Google Adsense
Monday, November 17th, 2008
Google Adsense: Adsense allows you to earn money even if you don’t have tons of traffic. I know of someone who earns $500 per day based on 500,000 ad impressions per day, while I can earn the same amount for only 15,000 ad impressions. If I can get his number of ad impressions, I’d really really be happy.
Aside from increasing your traffic, I suggest you experiment with various factors:
1. Responsiveness of audience to the ads = A limousine service website that provides information on limousine service and rates will attract visitors looking for ways to arrange their transportation needs on their business trips or vacation. Your site provides the info, and the ads will provide your competitors’ services, hotels, travel agencies, tourist destinations, car rentals or ads that are likely to get the attention of the users of your site. This is a site that will most likely do well with Adsense. However, if you are a gaming website where the main purpose of the user is to play games on your site, then Adsense will not perform as well.
2. Ad format = some types of ads do better than others depending on your content and layout. In our case, large rectangles in the middle of the content is the best, while leaderboards do not generate as much as income. Skys are the worst for us. Experiment and measure the results via channels and see which formats work best for you.
3. Ad placement - check Google’s heat map as they have tested where the best placements are.
4. Ad colors - sometimes ads blended into the content works wonders, but sometimes ads that contrast your site colors work best
5. Number of ad units on a page = we are allowed maximum of 3 ads + 1 ad links + 1 search box on a page. Maximize the allowed number based on the resulting look of your page (you don’t want an overkill of ads). Users going to your page and reading your content may ignore the banner or rectangle at the top of the page, but may click on the ad at the bottom of the article
6. Smartpricing - the big unknown in Adsense. No one knows how this actually works. But it can affect the pricing of the ads on your site. If the advertiser paid for $0.50/click - but your site is smartpriced - then the cost may be discounted lower (e.g. $0.25). So you may try to develop a site based on high paying keywords but if smartpricing gets to you, then you may not get as much per click as what you are expecting from your keywords.
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