More revenue with additional Ad-Programs – Never!

I noticed something similar a while ago when I was using a Popunder code by Valueclickmedia on my site. After removing the codes the PPC went up right away. Exactly the same thing now happened this week with Kontera. The test period has only been 3 days because the reduction in income really hurt, but right after removing the Kontera code the PPC immediately went up to the same value.

Why could evil AdSense do that to us publishers?

On the one hand there is a simple explanation:
AdSense does not have any real competition, with their monopoly they are easily able to do whatever they want with us. We are forced to accept that they do not want us to have other ad-programs along then.

On the other hand it may be a consequence of AdSense’s algorithm. I previously explained that it’s rationale if AdSense takes all their data into consideration for the determining the PPC. That way AdSense is able to perfectly adjust the AdSense PPC depending on the quality of the clicks. That way they are for example able to reduce the PPC for sites which have a lot of missclicks (accidental clicks for example).

My idea is that AdSense reduces the PPC due to the fact that the quality of our clicks is reduced. The quality is reduced because you distract your visitors from clicking your AdSense ads right away. They focus on the other ads on your site and then even be less interested in the AdSense ads. That does not conclude that your CTR goes down, but may subconsciously lead to less conversions per click for the advertiser.

Discussion – what are your thoughts on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say :-).

Google introduced a new map ad unit a while ago, and this let’s you monetize Google maps. You can find it within the AdSense for Maps portfolio, which you have to create with Google Maps API. Find more information on how to set Google Maps ads by following shown link.

A GAdsManager object fetches AdSense for Maps ads and displays them on the specified map.

Before you get into this mess of coding, you first need to understand how you can insert Google Maps into your website. It’s really dynamic way of advertising – as users scroll around the map, they get relevant ads based on the place they currently are looking at. So it does have potential.

Google Map ads

Inserting the Google Ad code into Maps

You enable the Maps Ad Unit by specifying an ‘adunit’ style within the GAdsManagerOptions object. Make sure to also specify your publisher ID within the GAdsManager constructor as well. You will receive advertising revenue right away for any clicks on the ads that are done for your API app. Optionally, you can also insert your own Channel ID to track it’s performance.

Look below for the code you have to insert into the GAdsManager:

var publisher_id = yourPublisherID;

var adsManagerOptions = {
maxAdsOnMap : 2,
style: ‘adunit’,
// The channel field is optional – replace this field with a channel number
// for Google AdSense tracking
channel: ‘your_channel_id’
};

adsManager = new GAdsManager(map, publisher_id, adsManagerOptions);
adsManager.enable();

See a live example of the Google ads on the map by following this link.

Cheers,

Mark

Adding more ad units to a page lowers the CPC drastically, and eventually the total earnings?

To answer this question, take a look below or at our forum’s post: CTR increasing, CPC decreasing.

Several people reported to me that their AdSense CTR is actually increasing but their CPC (PPC) decreases. This is an interesting phenomenom especially because it seems to make CTR optimization useless. I noticed the same thing and would like to share my thoughts on this.

It is not the CTR optimization that is flawed. The AdSense CPC is determined by:

• Quantity of ads on the website, simple offer/need relation.
• Quality of the clicks
• Bid on the keyword

Previous CTR optimization always included adding more ads, however it seems like that adding more ads will actually lead to reduce the CPC of each of the Ads. CTR increases but CPC decreases resulting in zero change of AdSense income. Furthermore adding more ad units to your website ruins the user’s experience resulting in both more missclicks and “get me outa here” clicks, lowering the CPC.

So, from my point of view you should definitely be doing CTR optimization, however not add more ad units. Optimize your current ad units by relocating them and changing the design, that’s it, nothing more.

I will be trying this out, removing 4 out of my 6 ad units on my main website. I’ll share whether I actually notice a CPC increase.

UPDATE:

So far my earnings have been around 30% for a week. My CPC did not go up. My CTR decreased to around 30% of what it has been before.

It could take some time until google re-calculates the price of the ad so I’ll test this for another week.

My CPC is extremely low (or: dropped by 50-75%), how did that happen?

Because Google’s income comes from Advertising – they give great care to their advertisers. After all “they”, the advertisers, keep Google alive. When you get hundreds of clicks on your ad units, but the advertiser is not selling anything from your clicks. Then Google will penalize you to PROTECT the advertiser. And yes if it happens on one of your websites, all your websites will suffer from it. This myth is called: AdSense Smart Pricing.

What basically happens is that you, as a publisher, will still get some money per click although this will be around 1 cent to max 5 cents per click. Simply put: this is a penalty because you are not optimizing your pages which you are using AdSense on. Help the advertiser, and he will help you!

Hendrik wrote a long post on how he got out of smart pricing, a must read. And for the record: a low CTR (click through rate) has nothing to do with smart pricing. A low CTR could mean 3 things:

• Either your page is poorly optimized for AdSense to show relevant ads
• The adsense placements are not ideal
• Your traffic is not targeted

Getting targeted traffic is actually only possible with search engines or niche forums. Social traffic will not convert into sales for advertisers. Google will see that because on every computer you have are doubleclick cookies, which track what sites you are visiting. Google understands that so they introduced interest based advertising. Visits from StumbleUpon or Digg are pretty much worthless. They come with thousands and they leave with thousands in 8 seconds.

You might want to check out the post Hendrik wrote on increasing the CPC.

What are the best performing ads?

The best performing ads are not necessarily the highest paying ads.

…yea?

I’m going back to the first example I gave in this post: Would you rather have an ad that gives you $1 per click and gets clicked 10 times, or an ad that gives $0.40 per click but gets clicked 100 times?

Understand that some ads are just better written than others and will attract the attention of the visitors more. Google knows what the best performing ads are and will likely display them since it gives Google a good amount of money as well.

If your ads have a high quality score, meaning getting a lot of clicks. Google actually rewards you by taking less money per click for themselves and give more to you as a publisher. Normally Google takes about 25% of the CPC, and the rest to you. (noone knows for sure though, it’s more of an estimate)

Note this: the best performing blogs are the blogs that are best optimized for one keyword (a.k.a niche blogging) and have targeted traffic.

How do you know when you fully optimized your blog fully to one keyword phrase? If the majority of your web pages get the same ads regardless of the individual posts then you have successfully optimized your blog for a keyword phrase. If, however, you get different ads on every single page, then your blog is not optimized for one topic. If you want the best performing ads for your main keyword phrase then you have to optimize your entire blog for them and not just a few pages.

Social Traffic and AdSense

If you are a profound user of any social media website, you must understand that any digg or stumble visitor is not targeted. Most of these social visitors will hardly ever click an ad – and that’s a good thing. Because Google tracks every user and where they come from (double click cookie) – they know that Digg doesn’t send in targeted traffic. Meaning that you could be smart priced if most of your clicks come from that source. Unfortunately a few will click an ad from time to time. And when they do Google knows where they came from and knows that they aren’t targeted traffic looking for that what you offer on your website. They are just casual browsers and if you get too many of these casual browsers clicking your ads then Google will discount the hell out of your CPC in order to compensate the advertiser who is getting really untargeted traffic from your site.

Google will smart price you until you provide quality traffic. Social traffic is not quality traffic and if you get a lot of it then you had best not have Adsense on your site. Because you have a lot of social traffic that rarely clicks ads you will have a very low CTR – hence the misconception that low CTR means you are smart priced. You aren’t smart priced because you have a low CTR, you are smart priced because your traffic is crappy and not targeted for the ads you display. You get a low CTR just because most of your traffic doesn’t click any of the ads.

Sure social traffic might be good for affiliate sales, but that’s not my expertise.

If you have further questions regarding this post, and I’m sure you do, then do not hesitate to drop a comment below.

Oh and be sure to jump in the forum if you have tons of questions :)

Greets,

Mark

1. Using vBulletin’s default AdSense integration

A post by Wayne_luke on the official vBulletin.com forums about using vBulletin’s integrated functionality for implementing AdSense units. The post features an FAQ, making it fail-safe for every Forum owner.

We recommend the default integration for everybody who:

• …is new to AdSense and wants quick results
• …does not want to get into AdSense

2. Banner blindness – our enemy

The longer your vBulletin forum’s visitors have been on the internet the more experience they have. The longer they have been on our forums the better they get used to everything like for example the sub-forums, where they have to post etc. Unfortunately they also get used to our ads and thus they develop a certain banner blindness.

This is an excellent study by Jakob Nielsen about banner-blindness showing and explaining the phenomenon. We learn the following:

• Get away from web 1.0 advertising (no horizontal banners, no skyscrapers)
• Forum members suffer more from banner-blindness

3. Placing AdSense units at custom locations

A post by NeutralizeR on the official vBulletin.org forums about inserting AdSense at custom locations all around your forums.

Still remember the first resource about banner-blindness? Yes, those codes will give you horizontal web 1.0 banners. Modify the codes and use as many rectangles as possible. The more squares you are using the higher your Click through rate (CTR) is going to be.

4. Template conditionals – customize your ads

The post by Brandon Sheley is a list of template conditionals for vBulletin.. Using them you could for example:

• Show ads to specific usergroups
• Show ads in specific sub-forums
• Show ads at custom locations (forumhome, forums)

Whatever customization there is, it’s only possible using the template conditionals.

5. The best placements for vBulletin

The post suggests the following:

• 2 large rectangles in the navigation bar
• 1 large rectangle inside your first post
• 1 horizontal link unit in the navigation of your forum
• 1 horizontal banner in your threadbit
• 2 square link units below the posts
• If you have vBadvanced: 1 link unit inside the navigation

The above post’s suggestions of AdSense placements for your vBulletin forum are pretty aggressive. But consider, I am showing ads to guests only. I am not monetizing my members and as guests won’t contribute that’s fair. Of course, the more ads you show the less likely they are to register. It’s up to you.

6. Design matters – the following colors make your visitors click

Another post here on DuoBlogger about the colors that get you the highest CTR. The post suggests the following:

• Blend your ads
  • AdSense Title color = Something blue or the link color on your site
  • AdSense Background color = your site’s background color
  • AdSense Border color = your site’s background color
  • AdSense Text color = your site’s text color
  • AdSense URL color = your site’s text color
• Rotate the colors every now and then to reduce banner blindness
• Use AdSense channels to track every slight change

7. Work on your forum’s AdSense Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Optimizing your vBulletin’s CTR you’ll want to work on upping the CPC of the ads in your forum. The post suggests the following:

• Get more advertisers to placement target you
  • Add individual AdSense channels per forum
  • Use the Google AdSense Ad planner publisher center
• Reduce the amount of missclicks as that increases ROI for the advertiser

8. Start working on your vBulletin forum – use this checklist

This post by Mark is a step by step checklist for optimizing your AdSense units. The post takes you through both CTR and CPC optimization. Follow the steps and you can be sure that you have done something good for your AdSense earnings.

9. Marketing forums on vBulletinSetup.com

The marketing forums on vBulletinSetup are a great resource to ask questions in case you have any. Many vBulletin owners regularly check out the forums and reply to questions. If you want to get in contact with a vBulletin expert, than that’s what you should be doing.

10. Advertising forums on vBSEO.com

The vBSEO marketing forum is another great resource. The forums exceed AdSense as the forum owners regularly also review other advertising programs. In case you have any questions or need help with other advertising programs, that’s the forum you should be checking out.

11. AdSense forums on DuoBlogger.com

Last but not least you can also ask questions on our AdSense forums directly.

Step 1: Signed Up?

Already signed up with AdSense? If not then read our sign up for AdSense post and follow the steps, as well as tips, there.
If you already have an AdSense account then you’re good to go.

Step 2: Review your possible placements

Review your own website where you want your ads to be placed.
If you think logically here:

Do I want to maximize my earnings?

• Inside your content
• Mainly above the fold
• Aggressive placements (ever visitor MUST see the ads, every visitor that has not seen a ad is a potential loss of click)
• Place link units at your site’s navigation menus
• Place all possible ad units possible per page. (depending on how many advertisers there are for that specific niche)
  • 3 Content Ads
  • 3 link units
  • 1 or 2 custom search boxes
• General niche site? Consider placing the ads only on subpages and not on homepage as that will only give you unrelevant ads
• To solve that part, if you’re using a blog, go for 1 post on the homepage
• Ads on individual pages instead? -> more relevancy

or:

Do I want to keep my website user-friendly?

• Ads should jump out more, meaning other URL/text/title color, making it look more like an advertisement (let the visitors choose to click the ads if they are interested in it, don’t draw attention to them instead)
• Placing your ads at positions which already contain links to other resources (bottom of page or post)
• Below the fold and right sidebar
• Make sure that the ads are not in the way for browsing visitors
• Ideal for webmasters that want to use AdSese to cover the costs of their website

Step 3: Creating the Ads

Did I choose the right ad formats?

• Make sure you avoid Banner Blindness, by making sure you don’t choose leaderboards or horizontal ad formats
• Make use of Rectangles/Squares
• Am I using Link units? They always bring in a buck or two
• Use image ads or not?

Did I choose the right colors?

• Am I using the standard ad colors? (better for non-profit websites)
• Am I blending the ads using the same colors as my website does? meaning:
  • Same title color as the link colors, usually something like: standard #0000ff or navyblue #000080
  • Same text color as my websites content colors, mostly black #000000
  • Using the same URL color as text color? (light grey is also an option)
• Is the background color the same as my websites default background color?
• Never ever use borders, period.

Am I tracking each ad unit per page (and per website) with channels?

• Did I create a channel for every ad unit?
• Did I include a description for every channel? (why? see further below)
• Are the channels targetable? (same reason, see below)

Step 4: Implementing the Ads

This part is completely up to you :) If you are unsure how to add AdSense to certain parts of your website then drop a comment below or send us an email.

Step 5: Review your website again

Are you happy with the placements? Are the colors ok? Are the Ads not too aggressive (within the TOS)?
Tweak a bit in the coding whenever you feel like AdSense in not yet placed correctly.

Step 6: Promote your Website using Google Ad Planner

• By creating your own promotion page for AdWords user to placement target your channels (which are linked to your ad units – that’s why I told you to include a description for every channel, let the advertiser know which place the ad is and how it will perform vs other places on your website. This simple system from Google could massively increase your CPC by a whole lot.
• It’s best if you read our Google Ad Planner blog post, as it’s more detailed
• Example: D3scene

There are 2 ways to quickly promote your website to AdWords users: place a link to your Ad Planner page at the bottom or top of your website. And search google for your keywords and therefore advertisers and send them an email instead to placement target your website. Give them a good reason to do so, else they will just ignore the mail.

Step 7: Watch, Learn and Enjoy

Now that you completely integrated AdSense into your website, you can site back and watch your money flowing in. However it does not stop here, there are always ways to increase your earnings – which is good – but it sucks up time.
Because you, if you followed step 3, integrated channels into your ads, you can monitor how each is performing and tweak the placement/colors a little.
AdSense comes down to experimenting experimenting and experimenting. There’s no way around it, if you want maximum profit from it. Try a different set of ads and placements each week and see how they perform, you can always revert back to your original placement set.

Some other things of note:

• Do not, and ever, click your own ads, even with proxies or whatever – Google will know in the end and won’t pay out, simple. (you might even want to consider keeping your websites private from your family as they often want to help you get money and click the ads which might get you banned) – it’s nice if they want to help you, but you must think about the advertisers as well. They have to pay for those clicks and they aren’t getting any conversions for it. Which could lead to Smart Pricing.
• When in doubt of your placements/colors or anything else from AdSense, consider taking in AdSense Consulting from us.
• Stuck on increasing CPC and CTR? Your only option for increasing your revenue is increasing your traffic. Try targeting other keywords to drive in more traffic.

Have a look: Increasing your AdSense CPC. The post includes a video.

Your not alone :)

It is time for a new project apart from DuoBlogger, and Hendrik advised me to buy an old domain rather than a whole website. So I went out and searched Google and ended up at some Indian website selling 10+ year old domains for $200 each. (yourmaindomain.com)
Now you might think, what’s the catch…..why selling them so cheap? Indeed the domains were all banned from Google’s index. However the good part was that the domains had an history of backlinks and still had an index in archive.org.

I wasn’t really looking for any specific niche because I was basing my niche on the domain name, i.e. if there was an domain name with iPhone apps in it – then I would go for the iPhone niche. Looking at domain names is a good way to find out what keywords you want to use to market your niche. Having the keywords already in the domain name has several advantages for SEO purposes.

Google tends to rank websites higher, which already have the keywords in the URL name, without having many backlinks pointing to their website.
Take for example; Blogger – it’s ugly – but once you let them host your domain – you benefit from their age, I believe blogger is like 6 years old (?). It’s easy to rank with blogger for niches which hardly have any competition (50,000 or less results) with just a few well placed backlinks from PR 6 and up.

Anyway so I added content to my Herbal Supplements blog (note: 11 years old :D registered in 1998 – The Google spiders visits the website every single hour) and a week later I slapped AdSense on it. It’s ugly, and that’s also my strategy – to let the visitors leave fast upon their arrival on my blog – by either clicking the back button or an ad. Tip: Do not let the users have to many options to look around the site as this will greatly reduce the chance of a user to click on any of the ads.
After 3 days I still had a major problem, the front page ads were as relevant as my grandma is with computers, thus getting near zero clicks. Only the sub pages were relevant. The theory behind this is that you (and especially me in this case) threw AdSense too early on the blog. The AdSense spiders still have an old page cached in their system thus giving you non relevant ads. (this is not the case with interest based ads – as they are cookie related)

Getting Rid of Non Relevant Ads on the Front Page

To resolve this issue, make sure to have some content on your website. Write your main keyword in the sidebar (in the widgets) and use a proper title and description on your blog. If you passed that then your ready to fix it. Hendrik told me simply RELOADING the page should fix it, however that was not the case for me as it took more than 3 days with 300 page reloads (designing phase) for any relevant ads to show up.

If you’re using wordpress – then you don’t have to do much – simply load another theme template (make sure you’re not using adsense in any widgets) and wait an hour before switching back. This will alert the AdSense bot that there are no ads to display on your website resulting in a complete reindex of your content in their system for your website once you put the theme back on.

Otherwise, when your not using a blogger platform, then you will have no other option then removing all the ads or wait weeks untill they reindex the website. Shame but it’s the truth.

If you’ve experienced the same and got something to correct/suggest to others, make an comment below as everybody will benefit from it.

Cheers,

Mark

I must say that I was pretty scared when I was on the highest point in the roller coaster.

Seeing CPC of Placement targeted ads

It’s pretty easy and can be done with only a few steps in your AdSense account:

• Go into your AdSense account
• Click on Reports
• Click on Advanced Reports
• Date Range: This month
• Show Data By: Individual Ad
• Tick: Show data by targeting type – contextual or placement
• Click “Display Reports”

What you are seeing there is of course not your CPC, those are your earnings. Divide the earnings with the amount of clicks and you’ll know your CPC.

What the numbers tell us

Now that you know your placement targeted ad’s CPC you should also go on and calculate your CPC for the content-network ads. The CPC of the placement targeted ads should be significantly higher. So, we wanna make sure to get as many placement targeted ads as possible. 100% increase in CPC means 100% increase in earnings.

Now that you know how to see the CPC of your placement targeted ads you’ll wanna read those two posts:

• Using channels to increase your CPC – channels are the best opportunity for getting advertisers to advertise on your website. Making your channels targetable allows them to select the channels and then serve ads
• The Ad Planner publisher center – The Ad planner publisher center is an excellent opportunity for getting advertisers to placement target your website.

Google is all about simplicity, sometimes ;), which also goes for adsense. If you have 1 google account, you can merge all the google services into one account. Simple as that – from Blogger to Gmail to Google Reader etc.
Adsense provides a step-by-step wizard to finish integrating into analytics in mere seconds, given that you already own an analytics account – if not: sign up here. It would be faster if you’d follow the wizard though. Having a look at analytics itself first is also adviceable to determine if you even want to use analytics (compared to your current web-traffic tracking service).

Integrating AdSense into Analytics

As you can see on the image above there are several benefits of integrading adsense into analytics. First off, you can find the adsense reports under: “content -> AdSense”. In the AdSense overview you can analyze all the numbers (CPC, CTR, eCPM etc.), pages and top referrers for your AdSense revenue. (picture taken from the AdSense blog)

Remember, having AdSense integrated into Analytics is not a must, however you could make use of the extra bit of information Analytics may provide you.

If you have any further questions regarding AdSense, do not hesitate to ask us.