AdSenseAccelerator review (Part 2)

Let's continue with our review of AdSenseAccelerator. I teased you with a few screenshots in Part 1 of the review, but not let's actually see the product in action.

As I mentioned before, the Keyword Research and Top AdSense Bids tabs are the most interesting parts of this tool. Let's start with the former.

The Keyword Research tab is where you start your search for good-quality keywords. You start by entering a “theme” keyword for the category and then pressing the “Get Keywords” button. Let's try it with the theme “adsense” and see what we get:

Wow! The “adwords” keyword look pretty impressive! But click on the Refined tab and you'll see even more keywords:

Hey, these ones look even better! But how good are they, really? What you want to do now is get bids and traffic estimates for the various keywords. To do this you put the keywords that interest you into the keyword basket. The quickest way to do this is via the “Select All” button. Let's add all the keywords we found on the Refined tab to the basket. We then move to the Step 3 part of the window and press the “Get Bids & Estimates” button and end up with this:

You can click on any of the column headers to sort by that column. Click on “Top Bid” and you'll see that the phrase “adsense blog” comes up on top at $27.50, followed by “adsense revenue” at $20.18. Apparently, my blog isn't raking in the big bucks it should be! But of course, there are some key factors to remember:

The prices shown are the AdWords bid prices for those phrases. Your payment will be a percentage of whatever the the advertiser pays, so it won't be as high as what you see.
There could be a steep drop in between the first (topmost) bid for a keyword and the second bid. This matters to you because the winning advertiser will pay at most just over the second bid's price.

That's why the other columns in the keyword list are important. One judges the relative quality of the keyword — the more dollar signs, the better. These keywords are all low-quality keywords, as we'll see when we explore them in detail with the Top AdSense Bids tab tomorrow. Then you see relative search activity and the total number of pages containing those terms. You want keywords that are searched enough but that don't have a whole lot of competition. Lots of factors to consider.

Tomorrow we get to the best part of this program, the bid analysis.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.