AdMoolah News and Views

There is a program called AlternateURL that puts replacement ads on you site when Google would put a PSA on your site. I joined this program and tried it out on several sites. They also have a referral program which allows you to get 10% of your referrers earnings.

I am now removing the AlternateURL ads from my site and taking the referral ads off of my site. The CTR and CPC rates for this program were horrible. In case you want to try it for yourself my affiliate link is: AlternateURL.

I apologize to anyone who signed up for this program based on my ad and was disappointed with the results.

Here is the note I sent to AlternateURL today:

Update: I received a response from AlternateURL which I have copied at the bottom of this post.

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Your program sounds like a great idea but I am getting terrible results. My referral network is seeing about a 0.0025% CTR with less less than $0.02 CPC.

I would suggest 2 enhancements:
1) Allow custom color palettes for the ads. Right now the ads look ugly because they don’t blend in with sites. Having ugly ads also reduces CTR.
2) Better targeting of ads. You should allow at least a general category of ads to display. Your off-target ads are not doing well.

I’ll be removing AlternateURL from my site until I hear that you’ve made these improvements, then I’ll consider putting them back on.

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Response From AlternateURL
The rates are improving. We share 1/2 of revenue with our members, and the
average CPC is now at 9.5 cents. We are confident this will continue to
rise.

You are right. CTR can be improved with color customization. We are working
on this now.

The categorization is another area that can be improved. Additional
back-end sponsors will ensure that the relevancy improves over time.

I appreciate you taking the time and for your honest evaluation. I hope you
will come back when the next ad code customization has been completed.

Google has introduced 3 major improvements to the AdSense system:

1. AdSense for Search Keyword Reporting
   You can now get keyword reports on what people were search for when the use AdSense for search on your site.
2. 200 Channel
   AdSense now offer 200 custom channels instead of 100 like they used to
3. Section Targeting
   The new section targeting feature on AdSense lets publishers let the mediapartners bot know which sections of the page should be used for determining which ads to show. This is the update I am most excited about. This will allow publishers to control which types of ads are shown by AdSense, hopefully improving relevancy

Its good to see Google adding more features. Pressure from YPN perhaps?

Found via JenSense: Keyword Reporting, 200 channels and Section Targeting

Google just released a new version of their Desktop. This release adds a sidebar that goes on the desktop. For AdSense publishers, there is a plugin available that will show AdSense earnings.

I personally won’t be using the plugin since I use the Firefox AdSense Notifier Plugin.

Found via: JenSense

This will be of interest to those of you who run AdSense on a WordPress blog (like I do).
Plant OZH has a post about creating a new WordPress Theme that includes “Adsense optimization”. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds interesting. Currently setting up AdSense on a WordPress blog usually takes a little bit of tweaking PHP code, so this might be a good option for people who aren’t comfortable with PHP.

I’d love to hear more details about the AdSense piece of this theme.

Workboxers is reporting that the new Yahoo Publisher Network is outperforming Google’s AdSense by a large margin. This is just a small sample but the result is promising!

Lets hope this starts up a war between Google and Yahoo that gives the publishers a larger percentage of the CPC!

There have been several reports (see AdRants and David Naylor) of Engadget having 5 or 6 AdSense ads per page. Engadget is a part of Weblogs, Inc. Network.

This is against the AdSense Policies, so there are three possibilities here.

1. Weblogs is blatantly violating the policy
2. Weblogs is a premium publisher and has negotiated the right to put more than 3 ads per page, or
3. Weblogs is participating in some kind of beta test for Google

Jason Calacanis, who runs Weblogs Inc, has this to say:

I can not comment on this beyond on the statement below, but I can assure you that we are not breaking any rules with Google and we are in constant contact with the fine folks over at Google.

Very official statement from Jason: If you would like information on Google Adsense running on our sites please contact Google’s press or Adsense departments. I can assure you we are not violating any terms with them. I can not discuss the issue beyond on that.

Given this statement and the fact that Weblogs, Inc. is making around 1 million dollars a year from AdSense and has a lot to use, I highly doubt that they are violating their terms of agreement. It remains to be seen if this is something available only to premium publishers or a beta test. I hope its the latter.

Also see: ProBlogger

As I predicted, Google has launched an official AdSense blog called Inside AdSense. Check it out to get all the latest.

Its about time!

Thanks to JenSense for finding this one.

According to an article at DMNews Google is allowing some publishers to send more signals in their AdSense code. This would allow ads to be better suited to the web sites audience.

I really hope that this is something Google will allow all publishers to do eventually. It is sometimes frustrating when the ads on a site have almost nothing to do with what the audience is interested in.

AdSense Tip #8: Effectively using High Paying Keywords

How can webmasters make the best use of high paying keywords? In the last tip we saw how to find high paying keywords, in this tip we will examine ways to use these keywords.

Have real content

The most important tip is to not create a website just for to display AdSense ads. The Google Program Policies specifically prohibit this:

No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.

Basically, if you have real content on your site that people want to read, you should be fine.

How to let Google know what a page is about

To know what a page is about, Google’s robot crawls the page. It looks for keywords in different places, including the title tag, the URL, and the content of the page. Words in different elements on your page may have more importance than other elements. For example words in the title tags, header (h1, h2, etc.) or bold tags will be seen as more important than regular text. Also, words at the beginning of the content will be more important than words near the end of the page. A complete explanation of this is beyond the scope of this article, but a search for “on page SEO” should provide a good starting point for getting more information on this topic.

Use Better Keywords

As we saw in the last tip, different, but related, keywords are worth different amounts per click. For example we saw that the maximum bids for “house” was $1.41 while the maximum bid for “real estate” was $3.77. So, if you have a page about “buying houses”, it might be a good idea to say “buying real estate” instead. Again, make sure you put this keyword in all the important places on your page such as the title, url and headings to make sure the ads will match these keywords.

Focused Pages

It is a good idea to have pages that are focused on single topic. This way, you know that the people visiting the page are interested in the topic and that the ads will match the visitors interest. If you have a topic that is several pages long it could be a good idea to to break it into sub-topics, each of which are focused on one particular keyword.

As usual JenSense has a some great advice for AdSense publishers. This time she is clarifying the compliance of the technique of putting images above ads.

If you use this technique or are thinking about it be sure to read this. It basically comes down to not making the images not look like part of the ad. Google usually suggests putting a border between the images and the ad.