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Adwords
& Adsense: A Beginners Guide
First a brief glossary of terms:
Adwords: The program advertisers use to make their adverts.
Adsense: The program Website owners use to display the adverts
CTR: Click Through Rate (the number of page impressions the number of
clicks on a advert)
The most effective methods of advertising on
the internet are Google's
Adwords program and Overture which is now officially called Yahoo
Search Marketing but still universally known as Overture. This method
of advertising is called Pay per Click or PPC.
The concept is
incredibly simple; Google and Yahoo provide listings on a Per bid
basis. You bid a certain amount of money for your specific keywords
when someone types in a keyword and you have the highest bid then your
advert shows up. On Google the adverts show up in the Adwords column on
the right hand side of the page whilst Yahoo shows them as sponsored
links at the top of the page.
If someone then clicks on your advert,
they arrive at your web site and you are charged the amount you bid.
So, for example if you bid $.10 per click on 'widgets', and that's the
highest bid, you'll show up at the top if It's the second highest bid
you'll show up second etc. If 100 people click on your advert, then the
search engine or PPC service will charge you $10.00.
Using Adwords to your Advantage
So now that you know how Adwords work you
can use this to your
advantage when building websites. If you build a site about a specific
subject you can then use specific keywords to attract adverts.
The best way to ascertain which keywords
Adwords & Adsense: A Beginners Guide
to use are by signing up for an Adwords
account you will then have access to Google’s Adwords tools
which will show you which keywords are highest paying for a particular
subject. In addition it will suggest alternative keywords.At this point
it is probably wise to point out it is against Google’s Terms
of Service to specifically create a page just to target Adsense,
Obviously if the site has lots of unique content then you are entitles
to tweak the keywords to maximize your revenue.
Making Adsense pay
There is very little point adding Adsense to
a page with no traffic. It is best
to build your site and spend a couple of months driving traffic to the
site, once you have a regular amount of people being driven to your
site by the search engines then it is time to add Adsense.
It is not just a case of putting Adsense on
your site and waiting for the
money to roll in. You should place the adverts carefully to maximize
exposure whilst not impacting on the browsing experience of your
viewers.
Leave the Ads in position for a week or 2
and monitor the
performance, also known as CTR. The change the position of the ads and
the color and monitor this for any improvements. Publishers have been
known to improve their CTR by up to 4 times by employing small changes.
So time spent tweaking Adsense is time well
spent.
Mark Thompson ran an IT consultancy In
London for many years. He has now taken early retirement and spends his
time in spain working on a number on online projects including The
Income Site
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