Google adsense-part twenty four

Making AdSense fit your forum site

When you run a forum site, ad placement and formats are key to designing ads that will be successful but not intrusive to your regular users.

Placement: Display your ad units where repeat users will notice them Because forum regulars tend to skip the header and go straight to the meat of the thread, placing your ad unit above or below the first post can be more effective than ads next to the logo. Place a leaderboard immediately after the last post. This provides users who make it to the end of a thread with a 'next step' when the content ends. Try to avoid placing it after the footer, though, as your readers will likely move to the next thread without seeing the ad. Formats: Adapting your design for multiple ad units and limited space. Using multiple ad units, you can use a variety of formats to fill ad space throughout your site. Placing a skyscraper above the fold on the left side of your forum seems to produce slightly better performance than other positioning. However, when using multiple ad units throughout the page our horizontal bias still favors the leaderboard. Our heat map provides more details. Use horizontal link units, which are small enough to fit near the top of your forum just below the header. For the regular forum visitor, link units offer a wider range of relevant topics to browse.

However you choose to implement your ads, keep in mind that forums are highly interactive sites with regular users. Be sure to blend the ads nicely, so they don't appear overly intrusive - but don't blend them so well they mislead your users! Every forum site is different and you know your community best, so as always use your own judgment to create the most positive experience for your users.

Tip for making the most of revenue opportunities: Like most sites, forums can benefit from opting in to image ads. Supporting image ads increases the pool of ads - particularly cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ads - bidding to display on your site. Since forums tend to have lower clickthrough rates than other types of sites, CPM ads can improve revenue without the need for clicks. Keep in mind, however, that CPM ads come in both text and image formats.

Google adsense-part twenty three

Why are the wrong AdSense ads being displayed?

Sometimes, Google seems to get it wrong. You create a page and ads you've seen elsewhere and were expecting to see on your page just don't turn up. Instead, you see vaguely relevant or totally irrelevant ads.

Here are four possibilities:

1. Your page isn't perfectly optimized for the keywords. It's very important to get the key phrase in the file name, for example "product-xyz.html", in the title, in the heading, in the first paragraph, in the body, at the end, and put it in the meta tag description, too.

2. Advertisers can choose to advertise just on Google's search engine. They can opt out of advertising on the AdSense content network. Perhaps the advertisers you're interested in have opted out. To check, type a few phrases into Google and try to find some sites that are displaying Google ads and see which ads appear.

3. Advertisers can choose which countries will see their ads. If you're in Canada, for example, you may not see an ad that people in the U.S. will see. To find out where ads are being displayed, download the free Adsense Preview Tool.

4. This is very rare, but weird stuff can happen for no apparent reason. If all else fails, contact AdSense support. I've always found them prompt and helpful.

Google adsense-part twenty two

Will the AdSense ads appear on your page?

Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites.

Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads.

You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.

For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

Google adsense-part twenty one

How to increase your AdSense earnings

If you hear about people achieving high payments per click with AdSense, remember that's only part of the story. for high total earnings, you also need lots of page views and a high click-through rate.

Here are some ideas on how to achieve those three things:

If you're starting afresh designing a site specifically for AdSense revenue, you'll want a simple design that makes it easy to paste Google's code into a horizontal or vertical space on the site. For experienced webmasters, that's easy.

To increase your click-throughs, design a simple, uncluttered page with the AdSense ads displayed prominently.

Use white space, so that the AdSense panel catches the eye.

Where possible, use ads high on the page. They catch visitors' attention.

Experiment with borderless ads high on the page. (You can create borderless ads by setting the border color to the same as the background color. Look in your AdSense control panel under "Ad settings".)

Try placing AdSense high in the left-hand column. That works well for super affiliate James Martell.

On very simple, one-column pages, making your article wrap around AdSense ads near the top-right of the page works remarkably well for me on a non-Internet marketing site.

Stick to only one topic per page - that makes it easier for Google to serve up highly relevant ads on your pages.

Plain, bland pages with few competing links result in higher click-through rates on the AdSense ads.

If you want to target certain high-priced keywords, use them in the file name, in the heading on the page, and in the first paragraph - in other words, use search engine optimization techniques.

If you change those keywords, Google will change the ads that appear on your page.

If you have trouble getting AdSense to serve relevant pages, check your anchor text - the words used in links on your page. Try changing some of those words.

Watch out for cases where Google has guessed wrong, and is displaying ads that won't interest your visitors. Figure out which words are involved, and rewrite those words. Help Google by sticking closely to the topic.

Don't worry about losing traffic via those clicks. If you can earn maybe 30 or 50 cents or more per click, you WANT to lose visitors!

You'll also want keyword-rich pages, optimized to rank highly in search engines, so you can serve lots of pages.

Try using ads at the top of the page and again at the bottom. At first, this wasn't allowed but AdSense changed the rules and it's now OK.

One of the beautiful things about AdSense is that you can generate revenue from informational sites even if there are no obvious related affiliate programs. With more than 100,000 advertisers, there's a good chance that Google will find ads that match your pages, better than the big ad networks can.

Don't be tempted into trying to create thousands of spammy computer-generated articles. Human beings review sites for AdSense. Build useful, interesting sites. Google likes them.

One way to create articles quickly is use Gary Antosh's approach. He pays people to write articles for him - by the truckload. So far he has bought hundreds of them and paid only $5 per article. See How to buy articles for $5 - the details

Another way is to use works that are copyright-free. Here's a book that describes how to find such articles: The Public Domain: How to Find and Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More

However, that technique isn't likely to be useful for long. At the very least, it would be wise to add your own introduction and conclusions to make your pages different from everyone else's.

Several websites now sell packages of articles on a wide variety of topics. I belong to several of these membership sites. It's an excellent way of saving time. It's so much easier to rewrite an article you've bought than do all the research and writing yourself.

These articles are often referred to as PLR articles or private label rights articles because you own the right to alter them in any way you wish. Here are some good sources of PLR articles.

You can use PLR articles to quickly add lots of keyword-rich articles to your site for the search engines to find.

For long-term success, write your own original articles on a topic you're passionate about. That way, you're writing for humans AND search engines.

Google adsense-part twenty

Serious tracking to maximize AdSense profits

How do you find out which AdSense ads get the highest number of click-throughs? How do you find out which ads are best at generating clicks that pay?

AdSense provides what it calls channels, and you can experiment to find out which pages on your site are generating the most revenue, which colors work best, what ad placement works best, whether you should use borderless ads, etc.

However, if you have a large site, you'll find AdSense tracking via channels is seriously lacking.

AdSense Tracker is a powerful php script that keeps detailed logs of all impressions and clicks on AdSense ads on all your websites without altering the ad code itself. The data can then be used to analyze the effectiveness of your sites, track different ad sizes and styles, or even individual pages.

You can track every click-through so you'll know what your visitors are looking for. This makes it easy for you to build more perfectly targeted, profitable pages.

It can track unlimited domains and pages. It's resource intensive and should be hosted separately.

If you just have a small site you probably don't need it. AdSense Tracker is a tool for professionals.

Google adsense-part ninteen

How AdSense matches ads to web pages

Google is doing a good job of finding ads that are highly relevant to the web pages.

Google says:

"We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on an algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

Occasionally Google gets it wrong. It places great importance on the file name. So be sure to use important keywords in the file name of each page, such as "contextual-advertising.html" for an article on contextual advertising.

Also, watch out for your anchor text - the words in the links on your page. We've found that sometimes if irrelevant ads are being served, you can fix the problem by rewriting anchor text.

You can check the relevance of the ads by looking at the text ads near the top-right of this page.

Google adsense-part eighteen

How much can you earn by Google AdSense?

 

Let's say you have a goal of earning $100,000 a year from AdSense. Is that possible?

Let's see ... $100,000 divided by 365 = $274 a day. So your goal is to produce either:

  274 pages which earn $1 a day
      OR
  548 pages which earn 50 cents a day
      OR
  1096 pages which earn 25 cents a day

The following are hypothetical cases. To earn $1 a day per page, you need, per page...

400 visitors, 5% click-through rate (CTR) and average 5c payout.
Or 200 visitors, 10% CTR and an average 5c payout.
Or 100 visitors, 10% CTR, and an average 10c payout.
Or 100 visitors, 5% CTR, and an average 20c payout.
Or 50 visitors, 10% CTR and 20c average payout.
Or 25 visitors, 20% CTR and 20c average payout.
Or 20 visitors, 10% CTR and 50c average payout.
Or 10 visitors, 20% CTR and 50c average payout.
Or 5 visitors, 20% CTR and $1 average payout.

Let's assume you choose a goal somewhere around the middle, say aiming for 50 visitors per page and want 274 pages earning $1 a day. You'd need 274 x 50 = 13,700 pageviews a day.

Does that sound too tough? If so, you'd better look for more profitable keywords and ways to improve your click-through rates.

Let's try a different scenario. You choose more profitable keywords and make your $1 on average per page from, say, 10 visitors. 274 x 10 = 2740 pageviews a day.

That's looking easier to achieve. If your average visitor sees 3 pages, you now need 913 unique visitors a day.

Is that too tough to achieve in your niche? If so, create two sites, each attracting half that number, 456 unique visitors, a day.

Can't achieve those click-through rates and payouts? Then you'll either need more pages on your sites on more niche sites.

Some affiliates have a goal of writing one article a day and building one site a month.

Need a little more help reaching that $100,000 goal? Add affiliate commissions into the equation. Add a newsletter for repeat sales.

Choose the goal which best matches your site or sites.

Then start building keyword-rich pages containing well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site.

Please note, because of the AdSense rules, these are all hypothetical cases. I'm not allowed to give real cases. Real CTR rates and payouts vary hugely.

It's fast

Google usually approves web sites in less than a day.

After your site is approved, within a few hours a special Google spider will spider your site. Then it's time to paste the code into your site and the text ads will appear.

You can choose between either horizontal or skyscraper AdSense ads.

Or

How much revenue can I generate with Adsense?

You receive a percentage of the amount paid by advertisers for each click on an ad. Unlike other networks, Google doesn't state what that percentage is, and I speculate it varies, but it does appear to be a generous share.

As to how much you'll make, this is a "how long is a piece of string?" type question. There are no limits. I personally know people who are generating 5 figure monthly checks by using AdSense. As for how much I make, well that's a secret :) - it's not 5 figures per month, but more than enough to keep me interested in using it as a method of revenue generation - even more so now after having read and implemented some of the strategies in Joel Comm's AdSense strategies book - but more on that later.

Revenue generation will be dependent on a number of factors:

• The number of pages viewed per day
• The topic of your content
• The price paid by the advertiser for each click
• The number of people who click on the ads

This doesn't mean to say that if you only generate a few hundred page views a day, you'll receive a pittance. In fact, light traffic sites can generate substantial revenue if their topic covers a very competitive market. 

While you ascertain from Google how much advertisers in your category are paying per click, you can draw a comparison by using the Overture bid tool. As an example, type in "web marketing". You'll see a list of advertisers and how much they are prepared to pay for each click. Pretty amazing isn't it? To be truly gob-smacked, type in "web hosting". Yep, that's right, that's how much some advertisers are willing to pay per click.

Google issues checks approximately 30 days after the end of each calendar month if you've earned US $100 or more. If you've earned under that, the balance is rolled over to the next month.