Besting Adwords

Google Sitemaps for Blogger

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:48:02 GMT

Yesterday, I stumbled across great step-by-step instructions for using Google's Sitemap with a Blogger blog. I'll likely rewrite this today for inclusion in the 10 Steps to Professional Blogging e-book.

Update: Done!

Yahoo! Search Blues

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 02:43:25 GMT

This last week, I've been experiencing the Yahoo! search blues. At first, I thought Yahoo! had removed my kbcafe.com domain entirely from their index. But there's always a couple pages, including the homepage, hanging around in their index. You can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to get this information. I sent an email to the Yahoo! team and Yahoo!'s one and only employee responded. Yes, Jeremy Zawodny. Is he the only employee that answers Yahoo! team emails? Jeremy responded by giving me the proper email address to send my concerns. Thanks Jeremy! I've sent them two emails over the last week and still haven't received a response as to why I'm grossly under indexed :-(

Google Checkout is Live!

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 19:29:53 GMT

Checkout Google Checkout! Seller transaction fees are $0.20 plus 2%. But for every $1 spent on AdWords, the seller gets $10 in free transaction thru Google Checkout the next month. Assuming your transactions are large enough that the flat fee is irrelant, then you save $0.20 on Google Checkout for every $1 you spend on AdWords. If your average transaction is $10, then you save $0.40 on Google Checkout for every $1 you spend on AdWords.

http://checkout.google.com/

Chief Editor Sterling Camden

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:02:37 GMT

Sterling Camden is helping me write the Ten Steps to Professional Blogging. I've incorporated a bunch (hundreds) of changes he suggested. Many others have also volunteered to write sections. Thanks to all!

http://www.webvertization.com/makemoney.html

I think I'll have to attach a license to it to make certain all the contributors are fairly treated. I'm thinking anybody can republish the final version, as is, with no modifications to the actually content. You would be allowed to add sidebars, headers and footers (that may contain ads). You could also quote from the final version, with linkage back to the original. Licensing suggestions welcomed.

Update: I also filled-in the section on del.icio.us today.

Most Profitable AdSense Keywords

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:28:53 GMT

Here' the top 12 most profitable AdSense keywords according to Xedant. Xedant the rest of the top 100 or so.

Keyword	Cost Per Click	Clicks/Day	Cost/Day
insurance	$17.41	49,893.5	$868,645.81
hotels	$3.52	200,636.0	$706,238.75
film	$2.88	183,044.0	$527,166.75
home	$3.89	102,282.5	$397,878.91
car	$5.09	52,069.5	$265,033.75
schools	$4.13	60,913.0	$251,570.69
acting	$2.28	106,337.0	$242,448.36
credit	$8.67	25,705.0	$222,862.34
cheap	$2.71	82,139.5	$222,598.05
digital	$1.70	130,607.0	$222,031.91
hotel	$2.38	84,776.5	$201,768.06
film schools	$5.64	35,501.5	$200,228.45

http://www.xedant.com/researches/top_500_adsense_keywords.php

Ads = Users?

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:37:53 GMT

Seth Godin: Even if you never cashed the checks from Google, you'd come out ahead.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/why_does_fred_h.html

Randy: Seth is entirely correct here. A blog with some ads seems more professional than blog without. I have no confidence in blogs with zero ads, nor blogs with ads up the whooza. There's a balance. Ads on the right. Ads at the bottom. Content top left. It's the magic formula.

Google Ready to Test GBuy

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:14:17 GMT

Mylene Mangalindan: Web-search giant Google Inc. is set to introduce a test version of its GBuy online-payment service as early as this week

AdWords CTR is Irrelevant

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:54:46 GMT

I can't believe how many self-titled AdWords experts go around the various AdWords forums misinforming users that CTR is somehow important. If you are using AdWords, CTR is about the biggest red herring in the business. The important thing in AdWords is profits, that's how much you make less how much you spend. Sometimes you can make more by working on increasing your CTR, but I've often found campaigns with lower CTRs are more profitable.

Let me explain. The easiest way to increase your CTR is to increase your ad position by increasing your CPC. This will have an exponential affect on your AdWords expenses (as both CPC and clicks increase). If this doesn't result in an equivalent exponential increase in revenues, then you are making less money. This is why it's so important to have good reporting tools that tell you if you are making money or how much.

Note on Section Targeting

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:19:03 GMT

Some important notes on section targeting.

it may take up to 1-2 weeks before you start to see changes to your ad targeting. Also, we want to make sure your ads are as effective as possible,so our technology detects whether section targeting will improve your results and implements automatically only if you'll earn more revenue.

That is, you don't have to monitor whether section targeting is working for you, as Google will do that for you and disable it, if you are losing from section targeting. That's pretty cool!

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/stay-on-target.html

When to Get AdSense

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:06:23 GMT

A reader of Besting AdWords asked.

I’ve just been reading your site. It is very helpful. I’ve developed a site [cut]. I get about 9K unique visitors a month. I have plans to build out the site even bigger by adding separate pages for each species of parrot but haven’t quite found the time to do it yet. I’ve been thinking of using Google Ads but someone told me to wait till I get my site fully built out to open an account with Google. However I did not get the reasoning behind it. My assumption was that the more pages I had Google ads on the better rate I got from Google on CPC. Is this correct or is there some other reason to not sign up till I am as big as I can be? Also I’m interested in your advice on how to use AdWords to help me generate revenue.

Addressing your question, I don't think there's a bad time to apply and start putting AdSense on your website. You'll likely make less than $100/month on 9K uniques, but it'll pay for hosting. More importantly, if you position your content to be the primary host in your webpages and place the Google ads in the right sidebar and at the bottom of the webpage, then you won't scare off users with ads while making a couple bucks. Further, CPC is not really a factor of unique visitors until you become a top 100 web publishers. That is, for the vast majority of us, the number of uniques, will never enter the equation. I'd encourage you to start experimenting immediately with AdSense.

As for AdWords, you can never really go wrong with AdWords. In your case, you have several ways of using AdWords-AdSense arbitrage to make a little money. For instance, you sell both birds and bird related products. At the moment you don't have any birds for sales, so let's focus on parrot related products. Place AdWords ads for your best selling products. Make certain the AdWords landing page is the webpage with the Add to Cart button. Bid 5 cents (CPC) and set your budget to $1/d. At $1/d, you can afford to experiment. Then track the conversions to determine if you are making any money. Don't be impatient, let it run for a week. If you are making money, then raise the budget and CPC. Don't be greedy and raise your budget or CPC too quickly. Further, remember that you are also gaining readers. Some AdWords clickers might click on your ad, not buy a product, but bookmark your website and return later. In other words, if you are breaking even on AdWords-AdSense arbitrage, then you are winning the game.

10 Steps to Professional Blogging Update

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 16:59:43 GMT

I add more content to the 10 Steps to Professional Blogging. The e-book is still weeks to months from complete, but you can follow along as I add more content. The last couple days, I added more content on Blogthings, RSS and leaving comments on other blogs. I've also got a couple friends who've said they will help write some content. If you want to contribute, then ping me or leave a comment.

http://www.webvertization.com/makemoney.html

Testing FeedBurner FAN ads

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:00:59 GMT

As previously mentioned, I've been testing the FeedBurner FAN ads. You can follow my testing on The RSS Blog. I've got the ads displaying on the website, but I've had no luck getting the ads in the feed.

AdSense + FAN

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 19:48:12 GMT

Great news arrived today from the AdSense team, in response to my email query.

According to our program policies, FeedBurner FAN ads may be displayed on the same page as Google ads on your site.

Yahoo! Search Sucks

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:36:20 GMT

I don't know what changed, but I noticed a considerable drop in Yahoo! search referrers these last 2-3 days. So, I went to Yahoo! search, typed kbcafe and voila! I didn't find my kbcafe.com website in the first 100 results. Yikes! Searches for randy morin no longer return kbcafe.com results. Searches for most my most popular blogs also fail to return the correct results; iBLOGthere4iM, The RSS Blog and Destroy All Malware. That's just borked.

Cost Per Action AdSense

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:36:28 GMT

Toivo Lainevool: Google’s AdSense has started to test CPA (Cost-Per-Action) ads.

YPN Showcases spammer?

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:45:31 GMT

I found YPN's showcasing with Jeremy Shoemaker pretty disturbing. Jeremy runs a Website called ShoeMoney.com which I recently found was spamming me. I sent Jeremy a reply indicating that spamming was against the AdSense terms. He replied "I guess its a good thing I dont use adsense anymore ;)". I noticed he had converted entirely to YPN. Anybody know the reason? Was he banned from AdSense for spamming? I replied back that Yahoo! doesn't permit spamming either, but haven't heard further. This last email was sent only yesterday and today he's highlighted by YPN. It's pretty disturbing to me that Yahoo! is showcasing a spammer, but it's entirely possible that they don't know he's a spammer, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Please spread this blog entry, if only to educate Yahoo! about who they are dealing with.

http://ypnblog.com/blog/2006/06/21/publisher-spotlight-6/

Chitika’s Multi-Product Unit

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:26:12 GMT

Chitika Blog: Chitika introduces a new interactive eMiniMalls Multi Product Unit, allowing our publishers to show 4 products at once.

http://chitika.com/blog/?p=49

Randy: I'll have to try this. This might help the CPM of Chitika ads, which at present are too low to justify much usage.

AdSense Calendar

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:38:37 GMT

Nikhil Achwal: Today we're launching the AdSense Calendar. You can use it to find our monthly payment schedule, a record of AdSense blog posts, future system maintenance periods, and upcoming events--all backdated to the beginning of April 2006. To subscribe to the calendar, simply follow these instructions.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/06/make-date-with-adsense-calendar.html

AdWords and Tradenames

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:35:41 GMT

Chris Sukornyk: I was recently having coffee with a local eco-friendly service and they expressed their frustration with the Google keyword system. It seemed that a competitor of theirs was purchasing advertisements using variations on their company name. As a result, their very competitors were profiting on the confusion about their name and the company was forced to try to out-bid their competitor. Despite many calls, Google would simply not respond to their inquiries.

http://weblog.fivelimes.com/?p=26

ShoeSpam

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 23:59:50 GMT

I was very excited to receive the following email (excerpts only) from Jeremy Shoemaker.

Hello,
sorry to spam you ;)

No unsubscribe link and it was obviously an auto-mailer, as it didn't reference me by name or mention anything about me, my blogs or websites. Jeremy is an AdSense publisher and doesn't appear to be aware that SPAMming is against the AdSense terms and is a valid reason for Google to terminate your AdSense account. I've heard Jeremy makes some pretty serious coin via AdSense. You can't stop most SPAM, but I'm entirely sure that by CCing AdSense abuse on my reply, that Jeremy will think twice next time.

cross-posted from Destroy All Malware

Does AdSense Arbitrage Work?

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:08:04 GMT

Besting AdWords reader shanX writes: I was wondering to step up into Adwords. Coz I've noticed traffic from Google gets more click throughs and earnings with Adsense than other sources. Coz I'm not sure whether Adwords would workout on content sites such as mine. I've no idea how to pay too. I need targeted traffic, who would go through Adwords > Content > Adsense. Would it be possible? And would Chithika eMinimalls would earn on sites like mine? Could I earn like Adsense with eMinimalls?

Randy: AdWords is always worth the trouble. As you point out, referrers from Google are more likely to click on your ads then your regular readers and user community. This is why AdWords arbitrage is so compelling. Let's say your average AdSense earnings per click is $1 and that 10% of your AdWords click-thrus convert into AdSense clicks. That means you could bid 10 cents per click and know that you are breaking even. But even better, some of those users will actually bookmark your website or subscribe to your RSS feed and return later for some more clicking action. Here's how to know if AdWords will work in an arbitrage situation. Multiply your AdSense earnings per clicks by your Google referrer conversion rate, if the result is greater than 1 cent, then you can make money. If you bid for AdWords less than this result, then you are making money and acquiring new users. Now, you wont necessarily get a lot of AdWords clicks bidding 1 cent, but you know that you're making money, so it's worth setting up the campaign and experimenting.

Chitika eMinimalls can work and has worked for me in the past, but the payouts of late are very small and I hardly think it's even worth the effort anymore. I still run some eMinimall ads, but I make an extremely small fraction of what I make on AdSense. Further, Chitika has screwed their publishers on more than one occasion and doesn't always pay on time.

Pages Indexed on the Up Tic

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:36:09 GMT

For several months now, we've been seeing plenty of complaints and discussions about which pages Google is choosing to index. The discussion started shortly after Google implemented a new algorithm titled Big Daddy that saw millions of low quality pages disappear from Google's index. I personally lost over a million pages from the Google index. This weekend, I noticed the number of pages on my sites that are index is increasing again, after months of decreases.

Ad Scheduling

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:49:54 GMT

Google has introduced a new feature to AdWords, called Dayparting, that allows advertisers to target particular days or times with their ads. I suspect many larger advertisers will retarget their ads to run during their prime business hours. For instance, sports website will likely enjoy better conversions in the minutes leading up to a live sports event and financial website will likely enjoy better conversions when the NYSE is open for business. This may in turn impact your AdSense earnings.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33227

Amazon Groceries

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:25:13 GMT

You can now sell non-perishable groceries from Amazon.

Who to Ping

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:00:48 GMT

Tracy: On your handy dandy step by step publication you've posted about how to make money blogging (at least the first parts you've put up), you mentioned using pingshot on feedburner. [cut] My question is why you choose the 5 additional services on pingshot (instead of the other 3). Is it just a matter of personal preference for you, or do those 5 simply outperform Tail Rank, Blog Buzz Machine, and RssFwd.

Randy: Tracy is referring to step 3 in the 10 steps to professional blogging e-book that I'm currently writing online. In this step, I select Feedster, IceRocket, Weblogs.com, Blogdigger and Syndic8 as 5 additional sources to ping when your RSS is updated. I left out Tail Rank, Blog Buzz Machine and RssFwd. I left them out because you can only pick 5 of the 8 options. My choice was based 100% on the amount of traffic that is referred to my site from these 8 websites. Tail Rank, Blog Buzz Machine and RssFwd send me next to zero traffic.

Maybe I should pause and re-examine using another index. How about Alexa ranking (a traffic ranking system)?

IceRocket - 3,937
Feedster - 6,365
Weblogs.com - 9,120
Syndic8 - 9,996
Blogdigger - 15,926
Tail Rank - 21,058
RssFwd - 89,714
Blog Buzz Machine - 774,892

Same results again. BTW, Alexa is really getting slow these days. Last, Tracy sent me these questions in an email, which I asked her, if I could respond publicly. Thanks Tracy, I like questions that make me rethink my thunk.

FAN

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:32:44 GMT

Shhhh! Very shortly, I'll be testing the new FeedBurner ad network.

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/adnetwork

eBay Ad Network

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:39:30 GMT

Toivo Lainevool: eBay is going to launch their own contextual ad network. [cut] Their “AdContext” product will offer publishers a chance to put ads to eBay auctions on their sites. Much like AdSense, an eBay robot will scan pages for context and then display relevant ads. Publishers will get 35 percent to 60 percent of sales, depending on volumes. One major difference between AdContext and AdSense is that AdContext will pay the publisher only when an actual sale takes place, not on a per-impression or per-click basis. Because this is a contextual program, AdContext ads will not be able to be placed on the same page as AdSense or YPN ads.

The Great Sitemap Experiment

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:18:14 GMT

I have a friend who has a small Website at a local university. His webpages have never been indexed by Google, so nobody can find him. I showed him how to submit a sitemap to Google and get indexed. His sitemap has 5 webpages about the courses he teaches, with outlines and assignments. He successfully submitted the sitemap on the 7th and 5 days later, he's still out in the cold. The sitemap website indicates that the sitemap is validated and without error. Sitemap also indicates that it was retrieved countless times in the last 5 days and he remains completely unindexed. Further, he also submitted his site homepage elsewhere to Google. No luck! The Google indexer appears to be completely borked this last month.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Make Money Blogging

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:28:27 GMT

It's been awhile since I wrote my last book, but I've become quite passionate about bloggers making money. I'm clearly no a-lister, yet I'm making very good money blogging (just ask my wife). A few weeks ago, I kinda got tired of the constant negativity around making money blogging. At BloggerCon IV there will be a session on how to make money blogging and they will tell you that unless you are an a-lister that you can't simply throw up AdSense and expect to make a living. My new book will attempt to dispell this lie. I've decided to make this a free e-book and I'm writing it online for all to criticize and help. Here's my first few paragraphs. Please post comments. If you leave feedback, your name and blog address, then I'll add you as a contributor. I'm looking for any kind of feedback; typos, errors in logic, suggestions. I'm even looking for co-authors. Once the e-book is complete, I'll present it to publishers. Another great experiment begins.

http://www.webvertization.com/makemoney.html

$132,994.97

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:28:34 GMT

Somebody had a good month. They thought it was Darren Rowse, but Darren admitted it wasn't him.

click to enlarge

Combined Ad Unit

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 14:58:27 GMT

Kristian Fiskerstrand sent me a link to this blog entry showing a combined ad unit. It's both a regular ad unit and ad link unit. I've never seen this myself, but I've heard them reported in quite a few forums.

click to enlarge

http://www.kristianfiskerstrand.com/2006/06/10/google-adsense-and-combined-ad-units/

Just do it!

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:31:17 GMT

This is my first podcast on the Besting AdWords blog and is meant primarily as a motivation speach. Listen and realize, I'm an idiot and you can be an idiot like me that makes money on the Web.

http://media.odeo.com/2/8/6/Money.mp3

How to Make Money Blogging

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:00:51 GMT

John Palfrey: Dave Winer has kindly (or, well, maybe…) offered me the chance to be the discussion leader for the “How to Make Money” session at Bloggercon IV. [cut] One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

Randy: Weird! I'm not part of the select few at the left-hand side and I'm making money.

The Biggest AdWords Mistake EVAR!

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:42:11 GMT

I've been waiting to write this story for a few months. It's about a company that is making the biggest of all AdWords mistake. But, not only are they making this mistake, they know they are making it and they continue to make it. Let me explain and I'll start by showing you the steps to follow what I'm talking about.

Go to Google search.
Type rss and hit the Search button.
You should see an ad for a company named Pluck.
Now, don't click their ad, I don't want this to cost them any more money then they've already wasted. The ad shown, goes to the following URL.
http://www.pluck.com/content/GetPluck.html
Click that last link and you'll find the page is 404, which in Internet talk means it's missing.

A user clicking on this ad will be presented with the following text (abbreviated).

The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Now, here's where the story gets interesting. I first noticed this months ago. I couldn't tell you how many, but let's say 3-6 months, I simply don't remember. I fired off an email to a contact at Pluck and didn't really think twice about it. A few months pass and I happen to click their ad again and again it's 404. This time, I forward an email to Pluck, which they respond to saying they cannot replicate the error. I asked a few friends over IM and they were able to easily reproduce the problem. Eventually, after a bit of back and forth over email (including with a VP at Pluck), I had to create a screen capture of the error to prove to them they had this problem. Of course, their email gateway ate the attachment and I had to resent the video embedded in a zip file. Finally, they admit to the problem, indicate they are gonna fix it and thank me for taking the time. They never fixed it, but rather they patched it. They redirected all 404 errors to a more friendly webpage. And a few weeks later, the 404 redirect disappeared and the ad clicks again started going to the ugly plain Jane 404 webpage. I sent them a final, laughing, email about the issue remaining unresolved and decided to write this little blog entry.

Pluck has over a long period of time maintained a rather high position in the paid listings for the RSS keyword. From that, I can only image that they are paying somewhere between $1 and $5 per click, but I'm just guessing. They also seem to always be in the paid listings, which indicate also they are likely getting 100s, if not 1000s of clicks per day. I'm gonna make a wild estimate that they are wasting $100 to $1000 per day or $35k to $350k per year.

The mistake they are making is not testing their ads. If you use AdWords, then test your ads. You don't even have to pay to test them. You simply have to login to AdWords and click the previews of your ads. But even worse, they've known about this problem for weeks, if not months and have never fixed it or at least paused their campaigns. This is what I call a toilet bowl. It's where VCs go to flush investor money. Don't be dumb like Pluck.

Low Quality + Smart Pricing = Declining Revenues

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:15:10 GMT

Here is an all-too-familiar story about an AdSense publisher who's earnings are rapidly falling.

I am perplexed. I have Adsense Ads & Google Search on 5 websites

www.discovercircuits.com
www.imagineeringezine.com
www.discoversolarenergy.com
www.discoveraudiobooks.com
www.djandassoc.com
The ads on each site are coded as channels so I can better track results. Discovercircuits gets by far the lions share of traffic. From October- December of 2005 I made what I considered to be a good income, but every month in 2006 my revenue continues to drop. Nothing has changed. Traffic & click thru's are about the same. But the revenue is now HALF of what is was in December. What is going on?

I reformatted the article slightly to make it more readable, but you can read the original at the following URL.

http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-earnings/msg/6b6f943b5852c929

If you take a look at the sites above, they are extremely low quality and contain little real content, mostly links from what I could tell. This type of site will generate low quality AdSense clicks, which should translate to lower conversions for the advertiser (but not always) and according to smart pricing, this will cause your AdSense earnings to decline. As you can see, this is exactly what's happening. This guy likely made some good money, in the good old days, prior to smart pricing.

Chitika running adult ads

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:43:00 GMT

JenSense: However, a couple of Chitika ad units caught my eye due to their very adult nature, complete with images.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/06/chitika_running.html

Randy: The ads in question, shown below, are definately adult, but I didn't find them all that bad. You likely don't want them on a kids site, but they're no worse than what you'd find on many MySpace profiles. Chitika has already blocked the ads.

XML-Sitemaps.com

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:24:02 GMT

Today, I came across this free sitemap generator. The free version is limited to 500 webpages and $15 for an unlimited version. Very nice!

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

What Cuban thinks of ClickFraud

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 22:27:14 GMT

Mark Cuban: This is why I think clickfraud FAR exceeds what is being published by search companies.

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000257073723/

Randy: Start by reading Mark's entire blog entry, which is well written.

I think Mark under-estimates just how much effort Google is piling into preventing click-fraud. If Mark can think of ways hackers can make money with click-fraud, then surely the specialists at Google can think of ways to prevent it. No matter what, there'll always be an element of click fraud in CPC advertising, but you'll be amazed how many AdSense accounts Google is terminating each and every day.

He compares click-fraud to splogs. But who is trying to stop splogs? Nobody really, because no-one actually owns the blogosphere or is willing to put any dollars behind an initiative to stop it. So, associating the growth of splogs and click-fraud doesn't hold water. Google is trying to stop click-fraud and nobody is really trying to stop splogging. So, splogs are growing leaps and bounds because it works. Click-fraud isn't because Google is actually terminating the AdSense accounts of fraudsters. Note that Google doesn't terminate the Blogger or AdSense accounts of sploggers.