pay per click
Case Studies
Throughout this book, I’ve been explaining all the different ways that you can optimize your site and boost your revenues. In this chapter, I’ve collected some examples. All of these are real sites that employed the techniques that I describe in this book to make more money. I’ll talk you through them so that you can see exactly what they did, why they did it — and how you can do the same.It can take some courage to make your ads the most important thing the user sees when he looks at the page, but that’s the approach that JourneyAustralia.com takes. You can’t miss these ads! They’re right above the fold and slap-bang in the middle. They’re the first thing the reader sees even before he knows what the site is about.Note too the picture right next to the ad unit. That helps to keep users’ eyes in the ad zone, but you have to be very careful doing that. Google’s ban on “misleading” images is vague enough for them to act on any picture placed next to an ad unit any time they want. That doesn’t mean they will but you don’t want to give them an opportunity. JourneyAustralia.com seems to have found the right sort of image to use. If you’re not sure about your image though, it’s best to leave it to one side. The strategy of placing an ad unit in the middle of the page though is very simple. It’s about as subtle as a slap in the face but it can be very, very effective. Do you have the courage to try it?Few sites do a better job of integrating their ads with the text as FreeAfterRebate.info. The ad units have lost their borders, the text matches the text of the content and the background color is the same as the background color of the Web page. The content itself is short as well. In fact, it looks a lot like an ad! That’s a great strategy to use. Instead of blending an ad unit into a Web page, you can create content that matches the ad unit. I’m not sure whether this is what FreeAfterRebate.com did but there’s no reason why you couldn’t do it. First, you’d decide on the format of your ad units, then you’d create very short articles that follow the appearance of those units. Because you wouldn’t be able to include much more than a headline, a sentence or two of text and a link, you could really only use this strategy on pages that discuss products, or home pages that offer teasers to longer articles. Look too though at the way this site uses an image. Instead of placing a picture right next to an ad unit, FreeAfterRebate.com puts it above the ad unit. That’s another great solution to copy.Gifts-911.com Gets Emergency Treatment With Multiple Ad Units
The most Adriana Copaceanu’s site Gifts-911.com had made in one month was $31.19 — not much more than a dollar a day. She put a main ad unit above the fold, a second unit at the bottom of the page and an Ad Link unit on the right. After making the ads more prominent and adding more of them, revenues doubled the following months and reached as high as $200 in the month after that! That’s was so simple. It’s a great example of how just a small change in AdSense can yield massive results. Could Adriana do more? Probably. But this is a pretty good start!
Check out Gift-911.com at www.Gifts-911.com.FireFox Plugin Reviews — Getting Your Clicks Faster
This blog offering tips and reviews for users of Firefox also has some pretty good examples for users of AdSense. Just see how long it takes you to find the ads in the screenshot below. Do you notice how you just don’t spot them right away? But as you read the content — and it’s great content — you just can’t miss them. Again, the ad unit’s text and background colors match the design of the blog’s content, blending the ads in perfectly. And by placing the ads inside the articles, users can’t help but read them. There are a couple of other things to watch out for though. First, the referral button is right in the middle of the article. But it’s an article about Firefox so that’s likely to get a lot of clicks.The second thing to look at is the fact that this blog also uses Kontera’s ad system. All of the links relate to Internet terms — the topic of the blog — and by just moving the color up a tone from the color of the content, they stand out and look inviting. That’s a great mixture of ad unit blending, referral buttons and contextual ad systems that can bring great results.
OffshoreBankingCentral.com Brings Home The Bacon
One of the great things about optimizing your AdSense ads is that with a little bit of thought, you can really come up with some very clever ways of blending the ads into the page.It’s easier to do this with some ads than others. Leaderboard text links, for example, can be very useful. A lot of people turn their nose up at horizontal text links. They think that because they’re so small not enough people will see them to click on them. While vertical link units can be easily integrated into a list of links, there’s no good place to put a horizontal unit. That’s a big mistake. OffshoreBankingCentral.com shows just how powerful a well-blended horizontal link unit can be. This site has two sets of ads: a vertical ad unit on the left separated from the rest of the page with a gray background (I’d be interested to know how well those ads perform but I suspect they’d do better with a white background); and horizontal link unit at the top of the page. That link unit just does an outstanding job. The unit displays four links right beneath the navigation bar. Each one of those links contains either the word “offshore” or the word “banking.” Even though “Ads by Google” is still there right next to those links, they still look like another line of navigation links leading to relevant parts of the site. I think there’s a very valuable lesson there about the value of link units.While it’s true that link units contain very little information, used correctly that can be an asset. Had there been another line or two describing the site those links lead to, it would have been clear that those links are ads. As it is, they’re perfectly blended. How can you copy what Offshore Banking Central did? Easy. Create a very simple navigation bar made up of links rather than tabs and place your horizontal link unit directly beneath it. You’ll need to make sure that you’re hitting the keywords in just the way you want but if you pull it off, you should see some fantastic results.You have to look hard to spot the ads at SudokuLinks.com. The entire site consists of a series of vertical columns, filled with links. One of those columns is a vertical AdSense column which is placed in the middle of the page, not at the side where it would be ignored.This is certainly a striking example of one way to blend an ad unit into a Web page but I doubt it’s going to work for everyone. You might be able to follow this strategy on a Resources or Links page on your website but clearly the biggest problem is the lack of content. The only content on the page consists of a small column right beneath the ad unit explaining how to play Sudoku. That could be the sort of thing that drives down click value; Google prefers sites with lots of content rather than pages that contain nothing but links. But you could still use this strategy on a site with dynamic content by, for example, placing teasers to articles in vertical or horizontal columns, that match the AdSense unit. And you could make those content columns more obvious than pushing them to the bottom of the page. In general though, this looks like an extremely effective strategy. If you can make it work for you, you should see some great results.
Go4th.org Takes AdSense Forward
Go4th.org also uses vertical columns, but this site has a much heavier focus on content and still manages to blend the ads in well. In fact, placing a vertical ad unit on the side of a blog has become pretty much a standard layout for many online publishers. You have a sidebar full of links, a link unit under the blog entry headline and a skyscraper on either the left or the right. It’s the obvious way to lay out a blog page, and it works. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t be creative and come up with new ways to blend those ads into the page and make them more attractive to users. Go4th.org does this in a really interesting way. The blog entry — or rather, the articles that the site posts — are positioned in a wide space in the middle of the page sandwiched between two sidebars. The sidebar on the left is where the ads go. The sidebar on the right contain a bunch of links to external sites. And this is where things get clever... The design of each of those areas is exactly the same. Even the “Ads by Goooogle” line has been copied and turned into “May lead to external sites.” That helps to draw the two parts together, an idea which is polished off by putting the word “More” above the ads and “Links” above the external links. Those ads just don’t look like ads any more; they look like the same sort of recommended links that are on the right hand side.This isn’t the only place that the site blends ads well into the page. There’s a second set of ads at the bottom of each article entry. What’s nice about these ads is that they follow a little author bio that includes links itself. That helps users get used to reading content that contains links and might be ads. Could the site get more clicks by replacing that banner ad unit with a square unit at the beginning of the article? Maybe. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that can easily be tested.If you wanted to use a similar strategy on your site though, all you would need to do is put two sidebars on your site, make sure that they both look exactly the same but put ads in one and links in the other. Easy!The challenge for AdSense publishers is to persuade people to look at your ads without letting them realize that what they’re looking at is an ad. One general strategy to do that is to camouflage them on the page. DogToysMart.com does this in a truly fantastic manner. It’s got the usual vertical ad unit in a sidebar and a link unit at the bottom of a list of other links. But above each section, the site also has a very neat header which it carries into the ad sections. So the left-hand side bar contains sections called “Information”, “Resources” and “Sponsored Links.” “Sponsored Links”? You got it. That’s where the link units are. The right-hand sidebar does the same thing, calling the links in its ads “Featured Sites.”But it’s in the middle of the page that this technique works the best. There’s an introduction, a section marked “New Products”, a section marked “Featured Sites” and a section marked “Recommended Reading.” By sandwiching the ads between two sections offering valuable products, the site makes the ad section looks like it contains something valuable too. It looks like it’s been put there by the site itself and not by a third party and I’m sure it’s going to deliver great results. The moral of this story is that one method of promoting your ads is to put them between two other valuable areas instead of at the bottom of the article or whatever it may be. That might require that you create those sections specially for the purpose... but it could well be worth the effort.Matching Articles To Ads... And Cell Phones
The usual way to blend ads into the site is to do 3-Way Matching: to make the ads match the rest of the site in terms of background color, font color and font size. It is possible to take a different approach though: you can make the site match the ads — or at least elements of it. Chris at GetACellPhone.com provides a fantastic example of this. He’s put one ad unit in the left-hand column but right above it and right below it, he’s also put introductions to two articles. The headline of each article is a link to the rest of the piece further in the site and matches the headline of the ad. That makes the ads look like links to articles, and it’s a great idea. What I really like about this set-up though is that there’s no space between the two introductions and the “Ads by Google” line. It makes the articles look like the ads, leaving the ads free and clear. As a strategy, it’s very easy to copy, but I’d take it further. You can match the color of the URL under the ad to the color of the links on the rest of the page and restrict the size of the introduction to just two line — just like the ads. Make the rest of the page look like the ads and you’ll do some great matching.Brewing Up Profits With Herbal Tea
Some of the most effective optimization strategies are very simple. Some are very creative. At TeaHerbalTea.com, we get both types. The site has three ad units above the fold: a banner ad immediately beneath the header; a horizontal text link above the content; and a large rectangle embedded in the content. But look at how each of those units is blended into the site. The banner’s background is lime-green, the same color as the site’s background, the titles match the color of the site’s header and the URL is kept just a tone or two above the background to make it almost invisible. The unit embedded into the article follows a similar strategy. The title of the links match the title of the article, the description is kept black and the URL is a light color so that it almost disappears into the background.It’s in the text links though that things get really interesting. The site has been designed so that it looks like there are little tabs above each of the links. That’s great idea. Would Google like it? It’s hard to say. So far, it’s not doing this site any harm, and it’s not an image, but you might want to clear it with your friendly AdSense rep before you put in your site.It’s worth asking about. The site’s ads don’t end there though. There’s another ad unit below the fold in the middle of the page, a Google search box at the bottom of the page and even a couple of referral buttons and an Amazon ad on the left. And with that second square ad unit turning up such well-targeted ads, there’s a great chance that they’ll get clicked. If you’re wondering about that “Ads by Google” logo in the first embedded ad unit, Google does have a habit of testing different approaches on its ad units. It looks like they were doing a little experiment here. Let’s hope they keep it; it looks a lot better than the long “Ads by Gooooooogle”.Whispy Makes Ad Units Disappear!
Sometimes, you really don’t have to do too much to get the sort of optimized ads that bring fantastic results. Whispy.com has done a great job of blending its ad links into its site. First, it’s used links in different colors. In general, that’s not a good idea; your users expect to links to be blue so that’s the color you should make them — and the color you should make your ad links too. But Whispy is only using two different kinds of blue: a bold blue which functions as the title for the profiles, which link to the content; and a lighter blue for the links in the sidebars. When the user sees ad links in exactly the same color, he’ll just assume he’s looking at more content links. This is a very simple strategy that anyone can copy: just make sure that your ad links are the same color as the rest of your other links... and hide those ad links in a list of content links. Very simple. Very, very effective.
Mixing AdSense With Kontera On DealOfDay.com
Ever since Google changed its policy to allow publishers to combine different ad programs on the same page, finding ways to make the most out of multiple ad units has proved an exciting challenge. I talked about how I blend horizontal ad units into my forum on DealOfDay.com but recently, I’ve also been playing around with adding Kontera’s ads on those pages too. Earning revenue from forums isn’t easy. I’m more likely to plan a forum as a way of supplying a service to my readers and building a community than as a way of earning income. People are just too focused on looking for answer to their questions to spend their time clicking ads. CPM ads often do better here. But blending AdSense into the forum can work very well. And now I’ve found that adding link ads helps even more. Notice how the two sets of ads look different and offer different things too. The AdSense ads look like category headings. In fact, this thread category was specifically about bargains on baby products, so I couldn’t have asked for a better keyword there.
The Kontera ads though focus on specific products. That’s their strength, and that’s why it pays to use highly targeted terms when you’re using Kontera (so “Tylenol” not “painkiller,” “Playstation” not “video game system”). The result on this forum was that I got to offer my readers a range of different types of ads... and picked up two different kinds of income.
Google Ads And eMiniMalls At GPSReview.net
Of course, Kontera isn’t the only extra revenue source that you can use with AdSense units. For many sites, Chitika’s eMiniMalls can make a very profitable addition. GPSReview.net is a great example of the sort of site that can benefit the most from Chitika’s services — as well as a great example of the right way to do it. And again, it’s a very simple optimization. The first thing to note about the site though is that it’s product-related. Sites that focus on products are always going to be the best option for eMiniMalls. Chitika produces very specific ads that will appeal most for people looking for products rather than simply further information. That’s what AdSense does, and like Kontera, it’s why Chitika’s ads work so well with Google’s.
That doesn’t mean though that you can only put eMiniMalls on product-related sites. You can put them on any site. But publishers with pages that talk about products are likely to see the best results with them. There’s no reason, in fact, that you couldn’t add a sub-directory to your website that offers reviews of the products related to your topic. So if you blog about television shows, you could offer DVD reviews. If you write about mortgages, you could offer reviews of home furnishings. If you write about coffee, you could offer information about coffee machines... and provide ads that let people buy them. Once you’ve done that, you’d be able to copy what Tim Flight of GPSReview.net has done on his site. Tim has put a big leaderboard right across the top of the page. By giving it a frame that matches the rest of the site, he’s done a great job of blending it in and it’s in a very prominent position. And do you see how it’s only showing one ad? That’s probably because he’s been site-targeted by an advertiser who’s prepared to pay a premium to be sure of appearing on Tim’s site.Tim has then placed a small eMiniMall between the title and each content article so that it looks like part of the post. It’s totally unmissable — and raised his income by 200 percent! Personally, I’d have gone a little further and experimented with a well-blended AdSense half-banner at the bottom of each post to give readers a place to go if they don’t want to go to the article. (On the article itself, Tim prefers to use another eMiniMall, followed by a Recommended Product Unit, an exclusive link unit supplied by Chitika to select publishers). I’d also want to put a small link unit in the sidebar... but that’s just me. Even keeping it simple though, Tim’s GPS site is earning him great revenues. With AdSense though, you should always be looking for ways to earn even more.