Tastybuds

Google’s two products, AdSense for Search (AFS) and AdSense for Content (AFC), have much in common, but there are also some key differences. Most people who signup start with AFC, but they are missing out if they don’t implement AFS.

AFC targets content pages, and tried to find a relevant advertiser given everything you put on that page. It is a difficult task, but Google does a fairly good job of matching advertiser to publisher. To help, you can implement Section Targeting, which gives Google a better idea of what your true content is, and can increase CPC (better advertiser match) and CTR (more relevant).

AFS is triggered when a user searches through you site, and in these cases, Google really excels. Google is given an exact keyword or phrase that the user is looking for. Also, Google has more advertises paying into AFS specifically because it is better targeted. The payouts are almost always higher, and because the ads are way more relevant, the CTR is usually way higher.

Most sites do not implement AFS, even though it is fairly easy to set up. Once you are set up, there are several things you can do to optimize. First of all, just like any other ad, you should test several styles and locations on the page. You wihout a doubt will find something at least 20% better than where you started, and often more.

But after doing these basic optimizations, you might realize that one of your main problems is not enough traffc to the search results pages. To fix this, you need to play around with where your search boxes are. Add more of them, put them in different locations, and start testing how they are styled. Once again, you will fairly quickly see large gains to traffic, which then leads to revenue.

One last tip is to start playing around with forced keyword searches. This is where you create a direct link to a valuable search results page. This page might be valuable because it has a ton of good article results which you users will like, or because of high paying AFS ads. Use <a href=”https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=3″>Google’s Keyword Tool</a> to find the best paying, but still relevant terms, and start trying them out. Don’t forget to once again test style, location, and which terms you are using to maximize your Google revenue.

Users who come to your site via Google, and other search engines, are much different than users who come directly to your site. Organic users know they are coming to your site and are familiar with it. Search users, on the other hand, are looking for something specific, which they may or may not find on your site.

Because these users are so different from each other, you should optimize your pages for each type of user. You can have different navigation structures, extra information for search users, special deals, or simply rearrange what you do have. It is difficult to know exactly what works best, but keep your key metrics in mind, segregate your audience, and optimize each one.

Even for something like AdSense, which you might believe has an overall “best” style and position should be tested for each type of user. You will often find that what performs better for one group of users will be quite a bit different than what performs for others.

Also, you might have different goals for organic users than for search engine users. For search engine traffic, you may want to drive them to register on your site; or you may want to immediately monetize them as best as possible; or you may want to lead them to a key information page. Whatever your goals, realize that they may differ for each audience segment.

A simple method to do this sort of testing is to cookie users that came directly from www.google.com, or any other sites you would like to segment. Then, for each page you display, and for your tracking software, look at the cookie, and act accordingly. Run the same exact test on both sets of users, and you may find the best result is different for each.

I just got my first traffic from Google after more than 30 posts. All of my other traffic so far has been from comments or trackbacks from other blogs. But even though the majority of traffic isn’t currently coming from Google, I am guessing that that will change soon.

I should have started earlier, but I just began monitoring where my site ranks with various search terms. This is an extremely important excercise, as it correlates to how often people will find me. A search for “danny gabriner”, currently only ranks third, after my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I should be the number one listing, considering that term is my domain, but because I never write it out, and those other two sites are massive, I could see why I am behind.

More imporant terms to monitor ate things like “optimizing adsense”, which is written on every single page, and I often write about. This is a highly competitive search term, and when I first checked, I was number 83 on the list. However, after only a few days, I have jumped to number 28. Once I get into the top 10, I expect quite a bit more traffic from this query.

A related term that gets far more searches is “optimize adsense”. I don’t write this term nearly as much as I should, and currently rank 133. As I become more concious of the important search queries that relate to my topics, I will focus on the SEO factor, and plan on tracking my progress in the Google rankings.

In addition to seeing where I rank on Google, I will be using Google’s AdWords Tool to find the keywords that are most imporant to me. Robert Scoble recently wrote a post on the lack of knowledge of this tool, and he is right that most people could gain heavily from it’s use.

My next steps are to compile my list of important keywords, and then I will start continually tracking and trying to improve my ranking on Google. There are so many SEO techniques that we all know to gain traffic, but this will actually give me a good idea of my progress.

One of the most critical aspects of a testing and optimization is choosing proper segments. You can lump everything together, and run one test for your entire site, but the gains will be far less than if you were to run 3 or 4 tests, one for each segment you are interested.

You can segment on just about anything. One of the most obvious variables is pagetype. For example, if you run a blog, the front page may be structured different from your article pages, which might be different from your links page. Each of these pages might be able to comfortably fit a different amount of ad units (for example, your homepage might get one below each article, while your article pages might only have one on the right side). Even if you do have the same initial layout on all your pages, you will find out that the same exact ad unit will perform different on each page.

Another variable you can segment on is whether a user is logged in. Regular visitors behave differently than casual ones, so you you should treat them as such. Often, the best style for one set of visitors will not perform as well for another set.

Time of day, or day of week, is another thing you can split on. If your site is business oriented, you might see different types of users during regular work hours than on weekends. Weekend users might be better optimized for multiple units, while business users for a single precise unit.

The point is that you have a ton of information about your users, and you should use that information segment. Each of these segments may perform different, and you should optimize accordingly. Other ideas dr segmentation include:
Time on site
Browser type
Country of origin
IP
Users from Google
Category or topic of page

Not all sites will be able to segment on all of these variables easily. Also, some of these variables might or might not have a huge impact. But the point is that you should be testing as much as you can, and when performing your tests, you should break things down as granular as you can.

One change you can make to your Google AdSense campaign which will have enormous impact is getting your ad units above the fold. I have often seen gains of over 50% by moving from beneath the fold to above it. The increase in performance will not always be this much, but there are plenty of gains to be had.

Being above the fold means that your ad unit is visible when you first load the page, and that you don’t have to scroll down at all to see it. One thing that many people forget is that because people have different sized monitors, and use different screen resolutions, the fold can be in different places for different users. Make sure you play around with different settings and different browsers to make sure your ads are above the fold in each scenario.

If you can’t be above the fold for whatever reason, you might also want to try placing your ads on the bottom fold. Users often scroll to the bottom of the page, so this can be a valuable piece of real estate.

As always, make sure that you test plenty of different setups, as sometimes the unexpected ends up being the most valuable. That said, it is almost always worthwhile to get your ads above the fold.

Optimizing AdSense is a fairly simple procedure to get started on, and you will notice the results very quickly. But as you begin to do more of it, you have to take into consideration the possible negative effects of your optimization. Many sites have multiple revenue streams, including display media, leads, and sponsorship. Is your optimization hurting those other revenue streams?

In order to get a good idea of the effect you are having, it is necessary to segment users into groups, and see how those groups are monetizing with AdSense, along with any other useful metrics you have access to. For example, how many pageviews per user are you getting with each test style? How many leads are these users generating?

Depending on your site structure, and what tools or partners you are using, getting the answer to these questions will be different, but the overall methodology should stay the same. One simple way to look at the overall site performance is to start each page with a cookie. If a user already has a cookie, you check which test group they belong to, and assign that value to a variable. If they don’t yet have a cookie, you randomly put them in one of your test groups, and give them the cookie for later pages in their session.

Once you have established a user in a group, you then make sure to pass this information anywhere it applies. For AdSense you will show the test style associated with that group. If you use a partner like shopping.com, you can pass in the test name for tracking leads from these users. For your analytics software, you likewise segment based on this test group.

Now instead of looking how just AdSense is performing, you can start to see a larger picture. In my experience, often what is best for AdSense often is a net gain for sites, but there are definitely exceptions. Using this framework, you can make sure that your testing gives you results that optimize your entire site.

Digging around the YieldBuild Blog, I just noticed a Trackback from “Optimize AdSense for your Blog”. Considering I am trying to find other bloggers in this niche, I followed the link to their site, and found that they are a blog that only writes snippets of other people’s blogs. The great thing is that all the posts are AdSense related. Not all of the articles are things I am interested in, as much of it is very basic, but it looks like I will be able to find many other bloggers through this resource that are writing about some of the same things I am.

I have been looking for some sort of centralized directory, but have been unable to find all of the bloggers out there who talk about AdSense. Both Digg and Technorati had very little in the way of “optimizing adsense”. So I am happy to have found this resource, and will definitely be looking around it for a while. I will let you know what comes out of it.

Jason Menayan over at the YieldBuild Blog wrote a series of Ad Format Myths posts which are all very insightful.  I’d recommend reading them all:

Myths
1. Bigger ads produce better yields
2. Ads that blend into the page background perform better
3. Optimization’s goal is determining one “best” ad layout
4. Once you’ve created an optimized set of layouts for a page, you’re done
5. All site visitors respond to ads in the same way
6. The more ads on a page, the greater your overall ad revenue

The common theme, which I believe is one of the most important things when using AdSense, is that testing is key.  Common sense works much of the time, but in the world of advertising, there are endless combinations of things to try, and many of them are bound to work better than what you would think to use.  Another great point is that users act differently from each other and even sometimes from their own past behavior.  You really need to be in a mode of continual testing of as many variables as possible, and breaking down pages and users and anything else you have control over into as many groups as possible.

This kind of testing can get complicated, but it has enormous return for a site of any size.  You will never get to the holy grail of fully customizable tests that segment users completely and try every variable, but you can work to get close, and thats what counts.

When you have AdSense setup on your site, and are trying to optimize it to get more revenue there are two main things you can do: make changes, and run tests.

There are many simple changes you can make which will almost be guaranteed to increase your RPM, such as increasing the font size, changing the font from arial to verdana, or adding a red hover color to the title text. These are things I usually do when I first get started optimizing a site, or when a site doesn’t get much traffic.

The number one thing you need to have before you begin testing is traffic. At a minimum, I like to get at least 10,000 impressions per test bucket, and usually at least 5 buckets. That means that if you want your test to finish in under a week, you will need at least 7,000 pageviews per day. On the higher end of things I often use 15 buckets, want 70,000 impressions per bucket, and am only testing one pagegroup of a site.

It is really all a sliding scale. Testing gives you knowledge to make changes. But you can also use knowledge from this blog (more on that later), friends, or intuition (which doesn’t always pan out, but often does). I am too impatient to test unless I can do a lot of it quickly, but really it is possible for any level of traffic.

After reading blogs for several years, I have now decided to write my own.  This is my second attempt, although my first was pretty lame.  About a year ago, I got into the hype of making money online, and thought that if I made several blogs, and stuck AdSense on them, I would suddenly start making lots of money daily.  I created 6 different blogs on Blogger, and made it a goal to get 5 or so posts on each one.  I don’t even think I made it past 10 total posts.

This time I hope its different.  I still don’t exactly know where I am going, but I am less interested in making money (immediately), and more interested in writing my thoughts down and finding like minded people.  Of course it still is a big challenge and game for me, but I don’t yet know what my goals are.

In this latest round of thinking about blogging, two major thoughts came to mind.  The first would be to write as much as I know about optimizing AdSense (This is the primary responsibility of my job at CNET), and show that I am an expert in the topic.  I would give out all of my knowledge, and then offer my services to publishers who wanted to let me optimize their sites.  With many sites, making a few minor changes can literally lead to doubling or tripling of revenue, and so I would ask for either a cut of the gains, or a flat fee.

The other topic I am pretty passionate about right now is cooking.  I just started getting into some of the basics of cooking, such as making my own stock, growing herbs and food on my deck, buying as many seeds as I could for making spices.  My thoughts were that I could share some of this extremely basic knowledge with everyone, and convince people of the joys of cooking.  Finally, I could make money off of this by starting an e-commerce site that sells one of any number of potential products: seeds, tea, sauces, stock, smoked foods.

These two ideas of making money are just dreams that may or may not happen down the line.  My interests might shift, and I may never get enough traffic to be able to monetize well enough.  So for now I am simply trying to find an outlet for my ideas and knowledge, and I will see where that takes me.