Relevant Ads Increase Adsense Profits
By Bas De Baar

If you’ve started using Adsense as a way to increase advertising income, but the numbers just aren’t adding up to what you expected, the problem might be with the ads themselves. If the ads being generated by Google’s Adsense aren’t relevant to your website, visitors won’t click on them. And, no click-y, no money. It’s that simple. And it’s a simple situation to fix.

One way to know if the ads are working is to monitor the click-through-rate (CTR) on a page. If it’s low, it’s usually an indication that once a visitor arrived at your page using a certain keyword, that visitor did not find any ads relevant to that keyword. And unfortunately for you, the visitor found no reason to click on the ads.

How do I know this? It happened on my website. On one of my sites, I had a page dedicated to PHP programming (a programming language). The page had a low CTR. Upon further examination of the page, I noticed that not one of the ads was related to programming or even to technology.

What I did notice was that the ads were related to guitars. Guitars? I thought to myself, “What relevance do guitars have to PHP programming?” And I imagined visitors to my site wondered this as well.

After studying the ads, I noticed that one word seemed to keep jumping out at me. The word was “strings” as in guitar strings. Well strings are used in programming too, but Google was not able to make this distinction which is why it was generating guitar ads!

The solution to this problem was simple. I removed from my webpage the words “string” and “strings” (or I just used another word in place of string or strings). After Google found this page again and updated its view of it, the guitar ads were replaced with relevant ads. And best of all? CTR on this page immediately increased and so did my advertising income!

If you have a page with a low CTR, you may need to tweak your text so Adsense generates ads that are more relevant to the page. When making these types of changes to your webpages, use the same ideas you use for search engine optimization. Why?

Because Google uses the same logic to determine the appropriate Adsense ads to display on your page as it does to determine if your article should rank high for “blue widgets.”

Some areas on your page that might need a bit of text tweaking include:

- The title of the page

- The H1-tags used in the page

- The number of occurrences of the keywords in the text of the article

- Changing the filename (this can be very effective, but only do this for new pages that are not yet in the search engines or you risk losing traffic)

One word of advice: Don’t forget that your keywords determine your search engine rankings so take small steps when changing keywords.

And remember, the only ads that will bring you the extra Adsense income you’re looking for are relevant ads!

Bas de Baar is the author of the e-book “Analyzing Adsense For Niche Websites.” To learn how you can increase online profits by testing and analyzing what will work for YOU, go to: http://www.AffiliatePotion.com.

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Google Adwords Traffic

For the majority of site owners, Adwords is not the most beneficial traffic source. Adwords can be costly and usually works best for sites selling goods. Even then, Adwords is usually only cost-effective if the CPC (cost per click) is roughly 1/5th - 1/10th of your product price. For example, imagine you’re selling rubberbands in packs of 20 for $3 and Adwords is charging you 50 cents per click. Assuming every 1 in 5 people clicking the ad is buying your product, you’re making ($3 - 5($.5) = $0.5) 50 cents. Whether or not this is worth it depends on where you are as a business. If you have a good chance of making users come back for return business, or if you have large packs of rubberbands to sell, then chances are you will see a decent profit using Adwords.

Another excellent situation in which to use Adwords is if you’re selling big ticket items. Of course, Adwords will charge more than 50 cents for iPod clicks and significantly more for BMW clicks. Still, if every 1 in 10 people is buying an iPod off you, or every 1 in 500 is buying a BMW you’re easily offsetting the minute Adwords cost.

Text Links

Forgetting the fancy programs, we return to the always classic text links. Text links are an inexpensive way of boosting pagerank and increasing traffic through better search engine rankings. Most text links however, get severely reduced clicks, and you will (generally) see much less direct traffic from a text link ad. There are two kinds of text links, one way links and reciprocative links.

One Way Text Links

One way text links have unbeatable results: a one way link greatly increase pagerank and is a big plus in the eyes of search engines. Your text link is only as good as the site linking to you, so make sure to be careful who you get a link from. You should generally only pay for links from sites with pageranks of 5 and up. In fact, most webmasters can tell you that upon getting a link from a pageranked 5 site, brand news sites are listed on google within 1-3 days, and start seeing increased traffic right away. The beauty of text ads is that you can pay the low cost for one or two months, then simple discontinue them without badly hurting your pagerank or search engine rankings.

Tip: When you get a text link, make sure you pick the anchor text (the text within the a href tags) to be a keyword you want your site to rank high on. It’s also important to change up the anchor text when you get multiple text links.

Free Text Links (Link affiliation)

Two way text links are less effective than one way links, but are helpful nonetheless. Do a quick google search of sites similar to yours and send the webmasters an email asking for a link exchange. Also look for forums where you are allowed to put text links in your signiture and put your site with appropriate anchor text in your sig.

Warning: Acting like a moron spamming your site will get you banned. Most webmasters will let a subtle link go unedited, but will almost always edit out an OBVIOUS LINK. Remember that a link is a link to a google bot, no matter how underdecorated.

Increase Search Engine Traffic

Although it is common knowledge to most site owners, the way your site is optimized will affect your search engine rankings, and will in turn affect the amount of traffic you have comming from search engines. Because serach engine optimization is so huge, I have written that article in the SEO section. See Increase search engine rank.