Archive for November, 2008
Increasing Adsense CPC
AdSense depends on 3 factors, the traffic, your CTR (click through rate) and your CPC (cost per click). Many publishers suggest that working on the first 2 factors is possible but then struggle when it comes to CPC optimization.
Increasing your AdSense CPC is definitely possible and we’ll teach you how to in this post.
Note: If the video does not run, try to turn off HD. That should fix it.
1. Placement Targeting is the key
Check your CPC of placement targeted ads. Notice the following:
- Your CPC of placement targeted ads is higher
- The amount of impressions by placement targeted ads is lower
- CTR is slightly slower
We need to increase the amount of advertisers placement targeting us.
- Advertisers can only placement target you using adsense channels
- Use the Ad Planner publisher center
- Contact advertisers, asking them to placement target your site
2. Don’t be selfish, make advertising more profitable
That sounds difficult, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, we can do that easily. The major problem are so called missclicks. Those are clicks are accidentally, don’t result in any conversions, usually a bounce only but nonetheless cost the advertiser money.
Banner blindness is a phenomenon that started occurring for some time now. Returning visitors to your blog get used to your ads. Do you still look at ads when opening your favorite websites? Probably no. It’s potentially dangerous because those people who ignore your ads usually only accidentally click on your ads.
Have a mobile phone with Internet access? Surfing on the internet with my iPhone I already clicked at least 20 ads. On purpose? No, simply accidentally when I was trying to click on something else the ads were nearby. Poor advertisers, poor publishers.
So what can we do?
- Use section targeting, as that increases conversions for the advertiser
- Forum owners: Show ads to guests only
- Don’t click on our own ads
- Don’t let friends click our ads
- We may not place ads at location where people click only.
- In Forums: At go to next thread locations (screenshot)
- Bloggers: At go to next page archives (screenshot)
- In the site navigation on contrary is a better placement, still missclicks, but less, as it has more purposes than just clicking
Following those tips you should notice an increase in cost per click. Please be aware, it is a time intensive process and can take a month, or even two. Keep working on this, it will be profitable for you.
Factors for Adsense cost per click
There are several factors that determine the price of an ad on your website. The most important one is the niche of your website… To give you an example: The top paying niches include health (cancer, skin care, medical treatment), cars, business and travel. What also pays quite well are extremely targeted niche sites, such as a website about lawyers in New York or cosmetic surgery in San Francisco.
The reason for an higher payout if you own one of those niche sites is simple: If people click on your ad and then purchase something on the website (that is what ads are for) then the person who might get a sale will earn a lot. For example, fixing your finger in the USA costs around 100.000$. Let’s asume that your conversion rate is 0.1 percent (which is very low). Then the person who sells the finger fixing service can expect earnings per click of around 100$ (unrealistic, just an example). A click on an advertisement is quite worthy for him because he will make a lot of money with it. In other words, his return on investment is very high. Because of his high ROI he will pay a lot more for an advertisement than for example on a gaming site. Let’s say someone advertises for a computer game then he can expect around 50$ per sale. With a realistic conversion rate of 2 percent he will get 2 sales per hunded clicks. Now you have to consider his costs and everything so that he will perhaps make 5$ per sale. Divide the number by hundred and you have a realistic amount of what the pricing of an ad on your gaming site is: 5 cent per click. It is a little higher of course as I am making around 7 cent per click….
But how does google determine that price? They have algorithms which evaluate the ROI of the advertiser. Depending on the ROI they are setting the price of an advertisement. Advertisers can also bid on an ad which will also increase the pricing. The more advertisers are interested in that niche, the more they have to pay (simple: Offer/Request dependency). If you are the only one offering ads in your niche and there are hundreds of advertisers then all of them must bid and overbid each other for putting an ad on your webbsite. That also explains why extremely targeted niche sites pay so much more.
Now that you know the factors which determine the pricing of your ad you will probably want to know how you can actually increase your CPC. Once you optimized your CPC you will want to improve your click through rate for more clicks and consequently more money.
Always keep in mind that Google is not hiring the top-mathematicans every year to play billiard – they are improving their algorithms monthly. Better algorithms will get them morey money as well. If you are away of other factors then please let me know.
Banned from Google
Today a person contacted me about a problem he had with Google. He was no longer getting any traffic from the Search Engine. Before he happened to get around 800 users per day and then suddenly only 10-20. The reason is simple: he used blackhat techniques and got banned.
I am dedicating this article to the internet death-sentence, the worst punishment you can get in terms of SEO….. A ban from Google. I am gonna explain the dangers of a ban, what indicates a ban and then let you know what you can do to get unbanned.
So what are the real dangers of getting banned from Google? There are a couple of them, I am getting most traffic on all my websites from Google. 79 percent of my visitors on my gaming site are in fact coming through Google. Only 6 percent Yahoo and 3 percent MSN. If I would get banned that would mean a dramatical loss of traffic for me. Instead of my 20 000 visitors per day I would be able to expect around 500 at most.
Indicators for a ban
With low traffic you are also of course not earning as much with your advertisements. 90 percent less visitors means 90 percent less money. If you some-how get penalized then it basically means that you can screw your website unless you somehow get unbanned. Let’s assume that you are making a living out of Adsense, did not get any education because your websites were running so well and then suddenly experience a dramatical loss of earnings… That would in no way be productive for you.
What are the factors that lead to a ban?
- Blackhat SEO techniques. Placing hidden text on your website is the most common mistake. Everything that is not white-hat (natural) can be labeled as black hat
- Duplicate content. Copying content from another website will get you banned. If you ever copy content then make sure to include a link to the original source. That method is often used on newspaper websites and consequently okay. But make sure that you also provide good content
- So called door-way pages that are just made to get visitors on to another site. Those wesites usually have a link in every article, Google penalizes that as well. I have once been banned on one of my blogs for making a cloak.blog which I only made to get visitors on my main-blog.
- Spammy website. You are usually labeled as spam if you get a massive amount of backlinks within a short period of time. Stay natural and build up your backlinks slowly. Also don’t over do it with the keyword density of your articles.
- Morally incorrect content: Content like extreme violence or anything else morally incorrect can get you banned as well. If you run a forum then this could be a potential danger – you can not control every user yet you will be penalized for them. Also viruses, spyware or any other badware will get you penalized and banned.
- Automated content. There are some programs that claim that they can write you 100 percent original content per mouse click. That is wrong, in most cases the content is simply copied out of an article directory, thus counting as duplicate content. Automating your content-creation is a good and easy way to get booted.
The indicators of a ban from google are relatively simple. Check Google’s index of your website. IF there are no longer any pages listed then that means that you got banned.
Now if you really got banned, what I don’t hope, then you can use a form to applicate for reinclusion into the search engine. To do so click this link. You are required to enter some details, what you think might have caused the ban, what you changed on your website since then etc. Make sure that you provide as detailed information as possible. Google will most likely not read your application on reinclusion twice. You only have one good chance, so make sure to be as honest as possible.
So what can you do to request a reconsideration of your website? Google has the following in their FAQ:
- First, make sure you’ve added your site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verified site ownership.
- Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools.
- On the Dashboard, under Talk to Google in the list on the right, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.
If you are unsure what you should write then please check out my google reconsideration template.w
For my cloaking blog it took five months to get reincluded. I removed everything google-unfriendly and then reapplied… In fact the long waiting time only shows how little Adsense cares about small websites. I am almost 100 percent sure that they developed algorithms, so that they do not even check the reconsiderations on their own anymore… It will most likely be done by a robot as well. Just make sure you are honest, that’s the best thing you can do.
Wishing your good luck with your application and re inclusion. If you will not get re-included then I can only recommend to make a new website, which is fully compatible with Google’s idea of a perfect website.
Improve Adsense CTR
Today I was contacted by Kiraly Zoltan – he asked for some tips to improve the Click-Through Rate of his Adsense ads on his website. I opened the website and noticed 2 major mistakes in the layout of his adsense units.
Bad Adsense layout
Do you notice what he is doing wrong? If not then make sure to read my post about the best Adsense colors and the hot-spot ad positons.
The first problem is that he is using a 728*90 banner. Banners are Web 1.0 – nobody clicks them anymore. They suffer from the problem known as “banner-blindness”. We got used to normal horizontal banners and do not click them anymore. Leaderboard and banner ads are out! Don’t even think about using them if you have alternatives.
If you want to get a decent CTR and not one click per year then you must work with the large rectangles. They attract a lot more attention and look less like banners as long as they are not showing an image. Replace them on your website and I am almost 100 percent certain that your CTR will improve by 1-2 percent. I have been using the banners before as well and no, they did not work for me neither!
So how do you place two large rectangles next to each other? The answer is simple, use html to create a table for your Adsense units. The code to do so is:
<table>
<tr>
<td>Code 1</td>
<td>Code 2</td>
</tr>
</table>
That will place your Ads next to each other drawing more of the visitors attention and as a result improve your CTR. Really, whenever you make a website – this code will get you a decent amount of clicks!
The next problem with his Ads is the color. He is using #FEA20F as the link and URL color. What kind of color is that? Have you ever seen someone using it before? Don’t invent new Adsense improvement strategies! Use that what works! Blending Ads with bright URL color has never worked for me and won’t do for you as well. Choose a dark blue as link color. #000080 is definately my favorite and most successful one. The reason for choosing the blue is simple: people are used to blue hyperlinks and will consequently click them more often. #0000FF is the color almost all websites use for ad-links – that’s also a problem, people got used to it and do not click ad-units in that color that often anymore! Take a darker blue as link color!
You also don’t want the readers to have a look at the URL – you want them to look on the link and click that one right away. If they look too long on the URL they will notice that it is an advertisement and probably not click which means that you do not get any money at all. Make the link color a grey like #cccccc or the same color as the text in your advertisements. So if your text is black, then make the URL black, or grey.
2 Large Rectangles
That’s what gets you the highest CTR with Adsense in my opinion. Let’s have a look what Kiraly changed. He implemented my suggestions and is now using a #021588 as link color which is almost the same as the navy-blue #000080. But what the heck? Why is he using a #21588E as URL color? That’s not the best solution if you ask me. You should make it the same color as the text-color of your Adsense unit. In his case the text-color of his Adsense unit is #424242 which means that he should make the URL look the same. That way the people tend to look and click the Link of your ad more often.
One last thing which I would suggest in case of his website is to place the Adsense units not in the middle, but more to the left. People look at the top-left corner of a website when loading the website. That is in fact the best position for advertisements. Try to allocate your Ads more to the left by adding a <div align=”left”>(your table with the adsense ads)</div> around your table. That will move them right into the so called “hot-zone” and result in a higher CTR, too.
Embed all those changes and I am more than sure that you will experience a CTR-boom. I did the same on all of my websites and believe me – my click through rate is way better now. It is like in your local shopping-center. The people arrange their products psychologically to make you buy products more often. Same applies to the Adsense ads – you want to magically make users click them! Let me know if you need assistance with the placement and look of your ads.
Adsense premium publisher
Perhaps you have already noticed, there are some website’s where the Adsense units look slightly different. How can you change your adsense ads to make them look similar? The answer is simple: You can not – to do so you will need to become an Adsense Premium Publisher.
That is not so easy – as you will need to have at least 5 million search queries or 20 million content-ad views per month. It will take a while until I can reach that with my current 20 visitors per day hehe.
To give you a brief idea of your advantages: Once you are a premium publisher you will be able to access exclusive services. The most important one if you ask me is that you can customize the look of the advertisements. You can make them look more like your actual content. The advantage of that is tremendous. Imagine you are already getting 10 000 clicks per day and can increase your CTR by 2 percent by changing the look of your advertisements. That’s 200 clicks more every day. Calculate that for a month – that is a lot more money. Especially on good niche pages where you get a decent amount per click.
Adsense Premium Publisher
Notice that you would not recognize that those were ads if there was no such thing as “Sponsored Links” written above. Also keep in mind that you get banned from Adsense if you use “Sponsored Links” somewhere next to your advertisements on your pages as normal publisher. I usually never click on advertisements – in fact only a few people do. But if your advertisements no longer look like advertisements then how would I know that they are in fact advertisements? You can only see that when hovering with your cursor over the URL – the link to a google page shows that. Imagine how it would look like to place a large rectangle in one of your blog posts? People would keep clicking the ads just because they would think that they are part of the article.
In fact you can also customize the look of the advertisements even further – you can use your own fonts, your own colors and your own size. You can make them flexible to your website’s layout. A huge advantage if you ask me, hence you can improve your CTR by matching the Adsense ads better to your website even more.
Sounds too good to be true? Wait, it gets even better:
You can place Adsense units on adult pages. That means if your website somehow has something related to the Adult niche you could use Adsense to display ads there as well. Content relevant adult ads should bring in some nice money.
You can use Adsense on Casino Pages. Gambling is strictly forbidden in most of the US-States. Same applies to Adsense – casino related websites are not allowed. Once you are premium publisher that rule does not apply anymore – you can use your ad-units on as many casino related pages as you like.
You get your own Adsense account manager. You are getting someone who is there for you whenever you have questions about your Adsense account. You will get a telephone-number which you can call to get help. Those people will actually help you – compared to the support for a normal adsense publisher the quality increases by around a million percent…. (Yes, I am tired of getting automated emails…).
You can negotiate the revenue share. Normal Adsense-publishers have no permission to discuss the revenue-share for Google. That stands in contrast to the Premium Publishers – they are allowed to negotiate the share which Google will get. That’s a huge advantage because 10% more on 100.000 per month is in fact quite a lot.
So what have we learned today about Adsense? They don’t care the slightest about normal publishers but once you have the required amount of page-views or searches they will offer you something named “support”. Until then you have to deal with Web 1.0 advertising techniques that are less customizable than a rock. Doing something wrong as a normal publisher will get your account suspended but doing so as premium publisher will only get you more money.
Good job Adsense, we love you. No, just kidding – we need you because there are currently no good adsense alternatives. Nonetheless, those companies at least offer good support and way better methods of monetizing your traffic.
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Mark
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Phone: +1 (310) 734-8977
+31 6 34045081
Skype: MarkDuoBlogger
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Hendrik
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+49 176 48899584
Skype: Hendricius
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