So how do we make money using Google AdSense? You have got to have website traffic, so you need to have your website setup in whatever form you require it (such content management system like Joomla or Wordpress or in a simple HTML website) and you need to have visitors coming on a regular basis. The amount of money that you’re going to make through Google AdSense will depend on the niche that you’re working in, the sector you’re working in. Obviously, the more competitive the sector, the more advertisers are going to paying for adverts.
Let’s backtrack a bit. Essentially, the Google Adsense advertising system is an advertising platform whereby Google serves adverts to your site, where you have put code, and the adverts are served from the Google platform so that advertisers that have chosen to advertise with Google on a pay-per-click basis show up on your website. The adverts have a title or description and URL, and every time some one visiting your site clicks on an advert, you get paid a percentage of the money earned by Google. The adverts are automatically made relevant to your website and your webpage. As time goes by and Google visits your page over and over, the content in the adverts become more relevant.
Let’s look at ad pricing. So the more competitive the sector, the more advertisers are likely to be bidding to get those clicks through their website. Not too long ago, the term remortgage attracted almost £20 or $30 to every single click-through to the advertiser websites. This obviously meant that people were making a lot of money as providers of traffic through the pay-per-click system, but also obviously the people that are advertising were making money through converting leads. So in essence, it’s a three-way win-win-win situation advertising with Google. Google earn their revenue through traffic they would not necessarily have seen. The advertiser gets their leads and gets their visitors so they can earn their profit and convert their leads. The publisher (i.e. you owning the website) get paid a percentage of the money that Google make, a three-way win-win-win situation.
So how do you make money? What are the tips? What are the techniques? Obviously first of all, let’s go down to traffic. Easiest to start with is to take a long-tail approach to gaining traffic and target less competitive keywords. Hopefully when you target those keywords and are getting visitors, competitive related keywords will be kicked in by Google and you’ll get clicks on adverts from advertisers on higher value keywords. Obviously, you can go for main keywords but this will take longer and you wouldn’t be making money from the start.
Ad placement is very interesting. Different sites gain different click-through rates depending on the way they put the ads on. The color of the ads and the size of the ads do make a difference. There are certain sized ads that are said to work very well, but I, myself, think that it’s more down to how they fit in with the site. Obviously, if you put your ads right down the bottom of the page out of the way, you’re going to get less clicks, unless you put them VERY prominently. But if you put them VERY prominently, is that going to detract from the look and feel of your site and therefore decrease repeat visitors, potentially cutting off other income streams. It’s a balancing act. You want your site to look nice if possible and you wanted to be a valued authority within your field, but you want to make money.
What’s worked well for me in the past is to use a search engine. Not a google style search engine but a proper search tool for aspects of your site. Above the search engine results I have ads. This works particularly well on my recruitment sites. For example, if someone is searching for leisure jobs on one of my sites. or searching for a certain leisure job, the search results are generated using the PHP system. These searches tend to reflect the site theme more than the page theme and so the results tend to be fairly good and static depending on who is advertising (and they tend to be fairly lucrative with decent click-through rates). My point really is that different things work for different sites and visitor profiles.
Another thing to try is to have different categories and have these categories well optimized for keywords. Put the adsense code at the top again.
Obviously, relevance of ads is important. If you go to site that is not showing relevant ads, you’re not getting clicks, there’s not much point having advertising on that and perhaps you should look at changing the direction with which you’re trying to make money.
So what about the way that the ads look? I tend to favor using colors that fit in with my site. Perhaps then you may get clicks from people that don’t know that they’re going to be leaving the site, that’s fine. If they are looking for a certain thing and they see it in the advert, then by all means, you have them click it. Also, you will get people that just enjoy the theme, enjoy the look and so will be clicking the adverts to find out more, and they will come back. Bear in mind, you are not allowed to change the coding every time someone clicks a Google advert they will be leaving your site, perhaps never to return. So you don’t want to be putting too many ads on because the more ads you put on, the further down the page the ads are, the less you can be getting from every click (except if the cpc of adverts is always high and the arena competitive). So although many people suggest that you put as many ads as possible on the pages, I would perhaps beg to differ, depending on the sector.
So important are the placement, the number of ads, the look of the ads, and the sectors in which you are operating. I would say and the best advice I would give is to try things. Db epending on how many impressions you’re getting on your site a day may be enough to test something and see if it works. If you’re getting 5,000 visitors a month, then everyday, you’re getting almost 200 visitors. That’s a reasonable sample. Perhaps you may want to leave it three or four days, try something, change it, try something, change it, so you can get the optimum amount of revenue from the site that you got. Do be aware though that certain trends with traffic outside your control. Traffic may be affected by weekends, seasonal holidays, or even just weather. So you need to be sure click though and revenue statistical changes are down to your site and the changes you are of making. Become a scientist! You can have a good revenue day based on just one advertiser’s ad getting clicked, so do be careful when you are changing the AdSense coding and changing new placements. Maybe keep a backup copy so you can return to how you worked before, and how you know you are going to be making money.