AdSense Tip #11: Plumb AdWords for keywords

Hopefully you've been following my ongoing series of Google AdSense Tips in your quest for better earnings with AdSense. This tip is for those who followed my advice in AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program. If you're not an AdWords customer, you can't do this.

AdWords customers have access to a number of useful tools, including the following:

• Keyword Tool to build keyword lists and do keyword comparisons
• Traffic Estimator to see how well certain keywords perform

Now while these tools are designed for advertisers to use, they're also extremely useful for us publishers. Particularly in finding the right keyword combinations for attracting more visitors (and ideally more clicks) to our site.

Here's what you do, it's all very simple. First, log in to your AdWords account. Then click on the Tools link in the Campaign Management tag:

Next, click on Keyword Tool:

Now type in the main keyword/keyphrase for your site and press the Get More Keywords button:

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Additional keywords to considerlink:

Scroll back to the top and select Cost and ad position estimates in the Show columns drop-down list:

You won't see any estimates until you enter a value in the Calculate Estimates using Max CPC field. Use the maximum value for the currency you're working with, which in my case is CA$120 (approximately US$100), and pressRecalculate:

Now you'll see estimated average cost-per-click values for each of the keywords in the list. Click twice on the Estimated Avg. CPC link to sort the list in descending order (highest to lowest value):

And presto!, you have a list of potential keywords showing what it would cost you on average to get top billing for your ad:

AdSense earnings are based on what the publisher pays per click, so this handy tool gives you a good idea of which specific phrases are good ones to target. That said, be aware that the price you see listed here is only the maximumbidding price and that most advertisers will in fact pay less. That and Google's smart pricing algorithms will all conspire to reduce the amount of money you actually earn on a per-click basis. So don't treat the values you see here as the Gospel truth — but they're good for judging the relative worth of different keyword combinations. See my high-paying keywords page for more information.

Once you've looked through your list and identified promising keywords, head back up to the Show columns drop-down and select Keyword popularity to see which keywords are the most searched for and which how popular they are with advertisers. If most of your traffic comes from search engine traffic, you'll use this information to further refine the list of keywords you should target.

As you can see, AdWords is a great way to plumb for keyword information! Now I need to revise my
Invisible Fence Guide (or maybe I should be calling
it the PetSafe Invisible Fence Guide) to take
advantage of some of these keyphrases… Well, maybe after the AdSense case study is done…

AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program

This is a continuation of my irregular Google AdSense Tips series. I'll get back to my ongoing AdSense case study tomorrow. (If you haven't seen the case study, it's a step-by-step account of what I'm doing to build a nice-oriented money-making site called the Invisible Fence Guide.)

For a long time now, I've recommended that AdSense publishers join Google's AdWords program. (If you don't know what AdWords is, see my AdWords summary.) There were two good reasons for joining:

• To access good keyword estimates
• To drive traffic to your own sites by buying ads

Now there's a third, even more compelling reason: AdWords customers get access to the Google Analytics service for free! (Actually, the program is free to all comers, but AdWords customers aren't limited to the number of page views they can track.) Google Analytics tracks how visitors use your sites by gathering all kinds of statistics. All you do is register your sites and embed some simple JavaScript code onto your pages. Google takes care of the rest.

Google Analytics is something that Google acquired during one of its (few) recent acquisitions. (Google doesn't buy many companies, and the ones it does tend to be small, Google seems just as interested in getting good people as well as intellectual property. I doubt you'll see them ever buying a big company because of that — too much chaff. But I digress.) As a company, Google loves to collect and analyze statistics, so it's no wonder that they're interested in collecting statistics about how people visit websites in their quest to provide better searching and advertising services.

Google Analytics is already causing a lot of buzz, so spend the money to join AdWords (it only requires a credit card and a small initial payment of $10 or less — it depends on where you are in the world) and reap the benefits of seeing what's happening. The great thing about this is that even bloggers whose blogs are hosted on sites they don't control — like the blogspot.com domain — can use this service. This is a great way to get some good data on what people are doing on your site.

Note: expect delays when trying to access the Google Analytics site for a while, at least until the dust settles due to the excitement this is causing in the webmaster community.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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AdSense Tip #9: Use section targeting to exclude stop/poison keywords from your content

This is the next article in my occasional Google AdSense Tips series.

The introduction of section targeting lets AdSense publishers fine-tune the content that the AdSense crawler sees in order to better determine the topic of the content and to choose the ads to display accordingly. However, AdSense was already doing a good job in content determination before section targeting came along. No, the real benefit of section targeting is the ability to exclude content, particularly to exclude specific “stop” or “poison” words and phrases that affect which ads are shown on a specific page.

Excluding content with section targeting is simple. At the beginning of the part you want AdSense to ignore, place this comment in the HTML for the page:

At the end, place this comment:

What you may not realize is that you can place these comments right in the middle of your text. Consider the following paragraph:

When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a multiple-personality disorder, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.

As it turns out, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” triggers ads for treatment of narcissism and other psychological problems, which is not at all the topic of this particular content. (Don't believe me? Visit the
permalink page for this tip and see what kind of ads are being shown.) In this context, then, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” is a poison phrase (not generally, just for this particular topic) that needs to be excluded from AdSense's consideration. This is all you do:

When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a multiple-personality disorder, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.

The AdSense crawler will then skip over the phrase when determining what the main keywords of the page are and selecting the appropriate ads to display.

Note that you can achieve a similar effect two other ways, by using tags to split problem words into multiple parts:

multiple-personality disorder

Or by inserting the offending words into the content via JavaScript:

Neither solution is as good, however, as AdSense section targeting because they affect how search engines see the page in general. If all you want to do is avoid certain ads, section targeting's the way to go.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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AdSense Tip #8: Access your console from alternate domains

It's rare, but on occasion access to the AdSense management console is unavailable from the usual www.google.com/adsense address. If it's not working and you really need to check your earnings, try logging in through one of the alternate domains like www.google.ca/adsense or www.google.fr/adsense, since these entry points may be up even if the main “google.com” site is down or inaccessible. You'll get a “Domain name mismatch” error from your browser because the security certificate is for “google.com” and not “google.ca” or “google.fr”, but if you just ignore that you can still access the management console. You may have to select a different language using the language selection box at the top of the login page — for example, “google.fr” defaults to (big surprise) French text.

This tip brought to you courtesy of Eric Giguere, author of Make Easy Money with Google, an AdSense book for the non-technical.

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AdSense Tip #7: When NOT to use CSS

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are a great way to control how Web pages look. They make it easy to separate the presentation from the structure of the content. However, some people go overboard and use CSS in ways it shouldn't. When this happens, AdSense publishers often find that the ads being displayed on their sites are mistargeted. What's happening?

As I explain in Make Easy Money with Google, HTML is a markup language. Its primary purpose is to describe the structure of a Web page. Tags let you specify which parts are headings, which are paragraphs, what the title is, and so on. HTML tags also let you format text using tags like and to indicate italic and bold text, for example. However, much of the formatting was done poorly and it polluted the content — there were tags all over the place and all kinds of tricks were done with

tags to get things to position where the Web page designers wanted them.

The emergence of CSS removed the need for many HTML formatting tricks, which is great. HTML returned to describing the structure of a document. However, there are a few tags that you should not remove. For example, don't remove the header tags (

and so on). Don't remove or tags. The tags are used by AdSense and search engines to figure out which keywords are prominent and important in your content. If you take them out, you're making it harder for them to figure out what your content is all about. Leave them in, but take out the other formatting tricks.

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AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages

My series of AdSense tips continues with a tip closely related to AdSense Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages. This tip is AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages.

AdSense publishers often complain that the ads that get shown on blog and forum pages are not really that relevant to the topics being discussed. This is because the Mediapartners crawler — the crawler that fetches and analyzes pages that display AdSense ads — visits pages at unpredictable intervals. The first impression you make to that crawler, as discussed in Tip #1, is therefore extremely important. The first time the crawler visits your forum/blog there better be some relevant content on display there.

There's another problem with many blogs and forums: the keyword density is skewed by all the links and extra “fluff” found on the page. For example, many blogs have multiple feed links listed on the page. These are often images. If those images all have alt attributes that say something like “RSS feed for GoofySite.com, a blog about Goofy” then “blog”, “feed” and “Goofy” will have higher densities than you might expect, especially if (in this case) “Goofy” and “GoofySite.com” show up in other places on the page (links to the home page, links to other pages on the site, alt attributes for images, and so on). You shouldn't be surprised if all the ads you see for that blog end up being related to blogging and/or Goofy, and not necessarily the specific topics being discussed.

There's no predicting when the Mediapartners crawler shows up, so it's hard to tune things for it. You can control when the first crawl occurs, though, so spend some time tuning that first crawl by making sure the blog/forum is displaying the right kind of content. Use a keyword density checker on the page before you place ads on it to make sure things are OK, then activate AdSense for that page.

Note that you'll have better control over permalink pages and thread-specific pages, provided again that you don't have too much fluff on those pages, either.

If things are really bad, rename the page and place a redirect in the old page's place. I had to do this recently with my Vioxx page. In Make Easy Money with Google I point readers to the www.memwg.com/vioxx-withdrawal address for additional information about Vioxx. But the ads that were showing weren't well-targeted, because in my hurry to get the page up (there's another AdSense tip — take your time!) I had neglected to check the keyword density. But when I did, after the fact, it's because that “fluff” I mentioned above was overpowering the Vioxx-related keywords. So after I fixed the page I renamed it towww.memwg.com/vioxx-recall and changed the original to redirect to the new one. When I activated the ads on the new page, the crawler was able to correctly figure out what the keywords were and now the ads that are shown there are highly relevant.

The fix-and-rename technique works well, but it's not always possible to do it, in which case you just have to wait for the Mediapartner crawler to revisit your site. Perhaps Google's new sitemap feature will help in this regard, but I haven't done any experiments yet to know if that's true or not.

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AdSense Tip #5: Manage your own AdSense account

My series of AdSense tips (the inspiration for my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google) continues with a tip about who should control an AdSense account. This tip comes directly from a conversation I had with someone who had been ripped off. Why were they ripped off? Because they weren't in control of their AdSense account.

For some sites, an AdSense account is like a license to print money. Now, most sites aren't making thousands of dollars a month from AdSense, but it's very feasible for niche sites to make a hundred or more dollars a month — see Rick's recent entry on Feedbuzzard, for example. Whether you're making a lot or not so much, it's still extra income that should be coming your way.

I say should because the reality is that many people outsource the management of their sites third parties. Not everyone has the time or the expertise to develop their own Web pages (though it's not that's difficult to learn the basics, as I show in Make Easy Money with Google), so outsourcing the development and maintenance of a site may make sense in many cases. But don't outsource the management of your AdSense account or, worse yet, let someone else use their own account to display ads on your site. The AdSense account should be registered in your name (or the name of your business), not in anyone else's name. The money should be sent to you directly, as should the tax information. If you want to give the guys maintaining your site a cut of the revenue, fine, but do it yourself from the money that Google sends you, don't have the money sent to Google.

For similar reasons, make sure that the ownership and control of your domain name rests with you and not a third party. Your domain name (or domain names, it's common to have more than one, even if they just point to the same site) is a valuable resource, it's part of your brand. Take the time to learn how to use a domain name registrar (it's easy) and manage the names yourself. If you ever have problems with your hosting service, for example, you won't be held hostage by them (you do have local backup copies of your website, don't you?) if you control the domain name — there are plenty of web hosting companies out there eager for your business.

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tips # 2, 3 and 4

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again. We appreciate your patience. Sincerely, The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

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Google AdSense Tips

Many of the pages on this site display text ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site must join Google's AdSense program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join. Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site. AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the content of a particular page. Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense program.

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

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Google Adwords Broken or Price Gouging

So I’m creating a new campaign with 40 or so keyword phrases, I submit them and I check and 38 of them are disabled with an “inactive for search increase quality or bid” message telling me I have to up my bid to $5 or $10 dollars. First of all how do they know if my ad sucks or not? It’s been in the system for less than 60 seconds. Since I’m a tinkerer I pick the best phrase and up it to $5. Now at $5 I’m not going to be making a profit, but I want to see what happens. I wait 15 to 20 minutes and there I am in the number 1 spot on the side (no premium results on this one). Ok I don’t want to be number 1, I want to be lower. I drop my bid back down the “increase quality” message is back and my ad goes away. Ok let’s try a $4.99 bid … my ad is still gone and “increase quality” message is back. So at $4.99 my ad sucks, but at $5.00 it’s ok? Clearly something is “broken” here.

This is not a $5 keyword … trust me. Are things getting so bad at the plex they have to have an automated way to force me to pay more than I want if I want my ad to show? Can you only bid on a keyword if you want to be number 1 and pay through the nose for it? C’mon Google what’s the story?

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Google AdWords CPC Price Increases

If you’ve been following WMW (see Sudden increase of CPC recently?), the Blogosphere ( see Technorati Search: adwords cpc increase), or even my blog(see Google Adwords Broken or Price Gouging ) you may have seen some some people complaining about increases in min CPC prices for AdWords campaigns. Basic recap of my situation if I bid $5.00 my ads show in the top spot and in some cases even displacing three premium listings, if I bid $4.99 my ads stop showing. If I want to play I have to be willing to play top dollar and be number one, I can’t bid for a lower spot. This happens for brand new advertisements with no history. Because I’m a tinkerer and I like to understand how things work, and because I can be a bit of a nudge and pest I really wanted to figure things out, so I decided to dig a little deeper, and get someone from AdWords to look and I’d also do some recon at Pubcon

Now to provide a little more information if the keyword converts I get a $15 payout so at $5 a click I’m going to need a 33% conversion rate just to break even. While I’m not going to say that’s impossible I will say it ain’t easy, and is pretty difficult. To be successful I really needed to pay a lower CPC for a lower position, I emailed AdWords asking how to reach that goal. After a few emails back and forth here is the response I got:

I’ve reviewed the account in question and specifically the keywords within
the Ad Group. The terms in this Ad Group are highly
competitive and will require higher CPCs, particularly when newly created.
I would suggest that you consider expanding the keyword list for this Ad
Group as well as including some additional keyword variations.
Alternatively, you can re-activate the keywords with the higher CPCs. If
these keywords perform well over time, it is likely that their required
CPCs may fall. Below I’ve included some general information regarding
inactive keywords and a link to our Help Center topic regarding optimizing
your keyword list.

Our automatic performance monitor evaluates each keyword within your
account when submitted and periodically throughout each day. When a
keyword doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score and maximum
cost-per-click (CPC) to show ads, that keyword may become inactive for
search. If you re-use that inactive keyword, or re-enter it in another
keyword matching format, you may notice that it is inactive for search
again. This is because our system recognizes that this word has not
performed well for you in the past and so is more rigorous in its
evaluation of the word.

Now I wouldn’t say that was especially clear and didn’t really answer my question as to how a I bid a lower price for a lower position. So I decided to try my luck at Pubcon. I went to the Google booth and spoke with one of the reps. Sorry I don’t remember her name but she was helpful and tried to explain things to me, and this is what I got translated into non corporate mumbo jumbo.

• When you start a new ad the average quality score used for all of the current advertisers becomes your quality score. Once your ad is running your quality score gets re-adjusted periodically (I think every few days but not positive on the time frame).
• Once you have a higher quality score your minimum CPC will lower, and allow you to bid into lower positions.
• If you pause or delete campaigns and then try to create another ad with the same keywords your quality score for those keywords will carry over to the new campaign.

So for really competitive keyword phrases you may end up paying more (in some cases a lot more) than you want for a few days in order get a good quality score and be able to lower your bid. While I get what they are trying to accomplish I really think there are quite a few problems with this approach. First off I’ve got to be wiling to overpay and lose a considerable amount of money just to be a player. Secondly using the quality score of other advertisers as my baseline seems a little unfair. Next if I write a bad ad and I want to start from scratch with a new ad using my history for quality score means I’m starting out in the hole. Now if any of Googlers happen across this post and I’ve got something wrong please let me know and I’ll correct it. However if you’ve been negatively affected by this please contact Google AdWords and let them know. Despite the fact that they are a big corporate environment, I actually believe many of them are open to new ideas and responsive to feedback. I spoke with a few people from Google at Pubcon and that they were all pretty interested in hearing what I said as long as I was constructive in the way I said it.

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Google Adwords More Pricing BS

Today, we’d like to revisit a common misconception, about which we receive quite a few questions. In the first part of the post, we will very briefly cover the most important facts and in the second we’ll take a more detailed look at four related questions.

The common misconception: Many advertisers believe that if they have no competitors for a keyword, their minimum cost-per-click (CPC) will automatically be lowered by the AdWords system to $0.01, the lowest possible CPC.

How it actually works: The minimum CPC for a keyword is not related to the number of competitors one has that keyword. Instead, minimum CPC is dependent on the Quality Score of the keyword, as it’s used in the advertiser’s account. This functionality was introduced in August 2005, when keyword bidding evolved to a quality-based model.

So what we have is an auction based advertising system that has nothing to do with auction based pricing! Because you have no idea what goes into quality score you have no idea if Google is ripping you off or price jacking you. In yet another stroke of brilliance check this out

If you look for your ad and see no competitors, this does not necessarily mean that there are no others advertising on that keyword. For example, many advertisers choose to show their ads only during particular times of the day, so you will not necessarily see them when your ad appears. Or, while you might be targeting the entire United States, competing advertisers may be regionally targeting and not including the area in which you are located — in which case you’ll not see their ads.

So lets see I’m in New York and running geotargeted ad only in NY and my pricing is affected someone in California running a geotargeted ad only in California? Really can you say that with a straight face? Exactly how much alcohol was flowing at that staff meeting because you really can’t expect anyone to believe that a bunch of rational people reached the conclusion that was logical anywhere except the bizzaro universe. Just because housing prices in San Jose are going up doesn’t mean they are in every market across the country.

Why don’t you just come out and say listen we’re going to charge you whatever we want to, and there’s nothing you can do except pay it. At least I’d respect you for not lying to me.

Somebody put me on adwords quality score debate panel at conference … please the voice of reason needs to be heard …

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New Google Adwords Formula = Just Pay Us More

The lunacy that is the Google adwords formula is actually really amusing lately, let’s take a look and dissect it line by line shall we …

Google AdWords Help Center: How is the formula for top ad placement changing?

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid.

OK there it is in it’s unchanged entirety now let’s lay it open bare why don’t we …

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control.

We want to know exactly how much we can extort out of you before you’ll bail, and rather than playing guessing games, we’re going to work only with that number and ignore everything else. The fact that it costs you the most money and makes us the most profit is purely coincidental … really …

This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you.

We’ve figured out that if you bid blind, and have no idea what the other people are bidding or paying (except for you pesky blackhat ppc seo’s with two accounts … oops …) it gives us the ability to extract the most profit out of you because you’re likely to over bid. We also want to make sure that we charge you the most we possibly can in case somebody below you has figured out how use the system correctly.

Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC

Did we mention how much more likely we are to show your ad the more you are willing to pay us … pay no attention to that growing pile of profits over in the corner. Notice how we don’t confuse your goals of paying as little as possible with our goals of making as much profit as possible

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots.

Did you notice that “minimum price” wording … pretty slick how we avoided saying things were price fixed wasn’t it. How are we going to keep getting free breakfast, lunch and dinner here at the plex if we don’t take a few necessary steps, the ends totally justify the means don’t cha know.

The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results.

You gotta love the quality score, it’s mystery factor X, pretty much allowing us to get whatever number we want on the other end. It’s like simple algebra, and we googlers love maths. We could have just said “we’re going to take the most you are willing to pay and charge you whatever percentage of it we want to, and if you aren’t bidding high enough we’ll totally say your quality score sucks” but well we like to put all that college edumacation to work and bamboozle with big words arranged in complicated ways, so you’ve got no idea what’s really going on …

As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay.

Since you have no idea what the quality score is, we won’t tell you, and it’s completely out of your control, that’s pretty much an irrelevant factor for you isn’t it. Oh you noticed we’re the only one’s who know what that score is … and that we control it … which means we can charge you whatever we want … Listen have you seen all this yummy food we get to eat for free !!! Don’t think of it as paying too much … think of it putting food in the mouths of happy googlers who will find more ways to charge you more next year ….

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Pay-Per-Click Placement Tips

In my opinion part of any good pay-per-click campaign consists of two parts. The first part is getting good ROI, or getting the most conversions from the fewest amount of clicks and for the lowest price. The second part consists of making sure your competition is paying the most and getting the lowest ROI. To be clear I AM NOT ADVOCATING CLICKING OR CREATING CLICK FRAUD ON ANYONE’S ADVERTISING.

What I am suggesting is you use a bidding and placement strategy that makes people you are bidding against pay as much as possible, and lower their bids. This strategy works best there are only a few people seriously bidding on a word or phrase, or when you are trying to get your ad from the right side to to left side. What you want to do is keep raising your bid each day until you reach an amount where you displace the person above you. If you displaced the ad above you by outbidding them then back off your bid price just a little bit and let it sit there for a little while. While the person above you may actually be paying less than you due to a favorable quality score they will be paying a higher percentage of their bid price. Keep this pressure up as long as necessary, with the goal of getting the bidder above you to drop their bid price. What usually happens is the person relents due to loss of ROI. If people follow human nature they won’t drop the price by a nickel but instead they will drop it back down to price they are more comfortable with. Wait a week or two and slowly start dropping your price, being careful not to drop it so low you go below the person you displaced.

Basic Intro to AdSense (for beginners)

Adsense Earns

Adsense Alternatives

Adsense Blogs Hubs and Helps

I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a PPC Keyword Today

Back in the not so distant past when I was still wet behind the ears and finding my way, like most newbies I was on the quest for the “perfect PPC keyword”.

I’ll admit I stalked a few people trying to figure out what they were bidding on, at some point I probably even resorted to begging for just one secret keyword. I figured once I had discovered that magic keyword things would be perfect. I would make more money, quit my job, buy a Ferrari, solve global warming and enact world peace. The truth of the matter is I was looking for a cheap easy handout, I was looking for a PPC enabler.

Sure I would have made some money in the short term but like many keywords, it would get more competitive over time, and profits would dry up and I’d end up back in the same place looking for a handout. I got lucky and nobody ever gave into my begging (probably more for their own economic protection than my well being). If I knew which keyword to bid on without understanding how to find them myself I really wouldn’t have learned anything. It’s the whole “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” thing.

To head off the more determined person who is thinking “well how am I going to learn how to do PPC and landing pages right if no one is willing to show me an example”. Ok here’s what you do go ahead and click some sponsored listings and study them and see what works and what doesn’t. Before some ding-nut gets in my face about how I’m encouraging click fraud slow down junior, and visit this page, type in some keywords and click some ads. The last time I checked nobody gets charged when you click ads on that page.

Right now I really prefer low maintenance keywords over anything else. I like keywords I can log in and check once every week or two and make sure they are working and I’m making money. I’m ok with giving up a little profit so I don’t have to micro-manage prices on a day to day level, automated bid tools just scare me. Don’t obsess over finding keywords that make hundreds of dollars a day, or thousands of dollars a month. I’m quite happy to find a bunch of keywords that will make me a few hundred dollars a month for 15 minutes of work every week.

Basic Intro to AdSense (for beginners)

Adsense Earns

Adsense Alternatives

Adsense Blogs Hubs and Helps

Adsense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing

As we saw in part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection, finding the right set of circumstances where AdSense Arbitrage is going to work requires a bit of work. You’ve got to get a large enough set of related keywords, get some prices, and then compare and look for the right opportunity. If you read Rae’s blog then you might remember her post on Legitimate Use of Mechanical Grunts, which is a perfect for this situation. However after you get the keywords, and prices you’re still going to have to sift through all that data. I was talking with Scott (aka Web Professor) last week and he pointed me in the direction of Standard deviation.

Ok there is going to be a little math here, and it may look really scary and look like it’s going to make your head hurt. Trust me it’s OK we can get through this really. I hate reading those long boring overly complicated search engine patents just as much as you do, so I’ll keep things simple. The big formula is coming brace yourself …

Ok I promise I won’t do that again. The formula comes from Wikipedia, but since most spammers aren’t interested in this kind of stuff we’re going to assume it’s reasonably accurate. We’re going to work with a sample of 4 bids for illustrative purposes, however I’d suggest a I wider sample range once you actually get going.

Bid 1: $4.58
Bid 2: $4.53
Bid 3: $4.10
Bid 4: $4.05

We are going to get the mean of these numbers (add them together and divide them by 1 over amount of numbers)

(1/4) * ($4.58+$4.53+$4.10+$4.05)
(1/4) * (17.26)

we end up with 4.315

Explaning the next part in words is too complicated so I’ll just show you the formula that funny thing is a square root

√[ (1/4) * [(4.58-4.315)² + (4.53-4.315)² + (4.10-4.315)² + (4.05-4.315)²]]

Inside of each of the parentheses we subtracted the mean from each of the individual numbers and squared the result.

√[ (1/4) * [(0.265)² + (0.215)² + (-0.215)² + (-0.265)²]]

√[ (1/4) * [(0.070225) + (0.046225) + (0.046225) + (0.070225)]]

√[ (1/4) * [0.2329]]

√[ 0.058225 ]

The end result is 0.241 (rounded to three significant digits). OK great your head hurts and 37 people how now unsubscribed from my blog because they had high school math flashbacks, but what the heck to you do with that number? Well the lower that number is the worse the situation actually is, here an example of four other bid prices for an actual keyword:

Bid 1: $16.99
Bid 2: $16.98
Bid 3: $12.00
Bid 4: $10.00

You can see the bid gap is larger by looking at it, but remember were trying do this without having to look at the numbers. I’ll save you the trouble and tell you result is 3.065. So a higher standard deviation will clue you in to a possibly favorable condition. Now I’m not going to recommend you turn your scraper on full tilt and let it make your decisions, what I am saying is get a scraper/number-cruncher to help you identify the best possible candidates. Let the machine do the grunt work, save you time and energy, and you do the thinking and decide if it’s worth pursuing or not. It’s not rocket science, but with a little programming, a little math, and a little creativity you may find a new way to build your income.


Basic Intro to AdSense (for beginners)
Adsense Earns
Adsense Alternatives
Adsense Blogs Hubs and Helps