Adsense Now

When talking about Adsense, the immediate thoughts are of the traditional Adsense advertisements of text and banner ads. While it sure is the commonly used aspect of Google Adsense, let’s not forget the earning potential of Google Adsense Search and Google Adsense Referrals. This post will tackle the latter. Google Adsense Referrals, when used correctly is a viable and potent avenue of earning. When you log in to your Google Adsense account, you can find the setup for Adsense Referrals in the Adsense Setup tab. Simply click on Referrals to forwarded to the setup interface.

On the setup, you can choose between showing either image or text ads, whichever you prefer using. You can then start choosing the ads you wish to show. You can either browse through the categories provided for you or you can make a search for relevant keywords to make sifting through everything simpler. When you make a search, you can either add the queried keyword to cart so all the ads under that keyword would show or you can choose the advertisements individually. When you’ve chosen your advertisements, you can then choose the advertisement display which is basically the same as that of the ordinary ad units. You can also customize and tweak the ad unit to blend in or stand out from your other ads.

What’s great about Adsense Referrals is that you can flaunt about the fact that it’s an ad. You can place a great big “CLICK HERE” on top of the referral ads, and even add appropriate bells and whistles. Of course, I recommend thinking up of something wittier than that so visitors would feel compelled to click on your referral ads. In a nutshell, if properly executed, you can earn a lot from Adsense Referrals. You are allowed one Referral unit per product, which is separate from the number of ordinary ad units you’re allowed per page.

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Smart-pricing is a term commonly encountered in web master forums where publishers of CPC ads like Adsense and Bidvertiser engage into discussions about various aspects of advertisements. You know you’re smart-priced when you’re receiving a few cents for hundreds of clicks at one time. You’re also smart priced when the click through rate or CTR remains the same but your income drops a huge 50 to 60% from the usual. There have been many conjectures on why such a phenomenon happens, but in truth, many factors come into play when talking about being smart-priced.

These factors include the bid of the advertiser, the relevancy of the advertisement to your web site’s content, whether the advertisement campaign of the advertiser is ending or only on the onset, and various other factors. Most usually, being smart-priced means someone clicks on an ad in your web site and it isn’t directly related to your content. It’s only common to experience such every now and then. That doesn’t mean you will be smart-priced forever, however. If you experience the symptoms of smart-pricing detailed above, you might want to think twice before you completely remove your advertisements. Let it sit for a while, develop your content and see how it goes — it’ll pass sooner or later.

When you develop your web site’s content and visitors who are truly interested in an advertisement click on them, the possibility of a conversion is higher. Advertisers pay more for quality clicks than random ones. So in the end, it all ends up on your method of developing the web site. Focus on creating optimized but compelling content so your web site commands relevant ads and visitors are more inclined to stay and read your content, all the while clicking a few ads in the process.

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Over at Performancing, Ahmed Bilal of Soccerlens asked if you had weaned your blog from Adsense yet. I know big Adsense earners are out there, but for some of us, we’re better off exploring other avenues of monetization. However, I believe many new web masters start out with Adsense. And as of late, I’m beginning to see a pattern, that when blogs become popular enough, it might be more viable finding sponsors to sell banner ads to, depending upon the niche. As the discussion went on, the focus went to how Adsense earnings for November dropped.

Bloggers reported that their clickthrough rate for the first 2/3 of November was dismal. They also said that it picked up again by around November 20. During Thanksgiving in the USA, however, general Adsense clickthrough rate was down again for the holidays. We haven’t exactly come up with a conclusion, but I believe the reason is the newly-implemented Adsense clickable area reduction. If you’ve forgotten, Adsense just reduced the ad area visitors can click at to just the anchor link. With the clickable area reduced, visitors are less likely to randomly click on ads than before. They’d only most like click on ads they’re really interested in, otherwise, they pass up. Apparently, I’m not the only one of the opinion. More similar discussions in web master forums have cropped up.

Google claims that with the clickable area reduced, conversions might be higher and hence advertisers would be inclined to pay more. I find that to be half and half, however. I had one click the other day from one of my blogs which surprisingly earned me $1.06. No, really. I was surprised myself. But so far, that’s about it. None of the clicks on my ads had an abnormally high earning. If anything, I, too, suffered from this change in Adsense. How about you?

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At the end of October 2007, Feedburner announced that you can start integrating Adsense ads into your web site via your Feedburner account. Confused? Well, I was too. Let’s start with the basics. Feedburner is an RSS feed stat analytics tool. Basically, when you set up a Feedburner account, everyone who subscribes to your feeds using any RSS feed tool they have gets redirected to your Feedburner feed. That way, you could keep count of the subscribers who read your blogs’ feed throughout an entire day. When you sign into your Feedburner account, you’ll get access to your feed stats, which includes not only the subscribers but the number of people who actually click on the link to visit your web site.

Feedburner has this functionality called “Feedflare” which allows you to view your web site statistics, sort of a like a counter. When you activate your Feedflare functionality, you will be given a code which you are then instructed to paste somewhere within your blog’s codes. After half an hour or so, the feedflare image would show after the first post. Now, Feedburner has taken this functionality and added pizzazz into it. Now, you don’t have to waste your space with just the feedflare graphic, you can use it to run an Adsense ad. If you have an existing account with Adsense, you simply need to integrate your Adsense into feed burner and when you paste the code into your web site, the code would show ads instead. Pretty nifty, except there are only two Adsense formats you could choose from — the 300×250 and the 468×60 text or image ads.

Now, what is the point of this again? You can just as simply insert Adsense ads after the first post of your blog quite easily, believe me. What I await for is the day when we’re given the option to integrate Adsense into the feed itself, now THAT’s groovy.

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When I was a bit newer to Adsense, I can’t count the number of times I had been scared of being banned from Adsense so I read the TOS thoroughly. I was especially careful not to accidentally click on my own ads while tweaking the page or something similar. I heard from someone I know that his account got suspended when he already got almost $100 in it, ready to withdraw. Well now, I don’t have to worry about accidentally clicking on ads and neither does everybody else. Apparently, Google sent out emails to some of the publishers (I didn’t get any, perhaps they’re only emailing a select few). These publishers choose to break the Non Disclosure Agreement and reported that Google has now reduced the clickable area of their ads. This means when before, clicking on the area around the URL itself would suffice, now the visitor would have to click directly on the URL. See the diagram below:

Google, in their email, said that was done so that the value of the ads will increase. If the visitor is diligent enough to find the right URL to click, that means the chances of the visitor to be converted is high. When conversion is high, all the better for the advertiser. With this scheme, the possibility of the amount per click becoming better is high. So bottom line is, this is a good change if visitors have been clicking on your ad on purpose, a bad one if all this time the clicks have been accidental. It’s too early to judge the change yet, we still don’t know whether the whole deal will actually affect publishers’ earnings. All I know is that what used to be a pitiful handful of clicks for me now turned out to be less than it already is little.

Source: Problogger

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Just recently, this November 2007, Adsense introduced a couple of new features for publishers. These features were meant to make publishers’ lives a lot easier and I got to admit, they really did make things a lot easier for me.

First off, the save adsense unit setting. Some time ago, when you create ad units, you can only save the style. Every time you need to add a unit to your growing web site(s), you have to go through the process again and re-create the units. It’s all fine and well, it’s easy enough recreating units. If you’re smart enough, you would have saved the codes somewhere so you didn’t have to create a unit each time. However, with this new Adsense features, things had just been made a lot easier. Every time you finish creating a unit, Google automatically saves it. You can then access all your units in the “Manage Ads” tab wherein you can grab the codes any time.

Now on to the second new Google Adsense feature. This time, Google thought it best to integrate everything you need to know about Adsense in one interface — the Google Resources tab. I think this is especially helpful for new publishers who are still learning the ropes in Google Adsense. The resources tab contain links to the Adsense Terms of Service, tips on how to optimize your ads, Publisher tools and even success stories to inspire all of us who haven’t even earned enough to warrant a single Google Adsense check.

With these two features being brought into existence, it is obvious Google is trying to make the whole Adsense experience user-friendly. With more and more people trying to being netrepreneurs, every bit of help is big help and this move by Google sure is.

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Early this year, news broke out in a big web master forum that Google could now send earnings via Western Union. Due to the fact that I haven’t even earned enough to request a check, I hadn’t caught wind of the news until recently. Last September, cued by a few online friends, I found out about this feature. Publishers say that upon logging in to their accounts, there was a tip informing them of the WU payment option. Other publishers, however,  couldn’t find anything on it.

Apparently, payments via Western Union are limited only to a handful of countries. According to the Google FAQ, these countries (as of now) are:

•    China (Mainland)
•    Malaysia
•    Pakistan
•    Romania
•    Philippines
•    Argentina
•    Chile
•    Peru
•    Colombia

If you are included among this list of countries, then if you haven’t yet, log in to your account, go to the “My Account” tab, find “Payment Details” in the “Account Settings” option and then click “edit.” You will then be forwarded to a page where you can choose “Western Union Quick Cash” as your payment option. You will be prompted to confirm that you have a valid photo ID with the name you used for your Adsense account to be able to claim your payment.

The cap for Western Union earning withdrawals is $10,000 per month — not too bad unless you’re Shoemoney. The Western Union payment type used is “Quick Cash” which isn’t offered in every outlet. To check which outlets near you offer the service, go the Western Union Agent Locator. To be able to claim your earnings, you need a valid photo ID (or two), Google’s details which you can find in the Adsense Help Center, the payment amount and the Money Transfer Control Number which would be provided to you upon withdrawal. Western Union Adsense payments take just ONE day to arrive at the branch you choose. Not bad, eh?

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When I saw the news about Adsense Video units, my heart soared. Finally. This is the answer to all of vloggers’ prayers — the Adsense video unit! I thought the possibilities were endless. Bloggers everywhere are putting YouTube videos in their blogs one time or another anyhow — adding Adsense in YouTube only means an increase in revenue. YouTube gets a cut, Google gets a cut and you get a cut. It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone, right? Well no, not EVERYONE exactly. You see, the YouTube Adsense units are only for publishers located in the USA. What a bummer.

Yep, no matter how great it sounds, if you’re not a US publisher, you can’t get YouTube Adsense units. I know, I know, it’s unfair, but that’s usually how it is. I believe this is a boon for American publishers though, seeing as they now could add not only Adsense text and banner ads but also video ads! I can imagine people who were formerly too shy to display their own videos jumping on the bandwagon. Hey, if it means decent revenue, why not? But do the Adsense video units really mean decent returns? Let’s examine the model, shall we?

In your YouTube account, you will find the Adsense Video option in your control panel. The link will bring you to your Adsense page where you can then choose video ads in Adsense for Content.. In your YouTube control panel, you can choose between two layouts and then afterwards, tweak the colors of the video unit to a hue of your choice. When you’re done with all that, you can start serving Adsense video units in your domain! The great thing is, whenever someone watches your video, a screen will pop-up, compelling the watcher to click it so it would disappear and they could watch the video in peace. Great for the publisher, a tad annoying for the visitor — but in the end, I believe adsense video units would do great in the long run.

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When it comes to using AdSense, no small part of changing or displaying the ads should be overlooked. Colors should be coordinated to match the site you own. Link styles should be changed to fit what your viewers would like to see. Sizes should be manipulated to get the best reaction. And most importantly of all, the ads should be placed in a spot where they are non-intrusive and easy to see, as we discussed before.

But what we didn’t talk about before are some of the more intricate options Google offers to website owners to place their ads. Instead of just having simple options like top and bottom or left and right, a website owner can put their AdSense ad pretty much anywhere. You see, AdSense ads are implemented onto sites through HTML code that is inserted right into your site or blog’s HTML. And if you know your HTML, you know that this allows you to put the ad pretty much anywhere.

If you don’t know your HTML, however, don’t worry. As always, Google is happy and ready to help the users who don’t use the web as much as others. They have specific instructions on how to place the HTML into certain sections to get good results. For example, one style allows a user to put his or her ad directly in between blog posts, that is the newest post and the second-to-newest posts. This allows users to see the blog after they have read the content.

Placement is important and can crucially affect how many clicks and how much revenue you make. Follow some easy instructions and do some fiddling and you should be upping your earnings in no time.

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When I first used ads to generate revenue on my websites, I had no idea what AdSense was. The tool I used was Commission Junction. And while Commission Junction offered a variety of good sites to advertise, such as eBay and Amazon, it didn’t place targeted ads like Google did. And there wasn’t much choice in what sort of ad to display.

Thankfully AdSense is much more publisher-friendly, as it allows users a variety of different options and changes to make ads more attractive to click. One of the biggest decisions that you will end up making is what type of ads to use. Traditionally, internet ads were big banners that displayed a combination of pictures and text relating to the product or service being advertised. More recently, however, a growing number of AdSense users have been able to just display text ads.

Text-based ads are less intrusive and, for the most part, flow better with the tone and direction of a blog. They are hardly distracting as banner ads can be. The bad part about them, however, is that they can sometimes go unnoticed. After all, who is going to click on an ad that they don’t see or can’t find?

Banner ads don’t have that problem at all. These ads are usually the first thing one sees when entering a website and they ensure that the user will have a chance to decide whether or not it appeals to him. But as mentioned before, they can also turn away traffic by making them feel like the ads are more important to the site owner than providing credible content is.

So how should you choose between the two? There is no easy answer to that question. But we will discuss different methods to test the waters and find which method best fits your site in future posts. For now just pick one and see if it works out. Good luck as always!

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