Begin with the blending ... and then track.
This is vital. It’s hard work and it takes time. You’ll need at least a week of stats to understand what’s happening, so it can be several months before you understand completely what works best on your site. But in the meantime, you’ll be increasing your earnings and building up some vital intelligence.
To help with the tracking, each of your units should be assigned a “channel,” a kind of tag that lets you identify the performance of particular kinds of ads. If you want to know how your leaderboard ads are doing, for example, you could create a channel called “leaderboard” and track the click-throughs and earnings for that channel for a week. You could then swap those ads for half-banner ads and do the same again to see which of the two formats performs best in that position.
There are things that you can’t do. You can’t encourage your users to click the ads for you. Advertisers will pay for users who like their products, not users who like your product. And you can’t click on your own ads, either.
That can be very expensive. Although Google understands that publishers might click on their ads accidentally—and discounts those clicks—if the company believes that a publisher is clicking the ads intentionally to earn extra cash, it cuts them off completely. You’ll be thrown out of the system, making it very difficult for you to make any decent KaChing from your web site. There is an appeals procedure, but it’s not great. The best thing to do is keep your cursor well clear of the AdSense units on your page. Let your users do the clicking.
The basics of AdSense are very simple. Sign up, format the ads so that they blend into the page, and paste the code onto your site. Test different formats and track the results to see which delivers the best results. It’s unlikely that you’ll see instant riches. That can happen, but don’t expect it. Instead, expect to earn significantly more from your AdSense for content ad units each month than you made the previous month.
When you have the hang of basic AdSense—and are earning the kind of money you always believed was possible on the Internet—you can start getting a little more ambitious. You can start to play around with keywords to find out which subtopics deliver the best ads. You can try AdSense arbitrage—buying users with a keyword on one service and then selling them for a profit through the AdSense units on your own site. And you can start trying to bring in higher-paying video ads and other types of units.
Most important, you can also start to add different kinds of ads to complement the AdSense units on your page, thus increasing the chance that the user will do something to satisfy an advertiser.
For an in-depth look at Google AdSense, and to learn more of my specific strategies, I invite you to download a free copy of my 230-page guide at AdSense-Secrets.com.
KONTERA
Increasing the KaChing from your AdSense units is all about making the ad unobtrusive. But there will always be a limit to how much you can do that. You can’t get rid of the little tag that says “Ads by Google,” and while you can surround the unit with text formatted to look like an ad unit, that would only harm the look of your Web page. (And Google might not like it too much, either.)
To some extent, users will always be able to spot the ad units on your page. You just have to hope that by the time they do, you’ve already associated the links strongly enough with your content to leave at least the feel of a recommendation and that the ads themselves are targeted enough to be interesting.
Kontera (www.kontera.com) takes a completely different approach with its ad units (Figure 3.6).
These don’t come in boxes that you place all over your Web pages, and they don’t come in units. Instead, the code that you place on your site picks out keywords, highlighting them in a different color. When users place their mouse over the keyword, they receive a floating toolbox that delivers the ad. If they click, you get KaChing.
Ads really don’t get less obtrusive than this—at least until the user mouses over. The links are completely blended into the text, and that’s a huge plus.
Figure 3.6A Kontera unit in action on WorldVillage.com.
Like AdSense, the units come in a range of different formats—including video ads, flash units, rich media ads, and expandable units that change size when they’re played. But you don’t get to choose them. Kontera does everything automatically, from choosing which keywords to highlight, to selecting the advertiser, to figuring out which type of ad would suit your site best. (In general, the bigger the site, the flashier the ad.)
That lack of control is a bit of a theme with Kontera. The company provides a small range of tools to help improve your results, but these tools don’t do a great deal.
The first tool provides the ability to set the color of the link. Usually, that’s very important—and a very easy decision. Users expect links to be blue, so making the links a different color confuses them. If they don’t know they can click on it, they ignore it. If you’re making money only when someone clicks, you want everyone to know how and where to click, so you want to make your links blue.
Kontera is different. The links do more than take
