AdSense versus Yahoo Publisher Network

August 24, 2006

The Yahoo Publisher Network came storming out of their corner, fists swinging with promises to rival AdSense, but so far it hasn't managed to land any major blows. YPN is still in Beta, and still only supports USA traffic–very light weight for the contextual network backed by the giant Yahoo.

Even so, there are a lot of publishers in the beta network (myself included), and I've seen the question posed many times: Who is better, AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network?

I know this may seem like a dodge, but the answer is… it depends.

It has been my experience, and that of many other publishers from what I read on the forums, that YPN pays much more per click, as a rule. But don't get too excited just yet. Their targetting is much worse, so the click through rate is generally far less than with AdSense. Yes they usually pay more per click (sometimes 5 times more), but with a 0.5% CTR that doesn't really pay the bills.

There have been reports of a few webmasters who are just thrilled with YPN, since they happen to have sites on the topics that YPN actually has good ad inventory for. Unfortunately for them, as soon as YPN goes out of beta and everyone can be a publisher, their EPC is only going to go down. Right now it's a seller's market, but when everybody can publisher, the market will swing more in favor of the buyers, the advertisers.

So the best thing I can recommend is to give YPN a try if you can get into the beta network, and test out your pages to see which ones work better with YPN–if your time isn't more valuable than any slight gains you might get from a few pages.

I'm afraid for now AdSense remains the heavyweight champion, and YPN is still in the lockerroom trying to figure out how to ties its shoes.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under AdSense, Blog | 16 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog.

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

Buffering Your AdSense Income With an Email List

August 22, 2006

Do you remember the early personal CD players that would skip if you stepped too hard, or went downstairs, or hit a bump in the road, or just because they seemed to feel that what you wanted at that precise moment was to hear a skipping CD?

The later models didn't skip nearly as much (if at all), because of buffering. Those models would read a few seconds of music ahead of time and save it, and then play the music from memory instead of directly off the CD.

That way, if the CD skipped, it still had 15 or 20 seconds of music to play from memory before needing to read off of the CD again. This gave the CD time to get back into alignment. When it realigned, the CD player filled the buffer back up, and voila, there was no break in the music because of the skip.

No, this is not a history lesson in personal electronics. This is about buffering. If your income is based heavily on AdSense revenue, you need to be creating income buffers. Why?

AdSense has dramatically changed over the past couple of years, and the search engines that feed AdSense income have changed dramatically as well. Many people who were earning high 5 figure monthly incomes from AdSense have dropped back down to the low 4's. If they didn't have any buffers in place they were probably in trouble.

Smart Pricing can make sudden and drastic changes to your Earnings Per Click (EPC) as well, slashing your income in half, or worse. If you're one of the people who just use AdSense as extra money or to pay for your web site's costs, it's not a problem. Buf if you rely on your AdSense income, you need buffers.

The best buffer, in my opinion, is a list of names and email addresses of people who are interested in your web site's content. Even if your site stopped receiving any traffic from search engines, you could email your list and earn enough to keep your business going strong while you worked on other forms of new traffic.

It's common for sites that offer products to build a list, but content site owners often seem to think that it's not necessary for them. That somehow, because they are a content site, people don't need to be reminded of the great new article that was just posted or the latest discussion forum topics that might interest their past visitors. It's like they're thinking, "those visitors will come back because we have great content."

Wrong!

Some people will come back, yes, but most of us are very busy people and unless reminded we will quickly forget about your web site. Why do you think eBay and Amazon still advertise all over the place? Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't already know who they are and what they do? Not many.

But even eBay and Amazon need to remind people that they're out there. If I'm thinking that I need to buy a used riding mower for my lawn and I happen to catch an eBay commercial on my way home on the train, I might just go to eBay and see what they've got.

Or if I'm listening to an interview on the news about an author and his latest best seller, and Amazon has a commercial spot in between the news casts, I might go to Amazon to buy the book.

You have got to remind people that you are there. Have an opt-in box on every page of every web site you own. Let people give you their name and email address, and when you post a new article, let them know about it.

Or maybe once a week send out a list of the most active threads on your discussion forum. I did that with great success with one of the forums I ran. Traffic spiked every time I sent out that email. And more traffic means more AdSense clicks, which means more money for you.

Plus, the more people are reminded of your site, and the more they go back, the more it's on their mind. If it's on their mind they'll tell other people about it, which results in more traffic to your site.

Also, with a big list of people interested in your web site's topic, if you find a great product that matches the topic you can send a product offer out to your list. They'll be glad to know about the product, some will buy, and you'll earn more than just AdSense income from them. Limit the product offers or just work them into your other emails to keep your unsubscribe rates low and not annoy your list.

Your goal is to convert your visitors into users and customers, and to reach a "critical mass" of users and customers that would keep your business flowing even if your site dropped out of the search engines completely.

Like those new CD players, when your AdSense business "skips", you need a buffer. And the best business buffer is a strong list of your users and customers.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under AdSense, Blog | 8 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

Is Smart Pricing killing your AdSense earnings?

August 21, 2006

When Google first started, you basically just earned a certain percentage of whatever the AdWords advertiser was paying per click.

It was pretty simple. If the advertiser paid $1.00 per click and if you as a publisher were earnings 50% of that, you made $0.50. Easy.

Google started to realize, though, that all clicks were not created equal. Clicks from some sites were more valuable than others, at least that's what they figured.

So they came up with an alogorithm, a mathmatical equation for determining how valuable your AdSense account, sites and pages are, and use that equation to determine what percentage
you get per click.

Speculation Galore

Smart Pricing has triggered a HUGE amount of speculation on the part of AdSense publishers. Google is notorious for having very little to say about the way its algorithms work. Their thinking is that the less people know about it, the less chance they are going to be able to cheat the system.

This lack of communication has caused all kinds of speculation about how Smart Pricing works, what it looks for, etc. Nobody knows exactly how it works, but I've got hundreds of
websites, and track everything. I've learned a few things about what Smart Pricing seems to like and what it seems to not like.

What We Know For Sure

The one piece of information that Google has given out about Smart Pricing is that it takes into account how well the visitors from your site who click on the ads convert into customers for the advertiser.

In a perfect system this would be all of the information that Google used. If your clicks converted well, you would be well paid. If they converted badly, you would be paid less per click.

However, AdWords advertisers are not required to reveal their conversion data to Google. Google gives them that ability, but a lot of advertisers do not use it, so Google has to try and "guess" at whether or not your clicks are converting for those advertisers.

What Smart Pricing Seems to Like

Smart pricing definitely loves themed websites. If your websites is devoted to Widgets, and only Widgets, Smart Pricing tends to reward your clicks better. The more narrow your targetting, the better.

However, Smart Pricing does not seem to penalize sites that have a group of related topics. So, for example, if your site is themed around Widgets but has content related to Red Widgets, Blue Widgets, Green Widgets, Building Widgets and Used Widgets, Smart Pricing seems to favor that.

If you have themed topics, it's appears to be best to seperate them into subdomains or subdirectories. So don't put your articles on Red and Green widgets where they can be found like so:

http://www.mywidgets.com/redwidgets.html
http://www.mywidgets.com/greenwidgets.html

Put them like this:

http://www.mywidgets.com/redwidgets/
http://www.mywidgets.com/greenwidgets/

Or better still:

http://redwidgets.mywidgets.com/
http://greenwidgets.mywidgets.com/

In line with theming, having a domain name with your keywords in it also appears to be favored by Smart Pricing. So the "mywidgets.com" example used above is a good one. Having a domain like "www.someunrelatedsite.com" seems to draw penalties from Smart Pricing.

So make your domain name match your theme, and split up your content into related topics in different subdirectories or subdomains.

What Smart Pricing Seems To Hate

The opposite of what Smart Pricing likes, it hates. Having too many topics on the same site really seems to draw penalties.

Having a domain name that has nothing to do with the topic of your site seems to draw penalties.

And, as discussed before, if your site does not convert well, you'll get hit with Smart Pricing penalties. You can avoid a bad conversion rate by only focusing on quality traffic to
your site.

Get traffic from Search Engines and links from sites about topics related to yours. Avoid cheap traffic brokers like the plague! They send lousy traffic (most of which is fake "bot-generated" traffic anyway and won't earn you a dime).

You might be tempted to try it out, but beware: Smart Pricing appears to calculate your "value" once a week or so. That means that if you goof, for the next week you'll get lousy paying clicks. It's best to get it right from the get-go and avoid those mistakes.

Is Smart Pricing Fair To Publishers?

That's an interesting question that I've read debated a lot. Some say that it shouldn't be up to the publisher to convert the traffic, it should be up to the vendor. And if the vendor's site converts badly in general, the publisher will get penalized. Whether that's true or not I don't know–only Google knows.

Other's say Smart Pricing was needed to help advertisers maintain a good ROI (return on investment). They say that "bad" traffic that doesn't convert well should not cost as
much as "good" traffic that does.

Regardless of what anybody thinks about it, or whether it works or not, Google has implemented Smart Pricing. So you've got to know how to work with it to maximize your earnings.

Following the advice outlined above from the start will help you to keep your click values high.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under AdSense, Blog | 13 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!