Earn money for free? Well, not quite - but almost right! Google AdSense is a revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large sites that place ads for goods and services relevant to your site's content, targeted at those who frequent your pages. In return, you are paid a small amount of money if the ad is shown on your page, or people click on it. We'll show you some great ideas that can increase your knowledge, which will help increase your AdSense revenue.
Step
Method 1 of 3: Creating an Ad Unit
Step 1. Sign in to your AdSense account
Open AdSense, and click My ads on the top left.
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Create a new Ad unit. In the main screen area, below Content > Ad units, click the button +New ad unit.
Step 2. Name your ad unit
This can be any name that suits you, but many feel that the standard naming format helps them to manage large amounts of data.
For example, using [target site for ad]_[ad size]_[ad date] is one approach, which would look like this: mywebsite.com_336x280_080112. Whatever format you choose to name it in, make that your default
Step 3. Choose the size
See "How to Do it" below for more details, but Google has found best practices that lead to more clicks.
Step 4. Set your ad type
This determines the types of ads you will see on your website: text only; text and images/multiple media; and only images/lots of media.
Step 5. Create a custom channel
Custom channels allow you to group ads according to your preferences, for example by size or location on a page.
You can track performance with custom channels, and turn your channels into targeted ad placements so that advertisers can direct their ads to your ad unit
Step 6. Create your ad style
This lets you choose colors for various components of an ad: border, title, background, text, and URL. You can also choose a corner style, from square to round, a font family, and a default font size.
- A good practice is to create an ad style that matches the look and color of your website.
- You can use the default settings from Google, or use your own settings. For both options, a sample ad on the right will show you how your ad will appear
Step 7. Get the code for the ad
When you are done setting up your ad, you can save your ad unit, or click the button Save and get code at the bottom to get the HTML code for your site.
If you don't know how to add code to your site and want help, click here for guidance from Google on how to implement the code
Method 2 of 3: How to Design Your Ad Promotion
Step 1. Review your content
In designing any type of advertising campaign, the most important thing is to know who your target is. If you're writing a food blog for cheap single men, for example, you've narrowed the scope of people who are interested in your ad. You also have an excellent focal point for your ad. What things appeal to single men who cook for themselves? Some of the possibilities include: dating, cars, movies, politics, and live music.
Think about who often visits your website, write something that you think is the most important characteristic of your website visitors
Step 2. Customize the ad
While AdSense will automatically populate your pages with ads they think are relevant, use their tools to give them even tighter control.
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Create channels. Channels are like labels that you can use to group ad units the way you want-by color, category, or page. By setting up a channel, you can get detailed reports on the performance of your ad units, and use that to your advantage. For example:
- Use one ad style on one group of pages, and another style on another. Track and compare the performance of the two styles, and choose the best performance.
- Compare performance on pages that focus on different things. For example, if a page about gardening performs better than a page about cooking, you might consider adding more pages about gardening.
- If you have separate domains, create a channel to track each one to see which domain is generating the most clicks.
Step 3. Optimize your ad placement and site design
Google has found that there are some places that are more effective, and places that are less effective for advertising.
- Ads that appear the first time you open your page (i.e., "above the fold" as in the newspaper world) tend to be more effective than ads that are below the fold.
- Ads on the top left tend to perform much better than ads on the bottom right.
- Ads that are positioned directly above the main content, and ads that appear at the bottom of the page and above the footer tend to perform very well.
- Wider ads are usually more successful, because they are easier to read.
- Ads featuring images or videos perform very well.
- Using colors that complement the colors of your website will make your website easier to read, and more effective.
Step 4. Learn how AdSense works
AdSense automatically sends ads to your site based on several different criteria:
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Contextual targeting.
The AdSense crawler scans your pages, analyzes your content, and provides ads tailored to your content. They do this by using an analysis of the keywords, word frequency, font size, and link structure of the web.
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Placement targeting.
This allows advertisers to choose to run their ads on certain subsections of a publisher's site. If your website matches the advertiser's criteria, their ad will appear on your page.
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Interest based advertising.
This allows advertisers to reach users based on their interests and the user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. Google's Ads Preferences Manager allows its users to choose their own category of interest, which in turn helps advertisers to focus their advertising campaigns. This is a great method to monetize your site more efficiently, as it increases value for advertisers and provides a more relevant experience for users.
Method 3 of 3: How Much Is It Worth?
Step 1. Manage your expectations
When you sign up for AdSense, you'll want to know what kind of revenue you can expect to see. There is a lot to do with what kind of returns you can expect, and managing them will help you maximize your earning potential.
Step 2. Traffic
First and foremost, to generate any kind of revenue from AdSense you have to get people to click on your ads. For this to happen, you need to have people go to your site, read your content! Whether it's a business website, or a personal blog, the rules are the same: Publish your site!
- A big site with a lot of traffic can get more than a million hits per day, whereas a blog may be lucky if it gets 100 visitors per day.
- For every thousand page impressions (views) you get, you can earn anywhere from $0.05 to $5. Yes, that's a wide reach-in a month, that's anywhere from $1.50 to $150.00! Within that range your expectation of frequent visits depends entirely on you, your site and your promotional efforts.
Step 3. Cost Per Click (CPC) or cost per click
It is paid every time someone clicks on an ad on your page. No, you can't click on your own ads – Google will know, and turn off your Adsense quickly as fast as you turn your head. The advertisers set the price for the ad, and the price can vary widely.
- An advertiser can earn you a lot of money on a cost-per-click basis, but the ad may make your site less attractive.
- An ad that earns $0.03 per click can get 100 hits, but it won't add up by much.
Step 4. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
This is the percentage of visitors on your site compared to the number of ads actually clicked on. If 100 people visit your site, and 1 of them clicks on your ad, then your CTR is 1%, and that's a reasonable amount. You can see that more traffic to your site will really make a difference.
Step 5. Revenue per 1000 impressions (RPM) or revenue per 1000 impressions
This is the approximate amount you could receive if you had 1,000 impressions (pages people viewed).
For example, if you earn $1 for 100 impressions, your RPM is $10. There's no guarantee you'll get such results, but it's a good way to check your site's overall performance
Step 6. Content is king
The quality of your content is an important factor in understanding your earning potential. If your site has comprehensive and engaging content and a good user experience, more users will be attracted to your site. Google's crawler will also make it easy to determine the type of ad content that best fits on your site. Interested users + targeted ads = money
Step 7. Start building keyword rich pages
Provide well researched and profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links on your site.
- If your site contains topics like debt consolidation, web hosting or cancer related to asbestos, you'll get more clicks than if you were writing about a non-specific topic about puppies.
- If you concentrate only on the most searched keywords, you will face stiff competition. What you want are keywords that have a lot of demand but are in low supply, so do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.
Tips
- While Google doesn't release exact details on how they determine which ads to place on specific pages, they do say that it's the text content of the site's pages that matters, not the meta tags.
- Some webmasters design new sites specifically to serve AdSense text ads, but it's against AdSense rules that prohibit sites designed purely for AdSense, so you'll need to include some affiliate links or also sell your own products.
- Avoid non-English characters on English pages. There is a bug that could cause the page to show irrelevant French ads.
- Quality is the most important part of any website. If your site doesn't have the quality content you expect, it's possible that your visitors won't come back.
- A good source of earning money is to use a traffic driving site like Flixya. You can sign up for Google Adsense and Flixya, without the expense or time to build your own traffic or site.
Warning
- In the early days of your internet presence, you might see a notification of a site asking everyone to click on the ads on that site. It's been a long time. If Google detects possible fraud, there will be no presumption of innocence. They assume that you are indeed at fault.
- Don't click on your ad. If caught by Google, they will suspend your account and withhold any income you may have. However, if you accidentally click on your ad once or twice, Google will withhold your revenue but will not penalize you as long as it doesn't happen continuously.
- If you don't have any content, Google will have to guess what topics are on your page. That estimate could be wrong, so the ads shown may not be relevant.
- Google has many restrictions on how ads should be displayed. One of the main reasons for account suspensions to occur is because webmasters try to obscure ads and mislead others into thinking that they are "content". Simply put, never try to use CSS to hide the Google logo unless you are given permission to do so!
