Once you’ve done all this, you’ll be ready to start using and profiting from AdSense. I’m going to talk you right through the process of signing up to AdSense from reaching Google to being ready to place your first ad. If you’ve been putting off signing up until you get time to figure out how to do it, you’ve just run out of excuses!
2.1 What Is AdSense?
Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re signing up to. Many of the principles and strategies that I describe in this book make the most of the way that AdSense works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on those ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues. Unfortunately, I can’t really do that. Much of the way that Google runs the AdSense program is kept under wraps.
I know a few things and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads. But I don’t know it all. No one outside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit that site best, there’s a good chance that the Web would be filled with sites created specially to bring in the highest paying ads instead of sites built to bring in and inform users. People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less money than high quality sites that attract loyal users who click on ads. The fact is, we can make the most of both AdSense and our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites.
That’s because AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level, AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. When you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and receive a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad). The ads themselves come from another Google service: AdWords. If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords. Advertisers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text and here’s where it gets interesting they choose how much they want to pay. Advertisers decide on the size of their advertising budgets and the amount they’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides where to put those ads.
So a company that has a website selling handmade furniture might create an ad that looks like this:
The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his advertising budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month. But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that and put them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of that dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret.
The New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 78.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’t been confirmed but it is around what most people in the industry expect that Google pays.) That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying. The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth. Neither of those things is true online. When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are going to turn up.
When you sign up to AdSense, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page. You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click. Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receive maximum revenues, and that advertisers get the best value for their money. So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furnishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only ad that could appear on your page.
There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks will give you the highest revenues. That might not be the ad with the highest possible click price though. If a lower paying ad gives you more clicks and higher overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead. In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price. In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportunity. You can influence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content and in terms of price. You can certainly influence the number of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that entirely up to you and it’s a crucial part of the difference between earnings that pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars. In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and the end of turning your site into income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it needs to be the beginning. You’ll want to make sure you’re not getting lowpaying ads, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the clicks that turn those ads into cash.
2.2 Signing Up Made Easy First though, you have to sign up.
Here’s how you do it. The signup page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like. First, you’ll have to tell Google whether you want an “individual” account or a “company” account whether you’re a company with more than twenty employees or practically a oneman show that’s just you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and they’ll be paid directly to you. You’ll also be able to choose between three different ways of receiving your money: Electronic Funds Transfer, local currency check or Secured Express Delivery. In general, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit using the Electronic Funds Transfer; Google charges for express mail checks.
(What you won’t be able to choose is whether you’re paid per clickon a “CPC” basisor for every thousand times you show an adon a “CPM” basis. Google decides that for you. Some ads will be CPC and others will be CPM.)
Fig. 2.1 The AdSense sign up page
The next piece of information that Google demands is your URL. There’s only room for one URL, which can be confusing if you have more than one site and want to put AdSense on all of them. Don’t worry about it. It won’t affect how you use AdSense at all, so just submit your biggest site for now.
The next question is about whether you want contentbased ads the type of small text ads I’ve been discussing so far, search ads or both. (Content based ads are better but I’ll tell you how to benefit from each so I recommend that you choose both.) Once you’re approved, you’ll just have to copy and paste a small piece of code into your website and you’re done!
2.3 Google Policies AdSense works.
I know it works because I’ve got the stats, the checks and the bank balance to prove it. And all of the methods that I used to increase my AdSense revenues were completely legitimate and in line with Google’s policies. That’s important. It is possible to cheat AdSense. But you’d have to be crazy to do it. You can make so much money working within Google’s rules that to risk getting thrown out by putting ads on pages without content or by persuading users to click on the ads is just plain crazy. I’ve put a detailed list of Google’s “do’s and don’ts” at the back of this book.
The things to look out for in particular are: Code Modification You have to paste the AdSense code onto your site as is. And you don’t need to do anything else! Your AdSense account will let you play with colors and placements (and getting those right is what will really rocket your income) so why bother playing with Google’s HTML? It’s not necessary and it could get you a lifetime ban. Incentives When the ads appear on your page, you have to leave them completely alone.
You might be tempted to tell your users to “click here” or support your sponsors but if Google catches you, they could well cut you off. They want people to click because they’re genuinely interested in the ad. Get your strategy right and they’ll do just that. You can encourage your users to download the products your referral buttons promote or to use your search bar, but never encourage your users to click your ads.
Content Google is pretty picky about where the ads are displayed. They don’t want advertisers complaining to them that their services were being promoted on a site that supports gambling or is filled with profanity or contains more ads than content. If your content doesn’t come up to scratch, you’ll need a site that does. Prohibited Clicks And nastiest of all are the people who either click on their own ads or create programs to do it for them. The bottom line is that you don’t need any of this stuff. Maximizing your revenue within the rules is a breeze!
2.4 As Easy as 123!
The bottom line is that there are three ways to increase your AdSense revenue.
2.1 What Is AdSense?
Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re signing up to. Many of the principles and strategies that I describe in this book make the most of the way that AdSense works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on those ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues. Unfortunately, I can’t really do that. Much of the way that Google runs the AdSense program is kept under wraps.
I know a few things and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads. But I don’t know it all. No one outside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit that site best, there’s a good chance that the Web would be filled with sites created specially to bring in the highest paying ads instead of sites built to bring in and inform users. People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less money than high quality sites that attract loyal users who click on ads. The fact is, we can make the most of both AdSense and our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites.
That’s because AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level, AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. When you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and receive a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad). The ads themselves come from another Google service: AdWords. If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords. Advertisers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text and here’s where it gets interesting they choose how much they want to pay. Advertisers decide on the size of their advertising budgets and the amount they’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides where to put those ads.
So a company that has a website selling handmade furniture might create an ad that looks like this:
The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his advertising budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month. But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that and put them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of that dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret.
The New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 78.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’t been confirmed but it is around what most people in the industry expect that Google pays.) That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying. The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth. Neither of those things is true online. When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are going to turn up.
When you sign up to AdSense, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page. You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click. Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receive maximum revenues, and that advertisers get the best value for their money. So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furnishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only ad that could appear on your page.
There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks will give you the highest revenues. That might not be the ad with the highest possible click price though. If a lower paying ad gives you more clicks and higher overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead. In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price. In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportunity. You can influence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content and in terms of price. You can certainly influence the number of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that entirely up to you and it’s a crucial part of the difference between earnings that pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars. In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and the end of turning your site into income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it needs to be the beginning. You’ll want to make sure you’re not getting lowpaying ads, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the clicks that turn those ads into cash.
2.2 Signing Up Made Easy First though, you have to sign up.
Here’s how you do it. The signup page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like. First, you’ll have to tell Google whether you want an “individual” account or a “company” account whether you’re a company with more than twenty employees or practically a oneman show that’s just you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and they’ll be paid directly to you. You’ll also be able to choose between three different ways of receiving your money: Electronic Funds Transfer, local currency check or Secured Express Delivery. In general, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit using the Electronic Funds Transfer; Google charges for express mail checks.
(What you won’t be able to choose is whether you’re paid per clickon a “CPC” basisor for every thousand times you show an adon a “CPM” basis. Google decides that for you. Some ads will be CPC and others will be CPM.)
Fig. 2.1 The AdSense sign up page
The next piece of information that Google demands is your URL. There’s only room for one URL, which can be confusing if you have more than one site and want to put AdSense on all of them. Don’t worry about it. It won’t affect how you use AdSense at all, so just submit your biggest site for now.
The next question is about whether you want contentbased ads the type of small text ads I’ve been discussing so far, search ads or both. (Content based ads are better but I’ll tell you how to benefit from each so I recommend that you choose both.) Once you’re approved, you’ll just have to copy and paste a small piece of code into your website and you’re done!
2.3 Google Policies AdSense works.
I know it works because I’ve got the stats, the checks and the bank balance to prove it. And all of the methods that I used to increase my AdSense revenues were completely legitimate and in line with Google’s policies. That’s important. It is possible to cheat AdSense. But you’d have to be crazy to do it. You can make so much money working within Google’s rules that to risk getting thrown out by putting ads on pages without content or by persuading users to click on the ads is just plain crazy. I’ve put a detailed list of Google’s “do’s and don’ts” at the back of this book.
The things to look out for in particular are: Code Modification You have to paste the AdSense code onto your site as is. And you don’t need to do anything else! Your AdSense account will let you play with colors and placements (and getting those right is what will really rocket your income) so why bother playing with Google’s HTML? It’s not necessary and it could get you a lifetime ban. Incentives When the ads appear on your page, you have to leave them completely alone.
You might be tempted to tell your users to “click here” or support your sponsors but if Google catches you, they could well cut you off. They want people to click because they’re genuinely interested in the ad. Get your strategy right and they’ll do just that. You can encourage your users to download the products your referral buttons promote or to use your search bar, but never encourage your users to click your ads.
Content Google is pretty picky about where the ads are displayed. They don’t want advertisers complaining to them that their services were being promoted on a site that supports gambling or is filled with profanity or contains more ads than content. If your content doesn’t come up to scratch, you’ll need a site that does. Prohibited Clicks And nastiest of all are the people who either click on their own ads or create programs to do it for them. The bottom line is that you don’t need any of this stuff. Maximizing your revenue within the rules is a breeze!
2.4 As Easy as 123!
The bottom line is that there are three ways to increase your AdSense revenue.
- By Tweaking the Ads to make them more appealing to your visitors;
- By Optimizing your Website for better AdSense targeting (or what the Google folks call 'content relevance'); And the only surefire way to get 1 and 2 right is by
- Tracking Visitor Response. If you don't know what works (and what doesn't work) in trying to increase your AdSense revenue… you're shooting arrows in the dark! The right tracking tools can reveal a great deal about your visitors and answer fundamental questions such as what they're looking for and what makes them 'click'. Once you've figured that out, bingo! You're on your way to big AdSense bucks! But it isn't as straightforward as it seems. If it were, there wouldn't be so many grumpy people on AdSense forums, complaining about their low AdSense earnings. It's not that they aren't doing anything about it.
