Pleasanton Web Design

Does Google Adsense Make Sense?

I’ve been “messing around” with Google Adsense for a few months now. I’ve also been on the other end – running Adwords campaigns that included the “Content Network” or, in other words, Adsense ads.

I’m sure there are people getting more clicks and making more money from the program than I am. Somebody blogging on electronics, cell phones or other consumer products are obviously more likely to get those high ticket clicks. Probably the most successful at raking in the Adsense cash are those who’s sole purpose is to capture the searches and direct the visitors to the ads.

The most obvious way to increase clicks is to increase the number of visitors to the page. Another way is to embed the ad in the content, so that the user may accidentally click on it, thinking it is part of the article. Yet another way is to optimize the page for the long tail keywords, and provide no useful content, so that the visitor’s best bet to get at the information they seek is to click on the ads. I would consider this last technique spam, and would never use it. I would also see it as having the best chance at high click-through.

From the Adwords advertiser’s perspective, would you want a lot of clicks coming from spam? Do you want to pay for visitor’s who have accidentally clicked on your ad because it has been embedded in the content? I think there are two sets of answers to those questions, depending who you are:

1. If you are a small business with a limited budget, the first thing I would do would be to unclick the “Content Network” box in you ad campaign. Stop advertising through Adsense for a period, and see if your conversion doesn’t increase. In addition, I’ve found that not only the clicks per page view increase when excluding the Adsense network, but when you do get a click it is more likely to convert to a sale.

2. If you are a larger company with a diverse marketing strategy, internet marketing is probably giving you your highest ROI of all channels, so you probably don’t mind the lower conversion per dollar, if it means higher overall volume.

So, to answer my own question: does Google Adsense make sense? – I’d say, if you are internet marketer who’s raison d’etre is to get those clicks, then yes, or course. For a site like mine, however, that has the ads up incidentally, “because I can,” then no, it doesn’t really make sense. It’s a waste of effort. But it’s still kind of fun.

I’ve only been seriously blogging for a few months now, although I published my first post in 2004. I’ve learned a few things and taken some missteps, and I thought I’d share them with you. I’m not at the top of the learning curve , so please take that into consideration as you read.

The following tips assume that you are writing blog posts with the intent of drawing maximum readership. They cover factors that are on-page. Off-page factors will be covered in part two.

1. Forget about Google for the first 6 months. They are very snobby and won’t care about your blog at first. I used to think there was such a thing as optimizing for particular search engines. Now I have a pretty standard set of rules, based on quality content and putting the right keywords in the right places. If you do try to figure out algorithms and tweak your blog posts accordingly, concentrate on MSN and Yahoo for the first 6 months to a year.

2. Your main page is where it is happening. When you are first starting out, with a piddly page rank of 2 or 3, your main page is going to have the best shot at showing up in the SERPs. After the posts fall off the main page, they are much less likely to get hits. I’m still experimenting myself, but suffice it to say, don’t set your posts to drop off from the main page too quickly.

3. Start multiple blogs. If you think you may want to blog on many or a few different subjects, don’t put everything on one blog. The last thing you want is a big mish-mash of different subject matter, which will dilute your targeted content. As stated above, it takes a while for the big-boy search engine, Google, to see you as an established presence, so think things out and start as many blogs as you think are necessary to they can each get their own page rank, and when you are finally ready to roll and start gaining some blogging momentum, you’ll have several venues with decent visability, instead of just one.

4. Just start writing. When I first started blogging, I had no idea what I wanted to say. Writing a post was like pulling teeth. Gradually, however, as I gained practice at putting my thoughts to words, and seeing which type of subjects made good posts, writing because more effortless. You have to start though. Just do it. Pay your dues. Just delete your early practice posts when you start getting traffic, or you could be in for a bit of embarrassment.

A couple of posts back I had a minor hissy-fit rant about the continued lack of relevance of my Adsense ads. A month ago it was all Bottlecaps, all the time. So I changed the name of my blog from Bottlecap Napkin, and filtered some URLs for bottle cap factories, and all was well. Then as the Christmas season approached – zing – my blog was Christmas tree spam central. Well I ranted and was busted by no less then Adam Lasnik, SEO Strategist for Google. The same Google I had just called bastards, collectively (tongue-in-cheek, of course). Adam was kind enough to point me to feature of Adsense called section targeting (you can read Adam’s full comment in my post Damn Google Adsense (Again)!!!).

The concept is simple enough. In the source code for your Web page, just wrap comments around the content you want the ads to pick up on like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Your good content here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You wrap the content you want ignored by Adsense in comments like so:

&lt!–google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore)–>
Your bad content here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

For more info check out Google’s Adsense Help Center article on section targeting.

In this way you can suggest to Google which content you want your Adsense ads to target, and which you want them to ignore. So the next time my blog is crawled, I’m looking for a sidebar without Christmas tree ads. That will be my Christmas present from Google.