6.1 Attracting Relevant Ads Getting the color and placement right will help improve your clickthrough rate.
But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves. In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash. The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money. The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page. Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.
6.2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant
How exactly the crawlers read pages is a secret guarded about as closely as Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have an effect though is the title of your URLs and files. When you create your pages and view them on your computer before uploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up ads related to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a pretty big clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name of the directory. Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important.
The name of the file plays a big part too. If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pages is trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the name of the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’ll see ads related to weddings. If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to do with your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title. Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you get better ads. Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a tag for your heading, try using the tag with headings that contain your keywords. That should help them to stand out to the crawlers. And if you don’t have any headlines at all, try adding some.
6.3 Finding Keywords
We know that Google’s crawlers search websites for keywords, then reports back and tells the company what kind of ads to send to the site. If your site is about pension plans for example, then your keywords would be things like “retirement”, “401k” and “pension”. Getting the right keywords on your site won’t just make your ads relevant; it will also help you to make sure that the ads you get are the ones that pay the most. There are all sorts of tools available on the Web that tell you how much people are prepared to pay for keywords. www.overture.com and www.googlest.com let you see how much people are prepared to pay, and keywords.clickhereforit.com also has a list of keywords with their prices. Again, you don’t want to build a site just to cash in on a high paying keyword but if you know that “401k” pays more than “retirement” for example, then it makes sense to use the higher paying keywords more than the lower paying ones. See Chapter 17 for more on finding the most uptodate high paying keywords.
6.4 Keyword Density
You’ll need the right keywords to get the right ads. But you’ll also need the right amount of keywords. There’s no golden rule for putting the right number of keywords on a page to get the ads you want. You’ll just have to experiment. It also seems to be the case that keyword density is counted across pages, especially for highpaying keywords. If you have a site that's generally about cars and you write a page for car rental, a higherpaying keyword, you might find that you need to produce several pages about car rental before you get the ads. In general though, if you find that your ads are missing the point of your page and that your titles are all correct, then the next step would be to try mentioning your keywords more often and make sure that they’re all finely focused. For example, talking about “fire extinguishers” is likely to get you better results than talking generally about “safety equipment.”
6.5 Keyword Placement
It shouldn’t really matter where you put your keywords, should it? As long as the right words are on the right page in the right amount of numbers, that should be enough to get you relevant ads, right? Wrong. One of the strangest results that people have had using AdSense is that putting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on the ads the site gets. The most important place on your webpage is directly beneath the AdSense box.
The keywords you place there could influence your ads. For example, mentioning clowns in the space directly beneath the AdSense box could give you ads about circuses and red noses! Keeping that in mind, you could play with your ads in all sorts of ways. If you had a site about camping for example, you might find that you’re getting lots of ads about tents and sleeping bags, which would be fine. But if you also wanted to make sure that one or two of your ads were about Yosemite or mobile homes, then mentioning those keywords once or twice on the page directly below the AdSense box could give you ads for sites with that sort of content too. Bear in mind though that you’ll often find that you get ads that try to combine the main thrust of your site with the words in that keyword space below the ad box. So if you had a site about gardening and you mentioned “cabbages” beneath the ad box, you’re more likely to get ads about growing cabbages than ads about cabbage recipes. Experimenting with the placement of the keywords could allow you to control at least one or two of the ads you receive and help keep them varied. That’s definitely something to try.
6.6 Keyword Frames
One of the reasons that websites don’t always receive relevant ads may be that all the navigation and other noncontent words affect the way Google reads the page. If your links and other words take up lots of space, it could well skew your results. One way to avoid your navigation affecting your ads is simply to create frames. You put all of your content in your main frame and the navigation material in a separate frame. Only the “content frame” has the Google code (google_page_url = document.location), so your keywords won’t be diluted by nonrelevant words.
6.7 Section Targeting
Probably the most effective way to ensure the crawlers read the keywords you want to emphasize though is to use Section Targeting. This is a fantastic technique. By simply inserting a couple of lines of HTML code into your Web page, you can tell the crawler which parts of your site are the most important and ensure that you get ads relevant to that content.
The lines you want to use to emphasize particular sections of your Web page are: Section text. The rest of the page won’t be ignored, but those particular lines will receive a heavier weighting. If you want to tell the crawlers to ignore particular sections, you can use these lines: Section text. You can highlight (and deemphasize) as many or as few sections as you wish, but what you can’t do is use these instructions solely to highlight keywords. So you can’t put them around particular single words or phrases on your page and hope to see ads that relate only to those terms.
In fact, Google recommends that you highlight a sizeable portion of text as much as 20 percent for the targeting to be most effective. The result of targeting small amounts of text could be irrelevant ads, public service ads... or even a banning if you deliberately tried to bring up ads that have nothing to do with your site. Section Targeting is probably most useful if you have a Web page that covers lots of different topics. So if you had a blog about MP3 players but had written an article about rap music for example, you could use Section Targeting to ensure that you didn’t lose ads about the music players to ads about rap music. Or you could tell the crawlers to ignore your readers’ comments and focus on your own entries.
And presumably, there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a paragraph with keywords related to your subject and telling the crawlers to focus on that section to ensure that your ads stay targeted. It’s definitely something that you want to play with. If there’s one problem with Section Targeting though, it’s that it can take up to two weeks before you see the results the time it can take for the crawler to revisit your page. So it’s not a fast process and that can make it a bit of a blunt tool. But it’s not blunt enough to be ignored.
6.8 No 'Baiting'!
Often I've clicked through a 'promising' website, only to find reams of keyword spam, interspersed with AdSense. Websites like these make AdSense look bad. Keyword spam may trick search spiders, but your human visitors will leave disappointed. People hate being 'baited' by a web marketer. Offer content that makes their visit worthwhile. Address the needs and concerns of your visitors with original content. Quality content builds trust and loyalty and that, in turn, makes people want to click. Search rankings may change, but loyal visitors keep coming back for more!
6.9 Changing Metatags
Metatags certainly aren’t what they used to be, and in AdSense they’re barely anything at all. There’s a good chance that when it comes to deciding ad relevance, your metatags have no effect whatsoever. I’ve already mentioned that the title of your page will have an effect. It’s also very likely that the description does too. But that doesn’t mean that your metatags are completely irrelevant when it comes to AdSense. They aren’t. They’re only seem to be irrelevant when it comes to serving ads; they still play a role in search engine optimization and getting your site indexed faster.
6.10 Inviting The Robot
So far in this chapter, I’ve explained some of the ways that you can tweak your page to keep your ads relevant. But the changes you make won’t have any effect until Google’s robot stops by and reindexes your page. What will generally happen is that once you upload your new page, you’ll still get the old ads and you might have to wait some time before the robot visits it again and you can find out whether your changes have the right result. To get the robot to stop by earlier, reload the page in your browser, and then again a few minutes later. Do not click on any of the ads just reload and wait a few minutes before attempts. This doesn’t always work but with a bit of luck, you should find that you receive new ads within a few minutes.
6.11 Google Ads Preview Don’t want to wait for the robot? No problem.
The Google Ads Preview tool at http://googleadspreview.blogspot.com/ lets you see the ads your site is likely to receive right away. Google has its own tool for this, but this program by Digital Inspiration is much better. That’s not just because it also works with Firefox (Google’s preview tool only works in Internet Explorer) but mostly because it lets you compare different programs and formats side by side. When you’re just starting out, that’s not really important. But when you’re combining AdSense with Chitika eMiniMalls it’s useful to see what effect a single change can have across the different ads you’re displaying. You can also compare the AdSense ads with those served by Yahoo! Publishers Network.
And here’s the real kicker:
the Google Ads Preview Tool also lets you toss in keywords and see which ads turn up. Try it! Surf over to the site, toss in a keyword relevant to your site and see what ads you’re likely to receive. Note that I said which ads you’re likely to receive, not which ads you will receive. That’s an important difference. Google uses all sorts of criteria to decide which ads you’re going to get. I’m not sure which criterion this preview tool uses to choose ads for keywords but I can’t see it emulating Google completely. Use the tool to preview the ads on your site and you’re on pretty firm ground. You’ll get a great impression of the ads you’re likely to get and you can either match your content to it or change your content to bring up some different ads. Use it to preview the ads you’re likely to get with a certain keyword and you’ve got a guide to where those keywords can take you. Either way, you’ve got a very useful tool.
6.12 Public Service Ads
The penalty for not getting your keyword placement and density right isn’t just irrelevant ads. It could also be no ads at all. If Google can’t find any relevant ads to give you, it could use your space to present public service ads, which are very nice but they don’t pay you a penny. You might prefer to earn money and give it to a charity of your choice rather than give space on your site to a cause that Google chooses. Google lets you get rid of that space by collapsing the ad, tossing in an image or by creating a color block in the same tone as the background color. But that seems like a waste to me. That space can earn you money. If something goes wrong with your contextualization, you want a backup that brings revenue. The most obvious solution is to specify an alternate URL in the event that Google has no ads for you. You can do this from your AdSense account. Instead of linking to the Red Cross or whoever it may be, you’ll receive a link to a site that you’ve prechosen. I set up default ads for my 336 x 280 ad block, place them at www.worldvillage.com/336x2801.html and choose that unit as my URL.
Fig. 6.1 My own version of AdSense.
It looks remarkably like AdSense ads, don’t you think? If these ads appeared on the same page as AdSense ads, it could cause a problem. But if Google is going to send public service announcements to my site, I use these as a replacement. You could also use this space to deliver imagebased ads that come from your server. For offers that pay per action (clicks or signups), I like to use WebSponsors.com. You can signup for a free account and find new ways to monetize your unused ad space.
Probably the best way to turn that wasted space into revenue though is to place a Chitika ad there. I talk about Chitika later in this book, in the chapter about other ad systems. The company has some fantastic looking ad units, and they can be used in conjunction with AdSense. Having a Chitika ad automatically replace a PSA ad is, I feel, the perfect solution until you manage to sort out the problem with your AdSense unit. The principle is the same as the AdSenselike ad units I used to use: create a blank page on your site, add your Chitika code and use the URL as your alternate AdSense URL It’s really very simple and very effective.
6.13 Blocking Ads
Another useful way to control the ads you see on your site is to block ads you don’t want. Google gives you a limit of 200 URLs to block, which isn’t much. You might well find yourself burning through them pretty fast, especially if you try to block lower paying ads in favor of the higherpaying ones. Playing with keywords, content and placement will give you much better results.
6.14 “Advertise On This Site”
Finally, there is one more way to influence the ads that you show on your site through AdSense: by keeping active the “Advertise on this site” feature. (You begin an AdSense campaign opted in; you have to choose to opt out.) The feature displays a small notice beneath the ads that potential advertisers can click to sign up for AdWords. You don’t get paid when the advertiser clicks but if they do sign up, their ads will appear on your page on a payper impression basis provided the price they enter beats other bids. While you can’t choose which advertisers will sign up or even see which advertisers are signing up you can be reasonably confident that any advertiser looking at your site and choosing to advertise on it is likely to be in a relevant field. You can also use the filters to block advertisers that you don’t want to promote. There are two things to consider when inviting people to advertise on your site. First, if there’s one message I’ve been trying to push throughout this book, it’s that you don’t want to make your ads look like ads. Keep your “Advertise on this site” feature switched on and you’re going to get the word “Advertise” right next to an ad that you’ve just spent hours trying to blend into your site. That’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make an ad look like content.
Sure, you’ve also got “Ads by Google” right next to it but you want to de emphasize your ads as much as possible, not push the fact that they came from a third party. What effect will that little notice have on your clickthrough rate? That’s something you’ll need to check. Once you’ve optimized your ads, opt out of the “Advertise on this site” feature for a week and check your CTR. Then opt back in and compare the results. That should let you know how much you’re paying for the chance of receiving a targeted CPM campaign. When you do get targeted in that way, you can then see how much the campaign brings in and decide whether or not the lower CTR is worth the expense.
On the whole, I think that for sites with plenty of traffic and who can earn large sums from a CPM campaign, it’s usually worthwhile staying in; other sites will need to do some careful calculations but most will also find that the lost clicks are minimal and that opting in pays. It can pay even more when you consider the second issue related to “Advertise on this site”: you can edit the landing page. When an advertiser clicks on that advertising link, they’re going to pull up a page on Google with information about AdSense and about your site. Google sees this page as a cobrand: they host and supply it, you can do what you like with it. Advertisers that don’t yet have an AdWord account will be shown how to sign up and place their ads on your pages, and advertisers that do have an account will be shown how to advertise on your site.
Google lets you make three kinds of changes to this page:
Once they’ve submitted their ads, they just have to trust the publisher to promote their sites in the best way possible. Similarly, as publishers, we have no control over what the advertisers write in their ads. We can’t tell them to use particular keywords, to write certain things in their headlines or to produce their copy in a particular style. If we get an ad with bad copy, we just have to put up with the lower CTR until we either block it or see it replaced by a more profitable ad. Edit the landing page, and you can tell the advertisers what they should write to get the most clicks with an ad on your site. You can even include your email address and contact information and invite them to contact you directly.
Your communication channel to advertisers. You want that page to look like part of your site. If an advertiser has clicked on the “Advertise” link on your site, it’s because they’ve liked what they’ve seen. You’ve impressed them, not Google, not Google’s robot and not Google’s method of matching ads to publishers. Google understands that means they’ve got more chance of signing up an advertiser if they let you do the selling. You should certainly add your logo to this page. It appears in the top left hand corner and makes the landing page look like you’ve endorsed it which, of course, you have. If you don’t have a logo, this is a good time to create one.
You could just use any graphic that appears on your site; the effect will still be to draw a link between the landing page and your site. And that’s the effect you want. At the moment, you only get one landing page per account, although that might change soon. If you have multiple sites, Google will make sure that the ads only appear on the site the advertiser was visiting when he clicked, but you might not want to mention a site name on the landing page in case you confuse the advertiser. The color scheme, of course, should match the colors used on your site. It’s in the welcome text that things can really get interesting.
You don’t really want to give advertisers a list of keywords that they should use. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be impressed by a bunch of demands from someone who has yet to earn them a dime. But they will appreciate information about the sorts of words that are likely to attract the most clicks. They’ll still feel that they’ve got the freedom to decide on their own ad copy but they’ll be more likely to write the sort of copy you want. For example, if you have a site about cars and you know your users are particularly interested in models that suit families, you could let the advertisers know. If your blog mostly attracts Republicans you could suggest issues that are likely to get your users clicking an ad. If you’ve got a site about pets, you could point out that your users are more interested in accessories for dogs than for cats. No one knows your users better than you. This is the place to share that information so that you can share some higher revenues. And finally, you could also encourage advertisers to sign up for a targeted site campaign.
While it’s likely that most of the advertisers who click on the link will want to advertise exclusively on your site and Google has set up the system to encourage that result it’s also possible that some advertisers who are new to AdSense will decide to spread their ads over a number of different sites in your field. That means you’re only getting a fraction of their advertising budget. A targetedsite campaign will give you all of it. Just tell them that a targeted campaign on your site is likely to give them the best results. Does all that sound hard? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. You can just take the text below and adjust it for your site, swapping the underlined sections for details relevant to your site:
Thank you for advertising on FamilyFirst.com, the web's leading site for familyfriendly web site reviews. Our users are typically traditional families, stayathome moms and parents of children aged between 3 and 16. We’ve found that users respond most favorably to articles and links about filter software, children’s DVDs and computer games, toys and family entertainment. Highlighting these aspects of your business in your ad is likely to earn the highest number of clicks and the best conversions. We’d also recommend that you focus your advertising with a targetedsite campaign. We look forward to helping your business grow! If you would like more information about advertising on FamilyFirst.com, please write to sales@FamilyFirst.com. See how easy that is? The page should be available within 24 hours, and once you’ve created it, you can put links to it anywhere you like; you’re not restricted to the little line under the ads. So you could put them in your emails and on your Web pages in places of your choice.
Why would you send potential advertisers to Google’s advertising signup page instead of your own? Well, you might not want to. You might prefer to just vet each advertiser yourself and set your own price. But bear in mind that any advertiser who follows that link has to outbid other advertisers on Google who want that same space. You don’t know what exactly the current highest bid is; the most you can know is how many clicks your ads received and how much money you earned in the previous days and weeks. You certainly can’t tell how much you’re going to receive in the weeks to come. Sending potential advertisers to your Google signin page will ensure that you’re always getting the highest paying ads for those spaces.
6.15 Does Location Matter For CPM Ads?
In a word, yes! This is what Google has to say about CPM ads, the type of ads you’re likely to get from a sitetargeted campaign (my emphasis): You'll earn revenue each time a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions, also known as payperimpression) ad is displayed on your site. You won't earn additional revenue for clicks on these ads. Please note that the placement of CPM ads on your pages can affect the amount an advertiser pays for that impression. Placing your CPM ad units below the fold, or in an otherwise lowimpact location, may result in lower earnings than if the ad unit was placed in a conspicuous location.
So if you were thinking, “Great! I’ll encourage clickthroughs above the fold and get paid per impression with an expanded text ad at the bottom of the page...” think again. Google claims that CPM campaigns have to bid for space on publishers’ websites in the same marketplace as CPC ads, and that therefore you would only receive a CPM ad if it’s the highest paying option. If advertisers are paying less for a CPM ad at the bottom of a page, it’s less likely then that you’re going to get one down there. Now, how Google is figuring out where on the page you’re putting your ads beats me. Their love of Smart Pricing (see Chapter 13) though, suggests that they could be comparing advertisers’ sales results with the number of impressions and assuming that sites with high impressions and low sales have put the ads in outoftheway places. Whichever method they’re using, the end result is that you’re still going to see higher revenues from ads in the best locations and less from the worst spots.
But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves. In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash. The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money. The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page. Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.
6.2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant
How exactly the crawlers read pages is a secret guarded about as closely as Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have an effect though is the title of your URLs and files. When you create your pages and view them on your computer before uploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up ads related to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a pretty big clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name of the directory. Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important.
The name of the file plays a big part too. If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pages is trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the name of the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’ll see ads related to weddings. If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to do with your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title. Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you get better ads. Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a tag for your heading, try using the tag with headings that contain your keywords. That should help them to stand out to the crawlers. And if you don’t have any headlines at all, try adding some.
6.3 Finding Keywords
We know that Google’s crawlers search websites for keywords, then reports back and tells the company what kind of ads to send to the site. If your site is about pension plans for example, then your keywords would be things like “retirement”, “401k” and “pension”. Getting the right keywords on your site won’t just make your ads relevant; it will also help you to make sure that the ads you get are the ones that pay the most. There are all sorts of tools available on the Web that tell you how much people are prepared to pay for keywords. www.overture.com and www.googlest.com let you see how much people are prepared to pay, and keywords.clickhereforit.com also has a list of keywords with their prices. Again, you don’t want to build a site just to cash in on a high paying keyword but if you know that “401k” pays more than “retirement” for example, then it makes sense to use the higher paying keywords more than the lower paying ones. See Chapter 17 for more on finding the most uptodate high paying keywords.
6.4 Keyword Density
You’ll need the right keywords to get the right ads. But you’ll also need the right amount of keywords. There’s no golden rule for putting the right number of keywords on a page to get the ads you want. You’ll just have to experiment. It also seems to be the case that keyword density is counted across pages, especially for highpaying keywords. If you have a site that's generally about cars and you write a page for car rental, a higherpaying keyword, you might find that you need to produce several pages about car rental before you get the ads. In general though, if you find that your ads are missing the point of your page and that your titles are all correct, then the next step would be to try mentioning your keywords more often and make sure that they’re all finely focused. For example, talking about “fire extinguishers” is likely to get you better results than talking generally about “safety equipment.”
6.5 Keyword Placement
It shouldn’t really matter where you put your keywords, should it? As long as the right words are on the right page in the right amount of numbers, that should be enough to get you relevant ads, right? Wrong. One of the strangest results that people have had using AdSense is that putting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on the ads the site gets. The most important place on your webpage is directly beneath the AdSense box.
The keywords you place there could influence your ads. For example, mentioning clowns in the space directly beneath the AdSense box could give you ads about circuses and red noses! Keeping that in mind, you could play with your ads in all sorts of ways. If you had a site about camping for example, you might find that you’re getting lots of ads about tents and sleeping bags, which would be fine. But if you also wanted to make sure that one or two of your ads were about Yosemite or mobile homes, then mentioning those keywords once or twice on the page directly below the AdSense box could give you ads for sites with that sort of content too. Bear in mind though that you’ll often find that you get ads that try to combine the main thrust of your site with the words in that keyword space below the ad box. So if you had a site about gardening and you mentioned “cabbages” beneath the ad box, you’re more likely to get ads about growing cabbages than ads about cabbage recipes. Experimenting with the placement of the keywords could allow you to control at least one or two of the ads you receive and help keep them varied. That’s definitely something to try.
6.6 Keyword Frames
One of the reasons that websites don’t always receive relevant ads may be that all the navigation and other noncontent words affect the way Google reads the page. If your links and other words take up lots of space, it could well skew your results. One way to avoid your navigation affecting your ads is simply to create frames. You put all of your content in your main frame and the navigation material in a separate frame. Only the “content frame” has the Google code (google_page_url = document.location), so your keywords won’t be diluted by nonrelevant words.
6.7 Section Targeting
Probably the most effective way to ensure the crawlers read the keywords you want to emphasize though is to use Section Targeting. This is a fantastic technique. By simply inserting a couple of lines of HTML code into your Web page, you can tell the crawler which parts of your site are the most important and ensure that you get ads relevant to that content.
The lines you want to use to emphasize particular sections of your Web page are: Section text. The rest of the page won’t be ignored, but those particular lines will receive a heavier weighting. If you want to tell the crawlers to ignore particular sections, you can use these lines: Section text. You can highlight (and deemphasize) as many or as few sections as you wish, but what you can’t do is use these instructions solely to highlight keywords. So you can’t put them around particular single words or phrases on your page and hope to see ads that relate only to those terms.
In fact, Google recommends that you highlight a sizeable portion of text as much as 20 percent for the targeting to be most effective. The result of targeting small amounts of text could be irrelevant ads, public service ads... or even a banning if you deliberately tried to bring up ads that have nothing to do with your site. Section Targeting is probably most useful if you have a Web page that covers lots of different topics. So if you had a blog about MP3 players but had written an article about rap music for example, you could use Section Targeting to ensure that you didn’t lose ads about the music players to ads about rap music. Or you could tell the crawlers to ignore your readers’ comments and focus on your own entries.
And presumably, there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a paragraph with keywords related to your subject and telling the crawlers to focus on that section to ensure that your ads stay targeted. It’s definitely something that you want to play with. If there’s one problem with Section Targeting though, it’s that it can take up to two weeks before you see the results the time it can take for the crawler to revisit your page. So it’s not a fast process and that can make it a bit of a blunt tool. But it’s not blunt enough to be ignored.
6.8 No 'Baiting'!
Often I've clicked through a 'promising' website, only to find reams of keyword spam, interspersed with AdSense. Websites like these make AdSense look bad. Keyword spam may trick search spiders, but your human visitors will leave disappointed. People hate being 'baited' by a web marketer. Offer content that makes their visit worthwhile. Address the needs and concerns of your visitors with original content. Quality content builds trust and loyalty and that, in turn, makes people want to click. Search rankings may change, but loyal visitors keep coming back for more!
6.9 Changing Metatags
Metatags certainly aren’t what they used to be, and in AdSense they’re barely anything at all. There’s a good chance that when it comes to deciding ad relevance, your metatags have no effect whatsoever. I’ve already mentioned that the title of your page will have an effect. It’s also very likely that the description does too. But that doesn’t mean that your metatags are completely irrelevant when it comes to AdSense. They aren’t. They’re only seem to be irrelevant when it comes to serving ads; they still play a role in search engine optimization and getting your site indexed faster.
6.10 Inviting The Robot
So far in this chapter, I’ve explained some of the ways that you can tweak your page to keep your ads relevant. But the changes you make won’t have any effect until Google’s robot stops by and reindexes your page. What will generally happen is that once you upload your new page, you’ll still get the old ads and you might have to wait some time before the robot visits it again and you can find out whether your changes have the right result. To get the robot to stop by earlier, reload the page in your browser, and then again a few minutes later. Do not click on any of the ads just reload and wait a few minutes before attempts. This doesn’t always work but with a bit of luck, you should find that you receive new ads within a few minutes.
6.11 Google Ads Preview Don’t want to wait for the robot? No problem.
The Google Ads Preview tool at http://googleadspreview.blogspot.com/ lets you see the ads your site is likely to receive right away. Google has its own tool for this, but this program by Digital Inspiration is much better. That’s not just because it also works with Firefox (Google’s preview tool only works in Internet Explorer) but mostly because it lets you compare different programs and formats side by side. When you’re just starting out, that’s not really important. But when you’re combining AdSense with Chitika eMiniMalls it’s useful to see what effect a single change can have across the different ads you’re displaying. You can also compare the AdSense ads with those served by Yahoo! Publishers Network.
And here’s the real kicker:
the Google Ads Preview Tool also lets you toss in keywords and see which ads turn up. Try it! Surf over to the site, toss in a keyword relevant to your site and see what ads you’re likely to receive. Note that I said which ads you’re likely to receive, not which ads you will receive. That’s an important difference. Google uses all sorts of criteria to decide which ads you’re going to get. I’m not sure which criterion this preview tool uses to choose ads for keywords but I can’t see it emulating Google completely. Use the tool to preview the ads on your site and you’re on pretty firm ground. You’ll get a great impression of the ads you’re likely to get and you can either match your content to it or change your content to bring up some different ads. Use it to preview the ads you’re likely to get with a certain keyword and you’ve got a guide to where those keywords can take you. Either way, you’ve got a very useful tool.
6.12 Public Service Ads
The penalty for not getting your keyword placement and density right isn’t just irrelevant ads. It could also be no ads at all. If Google can’t find any relevant ads to give you, it could use your space to present public service ads, which are very nice but they don’t pay you a penny. You might prefer to earn money and give it to a charity of your choice rather than give space on your site to a cause that Google chooses. Google lets you get rid of that space by collapsing the ad, tossing in an image or by creating a color block in the same tone as the background color. But that seems like a waste to me. That space can earn you money. If something goes wrong with your contextualization, you want a backup that brings revenue. The most obvious solution is to specify an alternate URL in the event that Google has no ads for you. You can do this from your AdSense account. Instead of linking to the Red Cross or whoever it may be, you’ll receive a link to a site that you’ve prechosen. I set up default ads for my 336 x 280 ad block, place them at www.worldvillage.com/336x2801.html and choose that unit as my URL.
Fig. 6.1 My own version of AdSense.
It looks remarkably like AdSense ads, don’t you think? If these ads appeared on the same page as AdSense ads, it could cause a problem. But if Google is going to send public service announcements to my site, I use these as a replacement. You could also use this space to deliver imagebased ads that come from your server. For offers that pay per action (clicks or signups), I like to use WebSponsors.com. You can signup for a free account and find new ways to monetize your unused ad space.
Probably the best way to turn that wasted space into revenue though is to place a Chitika ad there. I talk about Chitika later in this book, in the chapter about other ad systems. The company has some fantastic looking ad units, and they can be used in conjunction with AdSense. Having a Chitika ad automatically replace a PSA ad is, I feel, the perfect solution until you manage to sort out the problem with your AdSense unit. The principle is the same as the AdSenselike ad units I used to use: create a blank page on your site, add your Chitika code and use the URL as your alternate AdSense URL It’s really very simple and very effective.
6.13 Blocking Ads
Another useful way to control the ads you see on your site is to block ads you don’t want. Google gives you a limit of 200 URLs to block, which isn’t much. You might well find yourself burning through them pretty fast, especially if you try to block lower paying ads in favor of the higherpaying ones. Playing with keywords, content and placement will give you much better results.
6.14 “Advertise On This Site”
Finally, there is one more way to influence the ads that you show on your site through AdSense: by keeping active the “Advertise on this site” feature. (You begin an AdSense campaign opted in; you have to choose to opt out.) The feature displays a small notice beneath the ads that potential advertisers can click to sign up for AdWords. You don’t get paid when the advertiser clicks but if they do sign up, their ads will appear on your page on a payper impression basis provided the price they enter beats other bids. While you can’t choose which advertisers will sign up or even see which advertisers are signing up you can be reasonably confident that any advertiser looking at your site and choosing to advertise on it is likely to be in a relevant field. You can also use the filters to block advertisers that you don’t want to promote. There are two things to consider when inviting people to advertise on your site. First, if there’s one message I’ve been trying to push throughout this book, it’s that you don’t want to make your ads look like ads. Keep your “Advertise on this site” feature switched on and you’re going to get the word “Advertise” right next to an ad that you’ve just spent hours trying to blend into your site. That’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make an ad look like content.
Fig. 6.2 Emphasizing your ads with “Advertise on this site.”
Sure, you’ve also got “Ads by Google” right next to it but you want to de emphasize your ads as much as possible, not push the fact that they came from a third party. What effect will that little notice have on your clickthrough rate? That’s something you’ll need to check. Once you’ve optimized your ads, opt out of the “Advertise on this site” feature for a week and check your CTR. Then opt back in and compare the results. That should let you know how much you’re paying for the chance of receiving a targeted CPM campaign. When you do get targeted in that way, you can then see how much the campaign brings in and decide whether or not the lower CTR is worth the expense.
On the whole, I think that for sites with plenty of traffic and who can earn large sums from a CPM campaign, it’s usually worthwhile staying in; other sites will need to do some careful calculations but most will also find that the lost clicks are minimal and that opting in pays. It can pay even more when you consider the second issue related to “Advertise on this site”: you can edit the landing page. When an advertiser clicks on that advertising link, they’re going to pull up a page on Google with information about AdSense and about your site. Google sees this page as a cobrand: they host and supply it, you can do what you like with it. Advertisers that don’t yet have an AdWord account will be shown how to sign up and place their ads on your pages, and advertisers that do have an account will be shown how to advertise on your site.
Google lets you make three kinds of changes to this page:
- You can add a logo;
- You can set the color scheme;
- And you can write your own welcome message.
Once they’ve submitted their ads, they just have to trust the publisher to promote their sites in the best way possible. Similarly, as publishers, we have no control over what the advertisers write in their ads. We can’t tell them to use particular keywords, to write certain things in their headlines or to produce their copy in a particular style. If we get an ad with bad copy, we just have to put up with the lower CTR until we either block it or see it replaced by a more profitable ad. Edit the landing page, and you can tell the advertisers what they should write to get the most clicks with an ad on your site. You can even include your email address and contact information and invite them to contact you directly.
Fig. 6.3 The “Advertise on this site” landing page.
Your communication channel to advertisers. You want that page to look like part of your site. If an advertiser has clicked on the “Advertise” link on your site, it’s because they’ve liked what they’ve seen. You’ve impressed them, not Google, not Google’s robot and not Google’s method of matching ads to publishers. Google understands that means they’ve got more chance of signing up an advertiser if they let you do the selling. You should certainly add your logo to this page. It appears in the top left hand corner and makes the landing page look like you’ve endorsed it which, of course, you have. If you don’t have a logo, this is a good time to create one.
You could just use any graphic that appears on your site; the effect will still be to draw a link between the landing page and your site. And that’s the effect you want. At the moment, you only get one landing page per account, although that might change soon. If you have multiple sites, Google will make sure that the ads only appear on the site the advertiser was visiting when he clicked, but you might not want to mention a site name on the landing page in case you confuse the advertiser. The color scheme, of course, should match the colors used on your site. It’s in the welcome text that things can really get interesting.
You don’t really want to give advertisers a list of keywords that they should use. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be impressed by a bunch of demands from someone who has yet to earn them a dime. But they will appreciate information about the sorts of words that are likely to attract the most clicks. They’ll still feel that they’ve got the freedom to decide on their own ad copy but they’ll be more likely to write the sort of copy you want. For example, if you have a site about cars and you know your users are particularly interested in models that suit families, you could let the advertisers know. If your blog mostly attracts Republicans you could suggest issues that are likely to get your users clicking an ad. If you’ve got a site about pets, you could point out that your users are more interested in accessories for dogs than for cats. No one knows your users better than you. This is the place to share that information so that you can share some higher revenues. And finally, you could also encourage advertisers to sign up for a targeted site campaign.
While it’s likely that most of the advertisers who click on the link will want to advertise exclusively on your site and Google has set up the system to encourage that result it’s also possible that some advertisers who are new to AdSense will decide to spread their ads over a number of different sites in your field. That means you’re only getting a fraction of their advertising budget. A targetedsite campaign will give you all of it. Just tell them that a targeted campaign on your site is likely to give them the best results. Does all that sound hard? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. You can just take the text below and adjust it for your site, swapping the underlined sections for details relevant to your site:
Thank you for advertising on FamilyFirst.com, the web's leading site for familyfriendly web site reviews. Our users are typically traditional families, stayathome moms and parents of children aged between 3 and 16. We’ve found that users respond most favorably to articles and links about filter software, children’s DVDs and computer games, toys and family entertainment. Highlighting these aspects of your business in your ad is likely to earn the highest number of clicks and the best conversions. We’d also recommend that you focus your advertising with a targetedsite campaign. We look forward to helping your business grow! If you would like more information about advertising on FamilyFirst.com, please write to sales@FamilyFirst.com. See how easy that is? The page should be available within 24 hours, and once you’ve created it, you can put links to it anywhere you like; you’re not restricted to the little line under the ads. So you could put them in your emails and on your Web pages in places of your choice.
Why would you send potential advertisers to Google’s advertising signup page instead of your own? Well, you might not want to. You might prefer to just vet each advertiser yourself and set your own price. But bear in mind that any advertiser who follows that link has to outbid other advertisers on Google who want that same space. You don’t know what exactly the current highest bid is; the most you can know is how many clicks your ads received and how much money you earned in the previous days and weeks. You certainly can’t tell how much you’re going to receive in the weeks to come. Sending potential advertisers to your Google signin page will ensure that you’re always getting the highest paying ads for those spaces.
6.15 Does Location Matter For CPM Ads?
In a word, yes! This is what Google has to say about CPM ads, the type of ads you’re likely to get from a sitetargeted campaign (my emphasis): You'll earn revenue each time a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions, also known as payperimpression) ad is displayed on your site. You won't earn additional revenue for clicks on these ads. Please note that the placement of CPM ads on your pages can affect the amount an advertiser pays for that impression. Placing your CPM ad units below the fold, or in an otherwise lowimpact location, may result in lower earnings than if the ad unit was placed in a conspicuous location.
So if you were thinking, “Great! I’ll encourage clickthroughs above the fold and get paid per impression with an expanded text ad at the bottom of the page...” think again. Google claims that CPM campaigns have to bid for space on publishers’ websites in the same marketplace as CPC ads, and that therefore you would only receive a CPM ad if it’s the highest paying option. If advertisers are paying less for a CPM ad at the bottom of a page, it’s less likely then that you’re going to get one down there. Now, how Google is figuring out where on the page you’re putting your ads beats me. Their love of Smart Pricing (see Chapter 13) though, suggests that they could be comparing advertisers’ sales results with the number of impressions and assuming that sites with high impressions and low sales have put the ads in outoftheway places. Whichever method they’re using, the end result is that you’re still going to see higher revenues from ads in the best locations and less from the worst spots.
