AdSense Beginner Tips

I’ve already written a quick tips guide for AdWords this this week, so I thought it might be an idea to do the same for AdSense.

AdSense is the program that allows publishers to put Google Ads on their own sites - and generate revenue from them. It’s popular because it’s so easy to do and because the ads are context sensitive. Whatever the subject of your web site, Google will crawl it and automatically choose ads that match. And with thousands upon thousands of advertisers, the chances are you’ll get relevant ads on your site.

Getting AdSense up and running is fairly easy - just paste the Javascript code into your blog template - but if you want to make the most of Google ads on your site, here’s a few quick tips:

Placement
The placement of ads on your page (where you put them) is possibly the most important factor if you want to get maximum revenue from AdSense. Try to place ads “above the fold” - i.e. near the top of the page, so a reader doesn’t have to scroll down in order to see them. If you’re ads are right at the bottom of the page, nobody will ever see them, never mind click them.

Ad Sizes
Different sized ads can perform very differently, so it’s worth experimenting with different sizes to see which works for you. Many people find large leaderboard ads at the top of a page, or 300×250 ads embedded in the content perform best.

But you also need to consider how the ads fit into your blog template. If an ad won’t physically fit, try a different size or placement. You might even find that you need to try a completely new blog template in order to fit ads in without detracting from the content.

Colours
You might not think it, but the colour of your ads can have a huge impact on your revenue. Most people find that colours that blend in with your own site work best. In particular, look at removing borders (by setting them to the same colour as the background).

Change one thing at a time
When tweaking your ads, rather than changing ad size, placement and colour all at once, change one thing at a time and wait at least a day to see how that change affects your stats. This is by far the best way of seeing how a particular change is affecting your revenue, and you won’t have to spend time figuring out what it was you need to put back if your earnings suddenly fall through the floor.

Use channels
Google provides custom “channels” that enable you to track ads on specific pages or placements to see how they perform. This is really useful if you want to see how one ad is performing in relation to another, and it’s absolutely vital if you have more than one site. Spend some time setting up channels and getting a feel for how they work, and you could end up saving yourself a lot of time and money in the future.

Experiment with image ads
For some ad sizes, Google lets you specify if you want to see text ads, image ads, or both. Often, letting Google’s algorithm decide works best, but in some circumstances, using only image ads can improve revenue. If you have a very text-heavy site with few other graphics, an image ad can provide an eye-catching focal point to your page. On other sites, it just looks overly busy and doesn’t work. Experiment!

Don’t Click!
Never, ever, ever be tempted to click your own ads or encourage your readers to click ads on your site. Not only is this against the rules, but Google has some pretty sophisticated fraud detection algorithms, and if you’re caught clicking or encouraging readers to click ads, the chances are your account will be frozen and you’ll lose all your earnings.

It’s also worth remembering that someone - a real, living, breathing advertiser - is paying for every ad click. If you’re clicking your own ads, you are effectively stealing their money. So don’t do it!

Track your changes
You’ll be surprised how a small change in layout or placement can affect the amount of money you can make from AdSense, but sometimes, you might find a sudden jump or fall in revenue and think “What did I do???”.

A lot of the time, it will be nothing that you’ve done - a change in Google’s ad placement algorithms or search engine rankings - but if you do make changes to the AdSense ads on your site, just write a note of what you changed and when.

Get a book!
As with so many things in life, a good book can be the best way to learn about AdSense. The AdSense Code by Joel Comm looks to be a popular choice with good reviews.

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IZEA RealRanks

20 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: izea, pagerank, realrank

With all the fuss over Google stripping people’s PageRank, one company has decided to take matters into their own hands by developing their own alternative to PageRank - RealRanks.

IZEA - the people behind PayPerPost - introduced RealRanks last week following reports that Google was stripping PageRank from PayPerPost users.

RealRanks uses a piece of Javascript on your blog to track traffic, and requires you to be an IZEA user. That doesn’t strike me as being particularly accurate, but I think the point is to allow IZEA to replace Google’s PageRank as a way of ranking their own users’ blogs, rather than the wider world.

Personally, I think the RealRanks system would be much easier to ‘falsify’ than PageRank, but the fact is, many companies are using PageRank as a means of calculating the importance of a web site, and that can no longer be relied upon. Google has taken editorial control of PageRank, lowering (or removing) rank from sites at will.

These companies are going to have to come up with some other alternative, but I’m not convinced RealRanks is the way forward.

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Adwords Beginners Tips

19 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: advertising, adwords, google

Over the last few days, several people have asked me about Google Adwords and how to run an ad campaign for their blog there.

Adwords is a very complicated beast, and a comprehensive guide is well beyond the scope of this blog, but I thought I’d get together a few tips for those of you who are new to AdWords.

If you’re looking for something more comprehensive, there are many books out there. A quick scan of Amazon reveals that AdWords For Dummies is quite popular and has good reviews.

So, down to the tips:

Fix your site first
First things first - there’s no point advertising your blog if it doesn’t work - or just looks terrible. Before you consider advertising, you might want to move your blog to your own domain and find an attractive template. Make sure your template has space to promote you RSS feed, ad space, and anything else you need. Ask a friend or colleague to look over your blog and give honest feedback - and proof-read everything!

Start small
Ad adwords campaign can easily become very, very big. At one company I worked at recently, we were spending around $1000 a day advertising one site. Occasionally, we’d get a burst of traffic for one reason or another and end up spending twice that.

Set a budget and stick to it
AdWords has a “daily budget” feature, and it’s really important you use this wisely. Spending $10 a day might not seem like much, but can you afford to be spending $4000 a year? Don’t be tempted to increase your daily budget just to get a bit more traffic - at least, not unless you know you can afford it!

Don’t over-bid for keywords
Many people don’t fully understand how AdWords works, new advertisers often end up bidding (and spending) far too much on specific keywords. Depending on the content / niche of your blog, you may have to bid a little more or a little less for specific keywords, but remember, if you bid $1, you may well end up paying $1 per click on your ads.

Use geotargetting
Geotargetting (showing your ads only to people in the countries you specify) is incredibly useful. You might think you want readers from all over the world, but if your budget is low, you can end up only getting clicks from poorer countries where less people are bidding (and hence ads are cheaper). Certain countries also have more click-fraud. Personally, I try to start with a limited set of countries, then expand that slowly over time.

Use the keyword tool
The keyword tool lets you find similar or related keywords to bid on. Sometimes you may only be able to come up with a few keywords to bid on, but they keyword tool will often find hundreds of related keywords. Having a wide selection of keywords in your campaign will get you more clicks, and also allow you to see which variations perform best for you. As an example, I have around 200 keywords in the campaign I’m currently running.

Work out your cost per subscriber
I’ve already talked about subscriber values for my particular niche, so I have a reasonable idea of how much I should be looking to spend on advertising in order to acquire a new subscriber. In marketing terms, this is called the Cost Per Acquisition, and it’s vital to have an idea of this before you start your campaign - otherwise, you’ll just end up throwing money at ads that don’t really achieve anything.

Use several ad variations
Another great feature of AdWords is that you can have as many different versions of your ad running as you like. The system will work out which ad variations perform better and serve those more often. You might be surprised how a small change in wording can affect the click through rate of your ad.

Check your stats daily
This goes hand-in-hand with the ’start small’ and ’set a budget’ tips. Google changes the cost of keywords constantly, depending on several factors, including what other advertisers are doing. The cost of your keywords or the level of traffic you’re getting could very easily double - or half - over night, so keep an eye on things!

Watch your ROI
Your ROI (Return On Investment) is just as important as the cost per click. You might be advertising just to increase the number of subscribers to your site, but you need to keep an eye on how much income those subscribers are bringing in. You might end up getting 100 new subscribers a week, but if those people aren’t actually earning anything, you might want to re-think your strategy.

That’s it for now!

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Short term profit vs long term investment

17 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: advertising, investment, money, profit, tips

Money Blogger continues to grow at a rate far beyond what I had expected. We’re only 5 weeks old, but we’re on course for well over 100 subscribers and $200 revenue this month.

But looking at all the graphs got me thinking - what do I want from Money Blogger?

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know my primary goal is to see how much money I can earn from blogging in one year. But what’s the best way to do that?

Then it hit me - in order to make real money, a blog needs readers. Regular readers. If I spend my time now building up that readership, then the small amount of money I’m earning now will be completely insignificant by the end of the year. Rather than taking profits, I should invest as much of that revenue as possible in building up the readership - and that means advertising.

Now obviously, this approach isn’t for everyone. But if you’re blogging as a sideline and hope to “go pro” at some point in the future, then investing what you’re earning now into building up your readership may be just the way to do it.

So rather than taking profit from your blog and buying coffee/chocolates/holidays, why not consider some of these ideas:

* Replace one of your key ads with a Feedburner email subscription form.
* Use ad space on your blog to promote your most popular articles, rather than someone else’s site.
* Invest your profits in a Text-Link-Ads campaign
* Try a small AdWords campaign
* Invest a small amount of your own money to kick-start your traffic

Now if you are spending money on an ad campaign (particularly your own money), always remember to keep a close eye on your budget. A few dollars a day can easily turn into a few hundred dollars a month, and if you’re not increasing your readership, you should change something.

It’s also worth trying to work out how much a subscriber is worth to you - and never spend above that figure to acquire a new reader.

For me, I can see revenue increasing, but for the first six months at least, actual profit is much less relevant than having people actually reading this blog.

Having that 12 month goal that I set myself at the outset was incredibly helpful in figuring this out. If I hadn’t had a goal and and endpoint in mind, then I would not have been able to plan so easily for a specific point in time when I could start thinking about profit.

So that’s my other piece of advice - have a long term plan. Write it down and stick to it!

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AdSense: How’s your CTR?

16 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: ads, adsense, clicks, ctr, google

It’s been a few days since Google changed the clickability of AdSense ads, and I was wondering what changes (if any) people are seeing?

After a small blip upwards for a day, my CTR (click through rate) across all my sites has settled down to around 1.5%. Before the change, it was around 1.8%, and that was fairly consistent.

Interestingly, my CPM (revenue per thousand page impressions) has stayed fairly constant, which could be an early sign that advertisers are prepared to pay a little more to avoid accidental ad clicks and get better quality traffic.

Has the change affected you? Are you up or down?

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WidgetBucks = Scam?

15 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: ads, advertising, scam, widgetbucks

WidgetBucks, who until today were featured quite prominently on Money Blogger, have just changed their payment policy.

Now, ad networks changes their terms and conditions all the time, but the WidgetBucks change is the most mindblowingly stupid idea I’ve ever heard:

From now on, publishers will only be paid for trafffic from the US and Canada.
WidgetBucks = Scam?

For many publishers, that will completely wipe out their earnings, and they may not even be aware of the change. Meanwhile, WidgetBucks are continuing to accept clicks from outside the US and redirect them to their own affiliates. (I just checked - one of my links was redirected to Amazon via DealTime.com)

In short, they’re generating money from your traffic, while refusing to pay you for it.

Now, there’s a possibility that this is just a really, really bad attempt to try to stamp out fraud and not a ’scam’, but the consequence for publishers is exactly the same - WidgetBucks is stealing your traffic and not paying you.

I’m now in the process of removing all WidgetBucks widgets from my sites, and I’ve already taken down the ads on this site. My personal recommendation is that you should do the same (and maybe try AuctionAds instead) - but obviously, the decision as to whether or not to remove WidgetBucks is yours at the end of the day.

On the plus side, I do now have two 125×125 image ads on Money Blogger up for grabs at very reasonable rates. Get in touch if you’re interested!

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AdSense ads becoming less clickable

14 Nov

Posted by Dom
Tags: ads, adsense, google

Darren Rowse is reporting that Google AdSense ads are about to become “less clickable”.

Currently, a reader can click anywhere on an AdSense block and it will be registered, but with the changes, only the title and URL of ads will clickable.

The idea is that this will dramatically cut down on accidental ad clicks, saving advertisers money.

But what will the change mean for publishers?
AdSense Click Zones

Well it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen, but it’s likely that most publishers will see an initial drop in revenue from AdSense.

But you may also gain a few extra readers and increase reader loyalty too. Accidentally clicking an ad can be frustrating for a reader - and less people leaving your blog via ads could mean more of those people hanging around.

But if you’re relying solely on AdSense for your revenue, then now might be a good time to diversify. I’ve talked about the problem of relying on Google before, and this is a pretty good example of the issue.

The good news is, there are plenty of other ways to generate revenue from your blog, and I’ll be looking at some more of those in an upcoming post.
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