 Google AdSense Review/Overview
Google AdSense Review/Overview:
Author: rampy AT randomdrivel.com
Adapted from the infamous South Park "under pants gnomes" episode
Step 1: Build a website and put affiliate ads on it
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Big Profits!!!
Is Google AdSense program the coveted step 2? (read on)
Some background: I've tried quite a few affiliate programs on various sites (
Random Drivel |
UberCade: Mame cabinet | Build Your Own PVR site ). I have tried/used (and in some instance continue to use)
Amazon's Associates program, X-Arcade affiliate program, some Lycos program from
way back, and a few others I can't recall. The trouble with most affiliate
programs are:
1.
The percentage you get for the referral is really low (one exception linking
directly to an amazon book gives a decent percentage but a book is usually a lower ticket item)
2.
High payout thresholds ( you have to reach certain minimum amounts to get a check
mailed to you, and at this rate you'll never get there )
3.
You only get a referral if someone buys something at that site (either now or in
the near future). If you send tons of traffic to a site but nobody buys anything
you don't get one red cent.
4.
During the dotcom bubble certain places never paid out
regardless of whether you hit the minimum threshold or not (i.e. scams or the company went out of business). I'm still waiting for an All Advantage check =)
If I was lucky (on my semi-modest traffic site) I'd get enough in Amazon commissions (in
the form of a gift certificate coupon code which lowers the payout threshold to 10 dollars) to buy myself a paperback once every other quarter. Granted,
I didn't put a ton of referral links or a billion banner ads blinking "buy crap"… I just put up a few links to books/DVD's that I liked and thought my audience would like (or hoped
if they were going to be buying something else from Amazon anyway, that they would
consider throwing me a bone by clicking through my link when making their purchase). I didn't want to spend all day
being a huckster, nor make big bucks off the internet… Just trying to get some
sort of small perk or maybe offset the cost hosting my sites for all the time and energy I put into them.
Hopefully you are getting the picture here. I've been pretty disappointed in
the past with affiliate marketing.
Before I go into detail about my experience with the Google Adsense program and my experience with it, you
should have at least a passing understanding how the other side of Google
advertising works ( Google AdWords ). Google AdWords allow an advertiser to
bid (as in an auction) on placement of text-only ads placed in a specially marked
area adjacent to Google's search engine results. An advertiser can sign up for
the services, create the ad text/url, choose which search engine result key word(s)
the ad should appear under, how much they are willing to pay per clickthrough, and finally the total amount they are willing to allocate for a given
day. Here's where the ad placement order auction comes in. The higher an
advertiser bids the higher their ad will be placed (for the most part, read on).
The higher a text ad is displayed in a page the more likely it will be seen and
hopefully clicked on (people in the "western" world read a page left to
right and top to bottom; hence the desire for the top most placement. This is especially true on a search result page where a person may never look past the first few lines if they find what they are looking for).
The only caveat to this is Google measures how well an ad is performing clickthrough percentage-wise to guage how relevant it is to the key words it's being associated with. Google's
algorithm will reward an ad with the coveted higher placement if it's highly
relevant even over a slightly less relevant advertisement that paid MORE per clickthrough.
Hopefully you got all that. Google AdSense lets you display Google Text Ads on
your site and pays you a cut of the AdWords advertiser's clickthrough bid
price. From the AdSense front page, "AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads
that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages - and Google pays you"
Well I've heard that last line before =)
The sign up process was pretty painless. You do have to provide certain
information for tax purposes (Google giveth IRS taketh away) and there is some
sort of review process where presumably a person or bot verifies that your site
meets their content criteria (i.e. no porn, hate speech, etc see
their policy page for official details). One small note: You'll
need to already be in Google's index; brand new sites are generally not
accepted. One additional sidebar: sometimes Google can be picky - see Scott's
experience here and here over at the The Ultimate Insult with adsense )
Once you get your confirmation email and log into their self service system you
can copy the HTML/JavaScript code snippet and paste it into your site. That's all you need to have Google display text ads on your page. You can choose which style/size text ad to display as well as customize the text ads to fit in with your sites color scheme. I had no problem customizing the colors of my ad (the 160 pixels wide x 600 pixels high "tower" ad you probably see on your right ) to my site's color scheme. It fits right in. You can create all sorts of custom color schemes and save them in your Google Adsense account (you hear that Amazon! It remembers my custom color schemes ?!?!) There are a variety of ad display styles available from single squares, to traditional banner style, to high tower "strip" ones. Overall I found AdSense to be very
flexible when it comes to modifying/customizing the appearance of the ads.
Google AdSense ad's are targeted by the text that is on the page you are
displaying the ads on. If you run a site dedicated to say, dog grooming, and
you put up a page with a recipe to your famous buffalo wings, the the buffalo wing page will have
google ads about hot sauces, mail order buffalo wings, recipe books, etc. Meanwhile
your other pages with content about dog grooming will have links relevant to dogs or dog grooming such as stores selling grooming brushes, pet medications, or lassie DVD
widescreen extended Peter Jackson edition.
You can get a decent idea of what type of ads google "might" place on your
site/page by using this free tool: Google Adsense web tool
Google AdSense Review/Overview: Page 2
If Google can't find a relevant ad it will display PSA (Public Service
Announcement) e.g. the Red Cross, United Way , etc. You will not get
any commission/credit for these clickthroughs =(. Google provides a way for you to
put up your own alternate ad in such a case where they can't find a relevant AdWord ad to display.
One thing I've learned from my first month using google adsense is that it's
more important to have a well targeted website than to have a lot of traffic
(it would be best to have both, of course!). RandomDrivel gets around 4 thousand page views
a day, but since the content is all over the map ( political discussions to potty humor to the latest flash animation meme) Google AdSense had a hard time finding a relevant match and either displayed the PSA's or
displayed some really whacked out "as seen on TV" and real ghetto looking ads that weren't likely to be clicked on by my audience. Now would be a good time to mention that you
can filter out ads that you do NOT want shown to your readers. That is useful
if, for instance, one of your competitors took out an AdWord ad you wouldn't
want that displayed on your site. Or if you were a right wing discussion blog and
if adsense served up "parody bush t-shirts", I'm thinking that would be bad. But you have some editorial control over that (once you realize it's happening).
BYOPVR is highly targeted niche site (dedicated to building your own PVR from PC components) that is still building its audience and only gets around 1000 page views a day (if that). Google AdSense serves relevant ads with links to Windows XP Media
Center Edition (M$'s HTPC platform), Tivo, Tivo modding, etc. and for some reason people seem
to click on them! About 2% of the people that vist the site. Which isn't a great clickthrough percentage but for a small site it's not too bad either.
I watched my account page obsessively the first week. (and yes I did click on my own ads a few times to see where they were going, if the clicks registered, and how much a top placement click went for ) I was hoping to average a little over a buck a day
so that I could almost cover my hosting cost and it would only take me three
months to reach the minimum payout threshold of 100 dollars. If you don't make it in to threshold in a month it carrys over to the next month till you surpass the $100 mark.
The first evening the AdSense ads were in place I netted 2 clicks and 20 cents and I admit one of the clicks was me. The next day it was 13 clicks for $3.11 and again I did click on a few ads (FWIW the top spot seemed to go for around 40 - 50 cents at least with the ads being served on my site ). The following day 12 clicks for $2.38
I started to do some rough calculations, "hmmm... if I could average over $3.33 a day, I could break through the $100 dollar a month minimum for a payout!" Long story short: even though it was a short month (February) and I started on the 5th day of the month, I still was able to clear $137.37. My best day being the last day of the month with 1400 impressions, 57 clicktrhoughs, and $18.02 in earnings (the following days were higher than normal but it trailed back down - if I could have kept it at 20 bucks a day I'd be ecstatic). So far I average $6.00 a day (but I think that is going to trend down unless traffic increases) and 22 clickthroughs a day.
If I maintain a 2 percent clickthrough and increase my traffic I could increase my commission/revenue (that's why I'm a little sad that Google AdSense isn't a good match to my higher traffic site, although I'm working on a redesign that might help focus the results a little more. I'll post an update when that's done with the results)
Days where I brought in a lot of new traffic to the site (I happened to post a lot of comments that were moderated up on a particular day on the popular geek/tech site Slashdot and this site's URL is in my comment signature) my number of impressions obviously went up, but also my clicktroughs went up.
I also noticed something interesting when I used a free $25 dollar AdWords voucher I picked up from a 1 and 1 hosting promotion. I made an AdWords ad for this site, with some well written and enticing text, but I only put in the minimum allowed bid per clickthrough of $0.05 and capped it at 7 dollars a day to spread out my advertising budget. During those three and a half days I had my best AdSense days ever with a modest boost in impressions and strong boost in clickthrough % on my AdSense ads. (The days went $14, $18, & $13 dollars)… I invested 25 dollars in advertising and got 45 dollars in AdSense clicks! My theory (besides attracting targeted users to my site), is that when people click on a Google AdWords text ad, they are likely to click on another (some sort of inate text-ad predisposition or something). The down side is that those adwords click happy people aren't sticking around my site (apparently). They'd come in via AdWords and most likely leave by AdSense unless they found what they were looking for. I can't prove the causality but anecdotally there seemed to be a correlation. At the least I found it an interesting outcome… There could be some merit in investing in AdWords to help boost your AdSense clickthough rate ( which on the surface seems kinda silly, and it is possible that my site or that long weekend might just have been an anomaly *shrug* YMMV)
I feel I must point out to the regular viewers of my site(s) that these proceeds go to pay hosting first ( hosting several sites on a semi-dedicated VPS isn't cheap and if things keep growing I'll go to a fully dedicated server soon) and to buy hardware to review on this site. I'm not sure why I feel the need to point that out, I've been paying for sites out of pocket since 2000, and shouldn't feel bad about finally getting a token amount to cover expenses for once.
Google claims that they will pay out within 30 days of any month which you pass the payment threshold. They mailed the check for February on March 11th arriving on March 14th. That was pretty satisfying, although I wish they had a direct deposit option for future checks… hopefully in the near future they will consider adding it.
So, what's the verdict? Well, assuming you have a reasonably targeted site I say go for it. It's easy, it's free, it's based upon clicktrhoughs and not generated sales, and even small sites can reach the threshold (eventually) to offset hosting costs (or to order a keg and some pizza to celebrate). I do wish they showed more info on which destination URLs that people are clicking on and a breakdown on which ads pay what, but all in all I'm happy to be finally getting a little something out of an affiliate program.
Other Reading/Links
Wired Magazine Overview of Adsense/Adwords
Chris Cemper: AdSense Introduction : Chris's Google AdSense Tool Thingie
PVRBLOG's founder: Bloggin For Dollars
O'Reilly article: Adsense, PageRank, and the Way Things Combine
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