Optimize your advertising strategy - part 2

Are you in a high paying market?

Refferals have fixed revenues wherase adsense for content varies according to the market. The health market for example, is known for high advertising investments and a single click can pay many dollars. In contrary, a refferal for firefox will never pay you more than 1 dollar as it is clearly stated in the terms of use.

Therefore, it is by far preferable to display ad units or link units when you know you are in a high paying market.

On the opposite, if your average revenue per click is less than 10 cents for a long period of time, then we strongly recommend that you opt for refferals.

Do you have deep knowledge of your visitors?

Some targets are known to click more easily than others. A good example are elderly people who are not used to the internet and the new technologies and will click on your ads because they think they are really part of the site then will lend on another page and be surprised, so they will come back to your site and try another link... they are also fond of the search feature, I heard of à 200% CTR for some sites targeting elederly people !

Now, if you are targeting advanced computer users, do you really think they haven't installed firefox or picasa yet ?

Do you have qualified traffic?

Qualified traffic is vital for Adsense revenues because what makes google ads effective is the fact that they are "highly targeted" and based on your content. If your visitors are really interested in your content (qualified) then they are more likely to click on your ads (actually ad units and link units) since these are related to it.

If your traffic isn't that qualified, then you should probably consider adsense for search or refferals. Adsense for search is recommended since your visitors won't find what they are looking for and will use the search feature more often. Refferals are also indicated in this case because you can display wide target ads like firefox or picasa downloads that will suit almost any visitor.

Do you really recommend the product?

I must say that I am really happy to put adsense refferals on my websites because I know that I am recommeding quality products. This is very important when you are keen on gaining your visitors' trust and building a brand.

Adsense for content isn't as secure, and you may end up displaying ads that will disapoint your visitors (Made for AdSense websites or MFA).

I remembre clicking on an ad about "cheap high quality hosting" that took me to a page with just one written sentence and three adsense blocks!

Now that you have asked yourself all these questions, you are probably more clear about the best adsense strategy for your website - at least for the product mix.

Unfortunately, things do not always go the way they should and the internautes are known to be umpredictable. Experimentation and data feedback is therefore a necessary step we discuss in the following pages.

Optimize your advertising strategy - Part 1

In its AdSense program, google offers an array of products :

Adsense for content

Adsense for search

Refferals

The first critical task (after understanding each product), is to come up with the best possible combination of these products.

Of course, each website is unique and so requires a unique " Advertising strategy " combining AdSense and other advertising techniques. To help define the best AdSense strategy for your website we suggest you try and answer these simple questions :

Do you have many returning visitors ?

This is tipycally the case for a blog or a portal with constantly updated content (news, forums...). If this applies to you, we think you should not rely on refferals to yield much income as they only pay for "a first time install". Once the majority of your readers will have installed the reffered product (firefox, picasa, adwords, adsense subscription...) you won't be getting any more money from these ads.

On the contrary, if you have mostly first time visitors, then refferals can be a good choice.

Where do your visitors come from ?

Again, if you are considering refferals, you should keep in mind that these can be restricted to some regions of the globe. For example, the google pack installation won't pay you any cent unless the person installing it is from the USA. Thus, if the majority of your visitors comes from England it is useless to put this product on your website.

Is your design flexible

In some cases, and particularly with some blogging services, you do not have total control over the lay out of your website. Then you may have only one place to put your ads which is less than 20 pixels high. In this case for example, you cannot put any ad unit since there is no suitable format offered.

In some other situations, you may be using a CMS (Content Management System) to build your site and be confronted to the hard fact that the only region you can personalise is the menu (or sidebar). In that case we strongly recommend you use link units because they can be harmonously integrated into any menu.

What is a MFA?

“MFA” is a new term you may have come across lately on discussion boards or blog posts. MFA is the short version of “Made For AdSense”. It is always associated with the term “site” (or “website”) or “blog” as it is a new phenomenon touching all imaginable web contents.

An MFA Site is a site that has been designed, created, published… in the unique goal of generation income using the Google AdSense program.

Accordingly, content, design and general website quality are generally poor when it comes to MFA websites and cause a bad visitor experience. Moreover, MFA site creation has been made easier and easier over time as the process has been highly automated through some cheap software offering to create such sites in minutes.

Although some MFA websites use traditional traffic generation and marketing techniques, most of them are based on what is known as “AdSense arbitrage”.