Forum55

Google Adsense

2020-07-05T06:00:00.001-07:00

Google Adsense is easy to explain. Google Adsense allows Web masters to make money from their websites by allowing Google to display ads on their web pages.

From a web master perspective all you need to do is to copy a little JavaScript code which Google provide and that's it. When someone opens the page Google will display ads that relate to the web page content- context sensitive ads.

If someone clicks on an ad then Google charges the advertiser a click fee an splits it between Google and the Webmaster. Without a doubt Google Adsense is the easiest way of making money from a website.

Adsense has become so popular that some webmasters concentrate solely on Adsense for making money with their websites. Google Adsense offers a webmaster several unique advantages that affiliate programs don't:

Very easy to set up . You can include your Adsense code as part of your website template.
Only one company to deal with - Google
No longer need to spend hours trying to find matching affiliate programs.

The main disadvantage with Adsense is that it is too easy to become totally dependant on it and totally at the mercy of Google. A change in policy could devastate your income.

Google Adsense Stats

2007-07-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

Google Adsense Stats

Once you are up and running with Google Adsense you can login to the Adsense control panel an see how you are doing.

The main Page displays an overview as shown in the figure below:

You will notice that I've blanked out the figures as Google TOS states that you can't reveal them. However what I want the screenshot for is to explain the stats and what they mean.

First lets define the columns for the Content stats:

Impressions - The number of times an ad unit is displayed on a page. If you have 3 ad units per page then one page view is equal to 3 impressions.

Clicks- A click corresponds to a user’s click on any ad on a page.

Clickthrough rate - The clickthrough rate (CTR) is the number of clicks an ad unit receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is shown (impressions).

Effective CPM - Cost per 1000 impressions. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the CPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00. From a publisher's perspective, CPM is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programmes.

Observations

Although the stats are real time stats you will notice that there is a delay between the updates. Don't be too worried about seeing anomalies or stats that don't change for several hours and suddenly seem to jump.

Also the updates of the different stats aren't always synchronised. It is common to see large earning for few clicks or low earnings for large number of impressions during the course of a day. This arises. for example, because the earnings field has been updated but not the Impressions.

The stats are totally reliable when they become yesterdays stats and a new "todays stats" begins. So it makes no sense monitoring the stats during the day as they are often meaningless. You should do all analysis based on previous days stats.

CTR and eCPM Calculations

Here are some example calculations and what they mean:

channel	Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM	Earnings
	1000	100	10%	200	$200.00
c1	300	35	12%	133	$40
c2	600	45	8%	100	$60
c3	100	20	20%	1000	$100

The interesting columns are the CTR and the eCPM.

The CTR should ideally be high which means that the ads are getting clicked. You should be aware that the CTR can be affected by adding additional ad units to you pages.

For example if you had just one page containing 1 ad unit and the CTR was 10%. If you added another ad unit to the page you could see the CTR fall to 5%, as now each page view is 2 page impressions.

The idea when adding extra add units is that the number of clicks on the ads increases. This may well be the case but still result in a lower CTR as the following illustration shows.

Page views	Page impressions	ad units/page	Clicks	Page CTR
100	100	1	20	20%
100	200	2	20	10%
100	200	2	30	15%
100	300	3	30	10%

In the above table I have kept the page views constant and varied the ad units/page and the number of clicks to show the effect on CTR.

Therefore to understand changes in CTR you need to be aware of any changes you have made to the number of ad units. If you were getting a CTR of 10% (yellow highlights in table above) and then decided to decrease the number of ads from 3 to 1 you may find your CTR has jumped to 20%. The question is .. is that good? Well not if you are now only getting only 20 clicks (green highlights in table above) as opposed to the previous 30 clicks.

What affects CTR?

Increasing the the number of ad units per page doesn't normally increase you CTR as shown above but does generally increase the number of clicks ( what you really want).

The position of your ad units and the colour scheme you choose have a marked impact on the CTR. I have seen CTR go from 2% to 10% by changing the ad unit positions and colour scheme.

When conducting tests yourself on the best ad unit placement and the best ad unit colour scheme then please remember you can only compare the resulting CTR if you keep the number of ad units per page constant!

Effective CPM

CPM is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programmes. I use it mainly to compare page performance as each page can be made assigned to its own channel.

Basically a high eCPM means that the page is displaying some very high paying ads. You should take a look at the high eCPM pages and see what keywords they target and create additional pages based on the same/similar keywords.

In addition if we can find away to increase the CTR of the channels with high eCPM then our earnings should increase. When advertises bid for adds they pay a Price per click which Google share with the publisher of the ads and becomes EPC (earnings per click) .

EPC is determined by the advertiser when they bid on the ads. It is not determined by the publisher, but as a publisher it is wise to target high EPC keywords/areas. In the tables below I've added an extra column (earnings per click- EPC) to illustrate this.

channel	Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM	Earnings	EPC
	1000	100	10%	200	$200.00	$2
c1	500	50	10	100	$50	$1
c2	500	50	10	300	$150	$3

If we increase the CTR of both channels by the same amount ( 5%) and see what it does to the earnings. You can see that the channel with the higher eCPM had the greatest impact on the earnings.

channel	Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM	Earnings	EPC
	1000	150	10%	200	$300.00	$2
c1	500	75	15%	100	$75	$1
c2	500	75	15%	300	$225	$3

Summary

To maximise earnings concentrate on increasing the number of pages with a high eCPM and try to increase the CTR on those pages

Positioning your ads for the best Results

2007-07-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Positioning your ads for the best Results

Many newcomers to Adsense copy the Google ad placement and format and place their Adsense ads on the right hand side of the page using the very familiar skyscraper format.

Although used by Google this is probably not the best positioning and format for achieving a high click through rate. It is the most unobtrusive and hence it is probably why Google us it.

Interestingly Yahoo and MSN take a different approach. The sponsored results (as they call them) are the first things you see on the search results page. This should give you an idea of where to place your ads.

Google themselves provide a web page heat map which identifies areas of a web page that attract the most visitor attention (see below). It looks something like that below:

The red and orange areas indicate the best placement areas for your ads. Google point out, and it is important to bear in mind, that the area of concentration changes as the visitor reads the page.

If the visitor finds the article very informative then he may completely ignore the ads until he has finished the article, and hence ads at the bottom of the page should them perform better.

It is important not to over fixate on the money but to try to please your visitor. The ads when used correctly will ad value to your page if used incorrectly they will just irritate the visitor.

Recommendations For Ad Positions

It is difficult to get it right on every page, and it is too time consuming to experiment on each page. Therefore you need to standardise on a given ad placement. The placement I use and make part of my page template is top left and page bottom as shown in the fig below (ad positions in orange):

This may of course not be the best for you and you should experiment yourself with one or two pages. I do vary the ad placement when I have pages with lots of content and/or pictures/diagrams/illustrations. If the page starts with bullet points or has an header before the end of the ad block then I tend to adopt one of these layouts.

I want the visitor to focus on the content and then the ads and not the the other way around. The reasoning is simple. I may write an article on say "Cascading Style Sheets" which may include references to CSS editors, Syntax etc.

Now there are many tools, books etc that anyone writing CSS could use and the reader may be interested in purchasing one. This is the job of the ads. I could make a list and make some recommendations, I may even do that as well.

The ads however will augment that list and ad value to the page and they have even more value in that they change automatically. They provide, in effect, dynamic content.

Google Adsense Channels

2007-07-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Google Adsense Channels

Adsense channels allow you to track the performance of your Adsense effort. There are two types of channels :Custom Channels and URL Channels.

Custom Channels

Custom Channels require that you add channel-specific ad code into your HTML .They can be used to track the performance of individual pages or groups of pages. However there main use is to track performance for groups of pages.

The pages can be grouped using various criteria like page theme, Adsense positions, Adsense types, Adsense colours etc. For example if you wanted to see what ads performed best .. horizontal or vertical.

You would paste two ad channels called horizontal and vertical and generate the script for each ad type using the control panel. Then you ad the vertical script to the pages that will take the vertical ads and the horizontal script to the pages that will display the horizontal ad.

After a few days you should see the results.

The Problem with these type of channels is that to include a page in a channel you need to edit the page itself as each channel has a different channel code. I use them mainly for tracking the performance of sites.

Because you only require a single Adsense account regardless of the number of websites you have. I assign each site a unique Adsense channel. The screen shot below show how I monitor several sites using custom channels:

You can also see that my main site (build your own website- byo) is split into 3 channels:

byhohome - only on home page to monitor performance

byolu - channel for monitor link unit ads.

byo- channel for monitoring all other pages of site.

I have two channels for this site (money making websites) mmw-home for home page and mmw for all other pages. The niche and oehome are for two other websites.

How To Create Custom Channels?

When creating custom channels you should use descriptive names for each channel, so that they are easily identifiable in your reports. There are two steps to creating them:

Create of the custom channel name .......... and

Add the channel-specific code to your web pages.

To create a new custom channel name:

From the links below the AdSense for content or AdSense for search tab, click Channels

Scroll down to the Manage Custom Channels section

In the "Create New Channel' field, enter a channel name that will help you to identify this channel later e.g. horizontal or vertical.

Click Create new channel to add the new channel to the Active Channels list.

To add the channel-specific code to your page:

Click the appropriate product Adsense for content or Adsense for search tab

Select the add type and other selections as appropriate.

From the Channel drop-down list, select the appropriate channel for this code. The default is no channel channel.

Copy-and-paste the ad layout code into your web pages. Tip!

I always copy the code into a notepad file and label give the file a descriptive name like.. ga-250-white-mmw.txt. Where : 250 is the ad size, white is the colour scheme and mmw is the channel name. I can then reuse it when I need to.

URL Channels

URL Channels allow you to track the clickthrough performance of your pages without needing to modify any of your pages. By simply entering the URL of a domain, directory or specific page, you can start tracking groups of pages or individual pages in a matter of seconds.

URL channels can be used to track individual pages, or groups of pages.

To track a single page then enter the full path of the page in the channel setup. (see below):

e.g. mysite.com/test.htm

To track all pages below a specific directory : enter a partial URL in the channel setup. (see below):

e.g. mysite.com/subdirectory

To track only pages across a specific subdomain : enter the subdomain in the channel setup. (see below):
e.g. tests.mysite.com

To track all impressions and clicks across the domain (including any existing subdomains), enter the domain name without the 'www'.

e.g. mysite.com

To Track home page impressions enter the full url of the home page in the channel setup. (see below):

e.g. mysite.com/index.htm

To create a URL channel:

Click the Channels link below the AdSense for content tab.

In the URL text field, enter the URL that you would like to track (see above).

Click Create new channel .

The new URL channel will begin tracking data almost immediately.

Channel Numbers

Channels are available for both Adsense for content and Adsense for search.You are currently limited to 200 custom and 200 url channels i.e. total of 400 channels for content and the same number again for Search.

Adding Google Adsense To Your Web Pages

2007-07-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

Adding Google Adsense To Your Web Pages

There a many ads on the web for ready made Google Adsense Sites. However its really very easy to add Google ads to your web pages as we shall see.

The Google Adsense code is basically a JavaScript. The code is generated by Google and all you need to do is to copy the code and paste it on your web page. I always copy the code into notepad and store in locally on my machine and that way I can reuse it without having to get it from Google each time.

Google allows you to customise the look and feel of you Adsense ad with different colours and backgrounds, sizes and channels. When I create a new ad, perhaps with a different colour, I paste it into notepad and save it with a descriptive name . All Google Adsense ads for each web site I manage are stored in separate directories. The directories looks like this:

Where 250 is the ad size, byo is the website, white refers to the background colour etc.

Here are the contents of one of those files. Notice the comments at the top at bottom (marked in yellow). These I added to make the ads easier to find and so that I know which ones they are.

In addition to adding comments I also often enclose the code in a table so that I can position it correctly. I make the table width and height match the Google ad size. In the code above I would add the table as shown below ( marked in red).

You should notice that the above code is set to align to the left. I can position it on the page by simply changing it to right or center.

To insert the code into you page position your cursor in the location you want the code to appear and then switch to source or HTML mode and then copy and paste from the notepad file. Once done switch back to normal mode.

It is a good idea to preview the code just to make sure it is positioned correctly. However the preview on your local machine doesn't display more than one ad unit on the page and this will contain a public service ad. This isn't really a problem as all we really want to do is to make sure the page appears ok.

Starting with Google Adsense

2007-07-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

What is Adsense ?

Google Adsense is an advertising program were website owners allow ads to be placed on their website by Google. These ads are based on the website/page content and the Geographic location of the visitor (so called contextual ads). When a visitor clicks on these ads the advertiser is charged a fee which Google share with the website owner.

Adsense is in effect the opposite of Adwords, like heads and tails. A website owner uses the Adsense program to generate money with a website. An advertiser uses the Adwords program to advertise a product or service.

Adsense Components

The Adsense program currently consists of four components.

Adsense for Content (standard one you use)
Adsense for search
Ad link Units
Referrals NEW!

Adsense For Content

Google Adsense technology analyzes the web page content and serves ads relevant to that content. The ads , in effect, add value to the content. As the content changes so do the ads.

In order to place ads on a web page all you need to do is to paste Google supplied code on the page and your done. You have the flexibility to adjust the ads so that they match the colour and style of your page and they can be placed anywhere on your page.

Adsense for Search

Google search allows you to put a search facility on your site that is powered by Google. Visitors can search the Web or just your website. Not only that if the visitor clicks on a Adsense ad of the search results page then you receive a share of the click cost.

As with Adsense for Content. In order to place Google search on a web page all you need to do is to paste Google supplied code on the page and your done. You have the flexibility to adjust the search page so that it blends in with the colour and style of your page and they can be placed anywhere on your page.

It also gives you the ability to know what your users are searching for on your site? You can get a Top Queries report listing the 25 most common searches conducted through your search boxes which you can use to identify additional topics to add to your site.

Adsense Link units

Link units are links to ad pages. They appear like a navigation bar on your site with each link pointing to a page of related ads. Therefore the visitor must click on the link and then click on one of the ads on that page in order for your site to generate any revenue.

Referrals

These are new (November/dec 2005) are are normal affiliate programs. Google are currently offering commissions for referrals to Google Adsense and the Firefox web browser.

Multiple Ad units

You can place up to three ad units per page plus one link unit and one referral button per product.

Preparing Your Website and Applying

2007-07-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

Preparing Your Website and Applying

In order to start displaying Google Adsense on your website you need first to apply to Google. This is simple matter of filling out a form online with your details, and your website details etc.

However before you are accepted Google will evaluate your website. In true Google fashion Google want to ensure that your website is fit for its ads. This evaluation is done normally automatically, but in borderline cases, it may involve a person.

There is no need to get too concerned about the application. Google is basically looking for good content websites run by honest web masters. No Tricks no cheating and you'll be ok.

If you are rejected you will need to sort out the problems with the site and then re-apply. The idea is not to be rejected. Therefore...

Make sure your website is ready by observing the following:

Google ads cannot appear on personal sites
Make sure you are using your own domain name and paid web hosting.
Ensure that you have at least 25 good quality content Pages. The more the better.
Ensure that the site theme is clear and that you aren't jumping from one idea to another.
Ensure that your site navigation is clear and you have no broken links.
If you have any banners for other products it is a good idea to remove them all or at least reduce them as much as possible.
Remove any Popups or similar devices.
If you are using any third party on site search facility then remove it.
Ensure that have a contact me page and that it works.
Remove excessive affiliate links from your pages
The home page should be completely free from banner ads, affiliate links and any type of selling.
Your site should be suitable for a general audience and not be directed at any of the standard vices.
The site should not contain any competing ads from Yahoo, msn etc.
Wait until you are in the Google index and that Google shows at least 25 pages in its index.

You only need to apply to Google once and you can include Google ads on any other sites that you own. However ensure that those sites also follow the above guidelines. above for new sites or existing sites.

Now you are ready to apply:

Go to the application page... https://www.google.com/adsense/application-1
After creating a login for your AdSense account, fill in the application form. Apply for both AdSense for content and AdSense for search.
You will receive an e-mail requesting confirmation..... Confirm it.
A Google spider or Google partners spider evaluates your site and you should receive a reply within 24 hours.
If accepted you will receive your login information.
Log into your account and read and agree the AdSense Terms and Conditions agreement.