Adsense Tips and Tricks
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
Google Adsense is the most popular content-driven advertising engine on the internet right now. It’s also growing leaps and bounds, so much so that Google has more advertising than space to stick it in.
Although I get most of my traffic on my home page, I’ve avoided throwing up Google Adsense on there for fear of alienating my readers. The primary goal of my site is not to put money in my pocket. Since many of my old posts are found through search engine results, it makes sense to me to have some alternative links that folks may be looking for. And… since I do pay for hosting and bandwidth, I don’t feel too bad trying to get a couple bucks back for that.
I honestly wouldn’t jump into the Adsense business until you start getting some nice organic search traffic. That’s just my opinion… but folks come for the content. My theory is that if they get there through search and don’t find what they want, a nice contextual ad may carry them through to what they are looking for. I’m not really interested in burying my readers in ads.
Google Adsense bases the content of their ads on the content of your page that has been previously indexed. That’s key… if you continue to change content on a single page, the Adsense Advertisements may not always match the content there. But it will on older pages.
Here are a couple of additional tips on using Adsense:
- If you’d like to get some Adsense up quick and easy, John Chow has a nice post on a WordPress plugin that does the trick.
- You’ll find that there are some unscrupulous folks out there that intercept traffic at a cheaper rate to obtain Adsense dollars. According to the following movie, this is not an acceptable practice but you’ll find it all over the web.
- You can fight some of this and increase your adsense earnings by utilizing the competitive filter to oust these guys from your Adsense results page. Just go to AdsBlackList and follow the instructions.
- You can also integrate your Adsense with Google Analytics and measure your compensation. This is nice since you can do some additional analysis to identify what content drives revenue and what doesn’t. You’ll find the necessary instructions at Seobook.
How much will you make?
I was talking to Chris Baggott today and we agree that it’s safe to estimate about $5 per thousand hits on your site. So… if you’re getting quite a few hits, it could be lucrative. If you’re getting some really hefty traffic, though, like 5,000+ a day… you can monetize your site in more lucrative ways with other blog advertising folks. You can also monetize your RSS feed as well. Feedburner will seek you out if you’re getting some good feed traffic.
