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Wanting to learn more about Google Content from the publishing perspective, last week we placed ads on a single page of this blog (AdSense: Crossing To The Dark Side). Here are some initial impressions.

  • Google AdSense is much easier for the beginner than AdWords. A few clicks, here’s your HTML snippet, bang, you’re a publisher.
  • The AdSense interface is simpler than AdWords. Fewer options, fewer choices.
  • AdSense does a great job asking for the minimum information at each step. For example, Google didn’t request tax info and address verification until after the account had earned a few dollars. We’ve written about the power of keeping forms short (”drip irrigation”, or “dating before marriage“). AdSense executes this best-practice extremely well.
  • AdSense has solid FAQs. I combed through many of them with my advertiser glasses on, hyper-vigilant for anything potentially offensive. Found nothing along the lines of “As a publisher, do anything and everything you can to get visitors to click on your ads!” — all advice offered to publishers was advertiser-appropriate.
  • What I am most curious about (and what we’ll never learn from Google): is our page generating traffic for the advertisers which converts?

With no optimization, our test page is currently generating $1 per day. (We’ll donate ten-fold our AdSense riches to charity after the experiment.) Over the next few weeks we’ll play with section targeting, keyword stuffing, cramming on additional ad units, custom search, and maybe some javascript tricks to see how those affect earnings. Stay tuned.

 

adsense-earnings

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Comments

  1. AdSense Land, August 20, 2008:

    Nice to see some open experiments with AdSense.
    I would be particularly interested if AdSense let it’s publishers see their conversion ratio.

    Note: You should censor Page CTR and eCPM in the image since it’s against TOS to share the exact numbers.

  2. Alan Rimm-Kaufman, August 25, 2008:

    Thanks for the TOS reminder, fixed.

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