Saturday, December 6, 2008

Adsense Insider Part 2


Here's the link to today's lesson online.
Don't forget you can see working demos there.

http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/day2a.htm

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High Value Keyword Report Download

You can download your bonus keyword report from the link at the bottom of this page. As you'll learn in a moment, knowing which keywords are worth the most is an important part of maximizing your AdSense earnings
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First an apology: there's a bit of math ahead!

Yesterday we looked at AdWords and learnt how AdSense is Google's AdWords syndication program that posts AdWords ads on context-targeted websites:

Ads about binoculars appear on web pages with information about binoculars on them.

It makes sense doesn't it!

Today we are going to look at the factors that affect how much money you will get from Google if you sign up (and are accepted for) the AdSense program, paying detailed attention to those
areas that are controllable - because many aren't.

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The AdSense revenue equation
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Revenue is generated for you when someone clicks on an AdSense ad on your site. Google charges the advertiser for the click thru and shares this revenue with you.

The amount you earn from an ad is given by the following equation

Income PER AD=

Click thru price X
Fractional pay out X
Click thru rate X
Page traffic X
Appearance frequency

The CLICK THRU PRICE is the price the advertiser is bidding to place an ad under the AdWords program and is determined by a complex real time automatic auction process: Google advertisers set a maximum price they are prepared to bid for keywords and they usually pay less than this.

The FRACTIONAL PAYOUT RATE is the percentage of its revenues that Google pays out to AdSense partners. THIS FIGURE IS NOT DISCLOSED BY Google. However, anecdotal evidence suggest the payout rate is good and competitive systems such as 7search.com
payout around the 50% mark.

CLICK THRU RATE is the number of times the ad is clicked on divided by the number of times it is displayed ("impressions").

PAGE TRAFFIC is the number of times people visit your web page.

APPEARANCE FREQUENCY is the number of times a particular ad appears on your page (remember that ads are rotated by Google automatically and successful ads are shown more often.)

To repeat: this is income PER advertisement, so to calculate your total AdSense income you need to evaluate this equation for each ad on all your web pages and add up the results.

By the way, Google saves you the bother and tells you the answer.

But already the complexity of the process is apparent and of these factors, some are completely out of your control:

Fractional payout rate and Appearance frequency being two.

So let's look at those three factors that are at least
partially within your control.

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Click thru price
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The Click thru price, whilst fundamentally determined by the advertiser, CAN be influenced by the content of your website: if you can modify your site so that it includes more content
related to higher value keywords, you are more likely to get higher value click thru prices.

For example, if you run a site about Bird Watching you may get ads posted about Bird Watching books. But why not extend the site to include content about the best binoculars
for bird watchers?

Dedicate a page to this topic and you could find higher value ads running on that page because binoculars sell for more than books and businesses advertising binoculars may be
willing to pay more for keywords relating to them.

You could also run some pages about travel and hotels in exotic locations where rich bird watchers like to take their holidays.

It's all content relevant to your site but it is likely to increase your AdSense revenues too.

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TECHNOLOGY NOTE
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The ads you get on different pages of your site will vary according to the content of the page.

AdSense is that clever!
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If you've already got a site, you can get a tool from Google called the AdSense preview tool. This lets you see what sort of ads you'll get even if you haven't signed up for AdSense yet.

You can get it here
http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/adsensepreviewtool.htm?2


If you get ads that don't seem relevant there are 2 possible causes:

1) Google doesn't know what your page is about, or
2) Google has never heard of your site.

Uh-oh!

We'll discuss how you get round these problems later on.

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Estimating click thru values
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Visit
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/
to find out how much keywords are being bid for on Overture, a competitor to AdWords. This will give you an INDICATION of the prices people are bidding on Google which in turn will
give you some idea about the click thru value of AdSense ads relating to those keywords.

The rule is: aim high.

Alternatively if you already have an AdWords account you can use the Keyword tool to find out the exact price of any keyword - but remember AdSense is about content, not keywords so, again, this is only going to be an indicator.

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Click thru rate
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Can you influence this?

YES.

You can. Here's how.

You use your page to sell the products and services that are likely to be shown in the ads. To follow our binocular example, if you post content about the benefits of excellent (and expensive) binoculars and how they enhance the bird watching experience, readers are going to be more
interested in buying binoculars than if you simply post content about the different types of binoculars available and they will consequently be more likely to click an ad.

http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/zeiss_binoculars.htm?2

You have to write sales copy that focuses on the generic benefits of the products and services likely to be advertised on your pages.

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Page traffic
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This is what web marketers fight hardest over.

No traffic means no clicks means no income. So you have to maximise the number of people visiting your site.

There are a raft of techniques available and that's tomorrows topic.

To download your bonus High Value Keyword report click this link
http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/adsensekeywords.htm

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