Sootle Weblog

People are always comparing their old Google Adsense numbers with new ones. If the CPM is down, they’re likely to complain. But you have to take a few factors into account before you automatically assume you’re a victim of a conspiracy theory. Adsense is only as good as the traffic you drive to your website, and if you traffic profile changes, so will the CPM.

Keyword values have a tendency to erode

Advertisers are always looking for ways to pay less for keyword ads, and webmasters who publish the ads always want more. This puts the two parties at odds, in a way. When you get used to a certain payment for your ads, you get a little upset when you see the CPM erode. Maybe you even blame Google, thinking it would help to explain their soaring stock price. But before you waste too much time muddling around in negativity, consider the idea that it might just be that the advertising mix that used to exist is gone, or your traffic has gravitated towards lower paying keywords.

I add content all the time, so it’s possible I’m driving lower paying traffic to my websites. It’s a chance I’m willing to take in order to enjoy the benefits of higher traffic. To me, higher traffic is higher earnings, even if you have a downward effect on CPM. Plus, gaining more traffic through adding content is a factor I can control, unlike so many others. So I add content, and I tend to see a slight downward trend over time as it relates to CPM, but not total earnings. I can live with that.

In the end, the best way to avert a downward CPM spiral is to keep on building some higher value CPM keyword pages along with your news-driven and lower paying keywords. If you add enough of them, you can stem the bleeding as it relates to your CPM.

The fact that Google allows trademarked keywords to be sold to entities other than the trademark holder has long been a source of contention for certain companies. Now a judge has ruled that a lawsuit by American Airlines over this issue can proceed. The search company had hoped that the lawsuit would be overturned.

“We are pleased by the judge’s order denying Google’s motion to dismiss our claims,” said American spokesman Tim Wagner. “American would not have brought its lawsuit against Google if we did not believe in the merits of our claims, and the court’s order today ensures that we will have an opportunity to develop and pursue those claims.”
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Google spokesman Jon Murchinson said the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was disappointed in the judge’s ruling but said Google still believes the lawsuit has no merit.

“Google’s trademark policy strikes a proper balance between trademark owners’ interests and consumer choice and has been validated by prior court decisions,” Murchinson said.

Two years ago, Google won a similar case filed by insurer Geico, but other companies have continued to file lawsuits against the Internet company over its use of trademark terms in paid searches.

This case is very likely to set a precedent for keyword cases.

Here’s a feature that should be very useful to many. In the very near future you’ll be able to change your Google Adsense code from within your account, rather than having to make changes on your website.

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you’d like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account — you’ll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300×250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.

For someone who manages multiple websites, this feature could come in very handy. I’m always a fan of being able to change many websites from one location. When the feature is available, you’ll notice it in your Adsense account.

I’ve been messing around with Google Adsense since the beginning of the program. In that time I’ve found that some things work better than ever. In fact, I’ve come up with some principles that almost always seem to do very well. Let’s take a look at what Adsense implementations really work.

Continue reading “Adsense Implementations That Work” »

Let me rephrase this sentence as accurately as I can: the Google Adsense interface is running slower than molasses in January. And it has been for at least several weeks. In a sense, it’s no big deal when you’re just checking stats, but when you’re actually working on making changes, and the like, the incredible slowness is sort of annoying.

Usually Google is plenty fast about fixing errors and/or making upgrades. But this time there doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement. To even log in takes many, many minutes. I’m sure they’ll sort this issue out. There’s no big advantage to them offering slow logins or performance. In fact, I have to admit the fact they’re so reliable is the reason a slow down seems so noticeable.

The other option is that I’m the only one seeing this slowdown, but I don’t think that’s the case. In any event, I’ll put the question to you: is Google Adsense running very slow for you also?

So far I am not rich from running Google Referrals 2.0. Of course I didn’t devote any top grade real estate to the program, so I can’t complain too much. I did finally get one conversion after running the ads for about a week, but it wasn’t a big earner. I have noticed a very low CTR overall, and I’ve heard others saying pretty much the same thing. So I’ll keep experimenting until I can come up with something that works, or I’ll just have to ditch the whole effort.

Continue reading “Experience With Google Referrals 2.0” »

You can accuse Google of a lot of things, but “slacking” isn’t one of them. Their Adsense program has expanded rapidly in the last six months, and it’s even grown leaps and bounds in the last few weeks. We’re talking more offerings than any of us can even have imagined in the past. If you’ve used Google Adsense in the last few years, you have to be impressed with how greatly Google has improved the system.

Continue reading “Google Expands Advertising Offerings Relentlessly” »

Google is experimenting with even more ad types. The newest announcement involves a whole new type of interactive ads called Google Gadget Ads. Google has already been testing the ads, and the company and observers are quite impressed with the technical capacity of the ads, even going so far as to call them a breakthrough.

Gadget Ads is very far reaching,” said Andrew Frank, an online advertising analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc. “This is the platform that Google is going to build all their cross-media advertising services upon,” he said.

The new advertising service is designed for broad adoption across Google sites, including iGoogle personalized home pages that tens of millions of consumers use for searching and to be notified of updated information on the Web at large. The new format works across Google’s network of hundreds of thousands of affiliated sites and can be embedded in YouTube videos.

The ads use Flash and AJAX and represent a major step forward because they offer interactivity in a sense that is not currently being delivered.

Google has expanded their Referrals program to offer many different products and services. The program is a Cost Per Action setup with some extremely high payouts. The big difference between Referrals and regular Google Adsense ads is that you don’t just get paid for clicks. Instead, the consumer has to take some action, such as purchasing, signing up, or just giving up information in order for you to get your money. But when they do, you are in for some decent revenues.

Continue reading “Google Referrals 2.0” »

One of the big advantages of the Google Adsense is the nearly live time traffic stats that you get. Because of the almost instantaneous nature of the stats, and the presence of tracking channels, you can “play” with your Adsense implementation until you get something nearing perfection. This is one way that Google has managed to stay ahead of the competition, many of whom are delayed by 24 or more hours. For this reason, you should never be afraid to try different tweaks on your implementation. If you’re wrong, switch back. If you’re right, congrats, you’re earning even more money.

Continue reading “Google Adsense – There’s No Harm In Tweaking” »