I Was An Adsense Dummy. Are You?

Mark Wallace

It seemed like an easy way to make money when it first came out
and, let's face it, Adsense was miles ahead of everything else.
But, you need to move with the times. Sitting still is good but
it gets you run over.

The ease with which webmasters can post the Adsense code made
Adsense a very attractive way of monetizing a site. Google took
care of coming up with the exact code - you just choose some
color and other preferences - and you stuck the code on your
pages to make money. Google improved the program substantially.
They added new features, like AdLinks, which allowed webmasters
to extract money from locations that were previously
non-contributory; they added channels to allow monitoring of
which locations were and were not pulling their weight. Like a
lot of webmasters I made more from Adsense than I did from the
day job and finally quit working to live the Adsense UPS club
member life.

But, it's time for a radical rethink.

The problem with humans is that they like to take the easy way
out. Google appreciates that and doesn't give you too much of
responsibility for running the ads on your site. The general
message is that you should trust them to serve the highest
paying ads for the perfectly logical reason that as their
earnings are a percentage of yours it's in their self-interest
to maximize your ad revenue. And, that's the same expectation
they have of advertisers: Bid high and trust us to adjust the
bid downwards to stay just above your nearest competitor.
Millions trust Google so let's assume they're trustworthy.

They then introduced smart pricing. Now this changes things in a
lot of ways webmasters didn't appreciate earlier. The theory
behind smartpricing is this: Google tracks which visitors are
"converting" for the advertisers i.e. making purchases etc. Some
publishers send visitors who convert, others send "low quality"
visitors. Surely it's a fair system that rewards those
publishers who send quality visitors? And to do that at the
expense of those low quality sites with no original content who
have visitors clicking on the Adsense links only to get out of
the site? In theory, yes. But, let's step back a minute.

Previously Google's income was tied to yours; if you made more
Google did too. Now, Google adjusts your earnings by a
Smartpricing factor to take it down to ... well, whatever their
formula tells them. That's a bit too convenient. Are we putting
the fox in charge of the hen house? No, we're not! Remember,
Google is an honest company and their motto is to do no evil.
They claim that if you are smartpriced down then they lose money
as well as they refund the difference to the advertiser. So why
worry about smartpricing?

There are several good reasons but the primary one is the
secrecy. As a publisher you have no knowledge of conversions:
Google doesn't share that information. Further, some advertisers
are good at converting traffic into sales, others have yet to
learn that a landing page that doesn't work in Internet Explorer
and Firefox is... pretty useless. Yet, even for the latter type
of advertiser, you get penalised. The advertiser who
converts well is not rewarded at the expense of the advertiser
who wastes all the leads you send him. But, that's not all. Many
advertisers do not or cannot allow Google to track their
conversions. How those cases affect smartpricing is unknown but
it wouldn't be stretching credulity to assume that there's some
formula in some algorithm telling Google how much to penalise
you for. So, even if your site is the highest quality site and
your visitors are more likely to convert than visitors from
almost anywhere else you could be ending up with the lowest
payout because the formula says that your traffic is
rubbish! Moreover, as you have no knowledge of the
conversion rates you can't even work to improve your
earnings.

How do you know that your earnings would be three times what
they are now if it wasn't for Smartpricing? You don't.

This is what every publisher needs to do on a regular basis: Try
the competition. Till now that was not easily done as there was
no credible competition to Adsense. Now there is. Chitika is
just one of the many contextual programs that's competing with
Google Adsense and early reports suggest it's paying a lot more
but only if you know how to use it. You may have
thousands of pages and you may have Adsense served via an SSI or
a Frontpage "include" page... or you have manually inserted
Adsense into many locations. Isn't it too much of work to change
all of that to test run a new program? It is too much of work...
so don't do it. Pick a particular page or section, setup an
Adsense channel for that section, monitor the payout for a few
days - then try something like Chitika. The best pages for
Chitika are product pages and the best ads they serve are where
you choose the keyword/product to be advertised on your page
(yes, you can do that with Chitika). Have a look at some href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/4.htm">Chitika tips here first and then conduct your trial
run.

This may be the most profitable thing you did since you
signed up for Adsense.

About the author:

The author's website presents an extensive review of the href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/">Chitika program, and offers revenue enhancing ideas
particularly in relation to using Chitika together with Adsense
and staying href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/2.htm">within the legal agreements for both.

About the Author: