AdSenseAccelerator review (Part 3)
The final episode of my review of AdSenseAccelerator. Refer to Part 1 and Part 2 before continuing to read.
When we left off yesterday, we had used AdSenseAccelerator to grab a list of keywords related to the “adsense” theme. Then we got bids and estimates for the different keywords. From this we concluded that “adsense blog” and “adsense revenue” looked like winners, with top bids over $20. But are they really winners?
You might to go back a week or two and read my series on keywords and keyword lists. The problem with most keyword lists is that the top bid for a keyword rarely reflects what you'll get as an AdSense publisher. There are various reasons for this, but probably the biggest factor is the way the bidding process works. You see, there will always be a gap between what the first place bidder bids and what the second place bidder bids. To help advertisers keep costs down, Google only charges the first place bidder just a bit more than what the second place bidder bid. So the bid gap becomes extremely important.
Think about it: which keyword would you rather focus on, the keyword where the top three bids are $50, $0.50 and $0.25, or the keyword where the top three bids are $8, $6, and $4? The answer is the second keyword, because it has a smaller bid gap: the first place bidder is going to pay just over $6. With the first keyword, the first place bidder will pay just over $0.50. There's a big difference between $6 and $0.50, especially because an AdSense publisher will only get a percentage of the bid price paid by the advertiser.
This is where the third and final tab on AdSenseAccelerator is really useful. The Top AdSense Bids tab displays the bid gaps between the different bidding positions. Here's the list of bid gaps for the keywords we chose in Part 2 (click to see it in its full glory):
As you can see, the “adsense blog” keyphrase that seemed so promising is not that great when you look at the bid gap between the first and second place bids. The first place bid is $9.07 (note that this bid price is based on a broad match, the exact match bid for the same phrase is in fact over $27, but the bid gap is even broader, so for our purposes the broad match is good enough) and the second place bid is — wait for it! — all of 30 cents. So the first place bidder is not going to pay $9, but just over $0.30. All the subsequent bids are lower than $0.30, of course.
So what you really want are to find the keywords that have a high top bid value but small bid gaps. If we click on the second bid column to sort it in ascending mode, we can quickly see which keywords are better targets:
Now it's clear that the top bidders for any of these keywords aren't going to pay much more than $1, which means that you as and AdSense publisher will rarely see clicks over $0.50 for these keywords. You can make money with a high clickthrough ratio (CTR) and a lot of traffic, or you can do some research to find other related keywords that pay more.
All in all, AdSenseAccelerator is a pretty useful tool. I've given them a testimonial to use if they want it, and I'm not getting any kickback from them for talking about it. I like the tool, and I'm happy to recommend it to anyone looking for more than just a list of keyword values. (Don't forget that the data is real-time, too, as opposed to static keyword lists that are quickly outdated.)
Pricing and a release date for the software haven't been finalized yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I know.
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.