AvantGo for RSS

A posting that's been getting a lot of link-love recently is The State of Online Feed Readers, which reviews the major online feed readers — web applications that let you track changes to your favorite blogs and sites via their RSS/Atom/flavor-of-the-moment feeds. Personally, I use Bloglines to track the blogs I read (including this one — always subscribe to your own blog using one of these guys to make sure your feed is working!).

Blatant plug for my employer: Not everyone uses feed readers — this is why I provide an option to read this blog via email (see the note at the end of this posting) — but if you do and if you have a mobile device, look into the AvantGo for RSS service. This lets you subscribe to any RSS/Atom feed and have it sync to your device with the rest of your AvantGo channels. (If you don't know what AvantGo is, please read What is AvantGo? for a good overview.)

Which also brings up an important topic: optimizing your blog for handheld devices. If your blog is mostly text, you probably don't have anything to worry about, not if you can get mobile readers to read it via your RSS feed. (See above!) But as anyone who's ever browsed websites directly on a mobile device can attest, the user experience can be poor if you're not seeing pages optimized specifically for mobile devices (like AvantGo channels). I think I'll save that for another post, though, as it's a complicated topic to discuss.

AdSense publishers, take note that in many cases AdSense ads won't display in handheld browsers, because they're JavaScript-based. Logistically, the ads would probably take up too much screen space anyhow, so this is probably not a bad thing. That's why simpler linked-based solutions (affiliate programs and the such) make more sense on that kind of platform.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense Detective review: Tracking ad clicks

It's the end of the month, do you know where your clicks have been coming from? Not long after the AdSense program started, some clever programmers realized they develop tracking scripts that would give them more information than AdSense channels ever would. In the next issue of my newsletter, out tomorrow, I discuss how tracking scripts work in general and how to make sure you're not violating the AdSense terms and conditions. Today I'm going to review a tracking script product called AdSense Detective that I've been using for most of this month on a couple of sites.

Joel Comm and Robert Puddy

AdSense Detective is a joint venture between Joel Comm and Robert Puddy. Most of you reading this know Joel as the author of Google AdSense Secrets, the well-known AdSense e-book (now in its third edition). Robert Puddy is an Internet marketing expert specializing in traffic generation and list building.

I asked Joel if he wrote this stuff himself, but he found that very funny and said that he couldn't code his way out of a paper bag.

How AdSense Detective Works

Unlike the freebie software that Joel distributes called AdSense Buddy, you must pay for AdSense Detective. In fact, it's not really a software package but a hosted service. In other words, Joel and Robert run the computers that gather the tracking data and that generate the reports — all you do is place their tracking script on your pages. Very simple and very similar to how AdSense itself works. As a hosted service, AdSense Detective will appeal to those who don't want to install databases and scripts on their web servers. (Because it's all hosted by them, you can use AdSense Detective on a Blogger blog, for example.)

One you've signed up for the service (there's a monthly fee — more on this later), tracking the data is just a matter of using this script:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
var AdDecMember_ID = "XXXX";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.adsensedetective.com/adstrker.js">
</script>

You place the script on each page you want tracked. When the page is loaded, the script runs and installs the necessary hooks to track ad clicks. As an aside, always install this script (or any other tracking script, including those from Google Analytics) at the bottom of your pages, just before the </body> tag. Placing them at the top will slow down the loading of your page and may cause the script to fail (you want the ads to load first).

AdSense Detective Reports

After you've placed the scripts on your pages, data starts flowing back to the AdSense Detective servers almost immediately. The service has a simple console you can use to view the data and create all kinds of reports. Here's a small screenshot showing the kinds of reports you can generate:

You can generate reports for the current day or for a range of dates, for as far back as your data goes.

The most interesting report, of course, is the Detailed Clicks report, which shows you entries like these:

This particular entry tells me that someone clicked “Google AD Sense” on the page “http://www.memwg.com” and that they were referred to that page from Google.co.uk site. (In other words, they found me through a Google search.) [Please note that I've changed some of the details to keep within the Google terms and conditions.]

In my experience so far, AdSense Detective gathers information about most of the clicks, but sometimes it can't tell what ad was clicked, only that a click possibly occurred. These are due to limitations in the browsers themselves that all tracking scripts have problems with — more on that in my tracking script article in my newsletter.

The data in AdSense Detective is updated as soon as clicks occur, which means there's always a lag between what AdSense Detective shows you and what you see in your AdSense console. And there are a few false positives. But you do get a lot of detailed information.

AdSense Detective Pricing

Like most hosted services, AdSense Detective is priced based on usage. Currently it offers three plans based on the number of page views you have per day:

I suspect the Standard plan is the one that appeals to most people. To be honest, if you have 100,000 page views per day you can probably afford to setup the database and scripts required to run your own tracking service and avoid the recurring fees.

AdSense Detective does offer a 3-month money-back guarantee so you can test it out and see if you like it.

Final Analysis

Up until now, I've done most of my ad tracking using custom and URL channels, which give you very general information but not the kind of detailed information that AdSense Detective does. I can't say I've had any troubles with AdSense Detective yet, though if it gets really popular I hope they'll make sure their servers can handle the load. The wide variety of reports they offer is definitely useful. I'd recommend it to anyone looking to get more information about their audience and what kind of ads their visitors are attracted to. A $30 investment for the first three months isn't too expensive, and if you don't like it you can ask for a refund.

Let me know if you want more details, I'm sure there's more stuff I can dig up.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google's hidden payroll in developing countries

An interesting article about Google, Inc. appeared in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor and was subsequently picked up by other publications including USA Today. The article Google's hidden payroll was based in part on an interview I did with one of the article's writers, Carolyn O'Hara, who was looking for information about Google, Inc.'s AdSense program. As the author of Make Easy Money with Google (which, unfortunately, was mis-titled in the article) I was able to explain to her how AdSense worked and point her to some sites built by people in developing countries who were managing to profit from AdSense.

I've talked about this subject before, of course, such as in Are clicks from China and India automatically invalid? where I pointed out that while $100 a month in earnings may not be much to a North American, it can certainly be a lot to someone in a developing country.

It's always nice to hear some good news about AdSense. I've never really thought of myself as being a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) employee, though. Maybe they should be paying AdSense publishers in stock grants…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The Q&A Site: Easy content creation

Can't think of anything to write about? Does the thought of writing an article make you queasy? Then the Question and Answer (Q&A) site is a great way to easily write good content.

The Q&A site is in some sense the contrasting approach to the ugly single-page site I mentioned yesterday. (By the way, it looks like my example inspired at least one other person to build their own single-page site.) The single-page site approach (ugly or not) works by having just enough content (but only on a single page) to whet the reader's appetite in the hopes that they'll click an ad (the only links on the page) to learn more about the topic or to investigate related products and services. There's no breadth to the single-page site, and very little depth. It's like a wading pool with toll gates leading out to the ocean.

A Q&A site, on the other hand, is all about breadth of information. Each page on the Q&A site consists of a question and an answer to that question. Take my CluelessAbout site, for example, which contains answers to questions like:

Many sites follow the Q&A model. There are commercial sites like Experts Exchange and single-person-run sites like Ask Dave Taylor.

The Q&A site has a number of advantages to it:

You can easily build a Q&A site using a blog, too, which really makes it easy to get started. Each Q&A becomes a single blog entry, with the question as the title of the entry. You can use your blogging software's categorization feature to group related questions together automatically. The blog's feed (but don't put the entire answer in the feed, you want people to visit your site) can be submitted to various search engines and news aggregators. Other blogs and sites can easily link back to yours via trackbacks. (I should point out, though, that CluelessAbout is not blog-based, but that's mostly because I wanted an excuse to build a static site using the FMPP text preprocessing system, which lets me do neat things like automatically generate three different versions of a sitemap and create tag-based directories. But that's just me being geeky.)

For the Q&A site to work as a money-maker, though, you have to keep two things in mind:

  1. It's a long-term approach. The Q&A site works best if you work at it slowly over a long period of time, writing good answers to well-designed questions.
  2. You need to answer worthwhile questions. Concentrate on topics that people search for and that advertisers target.

If income isn't your primary goal, though, you can pretty much answer any kind of question you want. There's nothing wrong with building Q&A sites with no ads, or with no expectation of anything beyond paying their costs. You can always use them to direct traffic (and PageRank) to your other, paying sites.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's built themselves a Q&A site, or anyone who builds one after reading this.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The Ugly Single-Page Site

If you're looking to make money from AdSense you might want to try combining the ugly site and single-page site strategies to build an ugly single-page site each week or two. Here's how:

If one of the sites starts getting traffic, start building more content for it. In the meantime, move on to building other sites.

The perfect strategy for the design-impaired!

(I say this half-jokingly… it's amazing how much time you can spend tweaking your web pages to look right… there's a lot of freedom in not worrying too much about how the page looks and concentrating on building good content…)

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 29, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Many pages require many links for indexing

Getting the home page of your new site listed in Google and the other search engines is easy — just submit it to the search engines — but getting all the pages on your site submitted may be more of a challenge, especially with Google. Googler Matt Cutts confirms that even listing all of your URLs in a Google Sitemaps file doesn't guarantee that those pages will be indexed. He says it quite simply: “In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply.” (See his longish Q&A blog entry for details, it's buried in there.)

So, once again, do your best to garner links back to your site, preferably to specific pages on your site, not just the home page. But don't go buying links, that's a no-no. Sites that sell links risk losing their reputation. It's always better to get “natural” links, especially one-way links from sites completely and utterly unassociated with yours.

Other things help, too. Right now, for example, Google tends to trust sites that have been around for a long time. If you have an old domain that you haven't done much with, consider using it for your next blog/site, even if the domain isn't perfect, because you'll get some extra “Google juice” due to its age. My personal site has been in continuous existence since 1999, which I think has helped it maintain a fairly high PR level. Now if only Amazon would directly link to it and to this site, that would really help…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 29, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Amazon author blogs

Hard to believe, but the first anniversary of the publication of Make Easy Money with Google is fast approaching (June 17). This time last year I was (very) busy putting the final touches on the book, madly writing the last few chapters and updating screenshots whenever Google decided to muck with the AdSense console. (Again, my plea to Google: please bring back the old console.) The first entry in this blog, The Make Easy Money with Google blog is up!, was posted on May 30, less than 3 weeks before the book's official release.

Since then, I've written the equivalent of another book about AdSense in this blog! You can understand my reluctance, then, at participating in the AmazonConnect program, which lets books authors like myself create Amazon-managed blogs for promoting their books. For authors without a blog, it's a great idea. For authors with a blog, it's just more work! :-)

Still, I'm not one to pass up a chance to publicize my book, so this morning I created my own AmazonConnect blog for Make Easy Money with Google, which you can now see on the book's Amazon detail page. The best thing about the blog is that it appears before any reader reviews — giving me the chance to set reader expectations a bit better than the publisher's editorial copy does — and that I can direct potential readers to this blog. Amazon's normally pretty stingy about letting visitors off its site — remember our recent discussion about the single-page AdSense site and making exit points profitable? — and the fact that these blogs let you link to external sites at all (albeit via a redirection through a new browser window) is amazing to me.

I really doubt I'll be posting much more to that blog. Hey, I just passed the 100 subscriber mark for this blog on Bloglines (use this link to add your own subscription). That doesn't sound like much, but it's not the only way people read this blog and I've been quite happy to see the numbers grow over time. (Too bad I lost my Technorati ranking due to the address change, but that should fix itself in a few more months.)

Remember, you need to be in it for the long haul to make good money from AdSense. Writing good content — whether it's maintaining a near-daily blog like this or writing new articles for your site — takes time, and your traffic will build slowly over time if your work at it. I talked about this early on in Have you read “26 Steps to 15K a Day” yet? and the advice in Brett Tabke's wonderful posting still applies today. It should be required reading for all AdSense publishers! Print it out and re-read it every week.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 28, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Licensing does not prevent theft

One of the comments to yesterday's posting about making content theft work in your favor didn't like my cavalier attitude to content theft. I certainly don't advocate such theft, and I've written before about using Google Alerts to find stolen content. As someone who makes his living primarily from writing (my definition of writing includes programming) you can be sure that the protection of intellectual property is a great concern of mine.

But let's be realistic. If you put stuff up on the Web for free and provide it in a form that's easily manipulated — those feeds — then you shouldn't be surprised to find someone using your content in ways you didn't intend. Licensing your content under a Creative Commons or similar license won't stop this from occurring. In fact, you lose rights when you release material that way, because you're allowing others to reproduce your material. Without that license, reproduction rights are strictly limited — remember that copyright protection is implicit.

I don't think that embedding digital signatures like Numly numbers helps prevent serious theft. Sure, it'll catch those who blindly copy the material without changing it, but that won't deter the serious thief. If they're altering your content to remove links and such you can bet they'll alter it enough to make those watermarking schemes useless. You can lock your doors all you want, but a determined thief will always find a way to break in.

I do agree with the commenter's final point about finding some middle ground in all of this. The biggest problem I have with policing content theft is that it takes time away from content creation and traffic generation. Put in some basic measures — again, Google Alerts is a great tool for this — but accept that some content theft is bound to occur.

P.S.: A lot of content doesn't get stolen, but it's not due to diligent policing and anti-theft measures. It's because the content's simply not good enough to steal!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 28, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Content theft can boost your rankings

A quick tip. Syndicated content is ridiculously easy to reuse and repackage, making it perfect for automated content generation schemes. Take a few RSS feeds (from blogs like this one), parse out the individual entries, slap a page template (with ad code, of course) around each entry and then publish the new page to your own site and voila, instant site! Any competent (or semi-competent) programmer can write a program to do this in a weekend, and for those who don't have the skill or inclination to do so there are several software packages available for purchase that do it for you.

So what's a blogger (or anyone syndicating content — bloggers are just the biggest and most obvious group) supposed to do about this? Here are common tactics:

Or you could view content theft as an opportunity to spread the word about your blog/site. Make the thieves your unwilling accomplices in this. How? Simple: put a link back to your site in every posting you make. Yes, the feed has a link back to your site in it, but I'm talking about embedding links right in the content. You can do it quite easily via a short “bio” at the bottom of each posting, like I do (see below). Or strategically within the content itself, if appropriate.

This won't catch all the thieves, of course. Some of them strip links from content. There's nothing you can do about that, other than perhaps make sure you entries are peppered with enough links to make them only semi-useful without them. But the thieves that leave the links in place will end up helping you in the long run. Remember, one-way links are valuable and your own rankings can't be hurt by an independent site linking to yours.

My advice is to not worry much about content theft. After all, if what you're writing is so valuable, why aren't you charging for it in the first place? That's when you should worry about content theft. But if you're putting it out free, expect it to be reprinted and plan accordingly. There are more important things to worry about.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Free list of high-paying keywords

A friend of mine has been mining AdWords for several months now, collecting pricing information for various keywords, and he's decided to make the list available for free at 42ideas.com. His AdWords keywords and phrases list can be sorted alphabetically or by price and makes for interesting browsing. He also lists the date each keyword was last updated, which is important to know since the pricing may have changed since that time.

Have fun browsing it. My friend was thinking of making a product out of it, but apparently my recent mini-series on high-paying keywords convinced him otherwise. You, too, should read it if you haven't already.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

Trademarks as keywords

As the Invisible Fence Guide (soon to be renamed) proves, keywords that are trademarks can cause you some difficulties. First, though, let's see what a trademark actually is. Here is how the United States Patent and Trademark Office defines trademark and the related term service mark:

“A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods. In short, a trademark is a brand name.”

“A service mark is any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce, to identify and distinguish the services of one provider from the services provided by others, and to indicate the source of the services.”

In other words, trademarks (I'll use the term inclusively from now on to refer to service marks as well) uniquely identify goods and services. So the trademark Invisible Fence identifiers a pet containment system marketed by Invisible Fence, Inc. and its dealers. Most brand names are trademarks, of course.

Aside: if you're looking for some good information about trademarks, check out these articles about trademarks and domain names by intellectual property lawyer Ivan Hoffman. Well worth your time in reading.

Trademark owners must defend their trademarks in order to protect them. If the owner sees someone infringing their trademark, they must act to stop the infringement. This is what the Invisible Fence people are doing with me, of course.

I'm going to have more to say about this shortly, but I thought I'd leave you with an interesting tidbit. As you probably know, Louis Vuitton is luxury handbag maker whose designs are often counterfeited. Louis Vuitton does, however, work hard to protect its brand name, and that includes suing Google for letting advertisers place bids against Louis Vuitton trademarks. Contrast these two queries, for example:

Those links open new browser windows. Look closely at the right side of each window. The US window is full of ads. The French window shows no ads. Why? Because Google lost a lawsuit brought by Louis Vuitton in France in 2004. Interesting, eh?

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 24, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Chitika referral data is back

The folks at Chitika just wrote back to me to inform me that the eMiniMalls referral data, including the audited earnings for February, is back online. Some kind of server problem.

One thing I wish they'd add is the ability to view the audited referral data by date range, just like they do withe regular earnings. Then it would be easy to see what the referral earnings for a given month are. Right now you have to add them up manually, or eyeball them.

Although my audited earnings aren't down much, one of my affiliates reports a 50% decline, on par with what they've seen before. Their sites seem to attract a lot of invalid clicks. Again, if Chitika could do the auditing in a more timely fashion they'd avoid disappointing publishers at the end of each month.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Chitika posts audited data for February

Chitika publishers take note: though there's no mention of it yet in the official Chitika blog, the audited data for February 2006 has just been posted, so go check out your income. This time I see only about a 10% drop in my direct earnings.

More worrisome, however, is the fact that my referral income has dried up — because Chitika thinks I have no more referrals! The referrals revenue page of the Chitika console doesn't show me anything anymore. I hope this is just a glitch in the auditing process, but I'll have to enter a support ticket just in case. No referrals will cut my Chitika income (which is not much yet) significantly.

Goodness knows I never have these problems with AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google sponsors AdSense Help group

Over at Google Groups, Google has just made public its AdSense Help group. This is a public discussion forum meant primarily for self-help (is that like self-medication?) except that it will be monitored on an occasional basis (well, they'd better monitor it every 10 minutes to cut out the spam that's sure to crop up) by an official AdSense representative.

I may pop in there once in a while, but I already have enough to read as it is, and I tend to gravitate to the Digital Point AdSense forum. Some would argue that there's no need for yet another AdSense forum/group. But look at it from Google's perspective: they get to display ads related to AdSense and keep all the money instead of having to split it with AdSense publishers.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdWords keyword tool now open to anyone

This isn't great news for products like AdSenseAccelerator or Keyword Elite, but Google has just opened up the AdWords Keyword Tool to anyone. It wasn't a big deal to get to it before — you just needed to sign up for an AdWords account, which only cost you $5-$10 — but now you can access the AdWords ad data without an account.

The keyword tool is a great resource for casual keyword research. You've seen me demonstrate it before here in various postings. You can use the tool for various purposes:

You can do everything online and then download keyword lists into .csv files for import into a spreadsheet or database. Definitely a handy tool to have — check it out!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 22, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense Tip #12: Filter low-paying ads

Time for another instalment of my Google AdSense Tips series. Be sure to read all of them! Today's topic is the AdSense competitive filter.

The competitive filter, which you access from your AdSense management console, is a mechanism that lets you list the URLs of AdWords advertisers whose ads you want to block. Normally you block an entire domain, but you can actually block a specific part or folder on a domain. The details are in the AdSense Filter Guide — be sure you read it to understand how to specify the URLs to filter. Currently, you're limited to entering 200 URLs for AdSense for content and another 200 for AdSense for search. While this sounds like a lot, it really isn't if you're using the filter for its secondary purpose: filtering low-paying ads.

Of course, the filter is called the “competitive ad filter” for a reason. It was created so that AdSense publishers could filter out ads from competitors. It cannot, unfortunately, be used to filter out ads by keyword or topic — you can only do that by adjusting the content of your pages to emphasize a different keyword/topic. But really, there's no way to keep anyone out short of filtering by the ad destination.

Most AdSense publishers, however, don't worry about competitors, but they would like to maximize the per-click payouts they get from the ads shown on their sites. This is where the competitive ad filter can help.

To understand how it works, we have to turn to the AdWords program, which is where the ads come from. For any given keyword/topic, Google ranks ads using this formula:

Ad Rank = CPC x QS

In this formula, CPC refers to the maximum cost-per-click the advertiser is willing to pay (this is not the CPC that the AdSense publisher gets) and QS is the quality score of the ad. This vague number (we don't have exact details about it) incorporates the CTR (clickthrough rate) of the ad, the historical performance of the ad, as well as other attributes such as how well the landing page relates to the keywords the advertiser is targeting.

Let's simplify things somewhat and go back to the original AdWords formula:

Ad rank = CPC x CTR

In other words, we're assuming that the other elements of the QS term equal 1, which isn't entirely unreasonable for similar ads from different advertisers who are targeting the same keyword. Or we could assume that the other elements of QS are miniscule enough that any variance is negligible to the overall rank calculation.

(Remember that ad rank is a fluid thing as new ads are constantly appearing in the ad pool and old ads are being taken out.)

Alright, let's say we have two ad units from different advertisers targeting the same keyword. Call them MFA and CIK. There is a significant different in the CPC between the two: MFA bids $0.10 per click, CIK bids $0.50 per click. Say MFA's ad is better and attracts more clickthroughs, so that its CTR stands at a healthy 2.5%. So the ranking for MFA is this:

MFA rank = 0.10 x 0.025 = 0.0025

Now CIK's ad isn't as good and has a lower CTR of 0.5%. Even though it has a higher CPC, its rank is the same as MFA's:

CIK rank = 0.50 x 0.005 = 0.0025

So in any given ad auction for that keyword, both ads are going to rank identically, even though there's a big variance in the CPC. In fact, if the MFA ad unit get a slight boost in its CTR or the CIK ad gets a slight decrease, the MFA ad will outrank the CIK ad and will be shown more often.

That's all fine and dandy, but how does this help you as an AdSense publisher? After all, the ad selection algorithm will show the ads more likely to be clicked, which should make you more money over the longer term, right?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Let's say 1000 people visit a given page. And let's say that the publisher's portion of the CPC is half the maximum CPC bid — in other words, we're ignoring things like smart pricing that actually lower the effective CPC. So a click on MFA gives the publisher $0.05, a click on CIK gives them $0.25. Assuming the CTRs used in the ad ranking algorithm hold, both ads make the publisher the same amount of money:

MFA: 0.05 * 0.025 * 1000 = $1.25
CIK: 0.25 * 0.005 * 1000 = $1.25

But what if, for some reason, the CIK ad has a higher effective CTR for that particular page. For example, say the CTK ad is particularly appealing to page visitors and ends up having a 1.5% effective CTR instead of a 0.5% average CTR. Here's how much money it would make:

CIK: 0.25 * 0.015 * 1000 = $3.75

But if there are a lot of MFA ads, their higher ad rank based on the average CTR values will “push out” the CIK ads. Which means less money for the publisher.

Even if the ad rankings take the effective CTR into account, though, there's another way publishers can lose money: by losing their visitors to low-paying ads. Instead of staying on your site and exploring other pages and then hopefully clicking on a higher-paying ad (or an affiliate link or some other way to make money), they're gone. Sure, you're being paid, but is $0.01 (which is what some AdSense publishers end up getting per click for the low-paying ads) worth losing the visitor?

This is why filtering low-paying ads may make sense. I say may because every site is different. Maybe you're getting so much traffic that a few cents per click is enough to make you happy. Maybe your whole business model caters specifically to those low-paying ads, especially in highly competitive fields where the “real” ads are reserved for Google's search engine results pages. And the formulas we've looked at are extremely simplified and inaccurate. Filtering low-paying ads could reduce your earnings, not increase them.

But how will you know until you've tried it?

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 21, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Why can't the ugly be rich?

I've found the recent discussions about ugly sites earning more with AdSense very amusing. Do our cultural biases towards “beautiful” extend out to the Web? Why can't an “ugly” site be a rich site? And who says a site is “ugly” anyhow?

The reason “ugly” sites make money is that they have near-perfect ad blending. The ads look like the rest of the page, so they attract more clicks. As to the theory that people immediately “click away” from an “ugly” site, I just don't buy it. For one thing, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder — if you pruned away all the ugly sites, you'd lose 85% of the Web. At least! Casual surfers are more used to ugliness — or at least average attractiveness — than you may think. (Kind of like real life — look around you, how many truly “beautiful” people do you see?) The usability of a site is more important than its attractiveness — I'll take a useful, usable site any day over a good-looking, unnavigable site.

The other reason why people don't click away from ugly sites is that those sites have useful content. People surf for content, a fact few outside the adult website industry seem to acknowledge. (You want targeted content? How about… nah, better not…) Visitors who are truly sensitive to the “ugliness” of a site are more likely to click their browser's “back” button, not an ad.

This is why my multi-stage AdSense case study started by building just such an “ugly” site. It made me money almost from the beginning. Maybe I should ditch the CSS and revert it back to its natural state and double my revenues!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 21, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Search engine submission links

Whenever I create a new site or blog, I always take a few minutes to submit it to the “big three” search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN. It's actually very easy to do, and I realize I've never exposed the list of links I use to submit sites and feeds. Well, here it is:

Search Engine Submission Pages — http://www.memwg.com/submit.html

Bookmark that page and you'll have a quick entry point to all the major search engine submission pages. Separate links are provided for website and feed submissions, and all the links open into new windows to make submission even easier. If you haven't submitted your site/blog already, do it now and then go back to writing good content.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Invisible Fence removal

So my wife calls me at work late Friday afternoon to tell me that I've just received a 5-page fax from Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, the lawyers for Invisible Fence, Inc. (You can see where this going already, can't you?) Yes, they are unhappy with my Invisible Fence Guide, which I've mentioned and discussed many times here as an AdSense case study.

It occurred to me shortly after starting the Guide that my use of the Invisible Fence trademark, which is owned by Invisible Fence, Inc., might be an issue, despite the fact that my site actively promotes the use of the Invisible Fence electronic pet containment system. Since I had already started, I decided to forge ahead without complicating the issue by rewording and renaming things, but now that time's obviously arrived.

Over the next week, then, I'm changing the Guide to remove most uses of the words “Invisible Fence” and replace them with more generic terms like “pet fence”, “electronic pet containment” and so on. I've already done the first step and moved the site to the “pet-fence” subdomain on EricGiguere.com. If you have a site whose domain name includes trademarked terms, you might consider doing the same. Sites with generic names like stroller-advisor.com and wireless-digital-cameras.com won't run into these kinds of issues, of course.

Anyhow, as I change the site I'll be making a few more postings here discussing various trademark issues in relation to AdSense. That fax I received is actually a good thing, because it's given me a wealth of things to discuss, especially the law firm's dislike of Google's ads that feature their client's trademark. More on this tomorrow.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Southern Canada disappears under the waves

Americans equate “Canada” with “north”, but did you know that Point Pelee in Ontario is at the same latitude as northern California? Well, today's Globe and Mail reports that the southernmost tip of Point Pelee, about 800 metres (half a mile), has disappeared under the waves again, effectively moving the Canadian mainland slightly north.

Title baiting

So what does Point Pelee have to do with AdSense? Nothing at all, but today's topic of title baiting definitely does, and the title of this post is an example of title bait.

“Title baiting” is just another way of saying “write attention-grabbing titles”. It's a specialized kind of link baiting, which is writing sensational or controversial articles/postings in order to attract links. Title baiting is as old as the written word. Headlines like Madonna in Surgery Nightmare at the National Enquirer are meant to entice us.

Writing attention-grabbing titles is a bit of an art form, in fact. Many people don't realize that the headlines they see in their daily newspapers are not written by the reporters who write the articles, but by dedicated headline writers whose job is to make the reader want to read an article.

You have TWO titles to worry about

One thing that's different about web pages, though, is that you have two titles to worry about: the page title (specified via the <title> tag) and the top-level heading (specified via the <h1> tag). Both are extremely important, but they address different audiences:

A common strategy, of course, is to make the page title and the top-level heading identical. This is certainly how most blogs work these days, and changing that is probably not something most bloggers can do. But if you're building a non-blog site, you do have more flexibility in differentiating your page titles from the top-level headings.

The fine art of keyword insertion

The hardest thing about writing good titles, though, is having them include the appropriate keywords. SEO 101 tells us that we should use keywords in the page title and in the top-level heading, not just in the page content. By that measure, this posting fails SEO 101 because it's missing the keywords “title baiting” or “title bait”. But I'm not really sure how I would include them in a headline about Canada losing its southernmost point to the ravages of the weather. But this posting is kind of a special case: I was using the title to make a point.

The trick, of course, is to use keywords without making the title sound awkward or stilted. Or, at least, not making the top-level heading sound that way. An argument can be made for making the keywords in the page title more prominent, because on the SERPs the titles are shown with page text and the additional context may be enough to entice the visitor to click the link despite the weird-looking or awkward-sounding title.

Where to find help

There are courses and books available about headline writing, but you can find a lot of good resources for free with a bit of searching. Articles and tutorials for journalism students and rookie reporters are your best bet initially, like this little gem listing words that simplify the grammar of a headline or these headline hints by Joel Pisetzner. A search on “newspaper headline writing” will bring up many interesting and useful articles.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

March 17, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Next Page →