There are many Google AdSense success stories that can be found on the Internet, but for most people joining the program, they are far from being successful. Average Google AdSense publisher’s earning can barely pay for their website hosting, let alone to getting rich by it.
Many sites and tutorial make it sound too easy to earn big from Google AdSense. While it is true that it’s easy to sign up for the program and to earn from it, earning enough to actually make a living out of it sounds like just a dream.
This article tries to be realistic about making money online, particularly with Google AdSense. The following are some tips on how to be successful with the program.
AdSense works by AdWords advertisers bidding for how much they’re willing to pay per click on their ads. You as an AdSense publisher could get as little as $0.10 or more that $10 per click.
These are a few tips on how to get paid more per click in AdSense.
Doesn’t matter how optimized you sites are for AdSense, when it comes to people reading your site’s content via their feed reader, they are not served any ads at all. This reduce the chance of getting your ads clicked.
To start serving ads to your RSS or Atom feed, go to My ads → Feeds → Feed ads from your Google AdSense dashboard. Click on the New feed unit button from the page to start creating your AdSense ad unit for your feed.
You’ll need to fill up the details of the ad unit you are to create on the forms. This include the type, frequency, position, and color of your ad unit.
You have the option to track the performance of your AdSense for feed ad unit using custom channel. To do this, add the unit to any existing channel, or click on the Create new custom channel link in the Custom channels section if you want to create a new channel. You’ll then just need to enter the name of your custom channel’s name and click on the Save button to continue.
In the Feeds section, you’ll need to choose which of your site’s feed do you want to monetize using AdSense. Your site will be on the list if you already set up your site’s feed to use Feedburner service, which is linked to your Google account. If your site is not in the list, just click on the Burn new feed link to create a new one.
You’re then required to enter the URL of your site’s RSS or Atom feed, or you can just enter your site’s URL, and Google AdSense will automatically search your site for available feeds.
If your site has multiple feeds, you’ll need to choose the one that you want to monetize with AdSense.
You’ll then need to enter some details, such as the feed’s address and name. AdSense ads will only be served to people subscribed to the feed address configured here.
That’s all to it. Your AdSense for feed has beesn successfully set up.
You can see your created AdSense for feed by going to My ads → Feeds → Feed ads from your Google AdSense dashboard.
Whoever subscribes to you newly created feed will see ads similar to this in their feed reader.
Placing AdSense ad unit in blogs is generally the same with placing AdSense ad unit in other sites, which is to focus on places where visitor’s eyes linger the most, though is a bit more difficult. This is because of the almost similar page format for most blogs and by being a regular visitor makes a visitor ad-blind, which is the predictable nature of the ads make the visitors (maybe unconsciously) ignore the ads.
So, instead of just normal strategy in AdSense ad units placement, add the following tips to the list;
Forum normally has different layout as compared to normal websites. Forum visitors are also likely to be repeat visitors, which over time could have developed ad-blindness; the predictable nature of the ads make the visitors (maybe unconsciously) ignore the ads.
The tips below will complement the AdSense unit placement strategy so repeat visitors will notice the ads more.
There’s no single solution when it comes to positioning your AdSense ads. The best place to position your AdSense ads is where the visitor’s attention is focused, and visitors interact with every site differently, depending on the type of site and how the navigation and features is arranged.
In general, there are some areas in a web page that visitor’s eyes and attention is focused to more than the other. By compiling and analyzing the data of visitor’s behaviour, Google itself came up with the following “heat map”.
While the heat map above was provided by Google for AdSense unit placements, it’s also applicable to any other PPC or affiliate ads. The heat map suggest that the darker the area, more likely it is for visitors to look at your ads, and the better your ads will perform.
From the diagram we can tell that the best performing ads are normally the one placed just before the main content of the site, and followed by other “above the fold” locations and the left sidebar.
Do keep in mind though, though this is how it generally works for most websites, it might work differently for you. The general rule is, place it where your site’s visitor’s are focused to, and that could always mean near your site’s content; which could be some widgets you have, article body, Youtube video, so on and so forth. Whatever it is, keep experimenting till you find the right spot. Also keep in mind to not overdo with your ad placement, and try to keep your site clean, uncluttered, and inviting.
While Google has come up with great algorithm to serve relevant ads to your site, it’s not always foolproof. There are also times where you want to block specific ads from appearing on your site for being competitive with your site’s purpose.
To do this, go to Allow & block ads → Blocking options → Advertisers URLs from your Google AdSense dashboard. On that page, click on the Block new URLs button.
You will then come to the Block new URLs window. Make sure you select the AdSense product id that you want to block the ads on.
You can now add the URL of the ads that you want to block from appearing in your AdSense ad unit, one per line. You’ll also need to check on the reason on why do you want to block the ads.
Once you’re done, click on the Block sites button and the site you have just blocked will appear in the blocked ads list.
CTR or clickthrough rate in Google AdSense is the number of clicks your ads receive vs the number of time the ads are displayed. If your your site has 100 pageviews and your ads receive 2 clicks, then your site’s CTR is 2%. CTR can be as low as 0.05% or it can be more that 20%. Optimizing your site to get higher CTR could help improve your Google AdSense earnings significantly. These are few things that you can do to get higher CTR for your sites.
Google AdSense by default serve ads based on your visitor’s browsing history that Google stores in browser’s cookie. Depending on your website’s niche, disabling it can serve more targeted ads to your visitors and increase your AdSense earnings.
A niche with high competition in Google AdWords (where there are a lot advertisers bid for keywords in your site) would benefit from disabling the option, while site’s with less targeted keyword might suffer.
To disable 'Interest-based ads, go to Allow & block ads → Advanced settings from your Gooogle AdSense dashboard.
From there, disable the interest-based ads in the Interest-based Ads Preferences section.
Custom channels is a very useful feature for Google AdSense publishers where they can track their AdSense performance by assigning ad units to channels based on their unique criteria such as colors, formats, or placements.
A sample implementation is to create a channel for each ad position, and see which one performs best. In the case of TechRecipes, you can create channels such as techrecipes.net-top and techrecipes.net-bottom. You can also create channels such as color-red and color-blue and then use a custom script to rotate ads using the colors to see which one gets higher CTR.
