s quality data in there. There are links within the analyis to important search and IR papers, as well. Now I didn’t read the original patent before seeing this document, but I picked up a few nuggets of information about where AdSense miht be headed from reading it.
So who is the customer for this report and who will benefit the most from buying it? This document still contains some complex terms, concepts and ideas, so it’s not a geared for the sterotypical CEO or other C level employee. It’s also not for the AdSesne newbie, if you aren’t making the $100 minimum payout every month or are still cuttting your teeth with Adsense, again this is not for you, you’ve got a lot of other things to learn first. However if you are making a “significant amount of money” or AdSense makes up a “significant part” of your monthly income, this should be something you should look into purchasing (I leave it up to the reader to define significant as it’s a relative term and point). I’ve slogged through patent documents myself and I know it’s not a lot of fun. This patent is freely available so you could go and do it yourself. The question is how much time will you spend going through and trying to understand and decipher it, and is that amount of time worth more than $15 to you?.
Get more infomation on Understanding the AdSense Patent
Disclaimer I did receive access to a free Understanding the AdSense Patent valued at $14.95 prior to making this post. The free document was not contingent upon a positive review or endorsement. No other compensation, occurred to influence this blog posting. For more information please see my advertising policy

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Suggestions for Adsense

Hey Google Adsesne how about giving people the ability to call for a “fresh visit” and content reassessment so the adsense ads will target better. Sometimes we make typos or use phrase that call for the wrong ads to be delivered. Sure I can test it by throwing an irrelevant parameter on the URL but actual visitors to the site will get the old ads until you decide to revisit the page.

You could make it really easy and scaleable by making it a parameter like example.com/?recrawl=true, you could limit abuse by limiting it to one url per domain per day.

Of course you could really improve relevancy by allowing publishers to suggest kewords/phrases and comparing them to what you think the page is about. For example if you think the page is about oranges and the publisher tells you its about orange juice determine those phrases are related enough to go with the publishers suggestion. If you think the page is about oranges and the publisher thinks it’s about digital cameras determine those terms are too dissimilar and go with your interpretation.


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Google Adsense for Video Beta Program

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Google Adsense for video ads. Initially I was told this blog was approved, which seemed a little odd to me as the content really didn’t match. After some back and forth earlier this week they decided choose another of my websites instead. In a way I’m glad because the content of that website is much more inline with the content of the videos, however since it’s competitive space it’s not a URL I can share. However I’ll talk about it after the program is over.

 

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