Although I've neglected it of late, the Invisible Fence Guide has had a sudden flurry of AdSense activity lately. (Don't worry, I will shortly finish the belated AdSense case study that features the Guide — anyone interested in having a PDF version of the case study?) Wondering why, I did some investigation. The Guide still ranks in the top 10 or 20 (for “invisible fence” — it's still #1 for “invisible fence guide”) in Google, depending on which data center you're using, so nothing changed there. It is, however, now ranked #3 on MSN for the search term invisible fence. A quick look through my logs shows an increase in traffic from there. Of course, it could just be that it's a seasonal thing — as spring approaches in North America, more people are thinking about installing wireless electric fences to contain their dogs. Still, it's a good starting point for our discussion about making money from MSN and Yahoo via AdSense.
Do MSN users click more ads?
Although getting a high ranking in Google always seems to be the #1 priority for webmasters, a number of AdSense publishers have commented on the fact that it may be better to get a #1 ranking in MSN if contextual advertising is your income source. Why? Because it appears that MSN users click AdSense ads more often than Google users do!
Now why would this be? There are several possible explanations, and I'll leave it up to you to judge which are the closest to the truth:
- MSN users don't realize they're clicking ads. This is an argument made for a lot of online advertising, actually, but the point here is that MSN users as a class may be unaware that AdSense ads are, well, ads. Until recently, for example, Dell was using a branded MSN page as the default home page for its computers. So MSN probably got a lot of traffic from casual users that way. And of course from the default Windows installations, too.
- Google users develop ad-blindness. More Google users, on the other hand, know what the ads look like and develop “contextual advertising blindness”.
- MSN users develop ad-blindness. Oddly enough, if an MSN user develops “contextual advertising blindness”, that might in fact make them more likely to click an AdSense ad. Why? Because they look different than MSN ads.
- Google users tend to click the ads on the Google search results pages. Because the same ad service (AdWords) feeds the same ads to Google's own search pages and (via AdSense) to third-party sites, chances are good that when a Google user is searching for something they may see a particular ad on the Google search results page itself before they see it on a site they visit from that page. In other words, they click the ads on the search pages before they click the ads on the content pages.
And of course, don't forget the simple fact that if you can get a higher ranking in MSN then higher earnings may occur simply because you're getting more traffic to your site — your CTR may not improve, but your earnings certainly may.
Note that you could make similar arguments for targeting Yahoo! users.
Should you ignore Google?
So you might wonder if this means you should ignore Google in your quest for higher AdSense earnings. Of course not! Getting a high ranking in Google is always beneficial. More targeted traffic is always good, no matter where the source. You might, however, want to try the opposite-ad-program theory to see if you get better earnings, though: for Google referrals, show YPN ads, for MSN and Yahoo referrals, show AdSense ads. (I have not tried this theory myself because YPN still isn't available to non-Americans. But it's probably worth a shot for a week or two.)
What it does mean, though, is that you shouldn't focus exclusively on Google. Don't ignore the other search engines and try to get good rankings for your site in Yahoo! and MSN, and maybe some of the smaller ones as well. Some of these rankings should happen naturally due to good SEO practices. MSN seems to put more weight on the in-page SEO techniques (keywords in title, headings, text, image alternate text) and on the actual number of links than the other two do. (Be careful not to go overboard and get penalized in Google.)
Work your way higher on all the search engines and I can almost guarantee your earnings will increase significantly. It's all about traffic.
Coming shortly: A review of a neat product called AdSenseAccelerator.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.