Adsense Recap

My routine was broken the end of last week by a visit to the Grand National, so trying to get back on track here with a recap on Google's Adsense.

Personally, I think it can be a great tool. Not always, but given the right target website and audience and by keeping careful control of the keywords and adverts, it can reap rewards.

I have customers who's sites, even businesses, depend on the custom driven into them by adsense. Others top up customers through Adsense and others don't understand at all why anyone would use it, having tried and failed miserably.

You must get the keyword targeting done correctly. Then you must write a good adsense advert.

One point I didn't cover is where to send visitors. If you are selling and advertising hundreds of different widgets, then write different adverts for each (remember you have to target your adsense advert at the keywords) and that advert should send the visitor DIRECTLY TO THE RELEVANT PAGE. Not the home page, unless that product is displayed there. Get the customer straight to the information they want.

Tomorrow I'll start looking at other types of website marketing that I've found useful on CompareMortgageRates and customers' sites.

Google Adsense

I've talked enough about Google's Adsense over the last week:

How to choose adsense keywords covered why you should be very careful when deciding what keywords to target.

What makes adsense special covered the advantages of adsense, and other Pay Per Click schemes, over other marketing methods.

How to write adsense adverts covered a few of the theories behind how to write a good adsense advert.

Adsense click fraud looked at what Google is doing to protect advertisers

And adense content network looked at whether the content network gets you value for money.

Do I think adsense is useful - yes, if you keep a close eye on your budget. Watch what's happening and it should be very useful, in most cases. If you haven't already tried it, give it a go. And if you have and didn't like it, check your keyword list against how to choose adsense keywords and the content of your advert against how to write adsense adverts.

Is The Adsense Content Network Value For Money

Yesterday I tried to alleviate concerns people have about click fraud in the Google Adsense Content Network, but is it worth while using it, or are you just filling website owners' pockets?

Well, you only need to read the Adwords blog to know that many website owners are less than happy with their earnings. Not everyone - but there are many comments about struggling to earn anything and the low earnings per click. So advertisers can't be filling pockets!

But does it do much good? I've advertised Compare Mortgage Rates on the content network when it's being pushed this way, and both Spanish Catfishing and Ebro Catfishing are curently advertised on the content network.

Not that I've not had problems. I did see that ClickRentStay had received hits from an advert placed on it's own home page - Google had placed our own advert in the Adsense blocks, and someone had clicked on it!

I do think that this story shows that the quality of clicks from the content network isn't quite as good as that from the search network. People clicking on adverts might be more prone to just general browsing of sites. But this can be offset by reducing the bid price on the content network.

But there are times when the content network excels. Say I've invented a new car widget. It costs £3 and saves £20 per month in petrol. How do I advertise it?

No-one is searching for Keith's Widget - they don't know it exists. But if I created an advert and maybe chose which car websites to display it on, I'd be getting the advert seen by millions of people.

As always, with a bit of caution I think that the content network can be a great tool. It just depends on what you are selling and how much you are prepared to pay. Keep an eye on your campaign and watch what happens.

The Adsense Content Network - Is Click Fraud An Issue?

Most of my talk about adsense has in actual fact referred to the Adsnse Search Network - the adverts served at the side of Google search results. But what about the Adsense Content Network - can it be trusted?

The Adsense Content Network is where website owners sign up to display Google Adsense adverts on their websites - as you can see in blocks around these pages. Some people use them as great income earners and I myself have had a lot of success with Compare Mortgage Rates. But which sites do best and how to increase revenue is not really for this post. Maybe an aside one day soon...

Many people worry that by using the Adsense Content Network site owners will be clicking on their adverts to earn extra income. I've no doubt that it happens - it's very tempting. But I know from reports from my customers when they have clicked on their own Google adverts that in these cases no revenue is earned. Google has invested large sums of money to detect this so called 'click fraud' within its Adsense Content Network - to protect the network and the advertisers.

And Google doesn't just have methods of spotting owners clicking on their own ads (which is very eay to do - just watch what IP address you last signed on from and leave a cookie on the machine...), they also watch for other people doing this for the site owner. Google are watching click patterns - monitoring whether click patterns across a site are usual and across a machine. If there's a sudden increase in activity from a particular machine or on a website, Google's analysts will study the click logs and decide whether it looks genuine. If suddenly the click through rate increases on an account, that's looked at. If the click through rate exceeds an expected threshold, they investigate.

So, personally, I don't consider click fraud to be a great issue. Keep a tight reign on your budget and if you are the victim of such targetted attacks then your adverts might stop for the day, which prevents the fraud getting too high. Google should also detect what's been going on and refund you, in some cases it's almost instantly that the refunds take place.

Writing Best Adsense Adverts

So how do make those adsense adverts appealing, but only to the right people? I mentioned yesterday about a couple of my customers, John and Mo and Tom Harper, who are friends of each other. I run adsense campaigns for both of them for their similar Spanish Catfishing holidays.

For a start, write them in good English. If the advert is full of spelling mistakes and poor grammar, it won't look good. In actual fact Google will spot it and stop the advert. But there's only so far their checks can go. If in doubt, get someone else to review the text.

On the first line, grab the attention. For example, if you have searched on "River Ebro" and are interested in holidays, then "Ebro Catfishing Holidays" says it all. Notice also that there are benefits of capitalising the first letter of every word - title case.

For the next 2 lines I don't know if there's been any research into title case or sentence case. I suppose it's what looks best for your advert. Don't try to market your advert here, spell out it's unique features. For example, I've used "Bed and Breakfast with Tom & Vikki" on the first line of one advert. Instantly I've got the message across that it's B&B and friendly.

And that's the other thing to notice. If I'm bidding on general keyords, e.g. "River Ebro", then by refering to the holiday services I'm excluding readers who are maybe trying to find places to buy there etc.

You only have a limited space to get the message across. Write it well, write it concisely and don't go for marketing speak - just spell out what you offer.

What Makes Adsense Special?

What is it that makes adsense and other PPC providers so special?

Quite simply, it is one of the few forms of truely targeted advertising, where you know exactly what your customers are interested in at the moment they read your advert. What's more, if they click on your advert, they aer showing that they are interested in it's content.

So, not only do you make sure you pick good keywords for the advert, but you also make sure that the advert appeals to the right people. It should be worded in such a way that it is attractive to those you want to visit you, but also if there's any ambiguity in the keywords, those people that aren't going to be interested in your services see that straight away and don't click - saving your budget for your target audience.

So how do you do that? Well, there's quite a few little tricks to be used there and I'll talk in detail next time about what I'm doing for a couple of my customers, John and Mo and Tom Harper, who are both actually friends, advertising their similar Spanish Catfishing holidays.

Targeting Keywords For Adsense Campaigns

So, what are the problems with the likes of adsense?

Well, I learnt with my first campaign on CompareMortgageRates that you have to be very careful with targeting keywords.

When you look through the list of keywords and the expected traffic on adsense it's very easy to choose all of the high performing keywords. For example, 'Mortgages', 'Remortgages'. But these get loads of search traffic and therefore every man, woman and child with a mortgage site is competing on these keywords. They are therefore expensive - some charging £10 or more per click. Great if you know you can convert those visitors.

A customer of mine started running his own adsense campaign in the summer. He went for the general, high volume keywords. Yet his shop was very specialist and most of the visitors weren't finding what they were looking for. Hence, only about 1% of the visitors arriving through PPC were buying.

I convinced him to remove some of the high volume keywords (I did want him to remove them all) and replace them with specific product related keywords. The traffic into his site dropped by a half, but the conversions increased to 3%. They were also cheaper keywords to buy.

So for less than half the original cost he had trebbled his sales. Now, if only he'd remove all of the general keywords from his list...

Pay Per Click

So how do we go about marketing a website? If today I decided I needed to get more visitors to my site Compare Mortgage Rates, what would my very first port of call be?

Well, if you want visitors direct to your website and you want them fast and you would like to know how many people are seeing the advert and how many visiting your site, then Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click (PPC) schemes are an excellent starting point.

Why? Well let's look at the search network today.

Potential visitors are searching on relevant keywords, in my case maybe 'mortgage tools', 'mortgage rates', 'mortgage help', etc. I can pick a number of terms that I think would be useful. To help me in this, the Google Adwords system examines the website and shows suggestions, making it much easier than it sounds.

So when Joe Blogs searches on 'Mortgage Help', my advert is displayed. If I'm paying enough, it's displayed high and gets his attention, so he clicks on it.

Now in some cases it is believed that people are more likely to click on adverts than natural results, trusting the adverts over the results because they are paying to be there. That's just an intersting point to note!

So Joe Bloggs visits my site. I know he's searching on relevant information and using the Adwords system I can even send him to a specific page. What's more, of there are irrelevant keywords in use, I can exclude them so he doesn't see the advert.

Google provides loads of reporting information, which seems to grow by the month! From the number of times the advert is displayed to how many clicked on it. You can place a snippet of code into your checkout routine and they will then track how many people actually buy from you.

There are, of course, some problems with the Adsense system. More about that tomorrow.