"AdSense Manna" from Jerry West
07/24/2007 8:43 PM Quote Reply Alert
While I don't profess to be an "AdSense Monster", I do well for myself, but I use it in a different way than I think most do. I use it to foot my PPC bill. Let me share that with you quickly and we'll hit a whole bunch of points to hopefully assist you do better in AdSense.
My biggest point in this is right here. Have a plan on why you want to use AdSense. Why? Because what you are being paid per click is a fraction of what the advertiser is making. That's why they are paying you, because they are going to make more money.
Caution: Don't settle for 50 cents when you could have made $12.00.
Robots.txt Tip:
Make sure that you have the following code in your robots.txt file to ensure the Google media bot can index your site properly. It does make a difference, so make sure it is in there. The main benefit is that it will server more relevant ads and you will get fewer PSAs. Don't be nervous at the "Disallow" statement, that is the syntax of the robots.txt file. Since there isn't anything after it, it means it is disallowing nothing to the bot, or in other words, it is granting full access to spider all pages.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
Okay, when AdSense first hit, I signed up and placed ads on one of my affiliate sites. I was amazed that the conversion ratio for my affiliate program didn't move much. It stayed consistent. However, I had a 6% CTR. My conversion rate was about 2% so I was making money from 8% of my visitors. Not too shabby.
So I tested this out on more and more sites and the same figures came back. Conversions stayed about the same. Why was this? Doing an exit survey didn't give any details, because they people I really wanted to hear from (those that just left) didn't fill out the survey. My conclusion was that the people who bought, were going to buy anyway, even with ads showing. However, those that wanted to leave, a large percentage hit the back button, but there are a handful of others that "look" for a way out ... and those are the ones that hit the AdSense ads.
It's not really my fault they didn't find what they wanted on my site. Hey, I can't please everybody ... nor do I want to. I do, however, want to maximize my site's revenues. So, this is the plan I came up with.
1) When I launch an affiliate program and I know the keywords that will convert, I need to target a monthly budget. Let's say for the trouble, our budget is $1,000.00 per month.
2) Target the average CPC. Knowing how much to bid is pretty easy. Never bid more than 50% of your revenue per visitor. For example, if in your PPC campaign, the commission is $50.00, and your conversion ratio is 1%, your revenue per visitor is 50 cents. ($50.00/100 = $0.50). This means that you can't go over 25 cents per click. If you bid more than that you will lose money and that isn't what you want. :-) To improve this, watch lots of Dave Bullock and improve that conversion ratio. For example, if you increased your conversion ratio to 4%, that would mean your revenue per visitor was $2.00, and now you could bid up to $1.00 a click. See the power?
3) Now, with AdSense, if you can project a 6% CTR and a 50 cent per click revenue, then for every 100 views of the page, you can project $3.00 in revenue or $30.00 EPM (Earnings per Thousand).
4) Let's say in our example, we spent $1,000.00 for the month via PPC and averaged 25 cents a click, which brought 4,000 visitors to the site and an average number of page views of 3 per, or 12,000 page views.
5) 1% conversion: 40 sales x $50.00 = $2,000.00 (Affiliate Revenue)
6% AdSense CTR: 720 clicks x $0.50 = $360.00 (AdSense Revenue)
Subtract the PPC Spend - $1,000 (PPC Spend)
Net Profit for Campaign $1,360.00
Not great, but not too bad. However, don't put that $360.00 back in your pocket. Roll it over into your campaign. So the next month your PPC budget is $1,360.00
What happens now? Well, if everything stays equal (which is unlikely) as we all know, this is how it would look:
Visitors Driven: 5,440 (increase of 1,440)
Number of Sales: 54 (increase of 4)
Page Views: 16,320 (increase of 4,320)
AdSense Revenue: $489.60 (increase of 129.60)
And this continues to build each and every month. Of course you are making adjustments to your landing pages to increase conversions, adding new keywords that convert better, dropping the ones that don't, etc. But the bottom line is, your AdSense revenue is funding the increase in your PPC budget ... you aren't dipping at all into your affiliate earnings to expand your reach.
I chart this by quarter and I have NEVER had a quarter where I did worse overall than the quarter before. If you are just starting out, this is a good system to ues as it plays into "using other people's money" to fund your project, and that is exactly what I look at AdSense as.
Okay, let's hit some other tips ...
There was a survey done in January by Yahoo! and I spent an entire month looking at the results from my AdSense and YPN ads and the numbers produced by Yahoo! were pretty dead on.
Here are the results:
Placement Success Rate
Leaderboard 27%
Right Gutter 9%
Left Gutter 8%
Content 45%
Below Fold 2%
Rotating 5%
This makes the point clear that "Above the Fold" and embedded in the content is the best place for your ads to achieve top success with an ad content network. So, look at your placement and decide if where you are running your ads is the best place for them. Chances are, where you have them is not as appealing as it could be.
AdSense Arbitrage
You know that one of the major frustrations is the introduction of MFAs, or Made for AdSense ads. I know that Google is doing a great job of cleaning them up, but there are still some of them out there. I will share with you the testing that I have done with AdSense and how to get the most out out the clicks you get with AdSense, and get the MFAs off your site.
The AdSense game isn't complex, it is really simple. Seriously. To be successful with AdSense, it isn't the number of clicks, but the payout per click that matters. If you can increase your average price per click, for example, from $0.05 to $0.47, it becomes a numbers game at that point and the more traffic you drive, the larger your check.
The problem is, too many people give up on AdSense and say, "too much hype, it doesn't work" because they are stuck in the "nickel club". I will show you a few ways to get out, and it has nothing to do with changing the keywords that you are targeting.
There is a term that is floating around the industry called "AdSense Arbitrage". I've been doing this technique long before this phrase was coined, and it isn't for the faint of heart. But the MFA sites do it religiously, and you have to understand the model if you are going to make serious money with AdSense.
In short, AdSense Arbitrage is simply paying a low price for traffic to go to a page in hopes for a click on the AdSense Ad going out. I do HIGHLY recommend you have an affiliate offer as well. As sites that are just "AdSense" dominated can be classified as MFAs and you can get booted.
Now, the above sounds simple enough, but if you don't know what you are doing, you can lose your shirt quickly. You can use AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, etc. to drive traffic. What you normally want to do is bid on very specific terms (low cost per click), and then send the traffic to a very general site (hoping for a higher per click payout). This is the wrong way to do it in my view, and my testing concludes this thought.
Let me give you an example, if I take two sites, and they are exactly the same, one I drive traffic in hopes of a click through to an AdSense ad, the other the visitor is driven to a page where they make a choice to click through to a deeper page in the site, and THEN presented with the AdSense ads, the latter will win the numbers game every time.
How? I will show you.
Example: Let's take the plastic surgery industry. Using a PPC Projection Tool we learn the following:
plastic surgery $2.27
plastic surgery california $3.90
plastic surgery san francisco $4.99
plastic surgery los angeles $15.00
plastic surgery beverly hills $15.00
plastic surgery philadelphia $10.00
plastic surgery orange county $15.00
plastic surgery houston $5.00
Please remember that these figures are what the ADVERTISER pays, they are not your share of the click in AdSense. Often the share for you is 10%-60% of the PPC cost.
Now, there are dozens of other US cities that are in the $3.00 and below range. What do we learn from this? Simple. The general term "plastic surgery" gets barely over $2.00 per click, yet there are three in the regional category that are $15.00 per click. By driving low cost traffic to a page and presenting links to various regions, or having a map with the headline, "Click on the region closest to you", you will get the pass through visitor to a landing page about that region, and thus, the higher per click fee.
In the above example, we can target the "plastic surgery" keyword and pay $2.00 per click (or $200.00 CPC [Cost per Hundred]). If we are also getting an 11% CTR and a 60% share, we can estimate the following:
100 visitors = $200.00 total cost ($2.00 per click)
$9.00 = Top Revenue Per Click ($15.00 * 60%)
11 clicks = $99.00 in Revenue (11% click through * $9.00)
$101.00 Net Loss
This is why targeting the large traffic keywords do not work in this scenario. Instead, you must target keywords that are 50 cents or below. Why? You want to be profitable with this, so by taking your $99.00 projected revenue, you divide that in half and that is your ceiling to bid. You can get lots of traffic for 50 cents a click that is highly targeted. And while the above are just projections, once you start getting results, you can then make modifications to your campaign either up or down depending upon profitability. If your CTR goes up, of course you can afford to pay more per click and really increase your profits.
In the above example, I show you what the MAXIMUM is, but you only get the maximum if the visitor clicks on the ad appearing in the #1 spot. But they don't always do that, do they? What if they click on #3 or #4? You could be losing money down there, despite a click occurring. Most of the sites in the #3 or #4 spots are MFAs trying to get clicks to their sites. It has been drilled into your head by a lot of AdSense Gurus out there that the more ads you display, the more likely you are to get a click through.
That statement is absolutely true.
The problem with it, however, is the click through often pays out significantly less. That is a bad thing. You can't be in the "Arbitrage" game and be profitable by allowing that to happen. It will literally kill you - slowly but surely.
The best way around it?
Fewer ads. In my testing results, the sites that had fewer ads, thus fewer MFA ads, had higher CPM rates. I am a big fan of landing pages that remove all navigation, so they have limited choices (AdSense clicks, fill out form, buy, or back button). By taking away options, you increase your CTR, and thus, your EPM.
Tip: Watch the ads on your site closely and any site that you see that is not a quality site to your standards, block them. Spend at least an hour or two a week verifying the domains advertising on your pages. You will be grateful that you did. Your earnings will increase. And don't fall for the tip that you should have garbage sites advertising, as the visitor will click, see the site, leave immediately and then click on the next AdSense ad. I've tested this and it happens about as often as a Blue Moon. Don't do it. Weed out the "undesirables" from showing on your site.
There are a ton of eBooks and videos and seminars on how to get rich from AdSense. There isn't one simple cure, or a magical process to do it. If it was magical, everyone would do it and everyone would be rich. It is a process, it takes effort, it takes skill and understanding.
By sharing with you real testing results, by implementing the recommendations, you will see higher profits. And that, is always a good thing.
Better EPC - Feature Released Last Year
With Google AdSense, the real key is not the CTR (click-through rate) but the EPC (earnings per 100 clicks). Why? As I said above, there is a big difference in your check if you are getting $0.30 per click vs. $3 per click. Make sense? Of course it does. Now, how do you do it. First, you have to make sure the content of your page is easy to understand for the Google Media Bot to process.
A new feature that came out last year called Section Targeting that you probably don't know about. What is Section Targeting? A big issue with AdSense is that a page's content can be misinterpreted by the Google Media Bot and the ads shown on the page either may not be relevant, or they will be on-target but the revenue share won't be very high (30 cent click when it should be $3).
To implement it is easy.
The HTML tags to emphasize the content you want Google to score use the following format:
You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:
Straight from Google: 'In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.'
I have used the above on my AdSense sites since this was released last year and it has worked very well. The click through rates have not changed, for obvious reasons, but the earnings per click has increased 13% across the board. That is good stuff indeed. So, implement this and give yourself a nice 13% raise!
Protecting AdSense from Sean Wu
I was given a copy of Sean Wu's "Protect AdSense" eBook earlier this year and I wanted to comment on it briefly as some of the suggestions he makes should be avoided. I have no idea when the eBook was written, but it isn't as if the information is outdated, it is just poor. The main reason for this posting is to open your eyes regarding "suggestions" or "tips" that are hyped. And this is one that falls into that category.
Now, as all of us know that "play" in AdSense, one of the best ways to get booted out of AdSense is to click on your own ads. So, this 16 page eBook details how to guarantee that you, nor your staff, will ever click on your own AdSense ads ... and in some cases, no AdSense ads at all and turn your web browsing experience into a boring and painful one. :-)
First Level of Protection: Disable JavaScript
Seriously, this is his tip. His reason is simple, Google AdSense needs JavaScript to work, so by disabling it, it makes it so AdSense doesn't show in your browser when you view your own site so you can't click your own ads. Genius, right? Wrong. Ever surfed the web with JavaScript turned off? It is painful, it is boring, you will think it is 1998 all over again. Plus, you not only disabled AdSense from showing when your own sites are displayed, but for all sites you visit.
Fact: Many sites require JavaScript to even view them and/or place orders.
Why You Should Avoid This Tip: This makes the web surfing experience unenjoyable and you cannot verify that the right ads are showing up on your site. This is vital as you push for a higher CPM. His "workaround" of enabling JavaScript when you needed it and disabling it when you visited your own sites is a huge time waster.
How do you disable it? In IE, check out these steps: Tools | Internet Options | Security | Custom Level, then scroll down to the "Security Settings" area and look for the heading for "Scripting" and Disable the Active Scripting. Do you want to do that every time? Yeah, neither do I.
Sure you can use a FireFox extension to disable JavaScript on "untrusted" sites, but again, just doing this so you won't accidentally click on your own ads is not adviseable.
What To Do Instead: No one "accidentally" clicks on ads. Website owners can say they have idiot employees who click on the ads, and say "whoops". Please. If you can train your dog not to use your Afghan rug as a toilet you can train an employee not to click on your AdSense ads. Seriously, if you are worried about your employees then you hired the wrong ones. In my experience it has been very young employees or oversees contractors that are the offenders.
Second Level of Protection: Host File Blocking
You can edit the "hosts" file in your Windows system (usually under System32) and add the Google IP block that serves AdSense. It isn't that complicated and Sean walks you through how to do it in the eBook, but again, this is a solution that is far from a solution.
Why You Should Avoid This Tip: This is a detriment to your surfing. Why? This disables AdSense on all sites. This means you cannot verify that your sites are serving relevant ads, or to verify that your pages are "themed" based on the ads displaying.
He then goes into plugging his new Tag-and-Ping product, which shows the age of the eBook as that method hasn't worked in some time. Be mindful of the advice out there and if you have a question, throw it up in the forums and I will tackle it as soon as I can.
How was that Rocky? Worth the wait? :-)
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Best Regards,
Jerry West
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