Category — Adsense

The fluctuation in adsense earnings keeps on puzzling bloggers. And not many bloggers do not think of consequence of something like adding a top commentator plugin on their adsense earning.  This post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning will help you think about consequences of such small changes that you make on your month end earning.

I have been using adsense to monetize all my websites for more than 7 years now. However I am getting a sense that while adsense is the perfect solution while starting a blog/ website, it is not so good for an established blog/website. That is the reason why 1 of the steps in my latest roadmap to blogging success was to think beyond adsense. My view just got a little more confirmed with this post from Ajith where he talks about blog income pattern with age and asks the question, why don’t the probloggers use adsense?

Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense

1. Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
2. I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
3. Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
4. Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
5. Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.

What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?

Few days back I had made a post about the larger amount of blog traffic that will be generated for search terms related to IPL 2009 and had asked my readers about how do they plan to take advantage of it. Harsh has left a comment that

Using Google trend to drive traffic is good strategy, but then if its not your niche , you will simply end up increasing your bounce rate. Is int it??

I was going to respond to him in the comments section. However I just realized that many established bloggers and webmasters seem to have accepted the theory that high bounce rate = bad quality as gospel truth. That is NOT necessarily TRUE.

I Love high bounce rate on certain pages

You read that right. I love high bounce rate. I actually brainstorm for quite sometime everyweek trying to increase the bounce rate. And trust me I have not gone mad. Not yet atleast

High Bounce rate means higher CTR for adsense

What are the normal advice you have heard/read for decreasing the bounce rate? Provide lot of interesting links to your other pages from the body of the post, at the end of your post, provide links to your most interesting posts from the sidebar etc. Now think about what those interesting links are doing to your adsense blocks. All those interesting links are competeing with the adsense blocks for the attention of the user. As you succeed in making the internal links more and more interesting, the adsense blocks continue to become less attractive. Is it any wonder that your CTR keeps going down.

Answer to some queries about high bounce rate raised in the comments

I think Nihar, Tarun and Harsh have raised some really valid points in the comments section. Instead of answering them in the comments, I will deal with them here.

1. If you are blogging solely for money, then a higher bounce rate is good: I think this statement is true for most bloggers who monetize their blogs through ppc. However if you are monetizing your blog through affiliate products or if you want to monetize your blog by selling some service/product then this does not hold good
2. If you want to convert a google reader into a regular reader then you need to give them some option: Again true. However you need to answer some questions to know if it is true for you
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         • What % of your feedreaders actually read your blog daily? It is less than 15% for most of my blogs
         • How much you would have earned by putting an adsense block at the end of your post
         • What is the worth of the feed subscriber to you
3. A High bounce rate will decrease your ranking: Fair and logical point. However I and several authority figures in SEO do not think that Google has started using bounce rate as one of the quality parameters. My experience with the post about core 2 duo vs dual core bears it out. I think this is because bounce rate as a ranking factor is quite noisy and susceptible to manipulation.

Just imagine what will happen to your blogging dreams if your adsense account were to be banned. Well looks like if you are not careful enough any one can do that to you. 

I was having a chat with Pavan about whether use of adsense on my sample resumes website will result in a smart pricing. That is when it just dawned on me that if that is true then I can use anyone else’s adsense publisher details on that website and get his account to be smart priced. I am not that evil but still that is a possibility. Worse still, I can setup a p*o*r*n website and put up your adsense block in it and get you banned.

You can protect your adsense account from such evil people

Google adsense has a feature that allows you to control the websites on which your adsense can be displayed. Make use of that feature right now to protect yourself against any misuse.

Simply go to “adsense setup” tab and then the “allowed websites” subtab. Under the “choose your site settings” there are 2 radio buttons. Select the 2nd radio button and list down the websites where you want to display your adsense advertisements. Take care not to include any http or www prefix before website name. So I shall enter binaryday.com and mywalkin.com into that box.

Screenshot of how to enable the feature

What do you do when adsense fails to make sense of your website? My friend runs this blog about interesting advertisements. His posts are about advertisements of different products. His visitors are interested in the advertisements and not in the products. Obvious right? Not to Google It keeps on showing advertisements about the products. Noone is interested in them anyways. So noone clicks

What is the possible solution to this problem? Any ideas?

In this post I have included the first-hand experience of 6 people who have managed to get reinstated into adsense successfully. This can be a lifesaver if godforbid, you ever get banned by Google. If you use adsense on your blog, then make sure to bookmark this post.

1. http://www.pinoymoneytalk.com/2007/03/06/how-to-reinstate-banned-adsense-account/?cp=all
2. http://www.devilsworkshop.org/how-i-got-my-google-adsense-account-back-in-14-days
3. http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/04/19/how-to-get-back-into-adsense-account-reinstated/
4. http://stason.org/articles/money/how_to_bring_google_adsense_down.html
5. http://www.seopedia.org/contextual-advertising/google-adsense-adwords/google-adsense-account-disabled-the-faq/
6. http://yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within.html
7. http://www.yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within-part-2.html

What is the most popular adsense format?

There are many gurus in the world who have talked about this topic. However I was not satisfied with only listening to what they had to say. I wanted to find out what are the formats that real bloggers use. What follows is not my view but my findings based on study of usage of adsense by real bloggers. The link to the excel file with the raw data is here.

The most popular adsense format is 468 x 60
Out of the 15000 blogs that I studied around 3000 used adsense. All these blogs had a total of 6272 adsense blocks. The 468 x 60 format was the most frequently used format followed by 160 x 600 format. Surprisingly link units seem to be used by far too less blogs.

Result of my study of most frequently used adsense format

How many adsense blocks should you place on the homepage
I was expecting atleast 2 adsense adblocks to be used on the homepage. Surprisingly 955 bloggers have only 1 adsense block on the home page. Another 722 bloggers 2 units of adsense. I am unable to think why so many people are using only 1 or 2 blocks of adsense on their homepage. Any ideas??

P.S: These studies take up way too much of my time. I was just wondering if anyone other than me finds them interesting or useful. Else I shall rather concentrate on technical posts.Will appreciate if you can let me know what you think of the above data in comments section.

P.S to P.S: Let me know if you want me to analyze something else.

Optimizing adsense positions has really worked wonders for binaryday, pushing the eCPM to more than 10$. Primarily, I used optimization tips provided by Google. Here are some of the important adsense optimization tips that have worked for me. However do not just read these tips. Loginto your adsense account and start making the changes. All these changes can be effected in less than 15 minutes and you shall be surprised by the result.

The first adunit shows the ads with the highest revenue per click ads. Make sure that it is the ad unit with the highest Clcik-Through-Rate as well. Use of CSS can make it difficult to know what is the first ad unit. Visit the page from your browser and do a view source. Scroll down the html code. The first block of adsense that you see is your first ad unit. Use custom channels to check that it is the one with the highest CTR.

Size matters. Google’s data says wider ad units outperform the narrow ones. What do you use?

Do you still use wordpress built in search box on your blog. Stop throwing away serious money and start usings an adsense for search box.

Site targetted ads increase the competition for your advertisement place and there by increase your earnings. Modify the default message to convert more advertisers into site-targetted advertisers for your site.

The corner of the ad uniit makes a difference. Increase your earnings by using rounded corners for your ad units.

Go Borderless
Place your adsense unit below the header of your posts and directly below the border. Removing the border between content and adsense unit can result in an increase in CTR of as much as 300%. Binaryday uses this trick to the letter

Match your ads to the content
In May 2005 google published the secret to dogbreedinfo doubling its income to more than $650 a day. The simple tip that doubled the earning was use unobtrusive advertisements. It is not like for nothing that all adsense Guru suggest this as the first tip.

Way back in January 2006, Google published this simple but effective optimization tip for blogs. To get the best results from adsense, you should choose the right ad format for your blog and then place it at a place, where people will see it. Also make sure to use section targetting to get ads targetted to the specific post.

Google adsense is a boon for many webmasters and bloggers like me. It allows us to monetize small, niche websites like this. I have previously talked about people who have earned million dollars through adsense. However I was really worried after seeing this post as it seems to suggest that making money through adsense is easy. Let me make myself very clear, making money with adsense is NOT at all easy.

I am not saying that you can not make money with adsense. However for that you need some idea, some skill or something else that will set you apart from the othen zillion blogs that are trying the same. Most importantly you will need time. That is what I am trying to do with binarday. That is what tarun, abhishek and madhur are trying to do. So please try to build a good website with some really good content before yo go ahead and leave that job.

There are many more risks associated with adsense. Many webmasters have been thrown out of the programme in the past. Google says that they were thrown out because of wrongdoings. However the webmasters plead guilty. No one knows the truth.

Adsense earnings are known to be highly volatile. I have personally seen my earnings go upto 2000$ in a month and then come down all the way to 1200$.

If you depend on google for your traffic, then the traffic may go away anytime. Google for “google dance” to see what I mean.

Finally I am not saying that you should not take risk. Take risk by all means. However be aware of what you are getting into. The aim of this post is to make you aware of the risk you are taking up.

Here is the email from google adsense team

Hello,

The Google AdSense Team

Link to official post

The first step of any journey is the belief that you can reach the destination. Is it possible to earn a million dollar from adsense alone? Well to put that number into perspective a million dollar is what an average software professional in the US earns in more than 10 years. So when I suggested that we can earn that much money in one year simply by running a couple of blogs, none of my partners believed me.I wrote this post primarily to convince my partners that there is serious money that can be made through adsense. Hope it will convince some of my readers about the possibility of earning a million dollar through adsense as well.

So here is the proof.

Markus Frind runs a free online dating site called plentyOfFish.com and he rocked the Internet world when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD. You can see it for yourself here

The following is an image of a 1 month cheque for 1.2 Lakh dollars from adsense to the author of shoemoney.com.

Jason Calacanis was making more than $4,000 a day with adsense. He sold Weblogs Inc to AOL for $25 million dollars.

There are even more bloggers who have made more than a million dollar a year from their blogs.

I hope I have made my point. is it possible to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell yes. Is it easy to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell No.

A million dollar is a lot of money. It is not like anyone can start a blog, make some posts, put some adsense units and make a million dollar. Life is not that easy. (I wish it were though). A lot more dedication and descipline is required for that. I am definitely trying to reach there. I shall be posting about every step I take and every progress I make on this blog. If you will like to learn from my experience then go ahead and subscribe to my feed today.