As an AdSense “expert”, I often get questions from my readers about best practices for AdSense. Everyone wants to know what “the rules” are. How many ad units? Which formats? Which colors? Which keywords? Blog or website?

As it happens, there is a single answer to all of these questions: Test it and see what works for you. It's not the answer they usually want to hear, however.

You've probably heard the saying that “no two snowflakes are identical”, though the accuracy of that statement is up for debate. You can similarly argue that no two sites are identical — even if they look the same, they'll have different traffic patterns, different link graphs, different levels of findability. So what works for me on my site may not work for you on your site, even if our sites appear to be very similar.

Maybe I should setup an autoresponder to answer those questions — it would be trivial to do!

This is not to say that there are no common answers to AdSense questions. For example, I can state quite strongly that horizontal link units placed in the header area of a page work better than vertical link units on most sites. But I can't say that this holds true for all sites. Neither can Google — that's why they never say “doing X will increase your earnings” but instead say “doing X may increase your earnings”.

The problem with testing, of coure, is that it takes time. Time to implement, time to gather meaningful statistics. And it has to be done in small increments — otherwise how do you know which change increased or decreased your earnings?

So watch this space for some useful tips on how to test your AdSense usage to find the right answers for your site.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

So I see that the latest Inside AdSense posting is a case study showing how an AdSense publisher was able to dramatically increase her earnings by switching a vertical link unit to a horizontal link unit. This isn't news to readers of this blog, I said that over a year ago, and I also devote a chapter to it in Uncommon AdSense. I've never had much luck with vertical link units, but horizontal ones almost always surprise me with their earning power.

Why do horizontal link units work so well? Because they don't look like ads. Yes, there's the “Ads by Google” to the left of the links, but to many viewers that link isn't obviously related to the remaining links.

I have some personal experience with this view. Remember when Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers sent me a cease-and-desist fax about the Invisible Fence Guide Pet Fence Guide? One of the things they wanted was for me to take down the links labeled “invisible fence” that were in my header — that's right, it was actually a horizontal link unit. I had to explain to them that those links weren't mine, they were actually ads generated automatically by Google and that they should go talk to Google about the use of their trademark in advertisements.

Try it yourself. Place a horizontal link unit — there are two sizes — somewhere near the top of your page layout, preferably close to some kind of navigational element. Right under the header is a good spot in most cases. Let it sit there for a couple of weeks and see how well it works. You'll be surprised!

Sponsored Link: For more AdSense advice,
give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

I had a question from someone about using the Google AdWords program to advertise their site. So here's my quick primer on getting started with Google AdWords.

Preliminaries

There is some preliminary information you should gather before starting:

1. Your advertising goals. Are you advertising a specific product or service? Are you looking to build your brand? Are you trying to make money by promoting other people's products? For the latter, I'd suggest you look at one of the many AdWords books that focus on affiliate selling. This primer is meant for people who are looking to promote their own products and services.
2. Your landing pages. A landing page is a page on your site that customers “land on” after clicking one of your ads. You can have multiple landing pages. The landing page should ideally be directly related to the advertisements you'll be placing. It might be an existing page — say a sales page for one of your products. But often you want to use separate landing pages, both so you can tweak your copy to better fit the ads and also so that you can more easily track what's working and what's not.
3. Your desired customers. What language do your customers use? What countries are they in? Or do you want to advertise locally? Do you want to advertise only at certain times of the day?
4. Your credit card. You'll need a credit card to register for AdWords, and Google will be charging that card automatically at regular intervals based on your ad spending.
5. Your AdWords email address. You'll be signing in using an email address. If more than one person is going to access the account, you may want to create an “AdWords-only” email address that is used for this purpose that simply forwards any emails it receives to the appropriate parties within your organization.

Whatever you do, don't rush into AdWords advertising without the proper preparation. You might want to go so far as reading a general book about AdWords like Perry Marshall's Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords or Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords.

In particular, spend time on developing your landing pages, for two good reasons. The first is that you need to convert visitors into customers. The second is that landing pages gets analyzed by Google for quality and relevance and directly affect the cost of your advertisements.

Prepare Your First Ad

As part of the signup process you'll be asked to enter an ad, so you might as well prepare the ad ahead of time. Note that we're only talking about text ads here, the ads that Google shows on the right side of a search query results page. You can advertise in other formats, but the four-line text ad is the “classic” ad format and the way most people start.

Each text ad consists of four things:

1. A title or headline, limited to 25 characters or less.
2. Two lines of text, each limited to 35 characters or less. This is the body of the ad.
3. A display URL, which is normally just the domain name of the website that the ad links to. The display URL is what the user sees in the ad, and it's limited to 35 characters. (You can drop the “www” part of the domain name and capitalize the domain name appropriately.)
4. A destination URL, which is the address of the landing page on your website. The user does not see the destination URL.

Let's pretend that we're Amazon's advertising department and that we want to place an ad promoting one of the cameras Amazon sells. Here's a sample ad:

Title:
Canon PowerShot SD800


Line 1:
7.1MP Digital Elph Camera


Line 2:
Low Price and Free Shipping!


Display URL:
Amazon.com


Destination URL:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HAOVGM

Expect to spend some time on this, because crafting an appealing text ad that still fits within the character limits is not easy. Note that there are important editorial guidelines to follow. If you don't, your ad will not be approved.

The ad title and/or ad text should directly relate to the landing page if at all possible.

Make a Keyword List

The ads you run are associated with keywords. When users use those keywords in their Google searches, your ads get triggered. So you need to prepare a list of keywords to go along with the ad.

The easiest way to find keywords is to extract them from your ad. In the ad above, for example, the phrase “canon powershot sd800″ is an obvious keyphrase (you're not limited to single-word keyphrases). So is “7.1MP digital elph”. You can be as specific as you like. In fact, you normally want to use specific keywords over general keywords because the more specific and precise the keyword the more targeted the visitor is going to be and the easier it will be to convert them into customers.

If you're stuck for keyword ideas, use the free AdWords keyword tool, which anyone can use. Click the Site-Related Keywords tab and enter your landing page URL (the destination URL) into the tool to get a list of the keywords that Google thinks are related to that page.

Here's a small sampling of what keywords Google thinks are related to the Canon PowerShot SD800 page in the ad above:

• camera canon digital powershot review
• canon powershot digital elph
• canon elph camera
• canon powershot s410 camera

The list is actually very extensive. You might even want to revise your ad and/or landing page text based on what Google shows you.

This is a simple and very effective way to build a set of related keywords for your landing page, which in turn ensures your ad has a good quality score.

After you've come up with a list of related keywords, group the keywords together based on common subphrases. You could, for example, place all keyphrases containing “digital camera” into one group and
all keyphrases containing “digital elph” into another. Once you've done this, choose one of the groups as your “primary” keyword set and make sure that the common subphrase for that group is in your ad text and in the landing page text. Put the remaining keywords aside for now.

Sign Up For AdWords

Next, you'll want to sign up for AdWords. Start the process by clicking this button:

You'll have to choose between the Starter and the Standard editions of AdWords. You can upgrade from the Starter edition at any point, but I recommend you go with the full-blown Standard edition right from the start.

Google will ask you what languages and what countries/regions/cities you want to target, so fill in that info.

Create the Ad

During the signup process you'll be asked for your ad and your keywords, so enter them into the appropriate spots. Use the primary keyword group you created earlier.

Now comes the hard part, determining how much to pay per click. You'll be asked to set a daily budget (which limits how much the ad will cost you per day) as well as a maximum cost-per-click price. AdWords is essentially a big ad auction system. Advertisers bid against each other for placement on search engine query results pages. All other things being equal, the higher you bid, the higher your spot on the results page. But things are never equal. Google factors in how often your ad gets clicked, its relevance to the landing page, and the landing page's quality in order to do the final ranking. So a very relevant ad to a quality site that gets clicked on more often than the other ads for a given keyword can end up in the #1 spot and yet have a maximum bid price that is lower than the other ads beneath it.

Until you have some more experience with AdWords, all you can do at this point is choose a bid price based on how much money you're willing to lose (on the assumption that none of the clicks lead to sales). If you want, Google will give you its recommendations for getting the most clicks, but usually that's way more money than you want to spend. You can use Google's traffic estimator to see how many clicks you're likely to get at a specific bid price, but it's not exact. If you know your landing page converts at a certain rate, factor that into your calculations.

Tweak Some Settings

At this point you will have created an ad campaign consisting of a single ad group. Each campaign can hold multiple groups, and usually each group uses a separate set of keywords. You can go ahead and create an ad group for each keyword group you defined earlier on, or you can just leave things as-is for now until you get the hang of things.

One thing you should do at this point is edit the campaign settings for your new campaign and turn off the serving of ads to the “content network”. The Google content network are third-party sites, primarily AdSense publishers, and when you're just starting you don't want to show your ads there, you want to show them on Google's search pages only. Prices on the search network are generally higher than those on the content network, so if you don't turn it off you'll probably find you're spending more money than you expected because your ads will be getting displayed more often and getting clicked on more often relative to the other advertisers who've either turned off the content network entirely or have placed separate (lower) bids for placement on the content network.

You can also control when your ads are shown. If you think potential customers tend to fall within a certain time range (say between 8am and 10pm) then you can set the campaign to only run within that range.

Watch Your Spending

Once your first campaign is up and running, let it run for a few days and see what happens. Are you getting clicks? Are they turning into sales? Adjust your campaign accordingly.

That's the primer. There are so many things that I've left out that really need discussing, so I'd really recommend you get Perry Marshall's book and read it before doing much more with AdWords. There are various ebooks like Beating AdWords that are also available, but be aware that most of those books focus on using AdWords for affiliate selling, not for selling your own products and services.

Google's AdWords help center also has an extensive store of information that all advertisers can access for free, and it's well worth your time to peruse what's available there as well.

Feel free to ask any questions if I've confused you with anything I've said.

Sponsored Link: I also know a thing or two about AdSense,
so why not give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.