Adsense

This is a collection of articles about Google Adsense. Those are what we've learnt while we are developing sites that monetize from adsense. From our experience, some simple tips (e.g changing the ad position & modifying the ad colours) can result in a 100% (or even a few times) increase of the adsense revenue.

What is Adsense?

To tell what it is, it would be better to just quote from Adsense home page: "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages." In a short sentence, Adsense allow you to display ads easily (with almost no effort at all) and monetize your site traffic. To apply for an Adsense account is pretty straight forward, you just need to follow the instructions from Google. However, there are a number of tips that will make a whole lot of difference to your adsense revenue if you know about them from the very beginning. Those are what we will discuss in the following articles...

Different Ad Types

There are different ad types provided by Google. Basically, Ads can be divided into 2 main categories:
1. Ad Units - these are the most commonly seen ads, then can be in pure text or in the form of images. The number of ads in an ad unit base on the size of the ad unit.
2. Link Units - these are groups of keyword links which is kind of like a site's navigation links. You can choose either 4 or 5 links to be shown for a link unit. When your visitor click on the links, a landing page with the actual ads will be displayed. Those ads are baed on the keywords on the links.
For both category, different sizes (and thus the number of ads/links) are available. You can pick the ones that fit your page's layout:

	Ad Units	Link Units
Horizontal	728 x 90 Leaderboard	728 x 15
	468 x 60 Banner	468 x 15
	234 x 60 Half Banner
Vertical	120 x 600 Skyscraper
	160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper
	120 x 240 Vertical Banner
Square	125 x 125 Button	200 x 90
	300 x 250 Medium rectangle	180 x 90
	250 x 250 Square	160 x 90
	336 x 280 Large rectangle	120 x 90
	180 x 150 Small rectangle


Frankly speaking, it is hard to tell which type works best. It should be on a site by site basis. But in general:
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard works well as a horizontal banner
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper works well in the vertical series
• 336 x 280 Large rectangle works best when embedded inside the content text
It looks like the more space you allocate to the ads, the better is the click performance... seems a very straight forward explanation? If you don't have your site built yet, you probably need to take into account of the ad dimensions when designing your page layouts.

Ad Position and number of ad units per page

Ad Position Where to put the ads is another factor that affect your adsense revenue. Of course, the ad positions available on your pages are governed by your page layouts. However, if you don't have your site built yet, you may work from anothor way round; design your page layout to optimize your adsense revenue. Studies shows that the following positions are where users pay most attention to (and thus resulted in higher click rate) :
• Top Left corner - this is where your site logo or your site navigation (veritical one) appear. Depending on whether you weight your site usability or your ad reveneu more, you may consider putting your ad unit here (below your logo maybe). There are sites doing so and put their site navigation on the right hand side.
• Top of the page - this is usually where most ad banners appear
• The space between your horizontal navigation bar and your main content - This position is where your users are looking for the information they want, so a location with good attention.
• The space follow your main content - the reasonale is that after reading your main content, your user is looking for the next thing to move to, so ads at this location can have high click rate.

Number of Ad Units Depending on the length of your page, you can decide how many ad units to put on it. If you have a long page, you can consider putting ad units in the middle of your content. However, please be noted that more ad units don't necessarily yield higher revenue. According to Google, ads with higher CPC are having higher display priority. If your page has less ad units, in theory, most of the ads displayed would have higher pay. If your have more ad units, essentially, your are mixing higher pay ads with lower ones; which ad being clicked by your user is more or less by chance. So, displaying an ad unit in a prominent position and a link unit at the end of your content may be a good enough combination.

Pick the right colors for your ads

When you create your ad source code on Adsense panel (under the Adsense Setup tab), you are allowed to specify the color scheme for your ads. You can customize the color for the followings:
• Border
• Title
• Background
• Text
• URL
You can pick the colors that fit your page styles. But there are 2 major directions for the color styles:
• make your ads stand out - i.e. using colors that is different from your page colors, try to make the ads as eye catching as possible.
• blend the ads into your page - i.e. make the ads look just like your page content. Use the same text and link color as your page content, make the ads borderless... etc
Some publishers reported that the standing out ads worked better for their sites, while some claimed that the blending way boosted their revenue. There is no definite conclusion on which one is better, you probably need to run some experiments to see which one is better for your site. From our experience, blending seems to work better. Some how, we think that which color scheme is better is related to whether your site has mostly new users or recurring users. Thus, we've set up a polling to gather some concrete data. Please join our polling.

Improve Ad relevancy

If you found irrelevant ads displaying on your pages, that probably is because google's search engine "mis-understand" your page content. You probably need to spend some time on SEO (e.g fixing your page title, adding meta keywords / description... etc). However, Google's algorithm is not 100% bullet-proof and sometimes it may still assign ads that is not exactly what your page is about. The ads may match some parts (or some particular keywords) of your page, but not the main topic of it. To work around the issue, you can try the section targeting tags introduced by Google. It allows you to suggest which part of your content you want to emphasize or ignore when google do the ad matching. You can use the following tags to wrap arond the content that your want to emphasize: <!-- google_ad_section_start --> <!-- google_ad_section_end --> or use the following to wrap around the part that you want to ignore: <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
How much this can help? You have to try it out on your pages. But don't expect the ads will become relevant shortly after your changes. It usually takes time (days or weeks) for google to crawl your site and update its search index. So be patient.

Ad filtering

Ad filtering is a mean for you to get rid of some un-desired ads appeared on you pages. After logging in your adsense account, under the "Adsense Setup" tab, you should be able to find the "Competitive Ad Filter" sub-menu. There you can put as many as 200 " ad urls" that you want to filter. So, what kind of ads should you get rid of? and why ? Below are a few examples:
• ads from your competitors - if your site is running some sort of business, sure you want to avoid ad from your competitor.
• irrelevant ads - the resonale is that if the ads are irrelevant to your page content, most likely your visitor will not click on them, so why wasting the space for them?
• MFA ads - MFA ads are usually low paying ads (due to their biz model), so it may be a good idea to get rid of them. Another argument is that driving your site users to those "empty content" site is hurting your user's interest and your site's reputation.

High paying keywords

Keywords, almost every activities around search engine are about keywords. Search engine takes keywords (in the query) as input, publishers optimize their pages around keywords for better search result ranking and for more relevant ads, advertiser bid on keywords for their ads... etc. Keywords also play an important role in your adsense earnings. How much you get for a click depends on what keywords the ad is associated with. The pay for a click can varies from as low as $0.01 to tens of dollars (or even more?). If you are planning to build a site, building it around some higher pay keywords would be a good idea. Of course the topic need to match your interest/expertise, otherwise, your may not have real good content. Below is a snapshot of high paying keywords for your reference: (the list may not be that update now, but you can still get an idea about what terms are having high paying rate and verify them using some online tools, e.g. overture's bidtool. OR you can take a look at our keyword tracking tool) 15 year mortgage 21st century insurance 2nd mortgage 30 year mortgage aa car insurance aa insurance aaa insurance aarp adjustable rate mortgage adult web site hosting affordable web hosting america mortgage american equity american equity mortgage american equity mortgage american express credit card american insurance american mortgage ameriquest mortgage asp web hosting att cellphone att credit card auto insurance auto insurance quote auto insurance quotes automobile insurance baby sign bad credit mortgage bellsouth web hosting bellsouth web hosting bellsouth web hosting best interest rate best mortgage best mortgage rates boat insurance boston web design budget insurance buildings insurance business cards business credit business insurance business insurance business loans business web hosting buying stock california mortgage car insurance companies car insurance quote car insurance quotes car insurance rates care insurance 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Site targeting ads

Site targeting ads was introduced by Google to acquire the more traditional CMP advertisers user base. Advertisers can select sites (sites under the adsense network) to display their ads on CMP basis (i.e. on page impression basis). Advertisers still need to place their bids which compete with other CPC ads. According to Google, there is algorithm to select which ad to display on publisher's page which in theory should yield the best revenue to the publisher. However, the exact mechanism is unknown to the public. Recently, Google has added a new option on the adsense report to allow publisher to check the site targeting ads performance apart from the contextual (CPC) one. Some publishers reported that the site targeting ads performance is as bad as only 10% (or even lower) of the contextual one. e.g. with 1000 page impressions, the contextual ads yield $10, but the site targeting one give less than $1. Comparing the performances, there seems no good reason to waste the ad space for site targeting ads. However, according to google: "... Through site targeting, pay-per-impression ads compete with pay-per-click ads to be displayed on any page. Site targeting will work to your benefit, as more competition among ads will lead to higher potential earnings for you... " If you trust google's algorithm (about when to display site targeting ads verses contextual ones), you should just keep the site targeting ads running. Otherwise, you should opt-out from the program. However, you cannot control site targeting from your adsense control panel. You need to send an email to adsense support to opt-out. From our experience, getting rid of site targeting ads does not have much impact on the revenue. Click rate on contextual ads remain more or less the same as before and the total click rate dropped a bit since all site targeting ad clicks are gone. This suggest that google is doing well in the ads selecting algorithm? If you want to run an experiment on this, please share to us your result afterwards.

Smart Pricing

What is Smart Pricing? Basically that is what Google introduced to help advertisers to pay less for a click (in case of potential click fraud, the pay will be near to zero). How does that work? Google introduced a parameter when calculating the CPC (cost per click). That parameter is a number < 1 which multiply with the bid price of the ad to yield the final charge to the advertiser. The exact equation is not opened to the public. However, below is some hints about it: - if the same person clicks on an ad multiple of times or the clicks act like potential click fraud, the parameter will move to near zero. - the higher the page rank of your page, the higher that parameter will be - the higher the conversion rate the higher that parameter will be, however the conversion rate is calculated in per adsense a/c basis. So, if some of your ads is having low conversion rate, it will pull down the whole figure. You may want to spot them out and filter those ads (using the competitive filter on your adsense control panel).

Tracking channel performance

Channels are something that you definitely need to setup for monitoring your adsense performance. There are 2 types of channels provided by Google:
• Url Channels - as its name suggest, this type of channel is on per url (or more accurately, per url pattern) basis. You can setup a channel to monitor the performance of a particular page, or a group of pages under a folder.
• Custom Channels - for this type of channels, you have to assign them unique channel names. When you create your ad src code, you can specify which custom channel the ad should associate with. The custom channel name will then be included (as the google_ad_channel variable) in the final ad source code. This type of channel provide a finer gain of monitoring.
So, how can channels help you? By tracking different channels' performance, you can have better idea about which types of ad (e.g. skyscraper, banner or large square... etc), what color scheme and which ad position works best for you. You can also spot out problems more easily, e.g. pages with low click rate may indicate irrelevant ads appearing, pages with low EPC may due to MFA ads... etc. Try to setup some channels and pay attentions to the statistics. Take corresponding actions when you spot out problems; you will see your adsense revenue improves afterwards.

Google Jail

Did you ever heard of the "Google Jail". There are discussions about penalties that Google put on new sites to prevent them ranking high in the search results. This is essentailly a "jail" that google put new sites in. The period can be 3 to 6 months.
We don't have definite answer about whether the above is true or not, but it is true that new sites usually don't rank high in search result pages (even if they've been optimized for search engine ranking). So, may be google do have put some penalities on fresh new sites ? Anything one can do to minimize the penality? Below is a few tricks/tips:
• build your new site on a sub-domain of an existing site. Since the main domain is there for a while, your new site will not be treated as brand new.
• roll out your site as soon as you have enough content. You don't need to complete everything before go online. Roll out a few pages first and keep adding to your site content gradually. The theory behind is: the earlier you get jailed, the earlier you will be released.
• Try not to target your pages for the hottest keywords. Those keywords have a lot of competition, with the extra penalty, a new sites is almost impossible to rank high.

Publisher Tools

There are a couple of handy tools for publishers:

• Overture Bidtool - you can type in keywords and see the corresponding bidding prices. although it is not the CPC in adWords, but that give you a rough idea about the CPC.
• Alexa site ranking - Want to check out a site's info? Alexa can tell you the traffic ranks, site reach and related sites... etc
• AdWords - What is better than acting as an advertiser and get the data about keyword biddings?
• Google Search - Using google to check about your own site, e.g.
  
  search for: site:www.mydomain.com + "www.mydomain." + ".com"
  
  will show you how many pages of your site have been indexed by google. Or you can try our tool (to save u from remembering the exact syntax).
• Google Toolbar - you can view the Page Rank of the site your are visiting (including your pages).

Cost-per-Click (CPC) and Cost-per-Impression (CPM) Explains

When you are putting up your adsense in your web site, you may have some question in your mind in regarding to ad types (text vs image), bidding methods (CPC vs CPM), and targeting type (site vs contextual). In here, I would like to explain to you. For the ad types and bidding methods, people may asked does any bidding methods (CPC or CPM) ties up to different ad types? Actually, both text-based ads and image-based ads can either be paid on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM). Adwords advertisers can choose any types of ad they would like to create. So when you are putting up adsense in your web sites, you are advised to set the ads type to both - text-based and image-based. It can definitely maximize your potential revenue in your web site. For the targeting type, all CPM ads are site targeted, meaning that your site will only display CPM ads if an AdWords advertiser has decided your content is relevant to their ad campaign. To increase advertiser bidding on your site, you may wish to customize your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up landing page.

Adsense Teminologies

Below are some frequently used terms / abbreviations related Adsense:
• Page impressions - the number of pages viewed by your site visitors
• Page CTR - the ads click rate, i.e. #clicks / page impressions
• CPC - cost per click, usually used from advertisers' perspective
• EPC - earning per click
• MFA - make for adsense, usually used to describe sites that is without real content but just have adsense ads... those sites may join the adWords program in order to acquire traffic.
• click dump - sometimes, google will hold up some click earnings from your account (some people said those clicks are higher pay clicks and google has to run some test to verify if those are click fraud). Those clicks will be added back to your account some time later which resulted in a sudden adnormal high earning on a particular day.
• PSA - Public Service Ad, those are for charities and clicks on them won't earn you any cents.
• G.A.S.S - Google Adsense Stats Syndrome, describing people who keep logging into their adsense account to view the earning stats.