Written on April 15th, 2005 at 12:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Official Google Adsense Consultants
What do you think about the idea of Google licensing people to act as Adsense consultants?
They would train up independent consultants in the program, give them the skills and knowledge needed to help others optimize their ads. Then they give them some sort of accreditation or license that them ‘official’ status so that they can be hired by businesses and individuals wanting to optimize their adsense advertising.
I think it would be in Google’s best interests to offer this type of program. It would mean their publishers are better educated about the program, able to be more effective in what they do which in turn benefits them, Google and Google’s advertisers.
I know there are Adsense consultants already out there but to make them ‘official’ or ‘accredited’ could help Google to ensure the quality (and ethics) of advice being given is of a high standard.
Of course if there are any Adsense Execs reading this who want to fly me over to train me up as the first official Adsense Consultant - I’d be open to the offer! :-)
I’m interested in others opinions. Would you or your company pay for this type of advice? What would be the shortcomings of such a program?
Written on April 15th, 2005 at 10:04 am by Darren Rowse
The Etiquette of Linking
The hottest post on enternetusers at the moment is Adsense Developing Fully Customizable Ads Blocks? due to it being picked up by a number of reputable blogs, forums and websites around the web. It is an illustration of what a ’scoop’ (of sorts) can do for your ability to find new readers for your blog.
I’m always fascinated to follow the referral stats and trackbacks to the sources of those who are linking up to my posts to see what their take on a story is. In this case I’ve been surprised to see a number of blogs simply reposting my story virtually word for word. Some have been good enough to put quote marks around it others have not with some introductory comments - others have not. All have at least included a link back to the source.
I personally don’t mind being quoted (its part of what blogging is about) or even occasionally having one of my short posts posted in full - but recently have wondered if the art of linking up in an appropriate manner has been lost.
Here is what I consider to be etiquette when linking to a post that someone else has written:
• a link to the original source
• quotes being clearly marked as quotes - with at least quote marks, block quote formatting and/or posting in italics.
• I also think its good form (polite) to either have some sort of introductory remark or addition of your own opinion - either before or after the quote. I would qualify this by saying that on some blogs this is more appropriate than others. Many ‘news blogs’ do not take this approach as they are simply collating news on a topic. However if your blog is more of an opinion blog I think its a best practice to either add your own comment or opinion before or after your quotes. This is not only polite - it makes your post more useful to readers.
• If you want to republish a piece in full seek permission if its a longer piece.
• It is also polite to get the name of the person you’re quoting right (something at least four of those linking up this time have failed to do). So far the misspellings in this instance have been:
Darrne Rowse
Darren Rowae
Derryn Rowse
Darren Rouso
Oh - and for those wondering about pronunciation of Rowse - just say ‘House’ or ‘Mouse’ with an ‘R’ on front and you’ve got it.
Written on April 15th, 2005 at 09:04 am by Darren Rowse
Adsense Login Problems
Since returning home from Sydney yesterday I’ve not been able to login to my Adsense statistics. I keep getting a 502 Server Error and a recommendation to try again in 30 seconds.
Anyone else having similar issues?
Update - I finally got in and think I’ve worked out what the problem was.
The last view of my Adsense statistics was for ‘All Time’ and ‘All Channels’. This is a very long page (I’ve been at it for 18 months). Adsense recently changed their stats so that it would open the last page you viewed next time you log in - this is supposed to be for the convenience of not having to manually choose your favourite stats page each time you log in. Unfortunately its not very convenient when the page is a long one like mine.
Anyway - its sorted now and I won’t be viewing my All time stats as the last one before logging off again.
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 11:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Back in Town
Just arrived back in Melbourne after a whirlwind trip to Sydney for 36 hours of meeting with my blogging partners from the Breaking News Blog Collective who were up there for a few days from overseas. I won’t disclose all that we talked about at this stage except to say that it was a very worthwhile time together and that I’m excited by some of the dreams that we talked about and the blogs and blog services that will no doubt emerge in the coming months.
It was nice to have some face to face time with them also as our main interaction is via MSN Messenger which can be effective on some levels but nowhere near as productive as sitting together in front of a blog you’re working on together and talking it through.
The next few days are going to be about catching up on the work I didn’t do while away as well as working on some non blog related projects but have no fear - enternetusers will be back to normal (although I probably posted more while away than normal as I had the advanced posts going off as well as some new ones (we had a wifi connection in Sydney) so I doubt anyone would have realized I was gone).
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 06:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Tagvertising
Steve over at Micro Persuasion has a fascinating look into the future at Tagvertising.
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 03:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Six Profitable Blogs
Jim Buie takes a brief look at Six Profitable Blogs including:
- Instapundit earns $8,000 to $10,000 a month in ad revenue - 220,000 readership
- AndrewSullivan.com raised $80,000 in one week
- Back-to-Iraq 3.0 - raised $15,000- 25,000 readers
- DailyKos - earned $100,000 in revenue in 2004
- Jeremy Wright - $3500 from ebay auction
- BoingBoing.net - 240,000 daily visitors - undisclosed earnings
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 11:04 am by Darren Rowse
Did Volvo Miss an Opportunity with MSNSpaces?
Henry Copeland over at BlogAds writes a good post on Volvo buying Ad space on MSNSpaces pointing out that they would be getting better return on their exposure by sponsoring some big named bloggers than the random approach of putting their name on thousands of random blogs - some of which have questionable and inconsequential content. Henry writes:
‘To expand on Steve’s point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. MSN may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody — or more exactly “nobodies” — people who are viewed as influential only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.’
I’m with Henry on this one - whilst I’ve read a few quality MSN Spaces blogs - I wouldn’t want to associate my business with many of them. What do you think?
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 10:04 am by Darren Rowse
What to do when you Get Slashdotted
Getting a deluge of visitors to your blog from a larger site is what many blogger’s dreams are made of but what should you do if you want to maximise the benefit of this occurrence as and when it happens?
Every month or two I tend to get a link from the megablog Slashdot to one of my blogs (something that is called being ‘Slashdotted’ by many ). I’ve posted previously about how it can be quite a rush although the financial pay off is sometimes not quite what you might think. After being Slashdotted last time I started thinking about what a blogger could do to capitalise on the the rush of traffic.
There are a number of things that you might want to consider next time this happens to you (whether the traffic comes from a big blog like Slashdot or any other blog that is a little higher up the food chain than you). Before I outline what you might want to do - let me say that some of these will depend upon what the goals of your blog are.
Attempt to capture a few of our readers - no I’m not advocating kidnapping but I am encouraging you to think about how you might convert a percentage of these many one off readers into repeat readers. There are a number of ways of doing this.
- If you have an opt in email newsletter you might like to highlight it on the page that all your visitors are coming into. Write something like ‘if you’d like more news/tips/etc like this emailed to you weekly/fortnightly/etc sign up here’ (and put a link for them to sign up with).
- Suggest other articles or categories on your blog that they might like to check out - the more pages they read on your blog the increased likelihood that they will remember it and return (if your posts are good that is).
- Make a point of inviting their comment on your post - I have a theory that if you get someone to comment on your post you have a slightly better chance of them coming back to your blog later on to see if someone else has responded to them. If they do comment try and interact with them - get a dialogue going.
Capitalize Upon your Visitors - this may not be appropriate on all blogs but if you’ve got tens of thousands of new visitors to your site for a 24 hour period it might be worth thinking about how well optimised your ads are on the page people are coming to. You might want to consider adding another Adsense ad to your page, or adding an impression based ad to your site, or even adding an ad that points readers to one of your other blogs.
Last time I was slashdotted I added an impression based ad to the page using the
Fastclick ad system (which I was already signed up for) and it netted me $100 over the 24 hour period.
Keep an Eye on the Logistical Impact on your site - One of the most common problems for sites that get Slashdotted is that they are hit by so many visitors at once that their server crashes. There is not a whole heap you can do about this as the weight of numbers can be pretty massive but you might want to look at the page everyone is coming in on and consider making some changes to image sizes (if you have them) and even the length of the post to try and reduce the size of the files that have to be loaded every time a visitor comes in. Sometimes deleting an image can help quite a bit. Otherwise you might just need to keep resetting your server as it crashes.
Also keep an eye on your comments section. Last time I got slashdotted the comments got way off track and became a complete side-track argument over something irrelevant to the topic. I ended up closing the comments due to the extra bandwidth that all those extra comments were causing on my page (there were hundreds of them).
Related articles and resources on the Web:
- What to do if slashdotted
- Slashdot FAQ
- The Slashdot Effect - Wikipedia
Written on April 14th, 2005 at 03:04 am by Darren Rowse
Adsense Optimization - the Holistic Approach
Increasing Adsense Earnings is a task I get asked to help people with every day.
One of the interesting trends that I’ve noticed in chatting to people wanting advice is that they often come with a fairly single minded approach. The initial request is often one of the following questions:
- ‘Can you help me increase my Click Through Rate?’
- ‘I need to raise my page impressions to help me increase my earnings - can you help?’
- ‘CPM (earnings per 1000 impressions) are too low - can you help me increase them?’
- ‘I want to get higher paying ads on my blog - how do I do that?’
These are all good questions to be thinking about - however I find that post people seem to be obsessed about one of them and quite oblivious to the others. As a result they are only working on one of numerous factors that can increase your Adsense earnings and are possibly ignoring others that could have significant impact on your overall earnings.
The way I like to break it down is into an equation which I’ve previously talked about in Part III of my Adsense Tips for Bloggers Series - the equation is quite simple:
Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads
Another way of saying it is to say that you need to be thinking about:
- Impressions
- Payment levels per Click
- Ad Relevancy
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
Many people just concentrate on one of these factors and ignore the others. Here are some scenarios that I’m seeing every day:
Obsession with traffic levels - If they can just double their traffic they’ll double their earnings. They work so hard on getting people to their site that they forget to think about how they’ll get people to see and click on their ads when they do. As a result their ads are poorly positioned and designed. Yes their traffic levels are on the rise but they are not capitalizing on it. I’m constantly amazed how many highly trafficked sites have ads that are so under-optimized and hate to think how many bloggers are missing out on some significant dollars as a result.
Obsession with CTR - I’ve had a few consultations with people recently that have been so obsessed with CTR that they’ve failed to work on any other factors. In one case the blogger’s CTR was increasing nicely but his overall earnings was on the decrease because he’d been losing traffic (due to lack of blogging - he was watching his Adsense stats when he should have been writing content) and his payment per click was decreasing due to irrelevant ads.
Obsession with Click Values - This is a trap that many fall into. They read in forums that if they blog about ‘green widgets’ that they can earn $45 per click or more so they put their current blogs on hold to start a ‘green widget’ blog or change the focus of their current blog to include a ‘green widget’ category. The thing that they fail to realize is that while a few webmasters at the top of the heap may actually be getting high click values that its a very difficult thing to achieve to be at the top end of earners on these keywords. This is for a number of reasons.
1. Every man and his dog (or should I say blog) is targeting the high paying keywords because they read the same forum entries that you do. The competition is fierce in these keyword areas. Your competitors will have been developing comprehensive, well optimized sites for a long time - to get your share of traffic will be tough.
2. There is growing consensus among Adsense experts that Google watches sites carefully that target the higher paying keywords. They have to do this due to click fraud. Some have written that it is only the best and most credible sites on the high paying keywords that get the top rates. ie - if you start a blog on ‘green widgets’ you might actually find that instead of $45 per click you’re only getting 0.45 or even 0.04 cents per click until you build a site that is credible in Google’s eyes.
It might actually be more profitable for you to let the ‘green widgets’ blog idea pass you by (unless you have a way of getting significant traffic) and to find a mid range keyword where there is less competition and more chance of becoming an authority site on the topic.
My take home advice is this. Take an all round approach to your Adsense Optimization. Work on getting more impressions (you can do this by working on getting more traffic to your blog, adding more ads to your pages etc), work on CTR by tweaking your design and positioning, think carefully through what ads you’re targeting and making them relevant to your content and try to keep your time spent on these different areas in balance with one another.
You can read more about the different elements of my Adsense equation at Increasing Traffic, High Paying Ads, Relevant Ads and Well Placed and Designed Ads.
Written on April 13th, 2005 at 11:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Adsense Developing Fully Customizable Ads Blocks?
Google Adsense are testing new ad formats that allow publishers to have greater control over how many ads are show and what the overall size of the ad block is.
The other day when a few of us were analyzing the Adsense performance of Dogster and Catster it struck me that something was a little odd about the Adsense advertisements on those sites. (update: the Catster ads have been removed - but the Dogster ones remain at this point)
It didn’t hit me straight away what was different but after going back a few times in the days since I’ve realized what it is - they are in a format that is unlike any other ads I’ve seen on an Adsense publisher’s site before.
I’ve posted a screen capture (from Dogster) to the left and you’ll notice if you look closely and compare it with the ad formats that many of us are familiar with that this ad format is different on a couple of levels.
Firstly there are five ads on it and secondly the size of the overall ad is different.
Of course I wanted to get to the bottom of this and went to the site owner to see what they’d tell me. I asked if they were a premium publisher (who get some special treatment from Google for such things). They politely refused to comment. On reflection I realized that this would not be the case as Ted previously mentioned his traffic levels and they were not in the vicinity of what premium publishers need to do to get that treatment.
I also asked if they were trailing a new ad format. The answer again was no comment. As you’d expect from testers of Adsense publishers involved in testing a new ad format would not be at liberty to speak about the tests.
This did not deter me - I began to surf a few other sites that I suspected Google use as test sites and found a variety of new shapes and sizes of ad formats. Again I asked questions and after talking to a few hit the jackpot with one publisher who agreed to share what they knew as long as I didn’t reveal who they are.
Here’s the scoop. Adsense are testing a system where by the publisher not only chooses from a number of prescribed ad formats (as we currently do) but where they themselves are able to determine:
1. the ad format size
2. the number of ads to be shown in this space
This is an interesting development because it allows publishers to have much greater control over the design of ads and the integration of them into their sites. It would give real freedom to publishers to find the very best position on their site without needing to completely rearrange their site’s design to accommodate them.
There is no word of when such a system might actually go live but as far as I can see they are testing it in a number of places which could mean that it is sooner than later.
Update: Let me reinforce - the digging I’ve done is with a number of sites - some of them smaller bloggers - non premium bloggers. This leads me to SUSPECT that they are testing this for other non premium sites. This is a best guess/assumption/speculation/non factual statment. Time will tell whether my sources have the whole picture and if my deductions are on the money - but I’m hoping they are.
Let me know what you think of this possibility in comments below.
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