Adsense Wisdom | Tips and Hints for contextual advertising

“Expensive keyword” (high CPC) isn’t equal to “profitable keyword” (high earnings) due to the low volume of traffic expensive (niche) keywords produce. The best way to find really profitable keywords is to rank keywords by cost/day (cost per click X clicks/day) rather than cost per click.

Almost all AdSense publishers are looking for the most expensive keywords. Let’s have a look at the top 100 most expensive keywords. But first let’s add 2 extra columns to the list: clicks/day and cost/day by Google AdWords estimation:

Have you noticed that keyword price result in ZERO profit if there are no clicks? It’s cost/day (keyword price X clicks/day) that makes you rich, not keyword price itself.

Now let’s look at the list of the most PROFITABLE, not the most expensive AdSense keywords!

The per day list of most profitable keywords.

I have seen the same exact design sold on ebay everyday of the week. You may get 30 or so of these sites (different topics) for about $99. The 30 sites total 6,000 pages.

Similar sites are also sold daily (in multiple quantities) on ebay like “Huge Adsense Empire - 100+ sites 16,500 Pages” Imagine 150 of these sold and posted w/out change. 2,475,000 duplicate pages on the web.

Just look at the site for sell then check the sellers feedback from “buyers” - most are private listings. You will see that they may sell 1 to 3 per day!

Many new buyers purchase these and are unfamiliar with editing or adding content to a php site and get frustrated.

Now, there are some excellent sellers - sites and good deals to be found on ebay but you need to take a good look at the site and the number sold.

Also be sure the articles include the author’s resource box with a live link. Many sites chop off the end of some of the articles or do not display the authors “clickable” link (a no no).

Check the “page title” at the top of your browser. A page titled “New Page” or “Untitled” is not a good sign.

Look at the source code by right clicking your mouse and choosing view source to see if there are any meta tags or keywords in the page header.

Don’t confuse most of the “ebay mill” sites with sites you may see for sell that have limited numbers like 25 - are made with private or original articles & have support forums or excellent instructions.

These are Great for new users who need help and they provide a way to learn about the site.

The ebay mill sites typically are not in the same league.

Some of the better sites that are sold on ebay are in limited numbers and include an admin panel where you can easily add your own links - and your own content before and after each article page - giving you some uniqueness. Look for these even if they cost a little bit more

Not all ebay sites are an unwise purchase - I was a power seller a few years ago & sold websites - you can find a good deal and a good site.

Just do your research. With adsense the number two search term on ebay pulse under websites for sale, sellers have really jumped on the popularity of these sites

AdRotator Wordpress Plugin - rotate your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls
Adsense Deluxe - offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
Adsense Injection - inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog.
Adsense Inline - insert adsense in blog posts
AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar - Google AdSense widget I designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.

1. You should make your Adsense ads look as a part of your web page. They shouldn’t look like an Ad. People are negative to advertising. They search the internet for content not ads. Especially for Banners - they have a less of 0.5% response. Their days are over. Imagine if you have an Adsense ad looking like the typical Banner with different colors. It will not be profitable.

2. Text ads are better than image ads. Like before, people are more responsive to text than images. In a way it is considered as a part of the online document and is more clickable. 

3. No Border ads. One of the best tricks is to erase the borders of Adsense ads and make them, again, having the same color with your website’s background.

4. No other advertisements. The first reason is to be legitimate according to Google’s Rules and the second more practical reason is that you do not want to distract your visitor’s attention and go somewhere else without clicking your Adsense ads.

5. Placement. Even if you have the best Ad, people will not respond if they don’t see it instantly. The best place to see the ad is the top of your web page and the next is aside your document’s text. Visitors will click it more frequently since it will look like your text.

6. Traffic. Try to use legitimate ways of traffic. Some people use Google Adwords and other Pay-per-click search engines. The problem here is to search very carefully for the right niche and keywords in order to make your campaigns profitable. Other ways are link popularity techniques like link exchange directories, software or even mass blog submission techniques. Don’t use link farms and classifieds for that, because the search engine’s algorithms are extremely clever and they will ban your listings.

7. Do not rely on one website. Yes, you can make money with one website but try to make as more as possible.

8. Relevant content is King. Articles are one of the best tactics to create huge websites that will be crawled by search engine’s robots. Don’t forget search engines exist to provide relevant content at first. One excellent resource to automate your article directory procedure is http://www.articleequalizer.com .You can create an article database in minutes which otherwise is time consuming and it would take you a week!

9. Use site maps. Google’s site maps visit your site and crawl it much sooner that any other submission process. More information is here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

10. Relevant ads. It’s one of the most important factors for Adsense success. If the internet user can’t find a relevant ad in your page, he or she won’t click the ad. Would you act differently? So it’s critical to create relevant resource for your web page. In order to do that, you must do the following steps.

Yahoo on Wednesday launched a beta version of sponsored search results on mobile phones in the United States and United Kingdom.

Like Yahoo’s sponsored search results on the Web, advertisers will bid in an auction on keywords that will display their ads on the search results page. The service will work on most mobile phones and handhelds that have Web browsing capabilities.

Clicking on the link will take a user to the advertiser’s mobile Web site or a landing page that offers more information, including the ability to call the advertiser, Yahoo said.

The test will be open to some advertisers, Yahoo said.

The major search engines are eyeballing the mobile advertising market, which promises to be lucrative. Experts say consumers using their mobile phones to search the Web are likely to wind up making a transaction ultimately by visiting a retail store, restaurant or other merchant.

Yahoo has previously run tests of mobile ads in Japan and the United Kingdom and Google also has conducted tests of mobile ads in Europe and Japan.

Also on Wednesday, Reuters reported that NTT DoCoMo will add Yahoo Japan search services for its mobile customers. It previously said it will include search technologies from 10 search engines, including Google, the report said.

Online advertising continues to demonstrate robust gains in 2008, though the pace of such growth will slow slightly. 

Internet ad revenue neared $8 billion in the first six months of the year, per figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The record $7.9 billion haul gathered through June 2006 represented a 37 percent increase over the same period last year. The second quarter alone saw revenue exceed $4 billion, also a record. Yet according to Web researcher eMarketer, online advertising is not growing quite at the exponential clip seen in recent years. Emarketer said overall spending will increase by a still enviable 26.8 percent this year, versus growth spurts of more than 30 percent in the previous two years.

Total dollars will near the $16 billion level by the end of this year, pushing past $21 billion in 2007, per eMarketer. While online ads will account for just 5.7 percent of total media dollars this year, by the end of the decade it will reach 8.9 percent of spending. Paid search advertising still accounts for the lion’s share of Web spending (about 40 percent of ad revenue), according to both eMarketer and PwC.

Skilled traders of bonds, commodities or other equities often leverage their bets using arbitrage to take advantage of price differences in the marketplace. With a bit of creativity, you can use arbitrage to profit from price differences in search engine advertising programs.

How does this arbitrage work?  First, a publisher hosts ads on a web site or blog, from the Yahoo Publisher Network or Google’s AdSense program. The search engines pay for clicks on the ads hosted on the site or blog—they’re essentially giving the web publisher a commission from the click fees they collect from their advertisers.

Once a web publisher or blogger has hosted ads on their site, the next step is to drive traffic to the site using a pay-per-click (PPC) ads that are displayed in search results. If you pay less for buying clicks than what you receive for the ads hosted on the site, then you’ve made an easy profit. In a nutshell, that’s the essence of search arbitrage.

But what about consumers?  When they click on an ad in search engine results only to be directed to a page of more search engine ads, is that fair? Fair or not, PPC arbitrage is happening. Jeff Rohrs, president of Optiem, moderated a feisty session on this topic.

Jake Baillie, President of TrueLocal, said that arbitrageurs make the PPC space more competitive. According to Baillie, business marketers are bitter because arbitrageurs make easy money, plus they inflate their click fees or their clients’ fees. He also showed how second-tier search engines, shopping engines, directories and Internet Yellow Pages are engaging in arbitrage. “Everybody’s doing it,” Baillie said.

What do the search engines think?

Kim Malone, Director of Online Sales & Operations for Google, gave the generic search engine response. “We’re interested in a positive user experience,” she said. She did share, however, that misleading users is not acceptable. For example, you cannot offer something for sale in a PPC ad and then direct consumers to a landing page full of ads instead.

Google is also attempting to force PPC advertisers to provide a positive user experience with its July updates to its landing page algorithm. The content of the landing page now contributes to a PPC advertiser’s ad rank and minimum bid. PPC arbitrageurs are one group of PPC advertisers being targeted.

Frank Watson, Head of Search Marketing for FXCM, had no trouble voicing his opinion. “Arbitrageurs are a marketer’s nightmare,” he said. “They’re destroying search with landing pages that offer no value to users who are going to stop clicking PPC ads. Business professionals are paying more to advertise in a channel that’s going to become less effective.” Watson has seen an increase in the number of arbitrageurs who are using another search results page as their destination URL.

“Who is to say what’s good arbitrage and bad arbitrage?” asked Tim Daly, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Sendtec.

Daly believes it’s the advertiser who is paying for clicks. He then used TrueLocal’s arbitrage activity as an example of what he called a bad user experience. Daly showed that TrueLocal was bidding on “motorcycle parts” and promoting “Bargains in motorcycle parts here!” in their ad copy. TrueLocal’s landing page wasn’t a list of vendors, as consumers might expect. Instead, the landing page contained PPC ads. To access a list of vendors, consumers had to scroll below the fold and then type in their ZIP code. Is this a good or bad user experience?

Although Malone wouldn’t comment on TrueLocal’s tactics, she said users should get to the information you’re promoting in your PPC ad in just one click. It sounds like bad news for TrueLocal. But at this time, over a month since the show, TrueLocal’s ad and landing page for “motorcycle parts” are still running.

Kristopher Jones, President and CEO of pepperjamSEARCH.com, echoed Daly’s position and called the recirculation of PPC ads bad. But, he also criticized Google’s landing page algorithm crack-down. Jones said Google’s latest update is unfairly penalizing some ad publishers. It’s a huge problem for affiliates. And this concerns Jones, especially since he’s the CEO of an affiliate marketing management agency.

David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing, coined the phrase “evil arbitrage” to describe “ads-only” search experiences that annoy search engine users. He theorized that evil arbitrage advertising will eventually be legislated out of existence, as the search engines modify their editorial rules to eliminate such irrelevant search results. It should be no surprise that Szetela represents a marketing agency.

Jones was more concerned about Google’s algorithm change forcing PPC advertisers to pay ridiculously more money than necessary. Under the change, Google is drastically increasing advertisers’ minimum bids if the landing pages don’t meet Google’s secret criteria. He expressed concern that Google’s seemingly arbitrary enforcement leads to collateral damage for many innocent advertisers.

Malone replied by saying PPC advertisers can make an appeal to Google to review their sites if they feel that their landing pages were incorrectly evaluated. She also said that Google tunes their algorithms based on the feedback they get, and tries to maintain a healthy balance among advertiser, user, and publisher interests. “We aren’t bullheaded about our algorithms,” said Malone. “When our users and customers point out flaws, we have a human invest time in improving the code for the future to make sure that we are providing the best experience possible.”

Then Baillie said, “If you’re using their tracking products, I suppose Google could look at your conversion data and evaluate landing page quality based upon conversion metrics, but do you really want to share your conversion data with the folks who can increase your ad fees?”

There seems to be a sliding scale when it comes to search arbitrage. Generally speaking, business owners and marketing agencies see arbitrage as a detrimental practice, while those profiting as ad publishers and affiliates like the opportunity arbitrage presents. Time will tell what consumers think. Their response will certainly shape the search arbitrage space.

Author: Catherine Seda, searchenginewatch.com.

Members of the recently formed Click Quality Council want to speed up the process to establish standards for defining click fraud and valid pay-per-click activity.

The white-hot issue of click fraud has become a source of greater concern for advertisers. Fraudulent clicks that are not caught by PPC advertising providers like Google and Yahoo get passed along to advertisers, who then have to go through the process of disputing what they believe is illicit activity.

If the process does not find click fraud has taken place, the advertiser would not be credited for the disputed clicks. This takes money from the advertiser’s budget and pays it to the search advertising provider, and if those clicked ads were displayed on a publisher’s site in a network like AdSense or Yahoo Publisher, that site receives a cut of the ad revenue.

Advertisers have become understandably angered over the process of determining and disputing click fraud. The search advertising companies are equally adamant that they catch most of the illicit clicks that hit their networks before an advertiser is charged.

With both sides at odds over click fraud and the search advertising companies’ intransigence over revealing more of the process behind their algorithms and click fraud determination methods, some advertisers have taken steps to craft definitions of clicks and click fraud.

Lending Tree and Visa have been heavy online advertisers. They, along with ad agencies like Carat Fusion and Agency.com, have joined the recently formed Click Quality Council (CQC). The group discussed their aims in a statement:

The Click Quality Council will provide feedback and insight on issues relating to click quality that can be shared with the industry. Around twenty forward thinking advertisers and agencies will convene quarterly to review news, share ideas and comment on recent developments. The CQC will be moderated by Kevin Embree, former Trust and Safety Director of eBay.

“Our goal is to ensure that the voice of the online advertising community is heard when it comes to developing industry standards that will define click measurement guidelines. Members of the Click Quality Council and online advertisers feel the impact invalid and fraudulent clicks are having on their online campaigns everyday,” said Embree.

The findings of the group will be shared with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Click Measurement Working Group and other standards bodies. The Working Group includes Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and Microsoft among its membership.

That Working Group had been established to do what the CQC wants to do now. Advertisers have become impatient with the process and wish to take a more active role in developing the standards of clicks and click fraud. They may have as much trouble defining click fraud as they would in coaxing greater transparency of the click assessment process out of search ad providers.

List of websites where you can display your Google AdSense ads.

If you don’t have a blog or website to use adsense ads and earn revenue , no need to build one. There are many services that share 100% adsense earnings with users. This is a list of sites where AdSense publisher can use their own AdSense IDs to earn money.

1. Simpy

Simpy is a social bookmarking site.

Simpy has support for Google AdSense as a third party. Each Simpy member has his/her main page on Simpy (e.g. jaleel77 ). Every Simpy member can now enter his/her Google AdSense Id into Simpy, and his/her page will immediately start showing ads with his/her Id. All earnings from such ads go to members, as their Ids are used to display ads .

2. Digital Point Forums

Digital Point Forums is a forum site for webmasters.

This forum displays one advertisement in the upper right area as well is inline when viewing a thread. We use Google AdSense to automatically serve relevant ads for the content on the page. Google pays AdSense publishers on a per click basis as well as per impression.

If a user has an AdSense account, they have the ability to credit their account with the ads served on threads they start or participate in.

3. ArticleMuse

Articlemuse.com is a news article directory.

Sharing Ads Position: The Google Ads beside the main content of the article.
Sharing Ratio: Your ads will be displayed in any articles you have submitted 100% of the time till the end of 2006!

4. XpressIdeas

Xpress Ideas is an article directory.

If you have a Google Adsense ID, you can enter that ID when you register on the site. The Google Ads in the middle of the article will have YOUR Google Adsense ID in, meaning that if anybody who clicks on those ads, even on OUR site, YOU get the revenue!

5. Cybersist

Cybersist is place to share your photos and blog, free webmail, file storage and more.

Your Google ads will be displayed in 7 different locations on your public blog and photo pages. Those ads are specifically optimized to allow better penetration of the ads. Any click on those ads will generate a revenue for you through AdSense.

6. TagTooga

TagTooga is a free directory that anyone can edit.

It is easy to use TagTooga.com to earn advertising revenue. There are two ways to do it:

(1) Link to TagTooga.com. Traffic sent from your link will display Google Ads using your Adsense ID.

(2) Create your own category/tag pages.

7. ForuMatrix

ForuMatrix is a news posting site.

The posts you will make, will display 100% your Adsense Banner. No time limits or banner rotations. It’s simple, your Posts with your banners always.

8. Flixya

Flixya is a video sharing site.

Start sharing your videos from Youtube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and other video sharing sites. Our revenue share program is split 50-50. You will make 50% of the Google Adsense revenue generated by the videos you submit. The more traffic your video drives, the more ads will be displayed, and the more money you will make.

9. Swicki

Swicki is a site that allows you to create custom searches

After you have saved your ad program preferences, ads will immediately begin appearing on your swicki’s results pages.
For each active ad program on your swicki, you’ll be credited with 50% of the ad impressions and clicks. The balance will be credited to Eurekster.

10. Senserly

Senserly.com is a content hosting website

Senserely.com is to provide a place for honest Google AdSense publishers to legitimately increase their daily earnings. As soon as you register, this basically becomes your website, with your AdSense blocks displayed next to your content, and you’ll be able to write articles, reviews, and stories about your knowledge and experience with AdSense or any topic you feel confortable with, as well as read, ask questions, and exchange information with other AdSense publishers.

Google has added one additional format to the list of available ad formats: the small square (200×200). The small square supports text, image, and video ads, so using this format when opted in to both text and image ads will enable you to show a wider variety of ads on your pages.