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.

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.

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.

I just found this tool, which seems to be pretty nice at giving you a rough idea of the significance of your AdSense tests.  You can use it here:
http://www.splittester.com/index.php

I tested a few of my own numbers in there, and it looks to be at least in the right neighborhood of being accurate.  The tool seems like it was developed for AdWords, but the same concepts apply to AdSense.  I’m not sure on what algorithm they are using, and you can only input two sets of results at a time, but it is a good start.  When I have more time I will lay out some of the methods I use for determing if a style performs significantly better than another, and by how much.

So if you are new to testing, try out this tool, and you will well on your way to optimizing your site.

Every single site that used AdSense could be monitizing better, but by how much? Many sites that I have worked with have increased monetization by over 50% with a few minor tweaks, and have more than doubled revenue when we really worked on it.

There is so much money out there, and it is rather astonishing to me that there are not more resources available to inform people of proper techniques, or give ideas of what to do. It seems to me that if people were aware of the situation, there would be a ton of interest in the topic.

Considering my blog is on this very topic, I have been researching to see what other people are saying on the matter. There are definitely a few good resources out there, but it seems like much of the rest just repeats the same few things about using the correct unit sizes, blending or contrasting with your site colors, or following Google’s heatmap. Not that these are bad ideas, but there is so much else you can do, and there is not enough focus on testing.

The amount that has been written on topics like SEO or affiliate marketing completely dwarfs that of proper AdSense technique that could very easily make you way more money. Every SEO guide out there will tell you to find a niche, hopefully one that doesn’t have too much competition, and write as much as you can about it.

Well, I think I found my niche, and I can’t find any competition. I hope that I will eventually be able to get enough people interested in this topic so that we can begin to have conversations, and everyone can learn more.

I started using AdSense with my job at CNET, so sometimes I take it for granted that you should have testing capabilities.  Most users do not have access to the AdSense API, so it is a bit more difficult to perform tests.  Luckily, there are still methods to do it, and everyone who uses AdSense should be doing testing.

I will have more specific suggestions later, but to get started, Blazonry has an excellent article on how to perform a simple test using PHP.  The basic idea is that you create multiple channels within AdSense.  Then, some percentage of the time you display one style and track in one channel, while the other time you display other styles in their respective channels.

Once you get used to this type of testing, you will quickly see how powerful it is.  Later on I will explain how to expand from this simple testing mode to something that can scale to many tests.

The biggest issue most sites have with testing is that there is not enough traffic. Sure, you can test a few things over the course of a week or two, but that is not enough. To truly get the most out of your site, you should be testing as much as you can. Many sites I deal with will perform a dozen test styles in a day.

The reason traffic is so important is because it takes a while for your results to become significant. You might see one style perform quite a bit better than all others over 10,000 impressions, only to find out after switching that it performs worse.

One thing you can do to get more reliable results quickly is to focus on your CTR metric rather than CPC (or RPM, which is easentially a combination of the two). Most of the testing you might do will not greatly affect CPC. There are some test that will (such as testing number of ads), but for many tests, it is just a confounding variable.  So by focusing only on CTR, your test channels become statistically significant quite a bit faster.