Google Adsense introduces... Tell A Friend!

pay per click (PPC) advertising

Here's an unusually fun update from Google that's oh, so reminiscent of the Google-sponsored Orkut friends networking tool: Tell A Friend! Yes, that's right, if you're finding that Adsense is a good thing - and you certainly should be if you're building your sites properly - then you can now use Google to send your friends some information about the program

Here's what the Google message says:

"Just thought you might like to check out a program that lets you earn money from your website. It's called Google AdSense, and it's an easy way to get targeted ads that are relevant to your web pages.

"Google pays you when people click on the ads. It's free, and doesn't take long to set up. Check it out at: http://www.google.com/adsenseinvite_us P.S. Also check out the Quick Tour on the page above -- it explains what it's all about."

What hasn't been specified is whether there's any sort of bonus that you might get for recommending people for Adsense. If you have any information about this, please do share!

Want to start letting people know about this program? Go to Tell a Friend about Adsense.

The Future of Online Advertising

pay per click (PPC) advertising

If you were lucky enough to be with me here at Gnomedex in Lake Tahoe, California, then you already know that Paypal's Dave McClure moderated a panel entitled "The Future of Online Advertising".

Panelists included Jeff Barr of Syndic8 (a favorite site of mine), Henry Copeland of BlogAds (which I've written about in my article BlogAds: An Advertising Network Specifically for Weblogs), Bill Flitter of Pheedo.com, Mark Pincus of Tribe.net and Gokul Rajaram of Google's Adsense team (which I've written about quite extensively on this site, including Partner with Google and Make Money).

Dave shared a list of links to different Web sites that offer a good starting point for learning more about the future of online advertising and was kind enough to share them with me for this weblog.

With that introduction, here's the list:

flash/graphics

www.pointroll.com www.macromedia.com www.enliven.com www.bluestreak.com www.eyeblaster.com

email marketing

www.emaillabs.com www.topica.com www.constantcontact.com

affiliate advertising

associates.amazon.com | www.amazon.com/webservices www.google.com/adsense affiliates.ebay.com | developer.ebay.com

organic/paid search, shopping search, metrics

www.searchenginewatch.com www.google.com/adsense www.overture.com www.findwhat.com www.froogle.com www.shopping.com www.clicktracks.com www.webposition.com www.atlasonepoint.com

blogs & RSS

www.blogads.com www.pheedo.com www.feedster.com www.technorati.com

identity / behavioral targeting

www.typekey.com www.dynamiclogic.com www.revenuescience.com www.tacoda.com www.dotomi.com

other sites of interest

www.wilsonweb.com www.webmasterworld.com www.free-web-money.com

If you have additional sites that you think are good starting points for people learning about monetizing the Web site, Web pages, weblogs, whatever, please do post them as responses to this thread.

Optimal placement of ads on your Web pages

pay per click (PPC) advertising

While many of the conclusions in the recent research released by the Poynter Institute where they analyzed how people view Web pages based on tracking eye movement are so painfully obvious that it's embarrassing to read the article, the overall set of tips are well worth considering nonetheless.

Before we get to the tips, though, take a step back and think about the English language. It's a left-to-right, top-to-bottom language, so after a lifetime of learning how to read and process information, it should be no surprise to you that Web pages are assimilated top left to bottom right, and that people only view the page until they ascertain the gist of the content and/or the information they were hoping to glean from the page. Therefore, it should be obvious that the top left corner of a page is viewed the most, while the bottom right corner is, you guessed it, viewed the least.

Further, when it comes to advertising, larger is better than smaller (as long as you hopefully try to find a balance between advertising and actual content) and ads that seem to be integrated into the content are better than those that stand out by virtue of color, design, placement, etc.

Those are some of the conclusions of the Eyetrack III research project, so you can see why I'm not too impressed: research done without regard (or commentary on) the milieu and context of the research project is questionable and typically obvious.

But, as I said earlier, the tips offered in the article are nonetheless worth considering, so I'm reproducing them here. I encourage you to go and read the entire research report to get the full context if you're so inclined.

Simple Designs Work Best

"If you are responsible for creating the ad content for your advertiser clients, think about making sure that your design can deliver its message in a single glance, because that might be all you'll get. If you want to insert more text on an ad unit than can be consumed in a single (less-than-a-second) glance, then assume that the unit will have one glance to hook the reader's attention. Once hooked, you have the opportunity to draw the reader in closer, but only if that initial hook is effective."

Contextualize Your Advertising

"Consider designing news homepages so that ads are not set apart from editorial content too much with horizontal or vertical rules and excessive white space, which can act as barriers to viewing ads."

Integrate Your Advertising Into Your Content Design

"The researchers' observations suggests that you'll get better viewing for banner ads that do not contrast too severely with surrounding editorial content. An ad that broadcasts "I'm an ad!" by using bright, contrasting colors sometimes has the opposite of the intended effect. (Of course, the content of a contrasting ad can be compelling enough to counter this tendency; as is so often the case, the quality of the content can override other factors.) We are NOT recommending that ads be presented as camouflaged editorial content. While that may attract more visual traffic, this practice would diminish your credibility."

Size Versus Placement: Consider the Tradeoffs

"Size isn't always the dominant factor in Web ad performance. To get the most people to actually look at an ad (for them to fixate on it for at least a fraction of a second) on an article page, insetting it into the text flow seems to work better than any other placement. But in-text placement may not give you the most intense user engagement with an ad; sheer size appears to perform better in this regard."

"Expandable" Ads Work, But People Won't Know They're Active

"You might consider using expandable banner ads if you want better performance than static ads offer. If you do, you might want to let viewers know the banner will expand. It's not always a great idea to surprise users with this sort of behavior. If you're going to use a mouseover-expand ad, we suggest positioning it in a normal path of user mouse movement as a way to get the expanding part of an ad seen by a lot of people. (Note: We only tested a mouseover-action ad, but many sites now use ads that automatically appear on top of editorial content and must be closed by the user. This would make for an interesting future eyetracking test. We can make an educated guess based on these findings that such an ad would be seen by most if not all users. The trade-off is that such ads annoy some users.)"

Pop-Up Advertising Doesn't Work Very Well

"Should you choose to use pop-up ads on your homepage, be aware of their poor performance relative to other ads."

Please note that the section heads are mine, just the descriptive paragraphs are quoted from the Poynter Report, and that you can read that report in its entirety here.

Interesting new Google Adsense Capabilities

pay per click (PPC) advertising

In case you haven't already signed up for Google's Adsense program (see Partner with Google and Make Money! for some great reasons why you should), you might not know that the company has just expanded the program and added some useful new features that make Adsense even more desirable: multiple ads on a page, collapsing advert space, multiple domain support for SiteSearch (see Monetizing Site Searches with Google Websearch for more details on that Adsense capability), and some tips on an interesting experiment that Google's running and you might have already noticed. I'll let the Google folk tell the story on each feature:

Multiple ad units

To provide even more value to your users, and to help you further monetize your web pages, we're allowing publishers to place up to three ad units on every web page. Our system will automatically recognize the additional ad units, and will serve unique ads to each. Your ad units can each have different color palettes, formats, and alternate ad URLs, providing you with the flexibility you need to incorporate Google ads into your site design.

Collapsing ad units

An additional option for your alternate ad content, Google’s collapsing ad units ensure that your page space is used to its maximum potential at all times. When targeted ads aren’t available for an ad unit, the collapsing ad unit feature will shrink the empty ad unit, so that blank ad spaces are eliminated from your page. For instructions on implementing this feature, please read the AdSense FAQ.

Multiple domains for AdSense for search SiteSearch

Your Search Settings page now provides you with the option of specifying multiple domains for SiteSearch. Simply enter up to three domains when generating your search code - your AdSense for search box will list each domain with a radio button, allowing your users to choose the site on which they would like to search.

Ads by Goooooogle

We’re currently running a test with new branding features on Google ads. You may notice some of your pages displaying ‘Ads by Goooooogle’ ad units. We welcome your feedback on this new look, and we’ll be analyzing the results of this test over the next while.

If you aren't running the Google Adsense program on your site or sites, we do strongly recommend that you do some research and find out how you can add some revenue generating code to your pages. A good place to start is on this site, Free Web Money, with the article Partner with Google and Make Money!.

Monetizing site searches with Google WebSearch

pay per click (PPC) advertising

If you've already signed up for Google Adsense, congrats. You're smart and you're probably finding out that pages and sites that have just been sitting around doing nothing are now generating a revenue stream for you. It's possible that it's enough for a latte every few days, but it might be more. Quite a bit more. I have colleagues who see "four figure days" with Adsense.

if you haven't yet plugged in, then you'll want to immediately read the article Partner with Google and Make Money!. Back? Good. Let's talk about a whole new facet of Adsense that you can utilize to generate additional revenue from your site: search. If you read the Google Adsense terms of service, you'll find that you aren't allowed to have adverts on search result pages because their engine can't figure out how to accurately target the search results page. A definite drag since many sites have a search engine to help visitors navigate through material.

But Google does have a solution. After all, they're a search engine company, right? Their solution is called WebSearch and it's not only easy to add to your site, but the search result pages have adverts added by Google that have your adsense account data buried within. Very nice!

You can start learning more about this exciting program on their Google WebSearch Overview page, but here are the key highlights:

• Lets you customize your search result pages
• Lets your visitors decide whether they should search the Web or just your site
• Offload the task of building a search index database: Google will do it for you (how much disk space do these guys have??)
• Track results online
• Filter out unwanted ads

There are other aspects to the program, but if you already have an adsense account, there's no reason not to apply for WebSearch access and add it to your site.

To get going, just log in to your Adsense account, then click on the "Account Information" tab, then "Products" and Edit Information to subscribe to WebSearch. That's all there is to it. A few configuration fiddles and it'll spit out the code needed for a site search that you can just paste into one or more of your own pages. Here's what I got for this site after about 60 seconds - enter something and try it to see how easy it is to work with!

If you want to have the search include your site, then it's just one change on the Adsense site and a bunch of new code is spit out:

	Web free-web-money.com

And since it's all HTML, you could even tweak it to match the layout and design of your own site, which is always nice.

In summary, adding Google's WebSearch is well worth doing, and even if you have no other Google Adsense advertising on your site, it's nice to know that you can not only add a simple site search utility to your site, but you can make a few bucks off it too.

You can sell ad space on your Web site!

pay per click (PPC) advertising

In previous articles, I've written about the terrific Google Adsense program (see Partner with Google and make money! for a good starter on the subject), but after the Internet bust of the late 1990's, I never realized that I could be actually selling advertising space on my Web sites, and making a tidy revenue stream off the deal. But I am, and here's how...

What I'm not using is some fly-by-night "instant traffic" program where the pages are litered with typographical errors and the entire point seems to be separating you from your money. No, I am selling my advertising slots on a Web site called LinkAdage.com.

They bill themselves as a Link Exchange service and describe the site thusly:

"Promote your web site with high pagerank one way text link advertisements. You can buy or sell text link advertisements at LinkAdage Auctions - an online auction site that is built to help you find the links or link buyers you need."

But I think that it's worth emphasizing that you can - today - start selling ad space on your site and even purchase low-cost links on other sites.

For the most part, LinkAdage is focused on people who are into pagerank (see How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? pagerank to learn more about pagerank) so if you have a site that has a PR0 and a fair bit of traffic, you'll have a harder time selling ad space than if you have a PR5 and almost zero traffic.

Pleasantly, LinkAdage also has an affiliate program that you can sign up for, through an affiliate management company called shareasale.com. But the easiest way to sign up is to go to LinkAdage then click on the "Affiliate Program" choice on the LinkAdage Info menu along the top.

I can't really share specific ad sales figures with you, but if you check out my Casino Books Web site, all of the adverts in the right-side box were sold through LinkAdage, and they are all sold for a three-month period with no guarantee of any clicks or traffic. Just pagerank.

So if you have a nice Web site, have good pagerank, and would like to explore the possibility of selling your own ad space without having to fuss with finding buyers, LinkAdage could be an excellent solution for you. I recommend it.

BlogAds: An Advertising Network specifically for Weblogs

pay per click (PPC) advertising

If you run a weblog (aka "blog") you've probably already figured out that you can add Google Adsense to all your pages and make a few bucks from visitors (though don't forget to read some of the many articles here on Free Web Money that talk about ad placement, etc. Start with Improving your Adsense Click Thru).

What you might not have realized is that there's sufficient traffic in the world of Weblogs that some new networks are popping up targetted specifically to the weblog-reading crowd.

Most notable of these is Blogads, which advertises itself as a "network of influencial bloggers who accept advertising".

They state that the average blogger (weblog author, that is) makes $50/month selling Blogads, which isn't too bad at all.

But there are two issues here that you need to consider before you get too hyped up about this:

1. "influencial bloggers" seems to suggest that they don't just take any weblog author into their program, so you probably need a minimum amount of traffic or segment visibility to be approved. You can find out for yourself by signing up for Blogads. And if you have been rejected (or even if you're now running Blogads) please report here and let us know how you're doing.

2. More and more, the traffic to my own Weblogs, notably The Intuitive Life and Real Life Debt: The Weblog, is coming in the form of RSS feeds (Learn more about RSS), which cannot serve up the Blogads. So, while a blogger might have a total of, say, 500 daily readers, it might well be the case that 200 or more are just tapping into the RSS feed and using an RSS reader to keep up-to-date rather than a Web browser.

While Blogads says that revenue will increase as time passes, my suspicion is that revenue might actually decrease unless they can tackle the question of adversiting showing up within the RSS feed itself.

And it's worth noting that currently Google Adsense can only appear on Web pages too, but they are experimenting with Adsense within email messages (newsletters, not individual messages) and it wouldn't be much of a leap to have a slim, lightweight Adsense advert appear within an RSS feed too.

The flip side of this is that when magazines get too many advertisements, people stop reading them or insist that they be offered for free rather than via subscription, changing the entire economic model of the business. So perhaps the question isn't whether Adsense or Blogads can appear in the RSS feed, the question is: is someone creating an advertising network exclusively for the world of RSS and other content feed systems?

In the meantime, if you do have a weblog ("blog") that gets decent traffic and you're interested in revenue opportunities, don't constrain yourself to affiliate marketing programs: check out the different advertising networks too.

Oh! One more quick note: the Adsense terms of service prohibit other ad networks showing up on the same page:

"We do not permit AdWords ads to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads. This would include all content-targeted ads as well as text-based ads. Text-based ads, for this situation, can be loosely defined as ads that mimic AdWords ads or appear to be associated with AdWords ads on your site. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links."

so be careful if you're going to try and include both Adsense and Blogads on your pages.

Double your Adsense PPC click thru rate

pay per click (PPC) advertising

In a previous article, I talked about the importance of tweaking your Google Adsense adverts, specifically issues of size and placement. If you haven't read that yet, I suggest that you start by reading Improving Your Adsense Click-Thru before you proceed with this, the second part of the topic.

You're back now? Great. Let's keep talking about this interesting topic.

And before I go any further, please realize that while the specifics of this discussion are about Google adverts, the general user interface issues are true across the board: if you want someone to see something, you need to move it into their area of consciousness before you can have any success.

That's why it's so common to go to a Web site and stare blankly at the screen, trying to figure out where a given link is located, even though it's on a side navigational bar or similar. Even this site has that problem to some extent: quick, find the link that talks about custom 404 error pages!

But let's get back to Google. If you've already joined Adsense you know that while their model is clearly pay per click, you're on your own trying to figure out how to maximize your results. Worse, the default ad design that Google offers has black text on a white background with an aqua blue border. Probaby not a good look for your site, and much worse, overtly obvious as a Google ad (e.g., a visual element that many people have learned to ignore).

Fortunately you can easily change the color scheme of your Adsense ads. One way is to use their preset choices, but, again, do you want to try and find the "closest" color scheme that matches your site, or do you just want to match the exact colors you're using?

It turns out that if you look at the Google Adsense code, there are five JavaScript variables that define the colors used, as shown in this snippet:

google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "0000FF";
google_color_url = "666666";
google_color_text = "333333";

(Tip: If you don't understand the hexidecimal color scheme used here, you might want to grab a copy of Creating Cool Web Sites which is an instant education in all aspects of HTML, CSS and Web design)

Most likely, the two that you'll fiddle with the most are the google_color_border and the google_color_bg, which define the border and background color of the adverts themselves. What I suggest is that you have the border and the bg the same color as the background of your existing Web page, so that the adverts appear much more to be part of the content of the page, rather than an isolated element.

Oh, and if you don't have these five variables in your Google Adsense code, it's completely safe to paste the five lines above in - though you will want to double check that my color scheme of bright blue titles, grey URLs and slightly darker grey descriptive text against an undifferentiated white background works for your design, of course.

My experimentation has shown that making the adverts appear to be part of the content of the site will improve your click thru rate significantly, particularly when coupled with the ideas discussed in the first part of this article, Improving your Adsense Click-Thru.

Next time you go to a Web site and see Adsense adverts that are very different in color and design, are stuck on the very top or (worse) the very bottom of the page, and just stick out like a sore thumb, think about the fact that five minutes of alterations could likely double - or better - the click thru rate and significantly improve the revenue from that very page.

Improving your Adsense Click-Thru

pay per click (PPC) advertising

The leader in the pay per click (or PPC) market is Google, with its Adsense program, but if you're already an Adsense subscriber, with adverts on your own pages, you might not realize the importance of the design of your advert and the placement of the advert on the page.

You probably already noticed that the Adsense ads on this page are slipped inline into the main text, on the left. Further, you have also probably noticed that there isn't some strong color scheme and border lines blocking off and visually distinguishing the Google ads from the rest of the content of the page.

I've experimented and I can tell you that these two steps (putting the ad in the middle of the content and removing any overt border colors) can at least double your click thru rate (or CTR) and that means that you'll be making more money with the same number of visitors. And that's a good thing.

So let's have a look at how to do this.

First off, have a look at the different ad formats. Most people seem to go with the default "banner" format ads, which is too bad: after the last few years of surfing, I think people have been trained to ignore these banner adverts. Even the spiffy new graphical banners, like this:

Instead, pick out a different size and think about how you can get creative with the placement. Also, if you're going to have an advert, why not offer the most options for your readers and have a layout that has at least four ads, if not five? Really, the one-ad box makes no sense to me: if you're going to have an ad at all, why not maximize the chance it'll have something of interest to your reader?

Anyway, off that soapbox!!

How do I accomplish the layout trick I have on this page? I do something a bit sneaky: I drop the Google ad into a <table> and then use the attributes of the table to shift it left and let the text flow right around it:

<table border="0" align="left"><tr><td>
    Google adsense code goes here
</td></td></table>

No too hard, is it?

To learn how to tweak the colors of your Ad without using the Google tools, you'll want to read this pay per click article too: Double your Adsense PPC click thru rate.

Partner with Google and make money!

pay per click (PPC) advertising

Imagine you were a really big company and walked into the offices at Google, saying "I'll offer you a deal: I'll add your advertisements to my Web Pages, you sell the ad space, and we'll split the revenue." Sound too good to be true?

It's not. It's Google's Adsense Program and it's the basis of thousands of different sites currently earning money each time someone clicks on an ad. Some of these sites earn just a dollar or two each week, but others are earning over $500 each day. Without doing anything special, without managing ad inventory, and without worrying about collecting payment from advertisers.

So how do you sign up for this wonderful program? First off, you need to meet the Google criteria for Adsense, which are mostly just common sense. Remember, the Google mantra is "do no evil", so you shouldn't be surprised at all by what they detail.

Perhaps the most important item on their list is that your site must also adhere to Google's Webmaster Guidelines. These are good reading anyway, because by talking about what you shouldn't do, they give some very good clues about what you should do to maximize your searchability and page ranking.

But let's stay focused and look at the specific criteria Google lists for eligibility in the program:

Your site may not include:

• Excessive profanity
• Hate, violence, racial intolerance, or advocate against any individual, group, or organization
• Hacking/cracking content
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
• Pornography, adult, or mature content
• Gambling or casino-related content
• Excessive advertising
• Pop-ups, pop-unders or exit windows that interfere with site navigation, obscure AdWords ads, change user preferences, or are for downloads. Other types of pop-ups, pop-unders, or exit windows may be allowed, provided that they do not exceed a combined total of 5 per user session
• Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site's search engine ranking, e.g., your site's PageRank.

They have a very useful Overview of Google Adsense (PDF) that's worth reading for all the details.

Sound like a good program, one where for the cost of maybe an hour of tweaking your pages, you could start having your site be profitable, rather than a monthly expense? It is!

I really like Google Adsense, and along with many of my colleagues, I'm earning more than enough to cover all of my hosting and networking bills.

Have a quick read through their terms of service for Adsense, then sign up right now and get started!

Then please come back here and add a comment to let us know how it's going!