BlogHASH » Google AdSense

ShoppingAds – New CPC Program from Text Link Ads

Raj — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:03:28 +0000

Text-Link-Ads has launched a Cost Per Click (CPC) Ad program called ShoppingAds. I received a private invite to this program and if you are a TLA publisher, you might have received it too. I have made quite a few observations that might be of your interest if you are looking at trying out new Ad networks for making money from your websites.

Here are my initial observations about ShoppingAds.

Similar to Chitika and AuctionAds- This new program is very similar in appearance to chitika and AuctionAds, except that the Ads from ShoppingAds look much better than those of Chitika and may yield in higher CTR just because of their good appearance. The clarity of images of the products that appear in your ad unit is excellent. Note that these ads are not auction ads.
Higher CPC – When I last experimented with Chitika on my website, the CTR was low (due the nature of content I post) and also the CPC value. On an average Chitika paid $0.02 per click whereas, ShoppingAds claims to offer upto $0.20 per click on an average.
Variety of Ad formats – ShoppingAds offers almost all the Ad formats that AdSense offers. Customizing the look and feel of the Ads that will appear in your site is very very easy in the panel offered by ShoppingAds.

Overall – I am very pleased with the appearance and overall design of their control panel. It’s simple and good. I am yet to arrive at a conclusion if this program will perform better than AdSense on my blog and when I am ready, I will write another post to tell you more about it.

Currently ShoppingAds is running through private beta, when they launch it for public, do give them a try. If your site’s niche is electronics, you will like ShoppingAds.

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Wow! Premium AdSense Publishers can Link to Ads in their Newsletters

Raj — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:41:52 +0000

I am a subscriber of Moneycontrol.com which is one of the leading stock market related website in India. I regularly receive their newsletter by email that shows excerpts of their latest analysis and stock market related news and information. [See the screen shot below]. I had noticed it on various occasions that their newsletter contains a section called ‘RELATED ADS’ that had a list of phrases and I always thought that those were sponsored links from some companies and if I were to click on them, I will end up landing on some other website.

But today, out of curiosity, I hovered my mouse on one of those hyper-linked phrases and to my surprise all the phrases were links to a page on Moneycontrol’s website which shows only AdSense ad units. Yes, that’s correct – No content on the landing page, just full of Ads. It’s more like the standard Link Units that’s available to all AdSense Publishers but in this case customized and styled. [Screen shot is below]. The hyperlink itself contains the phrases that tells the page what ads it has to show up. Here is an example URL to the online version of their newsletter. Notice the related ads section on that page.

Isn’t that amazing to see so many privileges and levels of customization offered to premium AdSense publishers? Do you agree? What’s your take on this? I would love to hear what you think about it. Please post your feedback in the comments section below.

Note: Moneycontrol.com offers very useful information on Indian stock market. You may want to subscribe to their newsletter to keep yourself informed about the latest updates and trends in the Indian stock market.

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Search Engine Traffic has Better Ad CTR than Digg Traffic

Raj — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:37:07 +0000

Yes! You read it right. Traffic from search engines, specially Google, yields to higher CTR (Click Through Ratio) when compared to traffic from Digg. This difference is as much as 3 times, which means that the visitors are 3 times more likely to click on your ads if they come from Google when compared to the same amount of visitor traffic from Digg!

I wouldn’t have really believed that if it was not backed up by some real data analysis that takes into consideration a significant amount of data resulting in a decisive output. I am referring to this post from Chitika Blog Bash that has come up with this finding based on an analysis done on a billion+ ads served over a period of 31 days.

Now that’s what I really like about having a lot of data in your hands that you can use in variety of ways, similar to what folks at Chitika have done. Don’t we now know which traffic should we emphasize more on for better CTR?

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Tip: Determine Best Ad Format Based on Source of Traffic

Raj — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:49:16 +0000

Getting to know the best ad format can dramatically improve the overall performance of the Ad program for your site. Let it be Google AdSense, Yahoo YPN or any other Ad program, the same trick applies to all. The performance of your ad units, in terms of CTR, directly depends on the source of the traffic from which visitors visit your site for various reasons. The primary sources from which you receive visitors on your site are:

Search Engines – Also known as natural search traffic
Paid Traffic – Through various campaigns such as AdWords campaign
Referral, Bookmarks & Direct Traffic – Mostly through social bookmarks, link on other sites and direct type-in traffic
Stumbleupon and Digg – Non-targeted incoming traffic (not limited to just these two sites)

How does it matter where the visitors come from?

It does! There is a lot of difference between a visitor from search engine than someone getting referred to your site by Stumbleupon. When a visitor finds your website in search engine’s results page, it’s mostly because your site came up as a result of the search performed by the visitor using some keywords for which your site had some sort of relevance. But when your site shows up as a result of someone Stumbling, your site might have little or no relevancy for what user might be interested in.

To be more specific, when you receive traffic from search engines, it’s because of relevancy of your content and what user was looking for. It greatly increases the chances of the user staying at your site and reading through the content. In case of Stumbleupon, user may spend as less as 5-10 seconds quickly scanning through what your site/page is about and may Stumble again to see the next site. Similarly, when your site/page is on Digg, you will see a surge in traffic to your site which again will either have user spend some time on your site or quickly scan through and finally exit.

So, how does it affect my Click Through Ratio (CTR)?

Simple! A user who is reading through the content is more likely to click on your ad unit than someone who is paying very short visit from Digg, Stumbleupon or some other source. People spend a great deal of time reading through your articles when they find it through search engines and likely to click on your ad units placed along or in your content.

What ad formats should I use?

Now, that’s the right question! Depending on the type of traffic, we will accordingly select the ad format or ad unit format.

» Search Engines – Since people visit your site because your site shown up in search engine results, placing text based unit is more likely to perform better. Text ad units show more than one ad and hence present more options or ads for a user to click from. An image only ad unit may not produce relevant ads, hence text only ad units are recommended for your pages if the traffic is mostly from search engines. Suggested ad unit formats are 336×280, 300×250 and 160×600. You may place these ad units at the top of your content (see top of this page) or bottom of the page, but do blend the ads well.

» Paid Traffic – If you are running some sort of campaign to generate traffic to your site, placing an image unit is likely to perform better than text ad unit. This is because some visitors may or may not stay for longer on your site and to get their attention on ads, an image ad unit would be a better choice. Placing an image unit more closely to the point of their entry, such as top of the the content, below the header is highly recommended.

» Referral, Bookmarks & Direct Traffic – Strategy similar to that for Search Engines is recommended.

» Stumbleupon and Digg and others – An image unit is likely to out perform text ad units as the traffic brought in by such sources will often bring visitors who are less likely to read through your content. Getting their attention using an image ad unit is much easier than text ad units.

The suggestions and recommendations made in this articles are based on my experience with different ad placements on my blog. The results may vary on your site depending on your selection of ad formats and ad placement in your site.

You have some suggestions and tips for our readers? Please don’t forget to post your comments here!

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How To: Get Your Site Out of Google’s Supplemental Index

Raj — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:05:20 +0000

Since the inception of ‘Supplemental Results’ by Google, webmasters have struggled to get their content out of supplemental index of Google. New websites with fresh content often find their some or all of the pages in Google’s supplemental index and then it’s a long wait before your site’s content moves from supplemental index to the main index. Here are some tips to get your site out of Google’s supplemental index and move into the main index and stay in main index.

1. Make sure that every page of your site has its own unique title. If possible, give unique description to all the pages of the site.

2. All the pages must have unique content to avoid getting penalized by search engines. Avoid sub domain with similar content which is already in the pages of the main URL of your site.

3. Every page of your site must be linked through at least one other page of your site. The better inter-site linking you do, the chances of your pages not getting into supplemental results increases. Try to avoid links to pages using sessions IDs, don’t use dynamic navigation menu systems, avoid Javascript based navigation menus at all cost. Don’t use too many query strings in the URL. If a search engine crawler can not read your links, pages will not be indexed.

4. Adhere to W3C standards as much as possible. Get your HTML validated for standards. [This may not be applicable always]

5. If your content is short such as blog posts, try to use popular keywords in your content and link these pages from the main page or other pages of your site. [Similar to point # 3]

To check if pages from your site are in Google’s supplemental index, either type site:www.your-domain.com *** in Google’s search or use the nice handy tool at [oy-oy.eu]

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How to use Channels Effectively to help you Increase Your AdSense Revenue

Raj — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:43:42 +0000

Channels help you determine specific data points about performance of pages, pages with highest AdSense clicks and effectiveness of Ad units in your site. There are many ways in which you can leverage the AdSense channels to measure the performance of different pages vs ad units, find the CTR of a specific or group of pages, track the performance across different domains and add up all these data points to determine the pages that offer maximum contribution towards your AdSense earnings. Using channels does not directly increase your adsense income but using it in such a way that you get to know about various performance data points can help you towards doing effective AdSense optimization resulting in significant increase in your adsense profits.

What are channels?

Channel is a good way of mapping certain ad units, pages or groups of pages, sub-domains, domains to a friendly name which you can use to distinguish between the Ad units served across your site(s). You can create a channel name (say channel name is mysite_adunit_200x200) and map it to certain adsense code, say 200×200 ad unit, then use it on every page of your site at the top. After which when you look at your AdSense reports, the data about your adsense earnings, impressions, CTR and eCPM will be shown channel wise. So, if 200 ads of that 200×200 ad unit were served and out of which 5 people clicked on the ad, then it makes a lot of sense to use this data against other channels that you can compare with to track performance of other ad units on the pages of your site. Does it make sense?

Let me use another example. I run a forum based website and would like to use AdSense to track performance of ad units. I use a 480×60 unit on the top of every page and a similar 480×60 ad unit at the bottom of every page. I will now create two channels by names sitename_480x60_top and sitename_480x60_bottom, respectively. Going forward, this will help me in understanding which ad unit is performing best in terms of click through ratio and eCPM. I can then start experimenting with different ad units and name them accordingly to track their performance over time. The result will be lot of data that I can use for AdSense optimization for a forum.

Types of Channels

There are two different types of channels. URL Channel and Custom Channel. While URL channels can be used to track performance of ad units across your site, sub domains or a specific page, using Custom channels will let you track performance of specific ad units across different pages, one specific page, group of pages, adsense for search etc.

Using Channel Effectively

While there are no adsense secrets to using channels, there are some simple and logical tips that you can follow for effective performance tracking.

1. Use logical channel names that will let you distinguish between ad units of one type with ad unit of another types.
2. Use URL channels as much as possible to determine the performance of individual pages or group of pages.
3. Use URL channels for subdomains to get a quick understanding about performance between your sub domains
4. Follow a universal channel naming convention across all channels. One good example of a naming convention is shortsitename_adunittype_text(and|or)image_pagename_location, so examples would be bh_480x60_ti_thispage_top [where bh = bloghash.com, ti = text and image, thispage = a shortname of this page and top = location of this ad unit i.e top of the page]
5. If your site has less than 200 pages, I suggest you use a channel name for every page on your site. This will be very time consuming process but your efforts will be paid off very well.
6. Don’t create many channel names just because you have many available [200 of them], this will give you unrealistic performance report if you were to see a historical trend for a longer duration.
7. You can create, deactive, rename and delete channel names. So use them wisely.

Some Ideas with Channels

If you know how to code in PHP or other scripting languages, instead of embedding AdSense code on every page, use a simple PHP function to display adsense on the pages of your site. Use a mapping of URLs and channel IDs such that depending on the page that you are accessing, assign a channel ID in your adsense code using PHP. This is a simple trick to achieve with PHP. Since you have only 200 channels to use for your content pages, use this trick to measure the performance of as many page as you can.

I have implemented channels, now what?

Now that you have some data available for analysis, here is what you can do with it.

1. Measure the variation in performance of ad units over time.
2. Experiment with different ad units on pages with highest performance to determine the best performing ad units.
3. Measure the performance between different pages, sub domains and domains and place additional ad units of different advertisers such as amazon, text link ads or banners of some high paying affiliate programs.
4. Based on data available for high performing pages, determine which adsense keywords are attracting people from search engines to those pages or groups of pages on your site.
5. If you can, create a simple graph with available data to show top 20% performing ad unit and pages, look at it the other way, see the top 20% pages and ad units which are NOT performing well. Now, optimize the ad units formats and ad unit placements for only these pages to see an immediate impact on your adsense earnings.

It gets better only with experiments to determine the best suited ad units and effective placement of adsense ads on the pages of your site.

Related: How to make money with AdSense?

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Is Tracking AdSense or Ad clicks Good or Bad?

Raj — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:59:59 +0000

First, for people who didn’t knew that AdSense or other Ad clicks can be tracked, it’s possible with tons of such solutions already available on Internet. These solutions can effectively track the clicks on your AdSense ads. A simple Google search on ‘Track AdSense Clicks’, will produce lot of results to help you choose any of the available solutions to track the AdSense clicks.

Now, for people who want to track such clicks, there are few things to think about. Is tracking ad clicks good or a bad thing to do? Answer to this question should be available to you in few more minutes, after you complete reading this post.

An insider into how ad click tracking works!

Every ad showing program that publishers like us use on our site, has a landing page. So, if a user clicks on an ad on your site, he will be taken to a landing page on some remote website or your own website (if you serve internal Ads). To track those ad clicks, you will need to have some sort of solution on your pages that will track the outbound clicks to advertiser’s site. This is a little different when it comes to ad programs like AdSense where all the clicks will first go to Google’s website and then quickly redirect to advertiser’s website or a landing page. Google does this to record clicks from your website.

To track outbound clicks from AdSense served ads, you will have to track outgoing clicks to googlesyndication.com. Since you can not track these clicks using a server side script since the ads are clicked in the client’s browser, some sort of script must be used at the client side to track such clicks. Javacript based scripts are best for tracking such outbound clicks.

Companies or individuals offering solutions to tracks ad clicks have two types of solutions to accomplish this. First type of solution will place a Javascript on your site and track the clicks on a third party website such as website of the company offering the free or a paid solution. They will then be able to show you the click metrics on their web site. Second type of solution requires that you install or place [copy and paste] Javascript on your site and the clicks are recorded in a database on your site itself. The metrics are recorded and available from your site itself. The second type of solution does not transmit any data from your site to any third party website.

Advantages of tracking ad clicks using both types of ad click tracking solutions

The main advantages of implementing an ad click tracking solution on your site are:

Ability to track exact number of ad clicks on your site, including sub domains and all pages of your site.
Accurate reporting on number of ads clicked and pages they were clicked from and
A reporting system to show you some data about the how pages perform on your site.

Disadvantages of tracking ad clicks with programs that record information remotely?

Read this section carefully. The following are the disadvantages of using such ad tracking programs that records all click data on either a third party website or the website of the company offering such programs:

Information about your pages with highest performance is available to other companies.
Best performing Keywords and keyterms of your site is also available to them.
Your search engine ranking and the keywords that make you perform well is easy to derive from such recorded data. Since the click data is being recorded remotely, such key information about your site is much easier to find from the collected data.
Historical reports about your site’s best performing pages, keywords, search engine ranking can be easily used by your competitors to create similar pages and compete with you.

Conclusion: We don’t say that the companies offering solutions to track your AdSense or other ad clicks on their website and offer free stats will reveal important information to other party companies. But before you sign-up to implement such solutions where your click tracking information is hosted remotely, obtain clarification from those companies about what they will do with the recorded data from your website. If you already use such solutions, read the Terms and Conditions of your solution provider and ensure that the recorded information is not shared or sold to other companies. A program that will record all such information in your database without a need of having it transmitted to a remote server is what we recommend in a long term. After all, it requires lot of hard work to make it to the top of search engine results and stay there. Isn’t it?

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Tips to Generate more Revenue by displaying AdSense Firefox Referral button to only Non Firefox users

Raj — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:36:21 +0000

Are you displaying Firefox referral buttons to even the Firefox users? Chances are less that you are making right kind of revenue by displaying Google Firefox referral button to even Firefox users. Logic is simple, Firefox users will really not click on your Firefox referral button as they already have Firefox installed. Even if they do, you will not make any money, because Google will not pay you anything if users already had Firefox installed on their systems.

When will Google pay for Firefox referral clicks?

Firefox plus Google Toolbar: When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to US$1 in your account, depending on the user’s location. Your referral must be a Windows user, who has not previously installed Firefox, in order for you to receive credit.

So, what should you do?

The solution is quite simple! Display Firefox referral units to only those users who are using browsers other than Firefox. This dramatically increases the chances of your users clicking on the referral Ad unit and you making some money out of it. Also, when you know that a user is already using Firefox, display some other referral unit instead Firefox referral unit. This will make more sense. Don’t you think so?

How to display Firefox referral to ONLY those users who don’t use Firefox?

That’s quite simple to accomplish. We will show you a simple PHP based solution, that you can implement on your site, with minimal efforts. We don’t recommend using a Javascript based solution at this stage as it will fail if browser has Javascript disabled. But for people with no PHP, Javascript would be the best solution to go with.

Below is the self-explanatory PHP code that you can use in your pages. Users of blogging softwares such as WordPress, simply put it in right places and it will work right away. Of course, you will have to put in your Google AdSense code in the PHP code below for it to work.

# Leave below line for trackbacks. You may remove it if you wish to.
echo "";

# First lets read the user_agent information
# Note: I am not using built-in get_browser function here as
# it requires browscap.ini to be set properly on the server
# and that is not bundled with PHP. Many hosting companies may
# not have this installed. So let’s use something that works everywhere!
$browser_info = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

# What’s the browser we want to look for? Obviously Firefox
# Note: All other browsers are considerd non-firefox
$browser_name = "Firefox";

# Lets see if the browser name mentioned above is found in user_agent
$position = strpos($browser_info,$browser_name);

# PHP if loop to show firefox Ad if browser is not firefox
# and if not Firefox show something else!
if ($position > 0) {
#User has firefox, so show something else
echo "NON-Firefox Ad Unit here!"; } else {
#User does not has Firefox, lets show him Firefox referral unit!
echo "Firefox referral Ad Unit here!"; }
?>

Please feel free to test and report any issues to us. Your feedback is appreciated.

Suggestions: When you know that it’s a Firefox user, display AdSense referral Ad units of other products and that way you increase the chances of people clicking on your Ads.

How do you make more money by following the above tip?

Looking at my visitor statistics, I can see that almost 75% of visitors are Firefox users. That means, those users will never click on Firefox referral Ad unit if I were to display it. Isn’t it? It might be something similar with your website too! So, you must show Firefox referral Ad units to only those users who are not using Firefox. Statistically, those 75% users will now most likely click on the non Firefox referral Ad unit and thus chances of you making more money also increases.

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Tips and Tricks for Optimizing AdSense for Forums

Raj — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:55:18 +0000

These are 8 most effective tips for achieving better results with AdSense in forums.

1. Placing Ads for New Users – Let them be first time visitors or repeat visitors who will click on a thread for the first time to read the posts inside a thread, placing an Ad unit between first and second post in a thread performs best. You will have to blend the Ad unit well with your color schemes but do not blend it so well that your users will confuse between a post and an Ad. We recommend placing an horizontal Ad unit of size 468×60 and if your forum template is set to auto width, place a bigger and wide skyscrapper Ad Unit. If you don’t want to place a sckysrcapper unit, place a horizontal link unit between first and second post or between first three posts. This works very well with forums which are focused on niche areas and have a lot of keywords in their posts.

2. Placing Ads for Repeat Users – Repeat users are those who keep coming back to follow up on their earlier posts. They will immediately start reading the latest post and also since many forum softwares send a direct link to the page where the last post was made, they will not look at the beginning of the thread anyway. This also holds true when they have started a thread and have been following it for quite long. Placing an Ad unit just before OR after the last post performs best in this case.

3. Using Image ONLY Ad Units – Placing at least one Image ONLY Ad Unit increases the CPM Ads. Sometimes depending on traffic you will see lot of CPM Ads which is good. You may use your primary Ad unit as a text only unit, use a secondary Ad unit as an Image ONLY Ad unit to receive lot of CPM Ads. This works very well for forums with high traffic.

4. Use AdSense for Search – Using ‘AdSense for Search’ on your forum does not always produce high revenue but adds up to your existing revenue and works well with large forums.

5. Monetize 404 and Other Error Pages – For forums with thousands of hits every day, there could be at least 50-60 404 [not found] or other such error messages encountered by visitors. Why not monetize the your 404 and error pages? Place Ad Link units or skyscrapper or any other type of Ad unit on those pages. This one will depend on how you want to handle and design your 404 pages, so experiment and decide the best Ad unit. Don’t just use the default 404 pages, replace them with a better 404 page that will show nice Ads and also offer suggestions with alternate pages.

6. Avoid Ad Blindness – Repeat users who visit your site almost every day develop Ad blindness to your Ads on the forum. Try to take advantage of color scheme rotation, change the Ad placement, size of Ad units on a regular basis. Changing the Ad placement on a monthly basis is advised. For example: for first month, you can place and Ad unit between first and second post. Next month, place it before the first post and after third post. Then in the following month, place it between first and second then between second and third post. Keep changing the places and experiment. Also, don’t forget to change the color scheme with each change.

7. Placing Ads on Left and Right of Post Area – Placing vertical skyscrapper on either left of right side of the posts in the forum is recommended. Blend it well with the existing color scheme of the forum. Try to move it at either side on regular basis. Example: First month, you may place a vertical skyscrapper on left, next month on right. Enable Image ONLY Ad unit, sometimes, to increase the CPM Ads.

8. Ad Link Units Placement – In forums, placing an Ad link unit just before the place where it reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” works very well. You should blend it very well with the color of the link that reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” for best performance. Don’t always keep it there, replace it with other Ad units on a regular basis. Disable it for a month and enable it again. Keep experimenting. Work on any Ad rotation strategy you like, to avoid Ad blindness.

[Conclusion]: On forums, users tend to develop Ad blindness pretty sooner than you think. Key to success with AdSense on forums is to keep changing the Ad placement, color schemes, Ad Unit sizes and things should work well.

If you run forums and need any suggestion or advises, please feel free to contact me for a free consultation. My response will be a little slow but I will help you for sure

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Google Launched Patent Search

Raj — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:40:15 +0000

With over 7 million patents to search from, the site makes it very easy to search through filed patents. People who will love this kind of service from Google would be mostly lawyers, architects and companies who make products.

Each search for patents would result in a page with result representing an individual patent. The title of the search result is the actual title of the patent. Just beneath that, you will see the patent number that was awarded, and on right the year in which the patent was filed is displayed.

Clicking on a search result will open a page dedicated to an individual patent and shows the following information about a patent – Patent summary, Claims, Referenced by, Search within this patent, Citations and Drawings.

Some of the patents worth taking a look are:

Computer – [computers related patents], filed in 1982

Voice Interface for a search engine which was filed by Google –
[Voice Interface for search engine], filed in 2001

The Google Patent search page displays random patents on every visit, and that way you can see plenty of patents over time.

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Follow these Tips to Avoid getting Locked Out of AdSense

Raj — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:21:40 +0000

Google closes AdSense accounts of publishers who are found clicking on their own Ads. Some Publishers do not have a clue as to why their accounts were closed. Even though they had never clicked on their own Ads, how did Google claim that they clicked on their own Ad?

How does Google determine clicks from a Publisher on their own Ads?

Remember, once upon a time you had signed up for Google AdSense? Google then knew the IP address, its subnet and other information about you and your system too. It couldn’t have been difficult to record this information and map it to your AdSense account, in the Google database. Post your sign-up with AdSense, you started displaying AdSense Ads on your website(s). You then started checking your AdSense account for the revenue you might have made over days and months. Every time you logged into your AdSense account, Google knew the IP address you were using and many other important things about you and it kept mapping all those IP addresses from which you accessed your AdSense account, with your profile. So, if you logged into your AdSense account from a friend’s system, Google might treat it as your own system and connection and later on if your friend clicked on any Ad on your site, Google may treat it as you clicking on the Ad. Getting the simple logic?

What can you do to avoid getting locked out of AdSense?

Here is a list of places from where you should and must avoid logging into your AdSense account. In simpler terms, don’t login to your AdSense account from:

A Friend’s computer.
A Cybercafe/Internet Cafe
Your Office computer(s)
From a system which uses a public proxy to browse Internet.

If you do not have a computer at home and can not avoid temptation of checking your AdSense account whenever you have access to a system, setup your AdSense to send your reports to your email account. Remember to use any non-Google email account to receive the reports. [Google may know the IP when you login to GMail account ]

Conclusion – By following the tips mentioned in this article, you will be avoiding some of the most common ways of getting yourself locked out of AdSense. But these are not the only ways using which Google might determine your information and clicks. So, be careful!

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Google AdSense: How did I increase my AdSense Revenue with SAME CTR?

Raj — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 22:08:34 +0000

Sometime ago I was looking at my AdSense report and was disappointed looking at my CTR and the CPC values. I was totally clueless as to why would Ad clicks generate as low as $0.01 most of the time for weeks altogether. Searching on Google did not produce any definitive answer to my growing cause of concern. Some articles suggested that it happens most often during this time of the year while other suggested that it was due to lack of keyword rich content on the pages that was serving Ads. To me, lack of keyword rich content felt to be a little closer reason and worth taking a look at. I decided to dedicate a full 3 day work out, not writing any new article, and analyze the entire site [every single page]. The task seemed to be a pain but I wanted to get to the bottom of it. There was no other way anyway!

How and what did I analyze?

After doing some initial planning on drawing board, I came up with a simple 4 pointer for my site’s analysis.

Open every page on the site and check if it was displaying AdSense. [Or at least as many as pages I could]
Select random pages and check the type of Ads being displayed and if they were relevant to the content on the page.
Make a note of the Ads, type of Ads and their URLs which were common on different pages.
Check the log files and determine the top 20% pages with hightest page views for last 30 days and check those pages for the Ads being displayed and keywords in it.

At first, I clicked through each and every page on my site and looked at the Ads that were being shown on every page. I found all the pages of my site to be displaying AdSense Ads. Every page was showing text Ads and even the ones which were supposed to display only image Ads were doing so. The first task was completed in only few hours and there was no conclusion to be made as per the plan.

Next, I selected random pages to check if the Ads shown were relevant. I did not require lot of thinking on this one. Most of the pages were not showing relevant Ads. The Ads were related to computer industry but not any closer to the content than that. I concluded that Ads were not relevant to the content on most of the pages.

Third step was to make a note of all the Ads which were common to other pages. This one, by far, proved to be most productive step than the first two. I could see that there were 7 different Ads which literally dominated most of the pages on the site. It was as if those 7 Ads have been assigned to my site for ever. It was day one and I did wanted to arrive at a conclusion that sooner. I decided to keep an eye on this and check back the next day.

Last step was the most time consuming task. Since I use both Google Analytics and Mint on my site for tracking visitors, finding out the most viewed pages for last 30 days was not at all difficult. The pages which were most viewed were rich with keywords but most of the Ads were still the same ones which were shown on other pages. Conclusion – The pages were optimized as per Google guidelines, SEO tips that I had seen on many other sites and were all keyword rich.

Day Two – I repeated what I had done in step 3, and to my surprise, the same Ads which were shows the last day were still appearing on most of the pages. I concluded that my site was taken over by a group of Ads and they are not going to go away that sooner. Somehow, I felt that I should give it at least one more day and then arrive at a final conclusion.

Day Three – Step 3 again, and this time data points were so strong that I could conclude that it was that one group of Ads which was showing up on almost every page of my site, thus lowering the CPC value for the entire site. So, if someone were to click on any Ad on any page, chances were there that over 80% of the time the visitor would end up clicking on an Ad from the common group of Ads which had took over my site.

[Final Conclusion] – Irrespective of the CTR %, it was a bunch of common Ads which were producing very low cost per click revenue.

Look at the image below, all the three Ads shown are from the same site and [I guess] have very low click value. [No, I did not click on them to find where they lead me to, instead I checked the source of the page in some cases, and in other cases I typed the URL shown in the Ad, manually in a new window.]

Snapshot of AdSense Ad from this site.

[The solution] – I quickly sat down to fix this problem to free my site from the clutches of those annoying group of Ads that were all over my site. I randomly visited most of my pages and made a note of the URL. I could come up with 60+ such URLs which were either for a single page site, dedicated to AdSense or AdWords [also known as Made for AdSense] or an Ad for a personal home page of someone. I put them in ‘Competitive Ad Filtering’ under my AdSense account. I checked my site and revenue after 48 hours and I could see an improvement in the revenue. Since then, I have not seen those $0.01 clicks from this site’s AdSense Ads anymore and the minimum amount that now shows for any click is as low as $0.85

Going forward, I plan to repeat the whole exercise at least once every month to ensure that this does not happen again. And, I am sure if you check your site, you will find something similar going on too! Do let readers of this site and myself know if you find something similar. It will be of a great help.

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6 Things that Every Blogger Must Know and Do for Success

Raj — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:54:03 +0000

When I was new to blogging, I didn’t knew much about anything related to blogging, tools required, how to publicize my blog site etc etc.. Each day was a great learning experience and with every passing week there was tons of information that I had to grind to derive some actionable items from. I then started doing a weekly revision of different things that I was doing and, I observed that the practices I was following started to add value to my site, in terms of traffic and repeat visitors.

I know from reading comments on numerous posts in various websites and forums where new bloggers ask for a lot of information on making it big and taking right steps towards making money too. Here are some of my tips that most of you will find useful and some of these will probably have an immediate effect on your success.

1. Why should I blog? – Is it because blogging is the most happening thing these days or just that some of my friends have their own blogging sites and some are even minting money from it. Ask yourself – Why do you want to start blogging? Setting your own expectation right is the first step towards successful blogging. Take a paper and write down the topics that you will blog about. These may be Family, Yourself, Technology, Music, Internet, Programming, Web 2.0, Tech News, DIY stuff, Your City, Your Country, Your Music Band and the list will go on. If you plan to setup your personal blog and don’t really look forward to making money out of it or you will not be blogging seriously but just for your interest and fun, then there is not much you have to worry about. For people who are serious about blogging – think about the topics you will blog about, will you have a free sub-domain [something.wordpress.com] or your own domain name, how will you pay for your hosting charges etc etc.

2. The blogging platform – For either personal or professional blogging, I recommend that you get your own domain name and only if you can not afford domain name registration and hosting charges [somewhere around $70USD per annum], think of a free blogging account with WordPress or Blogger or anyone else. My personal recommendation is you own domain name + WordPress – simply because I can do anything with my website. I can change the look, the features, customize the code and many more things. Your website’s look doesn’t need to be unique, any free theme would do as long as content is clearly readable and accessible as well. Read [Best practices of Web Designing] and also Effective SEO of WordPress. For more info see how to choose the right blogging platform for your blog.

3. I am ready to blog – I hope, by now you have decided the topics on which you will blog. The first thing you should think of putting up is an ‘About Me’ page on your blog. No matter if it’s a personal or professional blog, you must put up this page for your visitors to know more about you. Professional blogging sites with a page about the author greatly helps your visitors to know what you do, your areas of expertise etc etc. The more articles you write at the beginning, the more beneficial it’s to attract visitors as soon as your blog is launched. I would suggest you to publish at least 5-10 quality articles as soon as your blog goes live and then publish articles regularly. There is no recommended number of articles a day, per week or every month. Write at your own pace but write regulary and maintain the posting interval. If you happen to post during weekends, then keep posting during weekends [not a rule]. Your visitors will know when to expect new posts on your site.

4. Quality or Quantity? – It will really not help you to write 5-10 articles everyday if it’s not worth reading. Your articles must be appealing and full of information. People must like your articles and keep coming back for more quality articles. It’s ok to write only 5-6 articles a week, but give your best, make it informative and avoid most common topics which every other blogging site writes about. It’s quality of your articles that matters, not the number of articles you post on your site. Keep your articles simple, straight to the point, clear and easy to understand and your visitors will like it. Don’t ever copy articles, content from other sites. This will bring down your reputation and also your site will get penalized by search engines, thus removing all indexed pages from search engines.

5. How to publicize my blog? – The first thing you must do is to setup pinging on your site. This will ensure that search engines, blog syndication sites are always informed about the newly posted articles on your site. Other things that you can do to reach wide group of audience is signup with Technorati and feedburner services. Technorati has got a huge collection of blogs and users too. Signup with Technorati and claim your blog, then setup pinging on your blog site. Feedburner, on the other hand, will offer feed and email subscription services to your visitors. Your visitors will then be able to sign up using Feedburner’s email subscription service and receive your articles in their mailboxes. For professional sites, you may consider AdWords and Text Ads to publicize your blog. The more articles you write, the more visitors you will receive and thus increase your chances of retaining visitors. Happy visitors will spread the word about your blog with their friends and other. So, blog more! For more info, see how to publicize and grow your blog.

6. Ok, I want to monetize my blog – There are plenty of options available to turn your blog site into a money minting website. For every type of website Google AdSense is a good option. If your website is more of product or hardware based, then chitika is another option. For sites with large number of email subscribers, Feedburner’s Ad Network is just great. Don’t get disappointed in the beginning if you don’t see the results you expected. Things works best with more number of visitors coming to your site which increases the chances of people clicking on the Ads. You must place the AdSense at right places which might yield in better click ratio. Don’t shift your focus towards making more money, just sit tight and keep writing more quality articles and rest will automatically fall in place. For more info see how to make money blogging and AdSense alternatives.

[ If your site has 60 pages that gets you 200 visitors everyday out of which 2 click on your Ads to make $2, then how many visitors you might receive with 600 pages after an year of writing those articles and how much money you might make with 20 people clicking on those Ads everyday? -- It's just to tell you that more number of visitors -> more money. Keep writing articles! ]

Summary – To be successful, you must have the right blogging platform which you could customize to any extent, write and keep writing great content, publicize your blog as and when you can and place the Ads at right places.

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Google Logo in AdSense Ads?

Raj — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:20:44 +0000

While doing a routine check on my posts, I noticed a small Google logo next to ‘Ads by Google’ on one of my pages. [The screen shot is below.] I wonder what purpose would it serve if the logo starts appearing in the Ads. Might be that if a web site owner by any chance blends the ‘Ads by Google’ header into the background, making it invisible, the logo might [still] show up! But then it’s just my guess.

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Google AdSense: The best practices for AdSense for feeds

Raj — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 15:55:03 +0000

Google AdSense for feeds is yet another way for publishers to make money from the feeds of their websites. The program is still [at the time of writing this] in beta phase and in testing. AdSense for feeds will let website owners who distribute their feeds, serve contextual ads in their feeds. This will be a better opportunity for those publishers who have large number of subscribers. Let’s look at some best practices of AdSense for feeds and be prepared.

Content Syndication: Since AdSense is contextual in nature, having more content in feeds is better. If you can not include full text for any reason, try to add excerpts that are keyword-rich to generate relevant ads when they show up in feed readers or emails.

Ad Unit Placement: Keep the primary reason, of users subscribing to your feeds, in mind. They want to read your content in their RSS readers and some prefer to receive content in email. So, an Ad unit at the end of the content will be most appropriate. Placing the Ad unit at the top will do no harm, keep experimenting or best, display Ads at random places.

One unit per article: As I said before, your users preferred to receive content in email for a reason, and you should not stuff your feeds with several Ad units. Try to limit the number of Ad units per article to one.

Use Channels: Using AdSense channels will help you track the performance of your Ads. Your content may have been delivered today through email but user may read it after a week, having an AdSense channel will help you in at least tracking the category under which your pages were posted. [Example: If I write an article on Google Search Engine and put it under category of "Google/Search-Engines", I then place an Ad in this article with channel name 'feed_ad_google_se'. Whenever user will click on any Ad, I will know which category that article belongs to and doing a trend analysis will reveal best performing content category.]

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