I know there were a few people who were using site targeting on this blog, and it wasn’t something I had a problem with. However on one of my other websites site targeting was being used so much that my earnings were spiraling downward. Since there is no way to turn of site targeting on a site by site basis (it’s a master account setting) I had to turn it of completely.

As an advertiser I never opt into the content network. Even though I can bid with lower prices I get crappy results. I did however use site targeting for some products where the content was spot on, and the quality of the site was above average overall. So I’ve got mixed feeling about this. I like being able to site target individual websites, but I can see how it can also work against the publisher. Being able to opt in/out on a site by site basis would be step in the right direction.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Removed Site Targeting

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Perhaps you’ve heard of the Google Adsense for video ads. Initially I was told this blog was approved, which seemed a little odd to me as the content really didn’t match. After some back and forth earlier this week they decided choose another of my websites instead. In a way I’m glad because the content of that website is much more inline with the content of the videos, however since it’s competitive space it’s not a URL I can share. However I’ll talk about it after the program is over.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Google Adsense for Video Beta Program

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Hey Google Adsesne how about giving people the ability to call for a “fresh visit” and content reassessment so the adsense ads will target better. Sometimes we make typos or use phrase that call for the wrong ads to be delivered. Sure I can test it by throwing an irrelevant parameter on the URL but actual visitors to the site will get the old ads until you decide to revisit the page.

You could make it really easy and scaleable by making it a parameter like example.com/?recrawl=true, you could limit abuse by limiting it to one url per domain per day.

Of course you could really improve relevancy by allowing publishers to suggest kewords/phrases and comparing them to what you think the page is about. For example if you think the page is about oranges and the publisher tells you its about orange juice determine those phrases are related enough to go with the publishers suggestion. If you think the page is about oranges and the publisher thinks it’s about digital cameras determine those terms are too dissimilar and go with your interpretation.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Suggestions for Adsense

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Eric Giguère of Make Easy Money With Google Adsense published an Adsense Patent Review and sent me a copy to review. Now I’m not a big fan of overly technical documents or patents but they are something we have to deal with in this industry, so you’ve either got to learn to read them and slog through or wait for someone else to do the dirty work for you. This one is little different than most patent reviews, mainly because it’s not free, it costs $14.95 to download.

The document starts off with a high level overview and some expalantions. It then dives right in to the analysis. First you’ll read the actual text from the patent, then you’ll get the acomanying analysis immedeatly after (screen shot below)

The different blocks of text and typestyles make the document much easier to work with and help you establish the proper context for each part and what is being said. Once you start getting into the analysis there’s quality data in there. There are links within the analyis to important search and IR papers, as well. Now I didn’t read the original patent before seeing this document, but I picked up a few nuggets of information about where AdSense miht be headed from reading it.

So who is the customer for this report and who will benefit the most from buying it? This document still contains some complex terms, concepts and ideas, so it’s not a geared for the sterotypical CEO or other C level employee. It’s also not for the AdSesne newbie, if you aren’t making the $100 minimum payout every month or are still cuttting your teeth with Adsense, again this is not for you, you’ve got a lot of other things to learn first. However if you are making a “significant amount of money” or AdSense makes up a “significant part” of your monthly income, this should be something you should look into purchasing (I leave it up to the reader to define significant as it’s a relative term and point). I’ve slogged through patent documents myself and I know it’s not a lot of fun. This patent is freely available so you could go and do it yourself. The question is how much time will you spend going through and trying to understand and decipher it, and is that amount of time worth more than $15 to you?.

Get more infomation on Understanding the AdSense Patent

Disclaimer I did receive access to a free Understanding the AdSense Patent valued at $14.95 prior to making this post. The free document was not contingent upon a positive review or endorsement. No other compensation, occurred to influence this blog posting. For more information please see my advertising policy

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Understanding Adsense Patent Review

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I know comment spam is not only a headache and time sucking machine, but I’m also firmly of the opinion that comments and discussions can often add value to an original post.  Since I have no qualms about shameless self promotion I’ll point you in the direction of a comment I made today over on the BusinessWeek Blog Is advertising killing search?

Technorati Tags: business.week advertising search adsense

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Adding Value in Comments

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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.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Adsense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing

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In part I AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets we went over the basics of how AdSense arbitrage works. In this part we’re going to roll up our sleeves and look at some actual keywords and see if we can find some areas where we might like to try some arbitrage.

While high paying keyword lists may be somewhat useful it’s important to understand how those lists are generated and some of their limitations (see Contextual Advertising with AdSense | High-Paying Keywords, Part 2 (series) for a more in depth discussion). I like to start with the Overture bid tool, and if things look OK then go into Google Adwords tool. It’s been my experience that with the AdWords keyword tool there is quite often a substantial difference between what they estimate I will pay and what I actually end up paying for a keyword. Now this could have something to do with the “quality score” variable Google doesn’t share with you, or any number of other factors, but I don’t put too much faith in the Google estimated prices I use them more as a reality check for what I see from Overture. Let’s look at the keyword [mortgage]

/>
Click to Enlarge

Now depending on how close the time you are viewing this page to the time it was written there may be some variation in prices. At the time of writing the top 10 bids were ($4.58, $4.53, $4.10, $4.05, $4.05, $4.05, $4.04, $4.02, $4.01, $4.00) so there’s not a big bid gap there at all. Using Google we see the prices are estimated at $3.67 per click (I think you’d actually end up paying closer to the Overture price when all is said and done)

/>
Click to Enlarge

To get your pricing down to $2.00 or less you are going be bidder #31. According to the Overture keyword tool there are over 1 million searches for the term [mortgage] per month. So you may actually get some click throughs at spot #31 but I don’t think you are going to get too many, so you may make money just very little very slowly. What we really need is a way to get higher priced keywords. Lets look at prices for [new york mortgage]:

/>
Click to Enlarge

OK these prices are much better ($7.95, $7.91, $6.25 etc), however there still isn’t a bid gap. What we really need is a way to get the [new york mortgage] ads to appear and pay the [mortgage] prices and still be contextually relevant enough that the advertisements will get clicked on. Can you think of a way? Remember in part I that I said knowing how the system works can be to your advantage? Here’s one solution, select the word mortgage in your advertising, but only target customers from New York. Write your ad so it’s more appealing for people in New York, then on your landing page write about mortgages for New York. It doesn’t always work but you can use section targeting to help ( see Section Targeting for AdSense allows you to ignore on-page content – JenSense.com for more information).

While I’m sure some of you feel I “tricked” the system I disagree, I just used the way the system worked to my advantage. I also don’t feel the advertiser buying [new york mortgage] got the wrong customer, so nobody got “cheated”. This is just one way to use the system to make a profit, there are many more if you’re willing to spend some time and be a little creative. What you want to do take advantage of inefficiencies that exist, they could be gaps that exist in the market or just using poor searching habits to your advantage. The takeaway here is try to find a way to better pre-qualify the customer for the advertiser, that way you’ve added value somewhere along the way.

Now you can see how this process can be fairly time consuming, in part III AdSense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing we’ll look at ways to search and identify keywords programatically.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection

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If you frequent any of the AdSense forums chances are you’ve come across the phrase ‘AdSense Arbitrage‘, while it’s been around for a while a lot of people don’t understand what it is, or how it works. While I’m not a big player in the arbitrage model I’ve been doing it profitably for a few months, so I can explain how I do it and share a few tips I’ve picked up. In part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection I’ll take you through some real keyword options, and in part III AdSense Arbitrage: Automation and Button Pushing I’ll go over some ideas for automating the process I learned recently.

To start let’s take a high level view of what AdSense arbitrage is and how it works. The basic principle is to pay for a low price for keyword in an advertising program like AdWords, Overture Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter and direct users to a page with AdSense or another contextual advertising program on it that has higher payout. You can either bid low on the same term, looking for keywords with a large bid gap (more on that later) or you can bid on very specific keywords with little competiton and drive them to page with ads for a more general and competitive term.

Sounds pretty simple you bid $1 for a keyword, direct the traffic to a landing page with ads that pay $2 sit back and watch the profits roll in right? Well there’s a little more to it than that, it’s not rocket science but the more familiar you are with how both Adwords and AdSense works the more likely you are to succeed. Up until fairly recently most publishers were getting a 60% cut of the adwords price, $0.03 on a $0.05 bid. However now that AdSense has factored in smart pricing it’s a little more complicated. Here’s a decent explanation of smart pricing from Jensense (One poorly converting site can “smart price” an entire AdSense account – JenSense.com)

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results – such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups – we reduce the price you pay for that click.

The role smart pricing plays in your account varies from one account to the next and is an unknow variable. To keep the math here simple I’m not going to include it, but it is something you should factor into your computations. To keep things simple lets assume you are bidding $1.00 for a keyword. Again to keep things simple lets assume the advertiser is paying $2.00 a keyword, so you’ll get $1.20 a click ($2.00 * 0.6). So you pay $1.00 a click but get $1.20 a click so you make $0.20 every click, not a lot but you’re not really doing any work after you get it running so you’ll make money slowly. The problem is you aren’t going to get a 100% click through rate on your AdSense ads. Lets run some numbers using 100 users coming to your page

So what did our little experiment tell us, unless we have a 90% CTR we are going to lose money. While I’m not going to say you can’t achieve a 90% ctr, I am going to say if you did it would be pretty phenomenal. Let’s take a much more realistic CTR of say 30%. If you were able to get the cost down so you were paying $0.25 per click you would be in much better shape

100 leads @ $0.25 = $25
30 clicks at $1.2 = $36
$11 profit

$11 Profit per day isn’t a lot, in fact it’s probably going to cover lunch at the diner and not much else. So you’re going to have to find something with a lot of volume per day or look for a wider bid gap. A bid gap is what occurs when there is a large gap in bid prices for a particular keyword for example:

Bidder 1 – $10.00
Bidder 2 – $9.75
Bidder 3 – $7.00
Bidder 4 – $3.00
Bidder 5 – $1.25

There $4.00 difference between bidder 3 and 4 is a sizeable bid gap, and these are the opportunities you are looking for when you play the arbitrage game. Adwords isn’t much help in revealing bid in fact the best you can get is a kinda close guestimate, using the Overture Bid tool you can get much more accurate bid prices. Let’s assume you are going to bid 1 penny more than bidder number 5 so it will cost you $1.26 for each bid. The top bid is $10.00 so you will get $6.00 per click, so lets run some number again

100 leads @ $1.26 = $126
30 clicks @ $6.00 = $180
$54 dollars profit

Ok $54 dollars is more like it, now you can take your significant other out to dinner. But let’s slow down let’s say you are running a popular sized adsense block, good old 300 x 250. Well that size block displays up to 4 ads. If the user clicks on advertisement #3 forget going out to eat it’s left over mac and cheese for you. If they click on advertisement #4 you’ve lost money, so you better call up mom and see if you can come over for dinner.

The point to here is it may not always be in your best interest to display as many ads as possible, in many cases you can actually make more money by showing less ads, imagine that! You may even want to use single ads like 125 x 125, 180 x 180, 234 x 60 or the double 468 x 60, and 120 x 240. In addition you want to make sure you have the ads in prominant clickable spots (see Maximizing Profits With Website Design and Layout: Part II :). You may also find you have a lot more success using a landing page with no external navigation. By eliminating options the only choices are clicking the advertisements or using the back button. This means your content is going to have to “add value” along the way just be careful how you add value. Lastly if you use multiple ad blocks give each of them their own channel. If one block consistantly gets a higher CTR, have it appear first in the code so it gets the highest priced ad. Position it where ever you want using CSS. Also remember many publishers bid lower prices for contextual ads than search ads, so this could affect your ability to turn a profit, just again another factor to be aware of.

There are some other points to remember as well like cash management. Let’s say you spend $1000 on Adwords, and get $2000 from AdSense, $1000 profit so what’s the problem? You won’t be getting your AdSense check until the end of the month, and chances are your credit card bill will come before your AdSense check arrives, so make sure you can cover the expense. Letting your bill run up and giving the credit card company 18%-22% of your profit just isn’t cool. If you can’t float the money find a 0% interest credit card.

Getting your first campaign up, running and making a profit is definitely the hardest part. You probably are going to have to micromanage it for a week or two. You may even ask yourself is this worth the time? Well remember you’re just on the learning curve, once you’ve learned how to do it for one the second one is easier, the third even easier and by the fourth one hopefully you’ve found your groove. AdSense arbitrage isn’t rocket science but you do have to be on the ball, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Next Part II AdSense Arbitrage: Keyword Selection

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks and Secrets

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Eric Giguere is talking about the change from 90 days to 180 days for AdSense referrals (see AdSense Deferrals)

Well, maybe it helps. Call me cynical, but for me this is just a deferral of non-income.

You know what he’s right. If i had a say over at the Googleplex (clearly something that’s not going to happen anytime soon), I’d give the people signing up a way to get in touch with the people they signed up through. This would allow that person to act as a mentor and help the other person reach their goal. The new AdSense publisher wins because they make money, the referring person wins because they get a referral bonus, and Google wins because they are making more money via AdSense. Concerned about privacy, make it an opt in for the referrer and the referee. Just my two drachmas.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Fix AdSense Referrals

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So yesterday one of my websites was targeted by a clickbot. They executed the exact same search 400 times from the exact same search engine, visited a few pages on the websites and then clicked on an Adsense ad. Now I’m not sure if it was a script kiddie playing a prank or a malicious attempt to get my AdSense pulled for fraudulent clicks, but either there were no committee’s to select or meeting to be held I had to swoop into action.

First I fired off a quick note to Adsense to make them aware of what was happening with as much information as I had at the time. I haven’t heard back from them yet but will add to this post if I do and it’s relevant. After that I identified the search and caused all incoming requests from that particular engine and phrase to “die”. Ok now that the hemorrhaging had stopped it was time to figure out what was going on. After reviewing the logs the query and search engine were identical but the IP’s were different about 50 different ones with no common range of numbers. After doing some investigating I found they were all coming from one ISP. So I did a little searching and came up with this bit of PHP to give me the ISP info:

$ip = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
$host = gethostbyaddr($ip);


Now on almost all of my website I have a variable flag that allows me to turn the affiliate ads, ad sense, yahoo publisher network, chitika, and or banner advertising by changing only one variable in a common include file. I will admit I contemplated just turning AdSense off until I had solved the problem but didn’t want to give the fraudster the satisfaction of victory, but I didn’t want to lose my webmaster welfare check either. I will also admit I wanted to trap for the condition, and send the person over to transvestiteporn.com (NSFW you have been warned) or some other website with 9 bazillion pop-ups, but I remembered the movie “White Men Can’t Jump” and the bit of wisdom Rosie Perez had to share, “Sometimes when you win you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win”. Anyone who’s married can tell you there is truth in that statement. So I realized the joy I got from sending them away would probably make them come back and attack more heavily. Instead I thought about how to make that person think they “won”. I came to the conclusion they wanted my Adsense down, and since I was able to trap for the condition I could turn off all the ads just as easily as sending them away. So when that person checks the script they will see the AdSense turned off and think they won, when they really lost.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Clickbots and the Wisdom of Rosie Perez

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