Maxmizing Your Revenue with Google AdSense Transcript of a live webinar delivered by David Risley on 7/25/2011. What Iʼll Be Talking About"... 3 Best Performing Ad Sizes"... 4 Ad Placement"... 6 Placement of Ad Code"... 12 Ad Colors"... 13 Custom Channels"... 13 Section Targeting"... 16 Ad Blocking"... 18 Adsense for Search"... 22 Top Performing Content"... 25 Beyond Adsense"... 28 Parting Thoughts"... 29 -- BEGIN TRANSCRIPT -- Welcome to tonight's webinar. As you know, we're going to be talking about Maximizing Your Revenue with Google AdSense. I've been messing around a little bit with AdSense lately. Actually, this is the reason I got the motivation for the webinar mainly because I've been messing around with it for my tech site at PCMech.com. Page 1 of 31
Here's the thing. You guys know that banner ads are not really my favorite way to make money with a blog. If you've read my Six Figure Blogger Blueprint, and I assume most of you have, you know that I'm a big believer in creating your own products and affiliate marketing primarily those two. Banners are really not my favorite way to go mainly because you're getting paid pennies on the dollar to send people away from your site. That being said, they still work. They still make money, especially if you optimize properly and especially if you have a lot of traffic to throw AdSense. You still make pretty decent money with these things. AdSense is one of those ones (unless you're running an adult site or something like that) that just about everybody can participate in. Therefore, it is extremely popular. It's really easy to use and it's also easy for lazy people. I'm a lazy dude. Over at PCMech.com I had the membership site, but when it comes to the advertising, I really don't want to have to go through all the work, quite frankly, to do direct sell banners. If people approach me, that's one thing, but I don't want to have to go out there and try to attract advertisers. I'd rather spend my time creating products and doing things that are a little bit more useful. Therefore, when it comes to banners, I do run AdSense over there. Being that I do, I want to increase my AdSense income through some tweaks. You know, PCMech had gotten hit by the Panda Update. I've told a few of you about this. The Panda Update was a recent search engine algorithm update that Google did. A lot of sites out there got hit by the Panda Update and PCMech was one of them. Nobody really knows the reasons for it. Nobody knows exactly what went into the Panda Update. It's not a Content Farm or anything like that, but yet it got hit anyway. All these things added up to the fact that being that I wasn't really paying attention, AdSense income kind of dropped. It was time that I paid some attention to it to get it back up. By doing some of what we're going to be talking about here tonight, I've been able to increase it on an average between 30% and 50% per day revenue-wise on PCMech, which is pretty good. Anybody on this call who uses AdSense knows that revenue on a daily basis goes up and down. It's just the way it is. Regardless of how well you tweak, your income is going to go up and Page 2 of 31
down. On the average, it looks like it has gone up between 30% and 50% per day, which is pretty good. Here are a couple of graphs. I've deliberately left dollar figures out of it because, to my knowledge, it's against the Terms of Service of AdSense for me to go around talking about exact earnings. Therefore, I don't do it, but you can see over there on the right side, as we get more toward the present, that the graph is starting to shoot up, which is the direction that I want. The bottom graph is the daily RPM which is revenue per thousand impressions. Again, you can see that it's going up. One of the keys to it is to attract higher earning ads. It's not like I'm trying to attract more traffic. Obviously, if you throw more traffic at AdSense, you can make more money, but it's about getting that RPM up so that you're making more money per unit of a thousand visitors or page views to your site. It looks like that's what I've been able to do through some of these tweaks. What Iʼll Be Talking About What we're going to be talking about tonight is what I've learned while doing this. We're going to be obviously translating that over into techniques that you can use to increase your AdSense revenue. Again, I want to make a quick note that some of this might not be new to you. Some of it may be new to you. Page 3 of 31
The thing about Google AdSense and Google is just this way in general is that they've got a lot of stuff and it's hard for us to keep track of all the little things that they've got. It's that way with AdSense. They've got some cool things built into the AdSense interface and with that system when a lot of people grab their tags and go to their site and paste it in there, they're not really utilizing all the tools at their disposal. So some of this might be new to you and I certainly hope that is the case. Before we get going, a quick note to take some notes during this webinar. I am going to cover a lot of different things here in a somewhat short amount of time. That's the design of this webinar. I don't want any of us to be here all night. This is being recorded so, if for some reason, I went over something too fast or you want to be able to follow up later, you'll be able to get the recording. Aside from that pen and paper, EverNote, whatever floats your boat you can take a few notes if you want to check into things on your own AdSense account. Best Performing Ad Sizes First things first. Let's talk about the best performing ad sizes. In short, you're looking at the square ad which is the 300 x 250, the 336 x 380 or the big column ad which is the 160 x 600. Generally, I've found that the 468 x 60 sucks. It doesn't really work very well. The 125 x 125, which is very common out there on blogs not so much with AdSense but, in general, blogs love running these little 125 banners. They suck for AdSense so don't even bother with them. Page 4 of 31
The one I didn't mention was the 728 x 90. You'll see it on the right graphic here. This is a graphic that I pulled out of a report that was actually created in conjunction with DoubleClick. DoubleClick is a pretty large ad network that Google bought. I did this report (I forgot when it was written, but it wasn't that long ago) and they rated the top performing ad sizes. The top one was the half page ad which is 300 x 600. This is interesting because, at least in my Google account, I don't even have that size available to me. I'm not sure what is going on, but really close to that is the 336 x 280; the medium rectangle which is the 300 x 250; then you have the skyscraper which is the 160 x 600. It does down from there. You'll see that the 728 x 90 is pretty much way down the curve. The 468 x 60 is worse than that. If you had to really sum this up, the bigger the better. Obviously, the larger the banner, the more attention it is going to get. You also have this thing called the AIB Standards with regard to banner sizes. It just so happens that the top performing ones are large, as well as being the AIB Standards which is the 300 x 250, 336 x 280 and the 160 x 600. A comment about split testing because the 300 x 250 and the 336 x 280 are a very similar size. One is obviously a little bit bigger than the other, but not by much. With that being said, you might want to just split test the two. Sometimes, depending upon niches, you're going to get better performance out of one than the other. Really what it comes down to is when the advertisers are coming into buy advertising, what banner size are they going to be shooting for? What I found on PCMech was that 300 x 250 worked a little bit better. Currently, that's what I'm running. Maybe in a week or two or three, I'll run another split test and see if maybe the 336 is doing a little bit better and we'll go that route. It really just comes down to testing on that one. My recommendation would be to run one size for a week and then run the other one for a week and just find out which performed better on the average. A week would probably be minimum because like I said earlier, AdSense income tends to go up and down on a daily basis. If you don't let this sit there for a long enough time, what's going to happen is you're going to end up freaking out by all these little upticks and downticks that are happening on a daily basis. What you are really after is a trend. One slot might not be making as much on one day, but then the next day it does extremely well. What you're looking for is that overall trend. Page 5 of 31
Ad Placement Let's talk about ad placement. This is really important. Basically, you want to place the ad right in the eye path on the site. Typically that means the top left, the top of the content itself, which is typically right at the top of your post or right below the post. Essentially, when you get down to the bottom of the post and a lot of times, I would even put this before you have any other calls to action, such as social media links, or comments, or anything like that have that banner right there underneath the content almost to the point where it looks like it's integrated right into the blog post. A really important thing to understand is what's called the F pattern. These things are really intriguing to me. I love seeing how people will interact with Web sites and the F pattern is pretty much a proven concept out there. When you do a heat map of where people are looking and where people are clicking on Web sites, you're going to find that often it resembles the pattern of the letter "F". You can see here with these screen shots these are three that I screen shot out from the net these are not my sites obviously I mean, one of them is Google but you'll notice that the red pattern there, which is the hottest part of these heat maps, kind of resembles the letter "F". You can see it pretty well. What it shows you is that the top left is really your key. They kind of scan across the top and then, they're going to go down typically on the left side. You're going to find that the F pattern is pretty much key on most sites. This is where people paid the most attention. Page 6 of 31
When you apply that F pattern to your own site, you're going to get a few things that you know. First of all, people are going to scan your content and not necessarily read it thoroughly. This is something where I could go into a whole other webinar on how to structure a blog post and how to write the blog post because of this single fact that people don't sit there and read it all the time. They scan it. As I said, they scan the top few sentences because it's the top of that letter "F" and they're going to scan down the bottom which is the left side of the letter "F". The first one to two paragraphs at the top of your post are going to be absolutely the most important. From there, they're basically going to scan right down the thing. You want to have really good key and important words at the start of your paragraphs because again, as they're going down the left side of the F pattern, you're going to want to have some really key words that are showing up there on the left side of your post. Those are the start words of your paragraphs and they are very important. This is also one reason why bullet points work really well, as well as sub-headers and things like that, in a blog post because as you're scanning down the left side with the F pattern, the bullets will bring you across. If you have a big, long paragraph, they might notice a start word of the paragraph and generally, they're going to scan right through that paragraph. That's a really important point. How do you apply this to ad placement? You want to place your ads inside the letter F. That's really what it comes down to. It's really pretty simple. Here are a few images that are direct from Google. I did not make these. On the left side, you'll see that the darker slots are the best performing ad locations for AdSense, at least according to Google. At the top, right above the post you'll notice it's an even better spot to be inside the content area, but right above the primary content. You've got the top left and then the footer, which is below the post. Page 7 of 31
Interestingly, I would say that that spot right above the orange in the footer is probably going to be even better because it's more integrated in with the content than below any kind of divider line there. Again, this is going to come down to testing on your own site. You'll notice on the right Page 8 of 31
sidebar of that left graphic, it's pretty cold over there not much is happening. I'm going to be talking about that on the next slide which is the sidebar location. Let's look at the right side graphics. Again, these are images made by Google with the blog post being repeated. With WordPress, you've got the loop. You're going to have several blog posts being repeated on the page typically on the blog's Home page. Google is saying that you throw an ad in between them. You could try that. I personally find it to be a little bit noisy so, therefore, I don't do it. You need to balance that out with the user experience, but that's what Google is saying. Then, they also say ad unit on the right sidebar. That being said, let's talk about that sidebar. A lot of blogs have the sidebar on the right. In fact, most of the blogs I know out there have the sidebar on the right, which if we look at that prior slide is one of the poorer performing areas to have an AdSense ad and probably any banner. Yet, that's what most blogs are doing. So, here's the thing that most blogs are doing out there not only do they have the sidebar on the right, but they're putting 125 x 125s in there, which is pretty much one of the crappiest performing ad sizes in the crappiest performing portion of your Web site. This is what most blogs are doing out there which is why the typical 125 x 125 on most blogs just doesn't work very well. Whether it's AdSense or not, it's just a poor place to have an ad. It violates the F pattern. That being said, it does lend more power to the actual content. That's an important point. That's not to be ignored. You want your content to get the most attention not your ads necessarily. However, when we're talking about AdSense tonight, with AdSense it's very important that you get people to click on those banners because otherwise, you're not going to get paid that much. Let's look at the idea of a left aligned sidebar rather than a right, which is what a lot of blogs are doing. On the left aligned sidebar, you put a 300 x 250 or a 336 x 280 (which is one of those top performing ad slots) right at the top of a left aligned sidebar, which puts it right smack dab in the middle of the eye path. It does not violate the F pattern. In fact, it's right there at the very tippy top of the F pattern which is great. Quite frankly, this might be a really good location for your Opt-In Box. Just aside from the AdSense stuff we're talking about tonight, if you don't want to run things like that, you might want to put an Opt-In Box in that spot in a left aligned sidebar rather than a right. You might find Page 9 of 31
that it gets a higher opt-in rate on the left side than over on the right side because it doesn't violate the F pattern. So this is a quick screen shot of PCMech.com. Recently, one of the design changes I did over on PCMech was to shift the sidebar over to the left side like a lot of blogs that used to have it on the right mainly because that was just a habit on my part. I went ahead and moved it over to the left and tested it, and I found that it worked a lot better. You'll see here that the arrow is pointing to a 300 x 250 ad slot that is right at the top of the sidebar right in the middle of the F pattern on this particular site. This banner up here that Clean and Repair Windows Errors is something that I am testing out I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it because I do know that it does distract from the AdSense banners no doubt. So I'm testing the payoff of that particular slot and I may end up removing it. We shall see. On the other graphic you can see that right at the very top of the content, below the headline, below the author's name, below the comma count, but basically integrated into the blog post, I have a 336 x 280 ad there. I've been finding this works really well. Here's the thing. Typically, any AdSense code that you have closest to your actual article text is going to perform really well Page 10 of 31
because that's going to be the most contextual. Not only that, it's going to be much more accurate with regard to the content that is on that page. The reason I have it at the top here and center lined is simply because I used to have it left of line which is great. If you don't have the sidebar like I have here, you can have a right sidebar but over on your content, which is on the left side of your site, you can put an AdSense ad and put it in the top left of your actual post. The only side effect of that is that sometimes it can make any images that you put in the top of your post look really weird because they're sitting there next to a banner ad, or they can make the image line wrap down and it just really looks funky. That's one reason why I've just gone ahead and center lined it here and made my post start below that. You can see in the screen shot I've got an image right below that banner ad which is pretty darn big and I don't want to make it so that we can't do that. So at the top of your content, you put it right in the eye path. That's a great spot and it's ideal for either a 336 or a 300 banner, which are one of the two top performing ad sizes for AdSense. An important point is that doing that can obviously annoy your repeat readers. If you have people coming to your site and they are reading your newest stuff, you don't want to just chuck an AdSense banner in their face every time. So it's a really good idea to throttle it so that you don't annoy your repeat traffic. What I've done is use a plugin, which I'll show you in a minute and I actually mentioned it on my blog the other day. It was to limit your AdSense to posts older than 7 to 14 days. Your brand new posts are not going to have the AdSense banner right in the post, but once it gets below a certain age, that AdSense banner will show up there. Basically, for search traffic and things like that, they're going to see it. For people who are keeping up with my blog on a daily basis, they will never know it's there. The plugin that I use to do that is called Ad Injection. It's a really cool plugin. It's absolutely free. It does some really powerful stuff. Quite frankly, the interface for it can be a little overwhelming at first, but as you test things and get things set up and play around with it, you'll get the hang of it. One of the things that it easily does and you can see this on the top left screen shot here is that it says "Only show ads on pages older than" and I've got it set for seven days. That's how I've been able to accomplish that. Page 11 of 31
Some other things it will do is it will only allow you to have the ad slot show up on posts that are beyond a certain length. I have mine set to always show, but let's say that you only had a 100 or 200 word post. It would be a little overwhelming to have that big ad slot there on a post that is so short. You can actually have Ad Injection limit that. So on super-short posts, it will not show the banner and on longer posts, it will. It does all kinds of stuff like that. You can randomly place the AdSense banner at certain points all over the post. You can float it back and forth on either side. It does a lot of cool things. I would recommend that you do a Google search for Ad Injection Plugin. It'll point you right to it. The url was too long to stick in a slide so I'm just going to tell you to go Google it. Check it out. It's a really cool plugin. Placement of Ad Code Let's talk about the placement of the actual ad code. When I'm talking about what you see in your browser, we're now talking about your actual source code your html code. Generally, the first ad that shows up in the html code is usually going to display the best ads. Basically, if you just go from the top down, if you start at the very top of your source code and you go until you find the first AdSense spot in your code, you're going to find that that usually gets your better paying ads and your most relevant ads. You can display up to three larger AdSense slots on the same page, according to the Terms of Service with Google, but it doesn't necessarily mean that all three are going to be paying you re the same. Typically, the first one is going to get the best performance. What you want to try to do is position that ad code to perform the best. You want it to be in the F pattern. You want it to be in the most relevant spot that gets the most clicks. You want that ad code to show up first in your source code. I know this might be a little technical, but this is something that is really not that difficult to do. If you want to post something in the inner circle and get some help on this, we'll be more than happy to help you do it. Also keep in mind that the position in your source code does not necessarily have to mean where it shows up on the actual page because using CSS positioning, which is simply your style sheets and a div layer, you can actually position it anywhere you want on the page. Even if the source code shows up first in the code, it doesn t necessarily need to be the first banner or the topmost banner on your actual page. Page 12 of 31
Just keep in mind that typically, the source code for AdSense the code that comes first generally gets the best performance. You can balance that out on the site. Ad Colors A quick comment about the ad colors. A lot of people have talked about this out there on the Internet. Generally, setting your link color and your backgrounds on your ad so that they match the style of your site tends to work best. This has been in my testing, especially for in content ads. Let's say you have that banner slot that's right in the top of your content or maybe you have it top left aligned right in the middle of your post. If you can make those links in those AdSense ads look exactly the same regarding color and font as the links that you put in the actual post, then it's going to look like it's part of your site and they're very relevant. You're going to get more clicks that way. If you have image ads coming into these ad slots, then it really doesn't matter because you're going to have a graphical banner there. This is primarily going to be relevant to you if you're having link units or the links inside the ad slots. You guys know what typical AdSense banners look like. Typically, let's say if you have white with a dark blue link, make your AdSense with a white background and a dark blue link. Now the only time you might want to radically change that is if you happen to have a site which is not using the white with black text. Let's say you have a dark background. Then, you're probably going to make your banners for AdSense have a dark background. Again, make it match the overall theme and I think you're going to find that it works better. You might want to run some split testing on this and find out if making it stand out by making it completely different works for you. In my testing, it works best in the F pattern locations and actually matching your site. Now, let's talk about the custom channels. Hopefully we're not going too quickly here, but I wanted to cover a lot of different tactics on the webinar tonight. Custom Channels Page 13 of 31
Custom channels is a really important component of AdSense that a lot of people don't use. When they get their ad tags out of AdSense, a lot of people simply create the right size. They copy and paste their source code and they just go over to the blog and paste it in, and they think they've done the job. Unfortunately, what happens with that is that they've done a couple things. 1) You can't really track and find out which of these banners is performing the best. 2) You are not allowing outside advertisers, who are the people buying these ads in the first place, to target these ad spots. What you want to do is you want to use custom channels, which are really a tracking tool. You can assign a plain English name to each of the banner positions on your site. It allows you to track which ads are making the most money. You can actually run performance reports on those individual custom channels to find out is the ad in the top of your sidebar performing better than the one inside your post? How well is the one down at the bottom of your post performing? You can find these things out and, therefore, it will allow you to do a lot more accurate testing by using these custom channels. It also allows you to make these channels targetable by outside advertisers. When a company is coming in to Google's AdWords system, which is basically the flip side of AdSense, and they are looking for sites to advertise on, they can now target your site specifically. Typically, when an advertiser targets your site specifically, you're going to get a higher amount of pay than a general network ad. Just keep that in mind. You're going to want to test that and make sure. Generally, more people, including myself, find that when you allow your custom channels to be targetable, you're going to make out better that way. Page 14 of 31
Here's a quick screen shot of some of the custom channels that I have inside my AdSense account. You want to name them something that makes sense. Some of these are internal because they're not targetable. For example, on this top one here you can see it says "Bottom BYOPC." That stands for Build Your Own PC. An outside advertiser is probably not going to know what I mean by BYOPC. I should probably change that actually. Some of the other ones are Forum Bottom, Forum Sidebar actually those aren't active anymore PCMech Post, Home Page, Top Articles. These are all custom channel names that allow me to know exactly where these banners spots are showing up so that I can track it independently. When you go to create a new ad unit, all you have to do is choose the custom channel. It's right there on the same screen. You are going to name the ad slot, choose the size, allow it to do text or image or whatever you want to do there. I would recommend text and image, by the way. Then, you choose your custom channel. If you don't have any made yet, you just hit the link to create a new one. Page 15 of 31
Let's say you're going to create an ad unit for the top of your sidebar. As you're creating that, you create a new custom channel for the top of your sidebar or "Top Sidebar," or whatever you want to call it, and assign it that custom channel. That's really all there is. It's very simple. The other thing is that you want to make your primary channels targetable to advertisers. The way you do that is you go into the settings for the custom channel and hit the check box which says "Targeting." It says, "Show this custom channel to advertisers as a targetable ad placement." You can check that off. Then, you are displayed with a few settings, such as you can say where the ad actually appears, what the location of that ad is, and you can give it a description. This description is something that you want to type in in plain English. Quite frankly, you want to put your marketer's hat on here and you want to make that ad slot really interesting to outside advertisers. These are the people who are going to be reading this. When they're out there looking for sites to direct ad placement of via the Google advertising system, you want them to be able to see this and say, "Okay. This might be a really great spot for my banner to go." Section Targeting Next tactic. Once again, I hope I'm not going too fast here, but we're about a half hour in and I just want to make sure that I can fit everything in. It looks like we're going to very easily get this done in the amount of time that I allotted for tonight, so we should be doing well here. Section Targeting. Basically, as a lot of you guys know, Google AdSense works via context. It is a contextual ad system so it scans the key words the words on the page and, therefore, it Page 16 of 31
looks for relevant ads to put inside of your content. Most of us have stuff on our sites which is not necessarily relevant to the post the person is reading. We have text in our footers. We have a header menu. We might have stuff in our sidebar. Those things can distract the accuracy of the Google targeting sometimes. What you can do is use section targeting in order to tell Google Spider which sections of your page to key word target. What this does is it basically puts the magnifying glass on the particular parts of your page that you want Google to look at when it comes to targeting AdSense ads. You can have it look at just the post and maybe not your nav bar, for example. The way this works is pretty simple. Basically, it looks like an html comment. You can see there Google_Ad_Section_Start and then the same basic thing, only you put "End." Anything that you want to do section targeting for, you just put those two things one at the beginning and one at the end. <!-- google_ad_section_start --> <!-- google_ad_section_end --> For example, a really common thing to do with WordPress would be to edit your theme. You would want to look at the single dot PHP file, which is the template for your actual posts, and right above the function that pulls in your post content, you just put this little comment there (Google_Ad_Section_Start) and right below it, you put Google_Ad_Section_End. That will throw the section targeting in right around the actual post. You probably also will want to include your headline, by the way. So don't just think you want to only get the post itself. You probably want to grab your headline as well. This can really help to find targeting of AdSense on your post and make the AdSense banners more relevant. One thing to keep in mind is that the results of this are not immediate. It's not like you're going to put these things into your theme and all of a sudden you are going to see your AdSense spike up to the roof. It's not going to happen that way. This is based on the Google Spider doing its job. It might take a little bit of time. Also, the results might not be particularly pronounced. You don't really know. This is one of many tools to Page 17 of 31
increase the accuracy of AdSense on your site and it really cannot hurt you to do it, and it's simple. It's called Section Targeting. Ad Blocking Now, let's talk a little bit about Ad Blocking. Up until recently, I didn't really incorporate any ad blocking and this is a mistake. It's one thing to optimize to get the best ads on your site, but it's another to block out the crappy ones. It's like you have this pool of advertisers who are out there looking to advertise on sites like yours. Some of them might have really low payout, they might be just low quality sites, or you just don't like them for a number of reasons. Maybe they are a direct competitor of yours and you just don't want them advertising on your site for one reason or another. You can block those advertisers out so that they cannot appear on your site. When you do this in a strategic way, you can actually increase the relevancy in the overall RPM (which is revenue per thousand) by blocking out the crap from your site. You can block basically the unrelated ads to increase your CTR (which is click through ratio). There are a few different kinds of ad blocking that are built into AdSense. The first one is based on the advertiser url. When you look at an AdSense ad, you'll typically see a domain name right underneath it that is actually the advertiser's url. One thing you want to make sure you never do is click the ad to get that link. You never want to click through your own ads. It's against the Terms of Service. You'll get banned quickly if you do that, so don't do it. I'm going to give you a tool in a minute that Google actually has where you can find out the url of an advertiser on your site without clicking on it. You can block out competitor ads and you can also block out what is called "low quality MFA" ads, which is Made For AdSense sites. Generally, these type of sites are now outlawed by Google AdSense. They don't want a page which pretty much has no content on it and that is built only for AdSense. However, you still have them out there. I found one just the other day. I was looking at the ad. I used the tool that I'm getting ready to show you, and I found the site and it was crap. There was pretty much nothing there. It was one of those sites where you click through and it looked like another page of search results with the key word directly in it. It was just a bunch of ads. It was a crappy site, probably with a very low Page 18 of 31
amount of revenue for me. I went ahead and blocked it. This is the kind of thing that can help you filter out the shaft, so to speak, and really get the best ads on your site. That tool that I was telling you about is called the Google AdSense Preview Tool. This is something that is actually made by Google. It's a fairly old tool actually. Its Windows only and only Internet Explorer. Basically, it downloads as a registry file. It's a.reg file. You'll double click the.reg file and it'll run you through some confirmations to make sure you're not going to screw up your computer. You just install it. It makes a few registry changes and then inside of Internet Explorer, you will now have this tool accessible via a right click. What you can do is go to any page of your own site and right click. Then, you'll have the Google AdSense Preview Tool available in your contextual menu. It will actually show you the ads that are relevant to that page. You can see in this screen shot how I've used that tool on PCMech.com on one of my articles. I pulled up some of the ads that would be targeted there. Then, you can check off any of the ones where you want to find out the url. You'll have an option that says, "Show Selected urls." Hit that and it will actually give you the full url that the person will come to when they click on that banner. What this tool allows you to do is you can just scan these things and find ads that look like they're stupid like they're not relevant they look like they're going to detract from the overall quality of your site. You can find out what the url is and you can go over to your AdSense account and throw it into the blocker. You basically put that url or that domain name into your list of blocked urls and that ad will not show up on your site anymore. Page 19 of 31
This is something you're going to do over time. When you're on your own site and you happen to see a really crappy ad from AdSense that's not relevant and it happens sometimes you want to see what you can do to block that. The one exception to that might be if when you look at your categories and you find that particular category is paying you really well, maybe you'll want to keep it there. It's up to you. This brings us into the blocking of general categories. This is another way that you can block ads in your AdSense account. In the right screen shot here, you'll see a list of the categories that were in my AdSense account such as Arts & Entertainment, Baby Care & Hygiene, Beauty & Personal Care, right on down the line and you can block these things. Interestingly, it gives you your stats based on the last 30 days and you can find out what percentage of your displays from AdSense are falling into these categories, as well as what percentage of your income is coming from these categories. What you can actually do is go through these and you can find out if maybe a category you really didn't see as being necessarily relevant to your site is actually paying you pretty well, then you Page 20 of 31
might not want to block it. If you're doing the specific advertising blocking that I was just talking about, you may want to leave those advertisers in if they fall within that category. That being said, sometimes you're going to find that you've got some really poor performing categories. For some reason, they end up on your site and they're just not related at all. You can see here on the screen shot that I have blocked the Baby Care & Hygiene because it has nothing to do with a tech site. I also blocked the Beauty & Personal Care. It looks like only about 1.1% of my impressions in the last 30 days were in that category. Still, that's a wasted 1% because a bunch of geeks don't give a crap about Beauty & Personal Care. You can also see that while it was only showing 1.1% in that category, the revenue was about 0.2% which tells you that this is not a well performing ad category at all. It's playing more than it s paying me and it just doesn't make any sense to have it so I blocked the category. You can go right on down the line like that and you can use these numbers and actually say, "Well, I don't know why that category is showing up on my site, but it's certainly not paying me well." Just hit the block button and any advertisers in that category are not going to be able to show up on your site anymore. The next way to do blocking is by sensitive categories. Now, sensitive categories are very similar to what I just showed you except that you're taking the typically sensitive or potentially offending categories out of the mix, such as religion, sex and politics, and I think gambling and some other ones are on there. If you just simply don't want those kinds of ads on your site, you can block them all or you can let a few through. It's really up to you, but the AdSense gives you the ability to block out those sensitive categories from your site. The last type of blocking is by ad network. This blocks by ad network kind of duh, right? The short story here is that there are a lot of third party networks that will pipe inventory into the AdSense program. Therefore, it's just an inventory thing for them. So what happens is that that kind of introduces a bunch of middlemen. Not only is the ad network getting paid, but then Google AdSense takes a cut. So you're really not going to be getting paid as much through an ad network. I don't block ad networks. That being said, maybe one day I'll test it and see what happens. Page 21 of 31
You can actually block a specific ad network. There is a pretty big list of ad networks inside of AdSense so you'd have to have some kind of inside knowledge to know if a particular ad network is just delivering you garbage. You can block it from the AdSense program and it will not show up in your account anymore. Adsense for Search Next, I want to talk about AdSense Search for a little bit. This is a really powerful way to go and a lot of people overlook it. Typically, the RPM (again, revenue per thousand page views) is going to be three to five times higher with AdSense Search than the typical AdSense banner. That means that when somebody does a search with the custom search engine on your blog, if they click on one of those ads, typically it's going to deliver three to five times the revenue in general than your primary banner ads. The thing to keep in mind is it does kind of offset itself because you're typically not going to get as many impressions on your search results page as your entire site is going to get. It's not like you're going to all of a sudden, magically, 3x your entire revenue for the month this way, but you are going to be increasing your bottom line and you're also going to be giving your readers a pretty darn good search engine because the WordPress search the built in search inside a WordPress is pretty decent, but it's limited. It doesn't do a lot of the cool stuff that Google can do. Not only that you can help people find other parts of your site that are not necessarily powered by WordPress. I'll be mentioning that in a minute. You can use AdSense for Search as a way to value ad for your readers to allow them to find what they're looking for on your site and in the process, you are actually able to make more money with the ads that are displayed in that search. The first thing you want to make sure you do when you're creating your search unit for your AdSense account would be to make sure that you limit the search to your own Web site. Obviously! I mean you don't necessarily want to repeat Google.com on your own blog. That's not going to help you at all. What you want to do is select only the sites you select with the radio button. Then, you want to enter your own domain name there so that the search that you're creating is only going to search your own Web site. When you display the search results, you want to make sure you display the search results on your own Web site and not send your reader off to Google.com. The way you do that is to select Page 22 of 31
the "on my Web site" using an iframe option when you select where the search results are going to show up. When you do that, what's going to happen is you're going to plug in a url where you want those search results to show up. Google is going to then give you a little block of code which contains an iframe. You're going to go over to your site and you're going to paste that iframe on that particular url and there you go! What you're now going to have is Google powered search results that are now showing up on your Web site, searching your Web site. The good thing is that you are going to have ads in it. I have my ads set to display top and right when they search over on PCMech.com. It works pretty. Well, like I said, I'm getting three to five times the RPMs than I am with the main banners on the main site. Here's a screen shot of what I've done on PCMech.com. You can head right over to PCMech.com any time and see this. I've put a search engine right on the front of it. This is not something you typically see blogs do. This is an idea I got the other day. Actually, it's probably been a couple of weeks now. If you just think about the mindset of the person coming to the Home Page, what are they looking for? They're looking for what you can do to help them, right? They are not always interested in the recent posts. Some are and, obviously, my PCMech Home Page has the recent posts listed. I would never remove them. Page 23 of 31
I've got this search engine put in right there at the front. It says, "What can we help you find?" So a lot of my people come into PCMech.com with some type of a problem they are looking for help with. They can plug that right into the Google custom search and run a search. They're going to get the search results that are coming in from my own Web site so it helps bring them deep into my own archives. It also serves very targeted ads for them because the ads are going to be based on the key word they are entering into that search engine. I am going to get a much higher click rate, as well as an RPM, inside those search results. Another thing the little red arrow is pointing to on the slide is how I put examples in there with basically suggestive searches. In my case, I put "build a PC and sell a hard drive the iphone 4G" which is just a hot topic installing memory, things like that. It's very important here that if it's against your Terms of Service with Google, you don't want to put any suggestive searches into the search box. You do not want to pre-fill the search box with anything, but it's not against the Terms of Service to put a suggestive search or examples underneath the entire search forum. It's just a way to kind of help them understand what the thing is for and kind of guide them to what you want them to do with that search engine. Here's another position that I've put together on PCMech.com which is right underneath the post. It's basically like a little call to action. They're coming down, they're reading the post and they get to the bottom and it says, "Stil1 need help? Type your key words here." So if the article did not help them with exactly what they're looking for, they can now run a search and they can now find what they're looking for on the Web site. Page 24 of 31
Again, I've got the suggestive searches in there and the whole thing so it's basically a call to action after the blog post. Every time they do that, I'm serving highly targeted stuff to them, plus I can get them into the archives deeper with PCMech.com, Another thing which is kind of cool that I haven't mentioned here on the slides at least I don't think I did was that you can actually go into your reports I think it's on the analytic side and you can actually find out what people are plugging into that search engine. You can find out what people want by basing it on what they are typing into that search engine on your site. Therefore, if you're under-serving particular areas of content that people really want, you can then create new stuff to target what they're looking for. Some of the benefits of running this type of thing is, again, you're going to get the higher RPM ads and the results. It allows your users to find what they need on your site. It's not all about the ads. It's all about helping people, too, and this allows them to do it. Also, Google can basically index anything, right? The WordPress-powered search is only going to search what is inside of the WordPress. If you're running anything like a forum or anything that is using different software, but it's on your same domain, it won't search that, but Google can. As long as Google can get to it and get its Indexable by Google, you are now putting everything into your search engine When you go to my search engine on PCMech.com and you search for something, it's going to search not only my WordPress powered blog, but it's going to search my Vbulletin powered forum and put everything into the same search results and give them whatever is most relevant. I really don't care if they are on my blog or on my forums as long as they're on my Web site, right? Top Performing Content Okay, now what about top performing content? Getting the best ads is going to depend on writing content that advertisers want to target on your site. If you're writing crap or if you're writing about your pet dog well, actually dog stuff might work for you but you know, if it's just a personal journal type of thing, advertisers might not be interested in that type of content. Typically, there is going to be niches out there and markets out there and typical verticals out there that advertisers are looking to target. If you put your content into that niche, you are going to get the benefits of higher paying ads on your site. It should be pretty obvious. Page 25 of 31
It's a good idea to monitor which posts are performing the best on your site. At least on PCMech.com, we are posting anywhere from two to three times per day, five days a week. Sometimes we post on the weekend but two to three times a day. With that flow of content, I need to regularly look at my Analytics account and find out which posts are performing the best. You can limit that report to say 30 days or whatever and you can find out, "Wow! My visitors are really interested in this particular thing." You can combine not only your top performing posts, but the information that you're going to get from your custom searches your search units and you can really tailor your site not only to advertisers that are paying you the most, but to your readers and what they're looking for. That's a good sense of demand. Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated so this makes for a really powerful combination. If you look inside Google Analytics did I already say that? Getting the best ads depends on writing content that advertisers want to target. That's funny. Let me go to the next slide here. This is a screen shot of Google Analytics inside of my account for PCMech.com. Obviously, I have grayed out the actual figures so that I can abide by the Terms of Service, but you can see that it lists my Home page, my Build Your Own PC Tutorial, and I've got my software category. I've got a post here which is pretty recent about the secret, ultra-low cost Verizon Wireless plans. That was a pretty well performing post on the site in terms of AdSense. What does that tell me when I'm looking at it? It tells me that mobile is a huge category. Page 26 of 31
Now, obviously as a tech guy, I already know that. If you didn't this is the kind of thing like Wow! That's a really hot paying topic, right? All of a sudden, I know that we're going to try to put more mobile posts on the site because they pay really well installing a Hard Drive Step-By- Step and right on down the line. I can tell what is performing the best. A few tips on this. With that report I just showed you, you can do a column sort on it by highest ecpm. That ecpm is basically your estimated cost per thousand. It's basically kind of like the RPM thing. Basically, what you're finding out is how much you're being paid per thousand on these posts. So, you search the column and you find out what the highest paying ones are in terms of ecpm. You're going to get some really high figures there. When I ran this sort on mine, I was getting some articles that were paying me over $2,000 ecpm. Obviously, that's not accurate. I am not actually getting paid $2,000. What happened is I happened to have one or two visits to the posts back in my archives. It just happened to get a click on the AdSense ad so it clicked the ratio through the roof. Still, it shows what the highest paying key words are here. You're going to have to think a little bit when you're looking at this. When you sort by highest ecpm and you look through that information, you can find out really well what the highest paying key words are, what the highest paying categories are, and what advertisers are targeting with the highest paying ads. Then, you not only can target your blog for the advertisers to get more money, but if people are advertising to that market, it also means that there is a big audience out there demanding it. Otherwise, these advertisers wouldn't be paying all that money which means that you can actually increase your traffic by targeting these topics as well. You want to keep a running log of your best performing posts. Keep a Google spreadsheet. The data stays in Analytics all the time, but you have to run the portal all the time. You can save a customer report if you want inside of Analytics and it accesses quickly. You can just keep a spreadsheet and keep track of these things. You can spot trends in the subject matter which is working really well. A quick note about key word research. This is obviously a big topic, but it's also quite important to AdSense because it is a key word driven ad system. The Google AdWords KeyWord tool, which is freely available for everybody to use, is a good tool to help you find out what to target in terms of increasing your AdSense revenue. Page 27 of 31