The AdSense Revenue Tricks That Sites Don’t Tell You About. – With Marc Phillips
on Apr 23, 2009 - 11:28 AM PSTThe full program
This is an audio program. Listen and/or download here.
A few lessons from this program
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About this program:
Most companies lie to you about how they make their money. They give you a noble-sounding answer, which usually involves cliches like “We just make good content.” But they keep the real answers to themselves.
In my interview with Marc Phillips, we talked about some of the real answers that companies don’t talk about. The focus was on AdSense–Google’s program for paying web sites to run text links–but we also talked about other ad types.
About Marc Phillips:
Marc is the publisher of AdSense Publishers Directory, which lists over 350,000 websites within the AdSense Content Network. He’s also the director of ADSPACE, the contextual advertising conference. And he’s the CEO & Founder of SearchForecast which provides website publishing software, diagnostic tools and solutions for lead generation via search engines.
An edited excerpt:
HealthCastle.com is really an AdSense rock start. If you check their web site and click through to different page, you’ll see what they’ve done is use the font and the color and the style guide and they customized their ads. It’s really about integrating the ads into the content.
Whether an ad is below the fold, above the fold, to the left, to the right, in the middle, or on the side, there are opportunities not to choose the Google default ad format. It’s about customizing your ad colors to the colors of your site.
The more indistinguishable you can make the content from the advertisement, the more likely people will feel that the ad is part of the content.
The full program includes:
- Discussion of ad targeting, placement and design.
- “Mouse trapping” and other tricks sites use.
- Why ugly sites can out earn beautiful sites.
Give your feedback:
What do you think of techniques like this? Have you used them on your site?
View Comments to “The AdSense Revenue Tricks That Sites Don’t Tell You About. – With Marc Phillips”
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April 23rd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I would say that PlentyofFish.com is an ugly site that does well with Adsense.
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
It's a nice tease, Andrew. I'm definitely interested in hearing more.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
I've gotten to look at a few site's revenues recently. And I noticed that
these ugly, ugly sites have incredible sales numbers.
This interview helped me understand a little bit of why that's true.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Thanks Chuck!
Let me know if the full program lives up to the expectations I set. I don't
want to oversell.
April 24th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I have followed the adive from Google about making ads match the style of the site rather than contrast or complement the site's colors. Just the other day I decided to make the border of a 160×600 ad have an accent color to bring it more attention. It had the opposite effect. CTR and revenue dropped.
I like the way ads look when they match the style of my site, but I do not like the idea that this may be tricking users into clicking on an ad.
April 24th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Looking at that health site, they are using a mix of Adsense and Adsonar ads. Isn't that against googles terms of service since the ads look similar?
April 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
It's discouraging if it is actually true that crappy sites with terrible content monetize better than sites passionate people who are proud of their work. Very interesting discussion though.
April 24th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Maybe there's something those crappy sites are doing that smart sites can
duplicate.
Thanks for the comment.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Hi dude. whatever you do, don't:
a) look at google trends for upcoming adsense niche ideas
b) check competition in google (under 5,000 for “keyword here” is probably rule-of-thumb crackable)
c) check keyword pricing on spyfu website.
d) pay a getafreelancer to write you 15 articles for $100
e) pay another getafreelancer to linkbuild for £$50
f) wack the content into WordPress
g) add sitemaps, etc
h) then add adsense..
baaad idea! don't do it…
April 27th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
See? Already you're one of my favorite commenters.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Did you ever get any examples from Marc of some crappy but successful sites that have ad links that are better than the content? I'd like to see what they are doing.
I know I can find them myself, but I would be interested to know what his idea of these are.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Thanks for the comment.
I'll introduce you to Marc by email so we can ask him directly.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
hi
What would be your suggestion ? what steps should newbies like me follow to generate reasonable ad revenue ?
May 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
From what I see, you may not have enough traffic yet to see a real impact
from revenue.
But I don't have your stats, so I can't say for sure. Email me if you want
to talk in greater detail.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:23 am
I would like to hear more on this topic. It was very interesting, but also bothersome that no basic step by step could be reached. I am not asking for a step by step process to make a million bucks. Just one that could serve as a point of reference.
May 17th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I'm going to see if I can find someone who will take us through this process
step-by-step.
I'll have to hunt through message boards to find them, but I'm sure those
people are out there.
June 15th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I go back and forth with advertising. Especially when it comes to the CPC model. By disguising the look of Adsense advertisements, in many ways, it's openly deceiving your users. Though it's important for a company to serve ads if that's their only stream of revenue, I have to imagine that there's a better way to do it than though deception. And essentially, this is what we're talking about here: making an advertisement seem like it's a part of your site's content, so that a user trusts that it's a reliable source — *even if it's not*.
I do serve ads on my own blog (http://www.techshots.net), but I don't leave them inline with my posts. Honestly, I don't generate the pageviews to drive significant revenue, but that's not the goal of my blog. Just wanted to give my 2 cents :-)
June 15th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Making ads look like content is important to talk about on Mixergy because
it's being done so much. I want you see what's out there. Then you can
decide what makes the most sense for your company.
Thanks for the comment Jaremy.
June 16th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Another great interview Andrew!
Loved the talk about “Mousetrapping”… a quality banner and a low price pulling people to a crappy site just to get them to click awayit's low, it's dirty, but there's no denying it's clever. I presume that mousetrapping and blending the ad into the content maximise short term revenue in a one-shot environment, rather than when you're trying to develop a community with repeat traffic. You mentioned above that “ugly sites have incredible sales numbers”… how did you find that out?
What were the names of the other competitive intelligence websites Marc mentioned? Recession Marketing Monkey commented on spyfu (which is really interesting), but I beileve Marc also mentioned a “pivotal” and a “trellion”?
July 27th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Passion doesn't necessarily translate into best practices. This is what I see as the difference between a real entrepreneur and just some schmoe with a dream. We're on here to learn from pros that know their stuff about certain areas that we could learn from to follow our passion in a way that can make it more likely that we can profit from it.
If crappy sites make more money by using certain techniques, learn from them and beat them by making good content AND using their tricks to make money doing it. Also, they're goal is the same, and if you're going to complain that you're not making as much money, when you're not willing to (for example) trick your visitors by making ads look like a part of the site, then you need to decide which it is you care about more.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Passion doesn't necessarily translate into best practices. This is what I see as the difference between a real entrepreneur and just some schmoe with a dream. We're on here to learn from pros that know their stuff about certain areas that we could learn from to follow our passion in a way that can make it more likely that we can profit from it.
If crappy sites make more money by using certain techniques, learn from them and beat them by making good content AND using their tricks to make money doing it. Also, they're goal is the same, and if you're going to complain that you're not making as much money, when you're not willing to (for example) trick your visitors by making ads look like a part of the site, then you need to decide which it is you care about more.