A few months ago, we shared a number of AdSense for search optimization tips with you. Here’s the story of one AdSense publisher who recently tried some of these techniques and saw substantial results after making a few small changes.VanGoghGallery.com is an art resource site that provides information about the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. Site owner Greg Alexander runs the Van Gogh Gallery to educate and share information about the artist, and has also used the site to explore new Internet marketing techniques. Greg joined AdSense in 2007, and although he didn’t know much about the program at first, he found it “a great opportunity to generate some revenue without spending the effort to sell ads.” He also tried other ad providers, “but none of them yielded the results that AdSense did. In addition, AdSense was the only one that provided relevant ads for our visitors.”To help users navigate through the many pages of the Van Gogh Gallery, Greg added an AdSense for search box to the right column of his pages. By enabling SiteSearch and displaying search results on his own pages, he was able to help users find what they were looking for while staying on his site.As an optimization experiment, Greg recently moved his search box to the center column of his pages and extended it to twice its original width.Before
After
In addition, Greg made slight changes to the search results pages — he removed the borders from the ads and search results, and added a new search box to the search results pages. According to Greg, “altogether, these changes took less than 15 minutes to do.”After making these updates, Greg noticed a dramatic and immediate increase in the usage of search on the Van Gogh Gallery. He found that “the number of queries performed each day increased 8 to 10 times, and search ad clicks and revenues increased even more.” His search earnings quickly grew from less than a dollar a day to double digits since his optimization test. “Now we frequently receive more search ad clicks than our total number of searches pre-optimization,” says Greg. “I’m still amazed at how simple changes can have such an incredible impact.”Greg has started using the earnings from his AdSearch optimization efforts to build and host additional websites about other artists. “Ultimately,” Greg says,”we hope to use the earnings to fund research trips to Europe to see the works of the masters and expand the quality of information we offer visitors to our sites.”Have you also tried our AdSense for search optimization tips and found success? Let us know.Posted by Jane Brinkley - AdSense Optimization Team
Google Adsense for Domains
When I first wrote about Domain Cash Parking, I wasn’t quite sure how it all worked. But, ever since then, I experimented with various domain cash parking services like Sedo and GoDaddy, as well as Chitika’s domain cash parking service. And, so far, I must say that I haven’t really seen any benefits from this practice. There must be more to it than what I’m doing, though. So, I decided to give it another go.
When I saw that Google Adsense is now offering the Google Adsense for Domains service, I immediately decided to sign-up a couple of my undeveloped domains. Since it comes free with my existing Adsense account, I thought, why not?
These are the basic steps that you need to take to get your domains on to the Google Adsense for Domains service:
1. Sign in to your existing Adsense account (or start one if you haven’t got one yet).
2. Go to ‘Get Ads’ tab and select ‘Adsense for Domains’ in the list of services.
3. Click on ‘Add domain’ and follow the instructions that Adsense will give you.
4. Instructions include signing in to your domain registrar and making changes to the account information. Adsense provides detailed information on how to do this with most popular registrars.
5. Once you’ve set-up your domain according to Adsense’s specifications, wait until it gets approved.
6. When your domain’s approved, you can then edit some of its settings (palette and keywords).
7. Wait for the money to roll in! (or not! :-))
I’m curious to see if domain cash parking with Google will be different. I’ll have to see and let you know.
What about you? Have you tried domain cash parking just yet? Have you looked in to Google Adsense for Domains? If you have, do let us know what you think of it!
Here’s a sample domain on the Google Adsense for Domains service.
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This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
My content, your content, other people’s content
Sometimes we receive reports about AdSense code appearing on websites that may contain content copied from other websites. We understand that many of our publishers are concerned about this issue, so we’d like to give you some information about the procedures and tools you can use to protect your content.For example, let’s suppose you own a movie blog, where you recently posted an article about your favorite actor. After publishing it, you notice that another website has copied and published your article without your permission. The owner of the other website doesn’t respond to your requests to remove the content, and it is monetizing their pages with AdSense. In a situation like this, where you believe that a site containing AdSense code is illegally copying your site’s content, you can let us know by following the process described in our Help Center. It’s our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other applicable intellectual property laws. The notice should be sent directly from the owner of the copyrighted materials allegedly being infringed (in the example above, that’s you), as we are unable to accept third-party copyright complaints. Also keep in mind that we are unable to process copyright complaints received through the AdSense policy violation report form. Once we’ve received a notice of infringement, we will take appropriate action. If you’d like more information about our DMCA process, please visit http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html.Additionally, if you find a site that is scraping (misappropriating and republishing) your content, you can report it for a potential violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. To do this, fill out the form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport (you must be logged into your Google Account to access this form).Posted by Gergana Marinova - AdSense Publisher Support
AdSense Lets You Change Your Font in Ad Units
AdSense have just announced a new feature that many of us have been asking for for a while - the ability to change fonts in ad units.
While there’s not an extensive choice of fonts (they allow Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces) it is better than nothing and allows publishers to tweak the way their ads look to fit with the design of their sites.
Find out how to access the new fonts via the official AdSense Blog.
Facebook Wants You to Make Money From Your Apps
Facebook has addressed the monetization of Facebook Platform for people building applications into businesses. They’ve set up some new pages to help people share ideas with other developers on how to get the most out of their apps. Among the pages are: - A brief overview of how to think about building a business, and commonly found business models on Facebook Platform .- A list of providers to help you - ad networks, payment providers, and analytics companies.- Articles written by bloggers and the press.
Speaking of ad networks, Facebook is testing an in-house one right now. Kelly Winters writes at the Facebook Developer Blog:
We are always internally exploring different ways we can directly help you monetize better. Starting today you may notice a few applications occasionally serving Facebook Ads directly in their canvas pages as a part of a small alpha test. We will use the results of this test and other tests that we do to determine the best ways we can help you monetize. For this initial test we picked a few developers that had a variety of different user bases and application types to give us the kind of data we need. We will examine the results to decide whether to open up the program to more developers in the future.The testing of such a network is not entirely surprising. “The move has been expected for some time by companies that have built large advertising networks within the Facebook Platform ecosystem,” says Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith.”Companies like SocialMedia, RockYou, AdParlor, AOL’s Advertising.com, SocialCash, Sometrics, Adknowledge, Rubicon Project, VideoEgg, Google’s AdSense, and other ad networks have been serving app developers since the Platform launched,” he adds. “Others, like Super Rewards and Offerpal, manage networks of offers for developers which generally pay on a CPA basis.”With much more focus on monetization now than in previous times, Facebook was probably very smart to change their Terms of Service back after the controversial edits that gave Facebook ownership to all content. As far as monetizing apps, and turning them into businesses, this is a very interesting phenomenon that will likely really take off in the near future, particularly as more mobile devices get deeper into open application-based models.
Fontastic new options for your ad units
You’ve been asking for more control over the appearance of the ads on your sites, so we’re happy to let you know that you can now change the font face of the text in ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. You can choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they’ll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.There are a few ways to customize the font face of your ad units. If you’d like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the ‘Ad Display Preference’ section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you’ve created in the past, regardless of whether you used the Manage Ads feature. By default, your ads are currently set to ‘Standard AdSense font family’, which we’ve found has performed well across browsers and displays.
However, you can also select custom font faces for specific ad units that you’ve created with the Manage Ads feature. When creating new ad units, you’ll be prompted to select between the default ‘Standard AdSense font family’, your new account-wide font face (if you’ve selected one), or another font face. You can also change the appearance of existing ad units, by visiting the Manage Ads page of your account and updating your font choices for specific ad units. Once you’ve changed the font face of an ad unit away from the default, those selections will be maintained even if you change your account-wide settings later.
Just as with color and placement optimizations, we encourage you to test these new font options to find the best combination for your sites. For instance, you can try matching the font face of your ads to that of your sites. Enjoy the new font faces, and feel free to leave feedback in our comments field below.Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
5 Ways to find Direct Advertisers for your Blog
It is the goal of many bloggers to move from monetizing their blogs with ad networks like AdSense into selling ads directly to advertisers. But getting into this game can be difficult - particularly in the early days while you’re still growing traffic.
Below are 5 ways that I secured direct ad deals with sponsors in the early days of my first blogs:
1. Type your blogs topic into Google
What advertisers come up above and to the right of the search listings? These products and services obviously have budget for advertising online and are looking for exposure and could be open to a direct relationship.
2. Visit other blogs, forums and websites in your Niche
Who is advertising on them? These advertisers are targeting sites on a similar topic to you and are more often than not willing to test new sites that have relevance to their industry.
3. Identify Affiliate programs in your niche
Some affiliates will also be interested in an advertising relationship with your blog. This may or may not be in your best interests to pursue depending upon whether your readership converts with affiliate products.
4. Hit the Classifieds
When I first was looking for advertisers I looked at what local photography businesses were advertising in magazines and papers here in Australia and I got on the phone and rang them to see if they’d be interested in placing an ad. Most had never done anything online before and quite a few took the step in buying an ad.
5. Online Stores and New Sites
This is another tactic that I used early on also with some success. It involved googling the keywords associated with my topic and not just looking at who was advertising (as in point #1 above) but looking at what businesses were listed in the search results, particularly those below me in the rankings. I paid special interest in online stores who had a direct revenue from their sites and contacted them to see if they’d be interested in advertising - quite a few did. I also noticed that new sites who were still getting established were also sometimes more willing to buy advertising.
It should be said that when you have a blog with relatively low traffic that none of these methods are going to earn you a fortune. You’ll need to be willing to price your ads relatively cheaply until your traffic grows - but securing these types of ad deals is better than no income for your blog and means that you already have relationships with advertisers to grow as your traffic increases.
Tags: Advertising
Site maintenance on Saturday, February 21
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this Saturday, February 21st. While you won’t be able to log into your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PST, we’ll continue tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad serving won’t be affected. For our international readers, here’s the start time of the maintenance in a few other cities:London - 6pm SaturdayCairo - 8pm SaturdayMumbai - 11:30pm SaturdayManila - 2am SundaySydney - 5am SundayPosted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
Introducing Adsense for Beginners
Hey folks. I have started a new site dedicated to explaining the fine art of making money online using Adsense. You can find the new blog here; Make Money with Adsense Due to the overwhelming…
Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.
Reports being updated
Yesterday, we experienced an issue which caused AdSense and Google Ad Manager reports to be delayed through the day. The issue began at 4am PST and lasted several hours, but has now been resolved. No stats from yesterday were lost, and our engineers have been working to restore your reports with the clicks, impressions, and earnings accrued from your sites. Most publisher reports have now been updated with yesterday’s data, with a few accounts still catching up.Thanks for your continued patience, and we apologize for the alarm and inconvenience caused by this reporting delay.Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
With love, from me (the AdSense Crawler) to you
We recently caught up with our friend the AdSense Crawler, who wanted to share this poem with our publishers:
Red roses are fine for showing your love,Kisses, jewelry, and chocolate, they’re okay.Yet my heart skips a beat from none of the above,Ask me what thrills and delights me and I’ll say:Great content’s what contents me when I visit your site,Stuff your truffles and send me a rich word bouquet,Keep your flowers, give me phrases, they’re what excite!Every day crawling your pages is Valentine’s Day.- The AdSense CrawlerHappy Valentine’s Day!Posted by Julie Beckmann - Inside AdSense Team
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Our new Help Forum, now in seven more languages
Back in October, we launched a brand new English Help Forum to make it easier for publishers to ask questions and share advice. Now, we’re happy to announce that this Help Forum platform is available for publishers in seven additional languages: French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. To start posting on these forums, sign in with your Google Account.If you’re using the new platform for the first time, some of the new features you’ll notice include the ability to vote on a best response to each question, receive answers to your posted questions by email, and subscribe via RSS feed. We’ve also introduced more community-building aspects to the forum, such as a customizable profile page and a rating system that rewards you for your contributions. Finally, we’ve integrated a CSE search box on each page, which will allow you to find answers to your questions across the Forum, Help Center, and the blog.Our Help Forums are also available on Google Groups in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Slovak, and Turkish — we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re able to migrate these languages to our new platform.Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
