1. Cost Per Click Values Are Critical
Usually when doing keyword research you are looking for words with a high search volume, not a lot of demand, and a good commercial intent.
When trying to sell a click rather than a product or service the commercial intent of the keyword is basically irrelevent. Focus on the average cost per click, this is what you should be focusing on.
Google is a broker between an advertiser and a publisher. As the publisher, you get paid 60% of waht the advertiser is looking to spend per click.
What it boils down to is this. If you have contextual advertising on a site that cointains content about lucrative topics such as SEO, weight loss, travel, or stock or forex trading you'll get paid much more than if your site or blog is about puppy dogs and ice cream.
2. Start Tracking
You don't want to track everything it's demanding on your time, it's confusing, and half the stuff your tracking doesn't really matter all that much anyway.
Link your analytics account to your google account. By doing this you will be able to see which pages on your site are generating the most income for you. Pay attention, this is very useful information here.
3. Pay Attention To Your CTR%
CTR means click through rate. This is the percentage of visitors to your website or blog who click one of your ads. If you are not getting at least a click through rate of 10% something is wrong with the layout of your page and adsense ads.
Normally this is due to poor placement as well as the styling of your ads. Are your ads below the fold meaning they can't be seen without the visitor scrolling down? If so this is probably part of your problem.
The other problem is the design of your ads. You want them to blend in with your site as to not look out of place, however you don't want to confuse your visitors and lead them to believe ads are actually part of your content. Though this may increase your CTR in the short term in the long run this will drag down your adsense payouts since these false clicks never follow up and buy anything or sign up with any advertisers.
Implement some of these strategies and you'll most likely see your Adsense revenue climb this year, but don't forget about the content, content is key.
At times I've had success with adwords and for certain industries it can help but they are constantly suspending me for stupid polices that seem to constantly be changnig. THey suspend me and then want me to put up contact info on my store when I alreayd have it up there and it's a pain trying to communicate with their customer srevice people who are terrible and hard to ge a hold of. Yahoo/Bing tho less popular in terms of number of people who search it is much easier to use and less headaches.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think to write about that in this post. I should actually do another post with some complaints about adwords. I have run into the exact same problems you have mentioned on a number of occasions. Also their customer service is terrible, not helpful, hard to get a hold of and you normally get form letters back and not much assitance.
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