Cpc

Optimization Tips for AdSense

Mark

Sep 4 |14:07

Here is an AdSense question which we were asked during a AdSense consultancy skype call:

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

11 essential vBulletin AdSense resources

Hendrik

Jun 11 |02:10

Using the below resources you will know everything that is required to properly monetize your vBulletin forums. You will know how your visitors behave, how to place your ads and how to color your ads.

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.

CPC of placement targeted Ads

Hendrik

May 13 |19:21

Being placement targeted by advertisers has advantages only. If you are unsure what you are missing then you’ll want to know what the CPC (Cost Per Click) of your placement targeted ads is.

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.

Using AdSense channels to increase CPC and CTR

Hendrik

May 6 |22:26

Despite being aware all of us save them setting up AdSense channels for our sites – a mistake we will nonetheless quickly regret. I have been using only 2-3 AdSense channels for my biggest website for years, so do you probably.

Placement targeting

The only reason to use channels I could think of was to track performance changes when relocating/recoloring the ads. I was wrong, AdSense channels are far more powerful and can impact our AdSense earnings like nothing else. Setting up the AdSense channels properly is the key, you can do it good or bad.

Before getting started I want you to check out your CPC of Placement targeted ads vs. content network ads. Do the following to see how placement targeted ads perform for you:

Go Into your AdSense reports
Click “Advanced Reports”
Date Range: Yesterday
Show data by: Individual ad
Tick: Show data by targeting type – contextual or placement

Unless you are a wizard you should see a significant difference between placement targeted ads and content network ads. In my case the Placement-targeted ad’s CPC is 5 times higher (gaming niche). The question is: How can we increase the amount of placement targeted ads? Watch the video, I am showing you how I am doing it.

Our video guide

How many channels do I have to make?

For tracking your CTR one per ad unit. For upping your CPC it’s a pain in ass, and we are aware of that. But to make it as attractive as possible for advertisers you need to make custom channels for different niche-related content on your website. For forums for example: custom channels per forum.

Tracking individual CTR performance

By setting up your ad units to be each in an individual channel you can easily track changes when for example relocating/redesigning your ad units. For example: You wanna check out how red vs. blue title color works, testing it for some days you can then see which unit has the higher CTR and thus stick to that color. (Blue will probably work best). Simply add that specific ad unit into a custom channel and you can track the performance.

EASY: Tracking sitewide earnings

Are you a webmaster with multiple websites each having 50 ad channels? AdSense introduced so called URL channels. Without putting any of your ad units into a custom channel you can set up so called URL channels to track AdSense earnings summed up per website. To setup new URL channels do the following:

Go into your AdSense account
Open the tab “AdSense setup”
Open the sub-tab “Channels”
Click on “URL Channels”
Click on “+ Add new URL channels”
Enter your website’s url – example: www.duoblogger.com

Testing never ends

We never finished the testing process, we are still testing for more than 3 years now. There are hundreds of factors to consider. Never stop testing and tweaking. Not doing so could result in potentially wasting money.

How do I contact potential advertisers?

Google for your main keyword, you will see Google Ads. Visit the advertiser’s website, write them an email. Make sure that it’s a good one, once finished reading your email the advertiser should feel like whether there is no way around advertising on your website. That’s possible, we don’t blog about writing but you might wanna check out outstandingwriter.com (thanks to Corey Freeman – @coreyfreeman). It’s time consuming, but the return is an incredible CPC boost.

Let us know your success with optimizing both Click Through Rate and Cost Per Click using the channels. You’ll also wanna make sure to check out Google’s new AdPlanner, another handy tool making it easier to increase placement targeting.

Chitika review

Hendrik

Feb 18 |22:28

Chitika – sounds like a banana, but stands for one of the best CPC programs out there. We’ll give you a nice Chitika review here, one thing to start, sign up for Chitika, you’ll not regret it. Finishing our Chitika review you’ll understand why…

There are good and bad advertising programs in terms of revenue for the publisher. Good ones in general are Google AdSense, YPN, Adsdaq and ….. Hmm well, can’t think of any other good advertising programs. I have been testing a couple of programs and most of them are just crap. They try to copy Google AdSense and fail greatly because they will never be able to have more advertisers than AdSense. They aren’t innovative. Good news, Chitika is a new, innovative and good CPC program.

What’s special about Chitika?

Relevancy for local Pizza ads

To understand why Chitika is a good advertising program you need to understand in which particular situations Google AdSense is unable to bring the publisher good revenue. Google AdSense puts everything into displaying content relevant ads, which is a good idea hence that way both publisher and advertiser earn more money. Less relevant ads means less conversions after clicking on the ad resulting in less revenue for the advertiser and consequently less money for the publisher. Now comes the part what makes Chitika special: Chitika does not scan the content of the page to display relevant ads, they scan the search strings which were used to enter the website.

By just looking at for example “Pizza in New York” compared to thousands of lines of unnecessary code Chitika is able to display extremely relevant ads. Sometimes even more relevant than Google AdSense (more at the end of this review)…..

By displaying relevant ads they are able to pay the publisher top CPC rates because the Return of Investment for the advertiser is very high (advantage of content relevant ads). One example: Dating ads on a website about insurance will most likely result in absolutely no conversions. It’s very easy to test how relevant your Chitika ads will be. Go to a website who runs Chitika ads and append “#chitikatest=New York Pizza” to the end of the URL, press enter and reload the website. You should then see advertisements about whatever you entered, in my case New York Pizza. If you are looking for a URL then just go to Wikihow. One special example I would like to point out is this url. The drink “New York Egg cream” is something special for New York. Have a look on the link and then compare the relevancy of the AdSense ads with the relevancy of the Chitika ads. Google only shows general new york ads whereas Chitika shows ads of local stores. Amazing isn’t it?

Chitika’s Ad Layout

Psychologically optimized ads

When I first had a look on the default layout of Chitika’s ads I was amazed. I previously made a post about psychological AdSense optimization where I talked about colors and all that. The layout is extremely important as it decides whether the user clicks on the ad or doesn’t.

Chitika offers all methods of optimizing your ads, changing the title color, text color, border color and URL color. That’s of course what Google offers as well but there is one significant difference. Google’s TOS disallows placing images next to your advertisements because they think that that could somehow encourage the user to click the ads. What’s the big deal? That only means more money. The visitor sees the image and then automatically focuses the ad unit next to it resulting in more clicks. That’s a clever trick which Chitika automatically implements. Check out the picture, Chitika automatically displays relevant images next to the ads! Amazing, I was stunned when I saw that the first time. That of course means more revenue for you.

How much revenue can the Chitika publisher expect?

First thing we talked about was the relevancy of the ads. The relevancy is the main factor for high CPC. Chitika is able to display relevant ads as I showed you above. The result is a CPC as high as together with AdSense. I even have a higher CPC on my gaming site with Chitika than with AdSense. That’s because AdSense performs really poor for everyone in the Gaming niche. The CPC you can expect lays anywhere between 75 and 125 percent of your AdSense CPC.

Next factor is the Click Through Rate (CTR), by allowing major customizations and placing images next to the ads the Chitika CTR lays somewhere between 100 and even up to 250 percent of your AdSense CTR. Please keep in mind that most people don’t use Chitika to replace AdSense but as an additional ad on the website. Look at Wikihow above, they are using 3 AdSense content units and 1 Chitika unit near the footer. The footer is a relatively bad placement (see the heat map), but still the owner reported a CTR of above 1 percent, which is tremendous! By using Chitika as additional source of income you are able to increase your total earnings by 10-20 percent. Do you want to miss that?

For which sites does Chitika perform best?

No text content?

Chitika performs very good for all websites. The sites AdSense performs bad for are the sites Chitika performs very good for. Poor text-content websites for example.

The AdSense crawler is unable to find any content to display AdSense ads on video sites for example. They are not able analyze the video, they can only check out the description of the video, the title, the tags or the comments. In a lot of cases those aren’t however that relevant. Chitika is able to display relevant ads for the visitor by just analyzing the tiny search string which reveals what the visitor was actually looking for!

All websites work well together with Chitika, the best websites are in my opinion video sites and also local sites (see the Pizza example above).

In terms of CPC the same niches as with AdSense peform best. That’s simply because the ROI for the advertiser is high (the advertiser earns a lot if someone purchases something) and resulting in spending more money into ad-campaigns. Car sites, Insurance sites, medical sites, foreclosure sites, lawyer sites, local sites and a lot more perform really good. Low paying niches are the same as together with AdSense, but that’s not the fault of the advertising program, it’s the problem of the niche. My niche is relatively low paying but still I am earning more than before.

Interview with Chitika Account Manager

I was so stunned by Chitika that I immediately started writing on this blog post and thought “Hey! Why not talk to someone from the Chitika company?”. Two days later Vik Chhabra (@vikc) joined me in an interview overviewing and explaining Chitika. Of course also all the benefits Chitika has were subject of the talk. Thanks again to you for the informative interview!

The video is in HD by default, you can turn it off in the player if your internet connection is too poor performing (I have a friend who still downloads at 30 kb / second LOL). Feel free to contact Vik in case you are interested in joining Chitika, he will assists you with all the questions you have and setting up your Chitika account. Make sure to mention that you came from us and he will put you on his top priority list!

We found another nice interview with Alden DoRosario (@adorosario) on the SESNY. Worth watching, good information:

Others on Chitika

There are a lot of positive and of course negative comments from other people on Chitika. Here are some found on the Chitika site itself:

Brandon from FitBuff.com said: I had heard good things about Chitika, but it was just one of those things that I never quite got around to checking out. Finally, I went to the website, had the code installed in minutes, and Chitika instantly became one of my top revenue sources in the first month! There was literally no learning curve or optimization, so I’m sure my results will be even better once I delve deeper. I simply input the code in the appropriate spot, and I was done. One of the best things about the ads is that they are only shown to visitors who arrive at my site via search engines, so the “regular readers” aren’t bogged down by more ads, even though Chitika is earning nearly as much as the ads that are always visible!

Arnold Alting from downloads.nl said: Chitika | Premium works great for us. A good Google Adsense alternative with very well targeted ads.

Carl from carlpei.com said: The best part of Chitika has to be the support! I have Ryan from Chitika on my MSN list and he’s always ready to chat. I’m a small publisher, this gives a very personal feeling.

@TomRoyce from House Meets Owner said: I use Chitika on a hobby site and it earns 3x more than adsense does for the same # impressions.

@trentiles from Dubs in the Buff said: Only have been using Chitika for a few days. So far good experience but I wish I could customize the ads more such as borders, etc.

We recently placed a thread on our forum about removing the borders from Chitika ads.

Own Experience

I have been using Chitika for almost a month now, mainly to get away from AdSense as only source of income. My website is in the gaming niche not a that good niche in terms of advertising because of the young audience and no really expensive products. Nonetheless my Chitika CPC is 30 percent higher than my AdSense CPC, which stunned me at first because AdSense was priorly the program that got me the highest CPC. Looking at my monthly revenue now around 20 percent comes from Chitika which is not that much of course. But considering that only 10 percent of my search engine visitor see the ads and generate 20 percent of my total income then yes, that’s a nice in earnings. I am really satisfied.

Signup for Chitika

We hope that we were able to bring Chitika a littler closer to you. You probably still have lots of unanswered questions but don’t wonder, every advertising program is like a unique new world. We can only recommend you to sign up for Chitika and test it yourself, it’s free of course.

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