AdSense introduces expandable ads

Adsense, the most used revenue generator amongst bloggers will serve third-party, expandable ads on the content network, as per the announcement made by Courtney Chin on the Official AdSense blog.
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How to set up AdSense for Domains on cPanel-WHM

What you have to understand from the very beginning is that Google can show advertisements on your parked domain only if you clearly specify in your DNS that the content for those domains should be served from the Google servers, not yours. Probably it would have been a better idea on Google’s end to just change the domains’ nameservers you want to park, though. I want to say that I don’t really understand why did they chose this setup. But it works, and that’s the important, so whatever.
What you have to do is to basically add the domains you want to park in your AdSense account, then add or change some A and CNAME records in your DNS. Let’s see the actions you have to take step-by-step.
If you have a cPanel account only and you don’t have access to the server’s DNS, you can still use this guide and inform the server administrator about the steps he/she has to follow (or just send them the link to this article).

1. The very first step is to let Google know which domains you want to park. Head to the AdSense setup tab in your AdSense account, then click the AdSense for Domains link. Click the Add new domains link if you already added domains to your AdSense account. You will face a screen like this:
   
   

   AdSense for Domains - adding new domains

   
   Add the domains you want to park in the field reserved for this purpose and click Add Domain(s). You will be presented information regarding what modification you will have to make in your DNS. Leave this window/tab open, you will need that information.
2. Enter WHM and head to the DNS Functions >> Edit DNS Zone section of WHM.
3. Select from the list the domain you want to park with AdSense and click edit
4. You will be faced with a table like this:
   
   

   WHM - Editing DNS zone

5. Scroll down to the end of the page’s end, you will be faced with a form where you can enter new, additional records to this DNS zone. Enter here the A records you got from AdSense. The “@” sign is the shortcut for the domain name you manage followed by a dot.
6. Scroll up again and find the row which first field contains the “www” text. In the last field of this row enter the your publisher ID followed by “.afd.ghs.google.com.”, note the dot from the end of the domain! When you finished this step, your WWW CNAME field should look like this:
   www 14400 IN CNAME pub-1234567890123456.afd.ghs.google.com.
7. hit save, and you’re done. Google will approve your request in no time and your domain will start serving ads

What problems can occur?

You mistakenly make two CNAME records for WWW, the original and the one provided by Google. This can be corrected by emptying all the fields from the old CNAME WWW record’s row. Just simply delete everything from the fields from within the old CNAME row and hit save.
You leave the domain’s old A record and your domain will serve the original content, not the ads as you would like to. Again, simply delete that old A record by emptying all the fields in the row.

Speeding up the AdSense-Analytics integration on your AdSense account

I believe I was the only one in the World who didn’t believe that the integration of Google Analytics in AdSense is possible, and smelled conspiracies all over the net. For my shock a while ago on the Official AdSense Blog appeared an announcement that they will gradually roll out this feature for all of the AdSense publishers, starting with those who live in North America. The bad part is, that I don’t live there, but in Europe.

So I had to wait. I also expressed my feeling about the fact that I couldn’t jump on the band-wagon in every possible way, but no one listened, at least that’s what I thought.
Then in my RSS reader a new entry appeared: Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers, obviously, this was posted on the Official AdSense Blog as well.
Great, I thought; another feature which is rolled out gradually, another thing which I can not use just because I don’t live in North America.

But, as I started to read, I observed a note just below the header:

Want to integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics? Improved reporting was on publisher wish lists this year, so we’re spreading the reporting cheer this holiday season. Fill out our interest form, and we may be able to enable the feature earlier for you.

I went ahead and filled out the form. And a miracle happened: in less than 24 hours my AdSense account was boosted with Analytics.

Hugs and kisses for the AdSense team.

AdSense transforming in non-contextual advertising program?

Since AdSense appeared on the market, it was known for every publisher that it’s one of the greatest contextual ad serving networks. They advertise on every possible way that “[...] Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. [...]”

And that’s almost OK. They really serve ads which are related to the (website’s) content, but. There always has to be a but, right? What about learn even more about the users before serving those ads?
I explain: Devoracles.com has quite a lot of content related to Google, Google Chrome and AdSense. So it’s quite easy to predict that if possible, AdSense will show Google-related ads for the users cos those are also relevant to our content. And if you look at our ads, you’ll see that sometimes there are Google related ads. If you look at the right ads in the right time, you will see that there are Google Chrome ads, too. Like, “Download Google Chrome“, or something like that.

Now look at the image on the left. What’s wrong with the image? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! I see adverts which keeps telling me to download Google Chrome even though — ironically — I’m seeing the advert through Google Chrome.
That’s the feature of contextual advertising? Advertising Coke and iPhone for the biggest fans of these products? Come on, Google, this can’t be right!

Say bye-bye to pagead2.googlesyndication.com and then welcome (or not) googleads.g.doubleclick.net

Since my first AdSense payout, when they really prove me that the system works and you really can earn money with AdSense, I was wondering why isn’t there a hostname for AdSense. I mean, like adsense.com for example. I know it redirects to the real AdSense pages, but for the matter of the example why the ads are hosted on a third domain, which has a kinda weird name anyway, googlesyndication, what a weird name.
Then Google bought Doubleclick. One of the greatest online advertising networks on the Globe. I thought they will start to use the Doubleclick servers for serving the AdSense ads. And so it happened, nonetheless to mention, in a half a year even our favorite John Doe would have transfer the files needed to serve the ads from one server to the other. I don’t know if anybody else noticed, but our tiny ads are served from the googleads.g.doubleclick.net hostname. But why is that good for us? I mean, it’s good for me, cos the “doubleclick” word is at least related in a way or other to ad serving. But why is that good for the AdSense publishers? I tell you what: it isn’t.

The only thing which has changed in our benefit is that the ad code is not 4kB but 3. Probably they stopped using the Prototype framework which is so uncool anyway, I would have expect something more from them. Oh, wait, that’s more than 1kB, so that can’t be.
Another thing which didn’t get changed is our ad codes. When a user loads a page, the browser makes a request to the old googlesyndication domain, which then bounces (redirect, nerds) the connection to the googleads.g.doubleclick.net. Since redirecting always costs load-time, some of the pages I manage and has AdSense ads implemented, now loads with almost 300ms slower. Per ad code. Thanks to the redirection I guess, since the file size is smaller I see no other plausible reason. You may say that 300 milliseconds is not a big deal. But what if a publisher has three AdSense ads on a page? That’s legal. 3 times 300 makes 900 additional milliseconds, let’s say a second. One second additional is a big deal for the website owners!
On another side of the note, can somebody explain for me, why the Flash ads have errors in them and I get the debugger popping up all the time? And when did I opt in for Flash ads anyway? I opted in for “Image and Text ads”, Flash ads are something else guys. At least if they would look cool…

As an end note, can somebody enlighten me why do I see only and only Google Chrome ads, anywhere I go?

Update: While I realize that my words seems to be offending, my intention was not to hurt anybody’s feelings, neither the guys’ from AdSense or from Doubleclick. I do appreciate your work and the post was just a “steam off”.
So, sorry ’bout that.

Selling links on your blog: Ethics or Money?

Who doesn’t like money? Everybody loves to have with a few bucks more in his pocket and I guess no webmaster is exception of this rule. The easiest way to get money from a blog or website is to advertise on it. Advertising companies is the usual and widely accepted way, this includes AdSense and AdBrite, or if we go on the affiliate network way, then Commission Junction and DoubleClick (Google). Other methods are, for example selling links on your website or simply writing so called sponsored reviews. These two are what I will argue about in this post.

Selling links on your website or blog

Selling links on your blog or website is strictly prohibited by the search engines and usually you get penalized if you don’t no-follow these links. That’s not a simple advice from the search engines, saying “You shouldn’t do it”, it’s a clear and simple rule which must be obeyed. Or you get yourself penalized and possibly removed from the search engines.
So, why are search engines so strict about link-exchanges? Because links are the base of the web and by selling these links webmasters poison the web. If links are sold on a website, those links will be adverts, thus the users have to know that the link they will follow it will land them on an advertiser’s page. The fact that every advertisement has to be clear to the consumers that it is an advert is stated in the European Community’s, the USA FTC’s and many other countries’ trade laws.
A user clicks on a link because thinks it will be useful for him. If you provide on your website links which are irrelevant to your content, you basically fool your users.
So how can you both sell links on your website and remain a good-guy? The search engines say that you should no-follow each link you put on your website and you don’t want to pass your reputation to. Like a payed link. The no-follow relation usually scares away the potential advertisers, but it shouldn’t really. They buy space on your page because they want traffic, if they don’t accept the no-follow tag, it means that they also wanted a piece of your Page Rank. And this is not really good.
Also, it’s up to you that you disclose that the link is a sponsored link or not. The ethics (and the trade rules) dictates that you should disclose, but since non-commercial websites and blogs aren’t governed by the trade rules and the ethics can also be put in the background in certain circumstances, again, it’s up to you what you do.
The no-follow tag has to be in place for every sponsored link, that’s the rule.

Sponsored reviews on your website or blog

That’s an odd situation, again. Starting from the “Everybody loves money” statement, one of the easiest way to get (almost) instant money is to write a 200-400 word long sponsored review on your blog. The problem appears when an advertiser requests from you to neither disclose that the article is a sponsored review, nor allow you to assign no-follow relation to the link which will point to the sponsor’s page. Excuse me, but as far as I my knowledge is OK, the advertiser wants to sell a product for example, not to increase its page rank by sucking a piece of your own rank.
The rules of the above mentioned linking rules should be followed in the sponsored reviews’ case, too. If you don’t apply the no-follow relation on the outgoing links from within the review, you will have issues with the search engines. That’s sure. Other than that, a sponsored review is advertisement, so your visitors should know that you wrote that article because you were hired to do so, not because you really — for example — recommend a service or product for them. But this depends on your ethics; if you’re an non-commercial website’s or blog’s author, you are not governed by any governmental trade law, of course, as far as I know.

My final thoughts are that webmsaters shouldn’t fool their visitors, and this applies to the ads and posts, too. Our websites are sponsored by the visitors, both directly and indirectly. If we fool them, we loose their confidence and they’ll never return. The worse case, when they start to spread that they were fooled by you.

Adsense Competitive Ad Filter will NOT help you to earn more!

This was a test running for a long time and now I decided to stop. The reason is that my earnings from AdSense dropped considerably.

I manage a lot of websites and only two of them doesn’t use AdSense for monetizing; all the rest is monetized with AdSense. About three moons ago I’ve read on a blog which actually states that it’s managed by “AdSense Experts”, that filtering some ads (suggested by them), will boost the AdSense earnings.

One of the top level domains on the list was blogger.com, thus entering in the filter list blogger.com will block any advert which has as landing page specified any blogger sub domain. Basically I will potentially block hundreds of thousands of adverts coming from bloggers who advertise their website via AdWords.

Back to my test. AdSense suggests to keep the competitive ad filter short as possible because it can ruin your earnings. I had 15 top level domains, some of them suggested by the so called experts, some of them from a website called AdsBlackList.com. I activated the list on 10th of August because it takes 2 days for the filter to be active. Now it’s 13th of October, that’s two months, and the list was cleaned yesterday.

I can’t tell what’s my daily earning with AdSense since it’s prohibited by Google, but I have high CTR mostly because all the pages are optimized for adsensea and they are blended in the page. The high CTR gives me some cool earnings every day.
As soon as the list was activated, my earnings started to drop. Slightly going down every day until I reached a level with about 10% lower than the usual. I thought that this is just because I got different type of visitors who don’t seem to like clicking ads. Then the days passed and the earnings were still low.

Until today: I decided to end my test and cleaned the competitive ad filter list. I don’t filter anything now and today my earnings got better, slightly moving upwards.

Just a coincidence? What do you think?

Adsense smart pricing – Tall tale

I have to admit, I tested on you a very interesting thing in the past few weeks. I don’t feel sorry because if I wouldn’t, I would have no reason to write this post and I wouldn’t know more about an AdSense myth.

The subject is quite interesting: AdSense Smart Pricing.

So I’ve read an article just before I started the AdSense Smart Pricing test. It’s basically about, if your AdSense performance is low, you get low earnings per clicks. Now as a SEO would say: the theory says, if you have low CTR, your earning per click will be also lower than if you’d have high CTR.

The first step is to determine what is an average CTR, to have a reference. One of my articles is about average CTR, what I wrote there is that the average CTR is about, let’s say 6%. That means that from 100 visitors on pages where you display adsense ads, 6 clicked an ad. I consider 6% to be a good CTR, it’s not too high, nor too low. High is not good because if you have a two figure number as CTR, that rises the flag at Google, you know: “Oops, this account performs too well, let’s see why”. And that’s not good. Too low on the other hand is not good for you, obviously.

So, how can one increase the CTR, there are dozens of options: blending, placement, borders, images above the ads… many tricks. But one of the most effective is to show ads *only* to the visitors which come from search engines. A good coder can do it in less than 30 minutes, if anyone is interested I explain how can it be achieved, but this article is not about this subject. It’s proven, that the users sent by a search engine click ads much more often than the ones who were referred by other sites. Don’t ask me why, they just do.
So, as the CTR is practically the per cent of the users who clicked ads on your site, it’s logical that if you show ads only to those who you know that will click ad, your CTR will be boosted.

Again: the myth says that if you have a low CTR, you will get only small earnings per click.

I applied to Devoracles and 2 other blogs I manage the above explained targeting, I showed ads only to the search engine referred visitors. And I think I only lost.

The earnings per click remained the same low as they were before, absolutely nothing has changed only the CTR has been increased and number of clicks dropped a bit since I didn’t show ads to everybody: thus I lost money.

So, let’s debug: what did I do wrong?

Absolutely nothing. OK, I only wasn’t as documented as I should have been. Smart Pricing means something completely different thing and is in absolutely NO relation with CTR!
Smart pricing is a tool to protect the AdWords advertisers. They don’t just want to show ads for you (sometimes they do, but that’s something else), they usually want to either sell a product, sign up for their newsletter, create an account, they want conversion to increase their ROI as they spent money on advertisement. Since the conversion rate on the content network –which is formed by billions of webpages where AdSense ads are displayed– is extremely low, Google protects its advertisers by lowering the earning per click for the AdSense publishers.
I explain: The AdWords advertiser wish to pay $1 per click. If somebody on the content network clicks on the advertiser’s ad, then immediately when the advertiser’s page loaded, the user closes the window, the advertiser lost. To compensate the advertiser, Google won’t charge the advertiser with $1 as the advertiser wished, but with, let’s say only one cent. So the AdSense publisher on whom site the ad was clicked, will earn only 1 dam cent.

Can Smart Pricing be avoided by the AdSense publishers? I guess the answer is no. We can’t instruct our users to remain and interact with the advertisers’ sites when they clicked on an ad. Its against the AdSense TOS. So our only relief is to calm down and be happy with that one cent we earned, it’s still better than nothing.

Another myth busted.

AdSense CTR – What is the average click through rate?

I was asked many times by my customers whether they perform well with AdSense or not. The answer to their question is simple: if they have high AdSense CTR, they perform well, else they do not.

Since they have no reference, the problem appears when they ask what is the average CTR in AdSense. Now this is a very hard question to answer. Why? Because it varies, it depends on too many factors.

Let’s think a bit and see what is the average CTR.

First, what are the factors which depends the Adsense CTR on? Not an exhaustive list, but the following factors:

1. Type of the website: regular presentation site, blog, online service, social network, etc.
2. Whether the website is content-rich and the content keyword-rich
3. Content industry. Is the content about medicine, IT&C, etc.
4. Visitors’ location (!)
5. Ad blending

If you don’t want to read all the explanations, click here for the answer, else read on.
Usually, blogs and social networking sites are the platforms on which the AdSense CTR is the lowest. I didn’t think yet about why, this is just my experience. Anyway, I think the blogs’ AdSense CTR is low because the age and culture of the visitors which visits the blogs and because many bloggers think if they post a 3-4 lines it’s enough.
If you think a bit and have a good analytic subscription installed on your blog, you’ll know that most of the visitors are between 12-35-years-old, at least on the blogs I manage/managed. Most of them knows which links are AdSense ads and which are regular links. Most of them doesn’t think that clicking an ad supports the blog they visit, or they think clicking an ad “may harm their computer”. Yeah, you heard well. I encountered some juniors on a conference where I was talking about online-advertising, who really thought that *any* type of ad may harm their computer. We all know (or we should) that this is very untrue and the AdSense ads are less offensive than a snail in a glass.
On the other hand, social networks doesn’t perform well, because they have less content. Take Twitter as an example: you tell in a few words the world what are you doing at the moment. Is that content? I wouldn’t consider it content.
Of course, all the above doesn’t apply on all the blogs. Many blogs have incredible AdSense CTR, many have older visitors. The above is just a general rule.

Websites other than blogs and social networks perform much better with AdSense, usually they have pretty high AdSense click through rate. The type of visitors is much more different and usually they arrive on a particular website because they were searching for one specific thing. And here comes in the scene the AdSense content matching technology. AdSense is very smart and provides ads very well matched to the content, the users finds the ad useful and will click on them because they are interested in the advert. A presentation site, a service has very clear content so the ad bot will serve ads which are extremely related to the content.

As a general rule of the thumb, a website has to have content to perform well with AdSense, read, have high AdSense CTR; if there is no content, the ad bot can’t serve ads (under content i mean text). But not all content is good. Let’s not forget that we want to show our visitors always ads which are very related to the content, and to achieve this, we have to use keywords in our articles and posts, they have to be keyword-rich. What am I talking about: for example if you write a review about a notebook, use many times the notebook’s type, manufacturer, and keywords related to the notebook, like the words “notebook, laptop, PC, hardware”, and so on.
Also, never forget that the ad bots can’t crawl *any* type of content. For example, if you publish comics on your website, the ad bot can’t crawl the text from the bubbles, thus will have no information about what to serve. Also, even if the Googlebot can crawl Flash based content, the Adsense bot can not! Well, this is not entirely true. Google announced today that from now on they will accept publishers who wants to publish AdSense ads in web based games, including games. Here’s the video example of how does this work:

If the ad bot can’t crawl the content, or has nothing to crawl, depending on how the publisher set his ad up, it will show either a solid color or public service ads which earns the publisher nothing. No AdSense ads equals null AdSense CTR.
The industry is also very important. If you have content for example about “how to cure headaches” and if your visitors don’t find your content useful enough, they will click any link just to find a great cure for their headache, and in the same time increasing your AdSense CTR. Simple yet effective.

Another aspect is ad blending. Basically, when an ad block is blended with the content the AdSense CTR is way higher. For example, if the title of the ad looks like a link on your site, the background is the same as you site’s, your CTR will be higher.

Finally, the AdSense CTR depends on where are the visitors located. I was amazed like you, but this is very interesting. Who do you think are clicking the most? Which nation: Japan, Brasilia, China, USA? I tell you what: US visitors. 90% of the clicks I receive is from US visitors, and more than 10% of my traffic is from the United States.

So what is an average AdSense CTR? I’d say, if you have a blog or social network then 3-6%. On a presentation site or any regular website the AdSense CTR is around 9%.

Get at least $1 per click with AdSense, hacking the relation between AdSense and AdWords

This article will be weird a bit, but in the same time very logical.
I’m an AdWords publisher, we create ads which appear in the search engines’ sponsored results or on thee content network, on AdSense publisher’s websites.
It was a hard way to learn that some keywords we are bidding on, cost a lot for us. Basically, because of bidding. AdWords is just an auction site, the only difference between Ebay and AdWords is that we don’t bid on items, but on keywords. Due to the bidding, some keywords are very expensive.

An example: I wrote an article about asbestos insulation in a PC case. If I would like to advertise that article using AdWords, I would bid on keywords like these:

• asbestos
• fireproof insulation
• mesothelioma
• asbestos cancer
• etc.

There is a problem with these keywords, specifically that I have to bid over $50 to $70 to use them. That means that if somebody clicks my ad, I will pay up to $70, for one single click.
And here comes the relation between AdWords and AdSense. While the AdSense publisher on whom website my advertisement was clicked will not get all that money because AdWords has a quite high commission, it will still get much more than the usual $0.05 or $0.1 .
So, we, AdSense publishers might get an idea which keywords pay better, and write articles or post content related to those keywords. Be aware though, that the webmaster guidelines states that we should publish our content for the User, you who reads this article, not for search engines or revenue centered, in our case to get better CPC in AdSense. But what if the article actually IS interesting? I guess then the above guideline is not applied on us.

Highest Paying AdSense Keywords

Do exist such a list? The answer is disappointing: no, there’s no such list, and can’t really exist. The lists you can find all over the net either for free or for money are useless, because the AdWords advertisers are constantly changing the ads, they bid on different keywords each day or week, so if I publish now a list of highest paying keywords, in a week or even in a few days it will become outdated, useless.
One thing is sure though. Even though the keywords are constantly changing, the highest paying keywords will always be related to the following things:

• Asbestos, related illnesses and services
• Auto insurance
• Life insurance
• Loans and related services
• Lawyers
• Cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles and Florida

While you can write articles related to the above keywords with the scope of getting better CPC it’s not a very wise act. You should write your content for your users, to be interesting for the users. If you write articles with the scope of high revenue and it’s not interesting for your users, you basically cut the tree under yourself.

While you may argue on the truth of this article, keep in mind that I tested this phenomena and I wrote about my own experience.

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