Have you ever wondered how much of the Adsense revenue you actually receive?

According to conference calls for FM Publishing’s network publishers (boingboing, metafilter, etc), obtained by Valleywag, the magic number if 43%. The FM Publising business guys claim that Google takes a 15% ad serving fee off the top, and then gives the publisher 51% of the remaining 85% of total revenue. To get the full details, you can listen to the call.

Google is making a huge margin from Adsense. I can only hope that Yahoo and Microsoft will gain some momentum with their contextual ad efforts and help push a greater share of revenue to publishers.

The new Adsense terms of service prohibits term paper related sites from using Google Adsense. This creates an inherent conflict between the the Adsense and AdWords policy.

A few months ago, I found out the hard way that Google was going to ban term paper related websites. In the Adsense terms and conditions released in the beginning of January, Google made this stance official by adding “Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays ” to the “site may not include” policy.

On the January 30th episode of ShoeMoney’s Net Income, Brian Axe of Google explained the change by saying:

This is consistent with our AdWords policy and primarily Google just has a big responsibility in things that we help to monetize…We received quite a bit of feedback from educators, and we felt the right thing to do was to not help to fuel this industry…We do not want to fund them with Adsense ads.

Brian’s comment was very interesting to me on a few levels:

1. The Adwords Content Policy does not mention banning term paper related sites.
2. A Google search for “term papers” shows all sorts of AdWords ads for sites selling term papers and related services. These very sites would definitely not fit within the new Adsense guidelines.

So Google does not want to “help to fuel this industry” but AdWords provides a highly efficient vehicle for these companies to gain customers. Something does not make sense here, and I hope that Google can create a consistent policy between AdWords and Adsense to remove the confusion.

I was going through a few posts over at the wickedfire forums today, and I learned about the AutoBlog plugin for wordpress.  This plugin allows you to specify multiple rss feeds and it will automatically parse the feeds into posts on your wordpress template. The plugin can even put the posts into wordpress categories if the rss feed is set up correctly.

Using this script will not help you generate much organic search traffic due to Google’s penalty for duplicate content, but it is a great tool to quickly build out content for a site. I own a few domain names that I am not currently using. Right now, I monetize the type in traffic via Sedo,  but I think I could do better using autoblog for content and adsense/YPN for monetization. I will give this a try on my parked domain for the knicks and post my results on this blog.
If you are looking for similar plugins, you might also want to check out feedwordpress and smartrss.

My previous post on Adsense Tips was popular, so here are a few more quick ones.
QuickOnlineTips has a good post about the best Adsense plugins for wordrepss. The plugins of most interest to me were:

• Adsense Beautifier - Adds attention grabbing images next to your Adsense ads. I have seen a few people claiming this technique helped them to double their Adsense CTR. The program puts a border between the images and the ads, so that you are in full compliance with the Adsense TOS. You can check out the plugin at use if you check out the post pages on EarnersBlog.
• Adsense Deluxe - Allows you to place Adsense ads into your posts. The script allows you to easily change the style of all of your ads and have some control over the placement. On MonetizeTraffic, I experimented with a similar plugin (Adsense Injection), but Adsense Delux appears to give you more control.

Darren over at ProBlogger has some good advice on how to improve the relevancy of Adsense ads. This can have a huge impact on your earnings. On my Example Term Paper site, a few changes to the meta tags and titles quadrupled my YPN earnings per click.

One of the most interesting portions of the article deals with section targeting. You can insert special HTML comments into your site to tell Adsense which portions of the site to emphasize/ignore when determining which ads to show. I have not used this feature, but I could see it coming in handy for some sites.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment in my Adsense Tips series.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few Adsense tips that are worth sharing:

• Using Images to Increase Adsense CTR - A user on digitalpoint forums quadrupled his Adsense CTR when he placed related images next to his Adsense ads. The thread gives an interesting view of the before and after layouts. In order for this to be in compliance with the Adsense terms of service, you have to have a border around the images or a line separating the images and the ads. I will not do try this on MonetizeTraffic, but I could see using it on some of my other sites.
• Adsense Tips Forum Thread - Another digitalpoint thread where members share some adsense tips. I really like this YPN optimized layout mentioned in the thread.
• Adsense Order Matters - A blog post from the Adsense team at Google where they explain that the first ad in the HTML code of your site receives the highest paying advertisements. Therefore, you should try to put the ad space with the highest click through rate first in the HTML of your site.
• Using the Competitive Ad Filter to Eliminate MFA Sites - A good post about how you can enter the URL of known Made For Adsense (MFA) sites into the Competitive Ad filter in Adsense to prevent the ads from being shown on your site. These ads are usually low paying ones where the landing page features a slew of other Adsense ads. Eliminating these from the ads served on your site should help to boost your earnings.

I am always on the look out for good Adsense tips and tricks. If you have some good ones, feel free to contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Update: The Adsense team recently put up a blog post clarifying their position on images next to ads. According to their post, it looks like they are strongly against placing images next to ads. They provide a number of examples of what is against policy, and they are even against images with a border between the image and the Adsense ads. This will pretty much kill the usefulness of some of the Adsense plugings that I wrote about in my Adsense Tips: Part II post .

Webmaster and bloggers will continue to innovate and push the limit around Adsense placement. Just be careful with images because Google has now clearly come out with their stance.

Google recently announced their coop program. Coop lets you create your own vertical search engine and monetize the search through adsense ads on the result pages.

Your search engine can be customized in a number of ways. When you set up your search engine, you can determine if you want the engine to show results from just sites that you select or the entire google databse. Similar to adsense, you can customize the link and text colors for your search results page. You can also choose to have the search results shown on Google’s site or on your site via javascript or an ajax api. The set up script allows you if you want to show ads on the top, bottom, or side of the page.
Setting up your search engine is quick and easy. It took me about 15 minutes to set up my Example Term Paper search engine. Linking up my adsense account required entering the email address, zip code, and last 5 digits of the phone number linked to my adsense account. After some configuration, the search engine works like a charm and is faster than I anticipated.

So far, I have noticed a few opportunities to improve the service. The search box has a background watermark which reads “Google Custom Search.” The watermark disappears when a user clicks in the search box to enter text. I understand Google’s desire to brand the search box, but the watermark might be confusing for some users. It would also be valuable to see data on what users are searching for in the coop control panel interface. This would help search engine owners to understand their audience better and customize the search engine accordingly.

Overall, it is an interesting experiment, and at least worth testing. After I have some usage data on my search engine, I will report back on my satisfaction with the service.

In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

There are 20 high level categories that you can choose from (Apparel and Jewelry, Automotive, B2B, Books-Movies-Music-Tickets, Computing, Education and Career, Electronics and Appliances, Entertainment and Social Event Services, Financial Services, Flowers and Candy, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, Mass Merchants, Professional Services, Real Estate, Reference, Sporting Goods, Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers, Toys and Hobbies, Travel) and each category has a few subcategories.

Once I set up the code, I inserted a few lines of javascript, and I was good to go. The first thing that struck me was that it took a few days for the contextual targeting to start. As I recall, Adsense was much quicker to show targeted ads. Once the targeted ads started to appear, I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps half of the ads were well targeted and the other half seemed like junk. I have been running the ads for a few weeks now, and while the targeting has improved slightly, it does not match the quality of Adsense’s targeting.

Unsatisfied with the contextual ads, I attempted to enter some content categories into the system to improve my site’s performance. None of the categories were a perfect match to my site, so I choose one that was the closest. While the category reduced my click through rate, my revenue per click nearly doubled. If your site is a good fit for one of the YPN content categories, I think that you could do very well with the program. I was also disappointed that YPN does not break out statistics by the ad category. Showing statistics by ad category and sub category would be a huge help in selecting the best categories for your site.

For one of my sites, the click through rate on my YPN ads was 68% lower than Adsense, and my CPM earnings were 42% lower than Adsense. Of course, your results may very. If you content fits one of the YPN content areas, I would spend some time testing the program to see if you can improve your earnings.

I have a three-step process for making changes to my sites. Although the process is very simple in theory, I have found that it helps to keep me focused.

1. Experiment. Even if you think that your site or blog is perfect, there are always new things that you can try. I have found that the short term hit in performance that you may see is more than worth it. For example, in the past few months I have tried running ads from Adsense, YPN, Adbrite, and Text Link Ads to see which perform the best. I learned something from each of these experiments. Some things you might want to experiment with are:

• Advertising Programs (contextual, pay per impression, affiliate, etc.)
• Ad placement and Size
• Related ebook sales
• Creative partnership or link exchanges

2. Track. Experimenting is great, but in order to know if you are headed in the right direction or aimlessly wandering, you need to be able to track your experiments. My method of tracking usually depends on the nature of the experiment. For my Adsense tests, I set up custom channels for each version of the ad that I would like to try, and then I will rotate the ads using PHP code. This can also be done with javacript.

To keep track of the days when I make the changes, I mark the days in my yahoo calendar. I learned to do this the hard way after being unable to remember when I started some of my experiments. To get a good idea of how the test is performing, I try to run each test for at least a week.

3. Optimize and Repeat. Once you have tracked your changes, you can alter your site based on your findings and repeat the process. Over time, a series of small changes can really add up into something big.
If you need some further inspiration, you can learn about how I used this process to boost my Adsense click through rate by 34%. Good luck with your experiments!

This is post is a part of the ProBlogger group writing project. I encourage you to check out all of the other great posts from around the web.

Jasmine, who used to work with at Kiwibox, recently launched Glamourite.com, a blog devoted to life in New York City. Along with 10 “Glamourites,” Jasmine chronicles nightlife in the big city. While I know very little about nightlife, I know about making money online. I recently gave Jasmine some suggestions to improve monetization on her site, and she graciously allowed me to post my ideas.
Monetization Ideas

• The adsense ads on the site have a gray border around them. I would alter the adsense code to make the border of the ads white, and therefore blend the ads into the site a lot more. From my experiences, this will significantly improve click through rates on the ads.
• To be more aggressive with the ads, I would use the adsense injection plugin for wordpress. It will randomly insert an Adsense box ad unit into one post on the page. Having ads this close to the content can generate some very good click through rates.
• I might also experiment with the adsense link unit ads that will show a search term instead of an actual ad. I have read that they can perform well. I would put them in place of the gevalia affiliate program on the right side bar.

Traffic Ideas

The site has a ton of interesting content, and I think it I think it would help to do more to expose visitors to additional content.

• I would using the related post plugin. After each post, the plugin will automatically provide links to related posts on the blog. It is a great way to get visitors deeper into the site.
• Post the 10 most popular posts up in the right or left sidebar to encourage visitors to explore the site.
• Generating traffic from other New York focused blogs would be great for Glamourite’s traffic. I would start a series of posts to highlight/review favorite nyc blogs or favorite posts in some of these blogs in order to drive some traffic their way and get their attention so that they eventually link to Glamourite.
• Setting up a myspace page and linking to it from the site would be a good idea. A lot of Glamourite’s target audience is probably on myspace, and it wouldn’t hurt to build up a friends list there.

Content/Partnership Ideas

• Every Thursday, I would have each of the glamourite ladies write a sentence or two about a weekend thing to do and then put it together in one post. This type of regularly scheduled content will help to build the audience and may help to garner linking attention from other sites.
• If the site becomes more events focused, I would syndicate RSS event listings from flavorpill, eventful, and upcoming and post them on the site. This would provide new fresh content with minimal work.
• For partnerships, I would start discussion with a club promotion site like clubplanet or velvetlist to work out a deal where one of the glamourites could attend one of their events per week and post about it and/or include it in the weekly things to do post mentioned above in exchange for some promotion.

The ideas above work on both the monetization and the traffic side of the site. These changes would boost key drives in the monetization framework that I have written about before, and should have a strong positive impact on the site.

I plan on doing more case studies in the future. If you would like your site to be reviewed, please email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

I have been experimenting with tracking Adsense clicks in order to increase the earnings on my sites. After reading this post about tracking Adsense clicks via javascript, I decided to give it a try on one of my sites. I did a quick search on hotscripts to find a decent tracking script, and I have been pleasantly surprised with the results.

Two nights ago, I installed the Contextual Tracker script on my site. Setting up the script is very easy. Installation involves changing a few parameters in the configuration script, running a set of SQL commands to install some mySQL tables, and inserting a few lines of javascript into the header of your site. Once you have installed the script, you can log in to an admin section to see your stats in real time.
Benefits of Adsense Click Tracking

1. See the URL ads users have clicked on. This is HUGE. Knowing which ads visitors respond to allows you to better target the content of your site. For example, on my cliff notes site I thought that most of the Adsense clicks would be related to term papers. It turns out that most of the Adsense clicks I have seen so far are going to CampusI (an online bookstore), Blish.com, and Barronsmag.com. I am a bit confused about clicks going to Barron’s which is a financial publication, but I will continue to investigate this. AdBrite has this feature for their run of network ads, but I would kill for this feature to be built into Adsense and YPN.
2. Protect yourself against clickfraud. The program tracks the IP address of users who click on your ads. If you see a large volume of clicks from a particular IP address, it would be a good idea to contact Google and let them know about the problem. If you are not proactive about the situation, Google may think that you are trying to scam the system and ban your account.
3. Know exactly which pages users clicked on your Adsense ads. I found this very useful on my site with thousand of pages. I always assumed that most of my Adsense clicks came from the homepage of the site. However, most of the clicks appear to be coming from the search pages and pages devoted to individual books. With this data, I was able to quickly identify pages that accounted for most of my Adsense clicks.

I will continue to experiment with Adsense click tracking. In a later post, I will write about using Google Analytics to do more detailed tracking and analysis of Adsense clicks.