How To Squeeze The Most From Google AdSense
For the last couple of years, Google AdSense has dominated forums, discussions, and newsletters all over the Internet. Already, there are tales of fabulous riches to be made and millions made by those who are just working from home. It seems that Google AdSense have already dominated the internet marketing business and is now considered the easiest way to making money online.
The key to success with AdSense is the placing of ads on pages that are receiving high traffic for high demand keywords. The higher the cost-per-click to the advertiser, the more you will receive per click from your site. Obviously, it does not pay to target low cost-per-click keywords and place them on pages that do not receive hits.
With all the people getting online and clicking away every day, it is no wonder why Google AdSense has become an instant hit.
For some who are new to this market, it would be a blow to their pride, knowing that their homepage is buried somewhere in the little ads promoting other people’s services. But then, when they get the idea that they are earning more money that way, all doubts and skepticism is laid to rest.
There are two main factors that successful webmaster and publishers are learning to blend together to make money easier using AdSense.
- Targeting high traffic pages on your website. If you check on your logs, you will discover that many of your visitors are taking advantage of the free affiliate marketing resources and eBooks that you are offering on your site. In simple words, your ads are working effectively and are generating more clicks. It also means more money for you.
- Placing AdSense links on pages that are producing little, or better yet, no profit. By placing AdSense on a free resources page, you will reduce the number of potential customers being lost to other sites. Tricky, but effective, nonetheless.
When they work together effectively, these two factors are a good source of producing a predictable amount of revenue from a high traffic page. Many people are using this strategy to pick up some extra cash with AdSense. This is also especially rewarding to informational sites that focus their efforts on delivering powerful affiliate-link-free content to their visitors. Now they can gain a monetary return for all that hard work creating content.
Over the last twelve months, Google has focused on updating and polishing the platform to account for things like privacy, bad players, fraud, and automatic bot clicking tools.
The one particularly handy money-making feature, Google recently added, is the ability to filter out up to 200 URLs. This gives webmasters the option to block low value offers from their pages, as well as competitors to their websites. Talk about taking only those that are advantageous and discarding the ones that seem “useless”.
With Google AdSense, the possibilities are limitless, if you know what you’re doing and are responsible.
3 Reasons Why AdSense Is Essential For Content Sites
Before you understand why AdSense is essential for a content-based website, you first need to know how it works.
The concept behind AdSense is simple. The publisher or the webmaster inserts JavaScript code into their website. Each time the page is accessed, the code pulls advertisements from the AdSense program server.
The ads that are targeted should be related to the content on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying Google for the click.
The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display targeted ads without the hassle of dealing directly with advertisers, collecting funds, monitoring the clicks and statistics. We all know how time-consuming and exhausting that would be.
There is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the AdSense ads.
Google launched AdSense on June 18, 2003. The program now has over 38 million websites using AdSense. And that’s the first reason why AdSense is essential for content sites. It’s been around long enough to be honed into the powerhouse it’s become. It knows the needs of publishers and webmasters.
Thanks to years of testing, tweaking, and upgrading, the system now allows for full ad customization. This means that as a webmaster, you can choose any type and size of ad that will best compliment your content, visitors, and webpage layout.
The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more clicks from visitors, who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting, thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way, the people behind the AdSense will get their content read and making profit in the process.
The second reason is the ability of the AdSense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing, but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines give webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that have the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates.
Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors, and pages within a website. Trends are also easily spotted.
With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. This allows for fast sorting of popular content. The type that are bringing in the clicks and generating revenue for the website owner.
The flexible tools built into the AdSense platform allow webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which increases the accuracy of insights on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.
The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated with having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus, increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. After all, the platform has been built for hyper targeting. Ads are served only to related niche visitors.
AdSense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site content and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate. This is the part where the effectiveness of the AdSense platform really shines.
The Basics On How To Start Making Money With AdSense
AdSense is one of the most powerful tools in a website publisher’s arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their sites easily. If used properly, it can generate a healthy income on a nearly set-it-and-forget-it system.
Of course, this assumes you presently have a content rich site with some level of web traffic.
If you have quality articles that are incorporated with keywords, and decent traffic, you are certainly a candidate for AdSense.
The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care to optimize clicks. Try to position your ads where visitors are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that website visitors look first when they visit a site is the top left. Of course, you’ll want to incorporate text-based AdSense ads in your articles, and on your site, as organically as possible. Never break up or slow down the flow of your content. Remember, while it’s important that you generate income, you must put your visitors and readers first. They are, after all, why you can generate income with AdSense. Don’t annoy them with too many obvious ads.
AdSense offers excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across several sites on a site by site, page by page, or any other number of metrics. You should be aware of this capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your AdSense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most and generating income.
Banners and skyscrapers are dead, for the most part.
Ask the experts. These days, site visitors universally ignore these kinds of ad formats. Quite simply, they’re universally recognized as an advert and people know they’re being manipulated to click – so they don’t.
5 Proven Ways To Improve AdSense Earnings
- Concentrate on one format of AdSense ad. The one format that has stood the test of time and still driven clicks is the Large Rectangle (336 X 280). This format tends to result in higher CTR (click-through rates). These ads look like normal web links. They don’t appear salesy or manipulative, and people are used to clicking on them. Oftentimes, the visitor is unaware that he or she is clicking on an AdSense ad, which will only work to your advantage.
- Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the AdSense look like it is part of the web pages. Essentially, fit the AdSense ads into the overall branding of your site. This guarantees more clicks from people, as your site’s hard-earned authority amongst site visitors transfers to the ads themselves.
- Remove the AdSense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your AdSense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between AdSense locations can make when you see your earnings.
- Be direct and ask your subscribers and site visitors to click on an ad. Do you know the easiest way to convince a YouTube watcher to become a subscriber? Ask them to subscribe! Don’t hide the fact that you’re using ads to cover your expenses. In fact, be honest about it. Let your email subscribers and site visitors know that you depend on these ads to generate revenue. Point out to them that you’re not asking them to purchase anything but should they see an ad that appeals to them, please, don’t hesitate to click it. Every click adds up and helps create more of that content you produce, which they love.
- Try to automate the insertion of your AdSense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side includes). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your AdSense code in a text file, save it as “AdSense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then, using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver, especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.
These are some of the tips that continue to work well for websites generating hundreds to a few thousand dollars monthly. Keep in mind that ads are displayed because they match the interest of the people viewing them. So, focusing on a specific topic must remain your focus. Too many sites once they start producing revenue through AdSense try to become more generalized to serve more ads to visitors. That will crush your site traffic, destroy your niche relatability, and anger your audience.
Things You Must Know To Increase AdSense Earnings
- Choose one topic per page. It is best to write content for your page with just a few targeted phrases. The search engine will then serve ads that are more relevant, which will then result in higher click-through rates. And of course, keep your content organic and conversational. It can take months to get ranked high enough on Google to start driving enough traffic to see a real paycheck from AdSense. Use that time wisely and build up your content pages.
- Match the ad to your site branding. You want the ad to seem fully integrated into your website. You built your brand and your audience, take that authority, and trust and share it with your AdSense ads that you’re running. If your brand colors are white and peach, make sure that your AdSense backgrounds aren’t conflicting with your brand colors.
- Test your ad placement. It is recommended to use the vertical format that runs down the side of the web page to get more positive results. You can also try both horizontal and vertical formats for a certain period to see which one will give you better results.
- More content-based pages. You’ll never go wrong by adding more content, provided it’s relevant and focused. This will optimize the pages for the search engines. It can not only attract traffic but also make them more relevant for the AdWords to be displayed.
How To Avoid Getting Your AdSense Account Terminated
Google, being the undisputed search leader, places a great deal of importance on the quality and relevancy of its services, including AdSense. The company is careful with its reputation and will quickly terminate any website that it thinks might make it look bad or, even worse, outright violate the terms and conditions of the service.
Never, ever, do the following unless you have a backup and don’t need AdSense anymore to generate revenue.
Hidden Text
Filling your advertisement page with texts too small to read, has the same color as the background and using CSS for the sole purpose of loading them with rich keywords content and copy will earn you a penalty for hiding links. Too many penalties and you’re banned from the program.
Page Cloaking
There is a common practice of using browser or bot sniffers to serve the bots of a different page other than the page your visitors should see. Loading a page with a bot that a human user will never see is a definite no-no. This is tricking them to click on something they otherwise would not. Google takes this very seriously and will immediately terminate your access.
Multiple Submissions
Submitting multiple copies of your domain and pages is another thing to stay away from. Essentially, you have one website laden with quality content. Don’t copy it and try, make a few keyword adjustments, and try and convince Google it’s a separate site entirely. They won’t believe you.
Link Farms
Be wary of who and what you are linking your site to. The search engines know that you cannot control your links on these low-quality, scammy, third-party pages. But you can certainly control what you link to. Link farming has always been a rotten apple in the eyes of search engines, especially Google. So basically, if you’re thinking about adding your link to a site with a hundred or more links per page, don’t do it.
Page Rank For Sale
If you’ve been around a while, you undoubtedly know that some sites sell their PR links or trade them with other sites. If you are doing this, expect a ban anytime in the future.
Doorways
This is like cloaking pages. The common practice of a page loaded with choice keyword ads aimed at redirecting visitors to another “user-friendly” page is a big issue among search engines. There are many SEO firms offering this kind of services. Now that you know what they are, try to avoid them at all costs.
Same Content On Multiple Domains
In case you are not aware of it, search engines look at domains IP’s, registry dates and many others. Having multiple domains having the same exact content is not something you can hide from them. The same goes with content multiplied many times on separate pages, subdomains and forwarding multiple domains to the same content.
Avoid any of the seven things above, and you’ll be fine.
Just remember, as you continue on your AdSense journey, be patient, pay attention to your stats, tweak your ad placements and types until you maximize your earnings. Most of all, be patient and stay committed. Like anything worthwhile in life, it takes time.
