Google AdSense Discussion

If web surfers behaved all alike, if there were strict patterns in users’ behaviour, wouldn’t all publishers be on a sunny beach right now, with a fancy-colored cocktail, worring not about AdSense optimization matters?

Web user’s behaviour depends on two main groups of variables: the user-related one and the website-related one.

User-related Behavior Variables

Though people react very differently at various stimuli, we can identify some peculiarities specific to web surfers. The behaviour is much like yours. Have you considered watching your own actions while surfing on the web? This might help if you want to improve your site’s appeal to readers, especially if you sell something or if you want your visitors to click on your ads.

Several groups of variables that influence users’ behaviour can be identified:

Components of the mental processes involved while searching and browsing on the Internet: attention, awareness, language, mental imagery etc.
The behavior of websurfers is influenced also by their subjective approach to matters, determined by temperamental characteristics, such as mood, patience and their purpose and degree of interest.
Also, users act differently varying with how used they are to web surfing.

Let’s see how we can tweak our websites to turn these to our advantage (and turn visitors into “clickers”):

Mental processes

Attention

The web designer keeps the tools to direct readers’ attention. A simple design, without unnecessary loading will prevent the reader from being distracted by unimportant elements. The ads placement must be done strategically, in a place impossible to overlook (recommended in the first paragraph, usually in the upper-left area). Pictures and graphics are considered attention-grabbers and will also be considered when choosing your ads’ placement.

Awareness

This is a very debated topic. Opinions differ on readers’ ads awareness. Some sustain that the more blended into content, the better, others say that this formatting will induce the readers the feeling of being “tricked” into clicking on ads, which they resent. I incline to say that blend-in ads work only for very well targeted ads, coming naturally as if belonging to the content. Positioning ads outside the content area would be effective mostly with advertising that builds brand awareness, based on image impressions.

Mental Imagery

Again, a pleasant, uncluttered design, a balanced look of the page contribute to a positive perception of the page from the part of the reader and to a more open state of mind. A professional layout is important. It inspires confidence, people don’t want to purchase from a just any backyard business.

Subjectiveness

Patience

A golden rule: don’t abuse your readers’ patience (for they usually don’t have one)! Web pages must load quickly, ads must not be placed in readers’ way and should be kept to a reasonable number.

Purpose and Mood

Are more related to the topic of your site and the type of content you publish. The idea is that users’ purpose anad mood can be influenced by copy.

Degree of Interest

Besides relevant, good content, that answers questions, the reader’s interest is influenced by involvement and interaction. Keep your reader involved, integrate your ads into an interaction environment: these will work wonders on your CTR.

User’s Degree of Acquaintace with Web Surfing

Net savvy users have developed certain immunities, such as ad-blindness. These are less likely to click on any ads. Customizing ads for this type of readers means harder work; the result must be ads of high relevance (and remarkable ad texts!), with an aspect as close to the rest of the page as possible, as if they were a natural continuation of your ideas.Important! avoid default formats.

Site-related Variables

The type of the site and the topic attract visitors with different interests with different behavioral patterns.

Site Type Readers vs Browsers

Whether the visitor is a “reader” or a “scanner/browser” depends also on the site type content and topic. Generally, readers are regular visitors while “scanners” are the ones who look for information and will not spend too much time on the same site. Site topic and content are most times factors in bringing more “uniques” or more regular visitors. Though not as a rule, these apply to many sites:

Sites Attracting Unique Visitors

These are mostly commercial sites, content sites. Statistics say that unique visitors are more likely to be your clickers, for regular readers are more used to your pages’ look and your ads. Contextual advertising works well with these sites. If you’re headed for unique visitors, make your site “SE-friendly”. They come mostly from search engines and are said to be “pre-qualified” clickers. So, your efforts should be directed towards keywords and keyword phrases optimization. The ideal would be to go beyond the technicalities, that is finding out what are the most searched for keywords in your area of preoccupations and try to find out why these are popular, try to find a behavioral pattern. This can be achieved by statistics and analysis.

Find out some niches in your area and the users’ behaviour within them � that is, lists of searches and then see what is it customers want. This will solve your puzzle and give you exact hints towards what works best for your site. Keep in mind: unique visitors are mostly “browsers”. Use ad placement and ad customization techniques that apply best for this type of users.

Sites with Regular Visitors

These are mostly forums, blogs and news sections (though news are somewhere in between). If you own sites with many bookmarks, that attract especially repeat visitors, then either you will be very imaginative in customizing your ads and finding new ways to interest your readers into clicking or if not the case, better use CPM based advertising. Brand bulding/reinforcement advertising works better in this case.

Site Theme Relates to Visitor’s Mood and Purpose

Commercial Sites

Sites selling and promoting products are more suitable for CPC advertising.By their specific, this type of site will attract visitors looking for a specific product/service/business opportunity. Thus, users are more in a buying mood, are looking for a way to spend their money profitably. These are clickers.
Content Sites, Blogs, Forums
Unless you market specific products, your readers will land on your page without the express purpose of buying something. However, you can influence your reader’s mood and needs thru witty, sales-directed copywriting. You just need to know some basic things that sell. One is that people are more likely to buy from persons they know, like and trust.

So, what will help you build these? Good content and structure. Especially with content sites, these are fundamental issues to focus on (unlike commercial sites that focus more on products). Good content, profesionally written and formatted for the web, containing information that is of high interest and relevance for the reader, within an easily manageable structure and good targeting on a specific theme are imperatives. On one hand these mean bulding confidence, the first step in selling. On the other hand they will attract well-targeted ads, more likely to interest your reader.

Great content will give you credit to your reader. Once you’ve gained trust, it’s easy to direct your readers: you just give recommendations and the results will appear. (Avoid being too explicit in recommendations, though � for example, directing readers towards clicking on ads is against AdSense� Program Policies.)

With blogs and forums, it is a different story. Not all forums and blogs are accepted for AdSense (or even if accepted, they must be also profitable). Only genuine, specifically-themed blogs and forums, with highly interesting content are suitable.

These conditions being fulfilled, forums and blogs are perfect as a source of advertising money they have what is very difficult for others to achieve: reader’s trust, liking and involvement.

Richard Warren is a veteran user of Google Adsense and is skilled in the art of boosting CTR and Adsense revenue. For a complete Adsense how to guide visit http://www.adsensehowtos.com.

One of the most essential aspects of getting the most out of your involvement with Google’s Adsense program is to be certain that Google serves up the most relevant ads possible on your site. The concept is easy to grasp–visitors travel to your sites in search of certain content on their topic of interest. If they see advertisements directly related to those content desires, they are far more likely to click on the ads than if they encounter only tangentially related material or, in a worst case scenario, ads that are not even related to their interests. As such, it is in your best interests to make sure your site displays relevant ads. Here are few tips for improving your content relevancy to produce more accurately targeted contextual advertising from Adsense.

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Before you even begin to use Adsense as a monetization tool, make sure there are relevant ads for your site or pages. In most cases, you will have determined this long before you even embarked on site design or content development. However, if you are thinking of adding Adsense to an existing site built with other monetization strategies originally in mind, you may not have bothered checking to see if other advertisers were going after that particular market. Be sure you are addressing a topic for which ads exist in sufficient quantity. If related advertising is sparse, it will difficult to avoid irrelevant ads.

KEYWORDS MATTER. You do not want content that is overstuffed with particular keywords to point of destroying readability and value, but you do want to make sure your materials make liberal use of on-topic keywords likely to spawn the most relevant possible ads. Experts maintain that using keywords with your titles and H1 tags is an excellent way to assist in getting the most relevant possible ads. This has added advantages in terms of search engine optimization, as well.

METATAGS. Once upon a time, metatags were a critical aspect of search engine optimization in general. Although the engines rely upon metatags far less than they once did, there is some evidence to suggest that using ad-triggering keywords in your pages’ meta-tags may increase the relevance of the advertisements displayed. This strategy may help, and it certainly cannot hurt.

LOOK FOR LACKLUSTER CONTENT. Many sites to a great job of supplying content related to particular themes or keywords in the main portion of a page, but have sidebars, headers and footers filled with less targeted terms and material. Take a long look at your navigational elements and other “side of the page” text and remove keyword terminology that may be leading to irrelevant ad service. Alternatively, you can use Adsense’s section targeting tool to remove those areas from Adsense’s consideration completely, so long as you do not plan to display ad blocks or ad link units in those areas.

TIGHT THEMING. You want to keep content tightly themed. That means you do not want to feature long, rambling articles that cover multiple topics. Instead, rely upon materials that address singular issues. You also do not want to feature multiple chunks of content on disparate matters on the same page for that very same reason. The value of tight theming may extend past individual pages. Many publishers argue that Adsense tends to reward tightly-themed overall sites with more relevant ads, as well. Even though this aspect of theming is not as well researched and proven, it makes sense to follow the practice, because of the search engine optimization advantages of having a focused site.

BLOCK THE BAD ADS. Monitor your site regularly and take note when irrelevant ads appear. Then, take the time to add them to your blacklist for the site. Google does give you the ability to block individual ads via the Competitive Ad Filter. If you block out commonly served irrelevant ads, you may improve your chances of featuring more ads upon which your visitors will actually click.

The more contextually relevant the ads appearing on your site are, the more clicks you can expect to see. As such, it is important to make an effort to use a combination of proven SEO methods that also work well with Adsense and some program-specific maneuvers to secure the best possible ads on your site.

Jean-Philippe Schoeffel ( http://www.nichesinabox.com )has created a “site building system” unlike any in the world, focusing on multiple income streams and interactions with visitors. He now runs a membership delivering a complete business each and every month : http://www.nichesinabox.com

In spite of all the good things that most affiliate marketers mention in their reviews of Keyword Elite, I would like to strike a balance by giving a more realistic review of this piece of software. No doubt, Keyword Elite is a piece of excellent software that can be run on your desktop to help you carry out a more extensive keyword research. It surpasses every single free tool in the market, which many people are using. However, there are two major caveats you need to bear in mind before you buy Keyword Elite.

1. The Problem of Current Database Keyword Elite does not generate keywords by itself. In fact, keywords are pulled from various sources such as Overture and Google. This means that in most of the time, accuracy and speed are depending on these external sources. If the sources are not reliable or their servers are slow to progress, you will have a hard time in using Keyword Elite. For example, at this time Overture database are having problem of speed and stability. Therefore, if you choose Overture as one of the sources to retrieve a list of keywords, you will spend many hours before you can finish the search. Because of this, you may find some users complaining about the slowness of the software and even sometimes they will get N/A results from their research. Another good example is taken from Wordtracker. For instance, the recent update for Wordtracker will cause a captcha appears for every single keyword in Project 2 of Keyword Elite. A captcha is a kind of test adopted by much internet technology to fight spamming. The most commonly used captcha is a gimmick that requires you to put in certain numbers or letters given in a distorted image. It will definitely annoy you if you need to key in repeatedly hundreds or thousands times just to get rid of the captcha for a long list of keywords. To be fair, these are external factors that fall out of control of Keyword Elite. Any keyword tool that depends on these external sources will face a similar problem.

2. The Accuracy of High Paying Keywords One of the commercial baits that seems very attractive in Keyword Elite is that it enables you to find Adsense high paying keywords. If you are using Adsense on your website to generate income, surely this feature seems to be a killer. How does it work? The answer is simple. Keyword Elite can retrieve those high paying keywords based on the estimation of Adwords cost-per-click (CPC). However, this is one of the features that disappoints a lot of users. The truth is that the CPC retrieved from Adwords only reflects the Google regular search, but not the content search network. In most cases, the Adwords advertisers will bid much higher in Google regular search than the content search network. This means that you may see $5 bid price in CPC that you obtain from Keyword Elite but in real picture, the same advertiser may have a bid price of $0.03 for a similar keyword, thus causing you to get a much lower CPC for your Adsense. This is the main reason why I heard so many users complaining the inaccuracy of Keyword Elite. In reality, this is not a fault that belongs to the software per se, because this is the limitation imposed by Google itself. Be that as it may, Keyword Elite is still a time saver and many of its features can still earn Keyword Elite one of the best keyword research tools in the current internet enterprise.

Peter Wong is the chief editor of Keyword Tool department of Review7.Net, a website that provides a more realistic review of various products and services in the industry of keyword research. For more info about this article, please visit Keyword Elite Review