Google Ad Sense - The business!

[daunk]

Well I have to say very impressed with teh forums here - they are fabulous I have been lurking for quite a while now :)

Today I decided to register with Ad sense at 10:30 at 10:33 I recieved an email saying I had been accepted into the program! 3 minutes! Record or what! Needless to say I was very impressed and put the code up onto my website, within 10 minutes my website was showing real adverts live!

Needless to say I'm a very happy bunny :) I was just wondering though - I know you're not allowed to discuss CTR etc.. but for a site with about 40k hits a day (it is a forum though) do you think that will bring in enough to cover the hosting ($40 month)

[Jenstar]

Someone has already got three minutes beat by two minutes ;)

[webmasterworld.com...]

You should have a pretty good idea in a day or two how well Adsense is doing on your forum, and if it will cover your hosting or not. There are so many variables at play, that one is true for one person might be the exact opposite for another.

And Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] daunk!

[daunk]

Hi jenstar, thanks for the really nice welcome :)What you say about the revenue is really true - silly me for asking the question, I'll see the results and a pattern emerging over the next few days and weeks. I have been an amazon affiliate for about 3 weeks and only got 1 buy from that :(

Out of curiousity do more people use the skyscraper or the 468x60 advert? I have the 468x60 as the larger one would really mess up my forums big time - although I imagine this will affect my revenue?

[loanuniverse]

Daunk:

Welcome to the forums, I have found these forums to be one of the best in the net. As you are aware adsense revenue is closely tied to the keywords that the spider can come up after it crawls your pages. In the case of forums, I don't think you will really know the type of revenue you will get until a week or two have passed and the novelty wears off on your regular posters.

Regarding the code, the skyscraper is bigger and grabs more attention since a lot of people are conditioned to skip the banner mentally. In addition, you give the visitor four choices instead of two with the skyscraper, and who knows maybe choice #3 was the perfect fit.

[Jenstar]

If you search through the recent threads in the AdSense forum, there are quite a few on skyscrapers versus banners. It seems that skyscrapers are winning by an overwhelming majority.

In most forums though, you might want to use the banner, not the skyscraper - skyscrapers can reduce the width of your forums, and cause cranky forum visitors ;)

[daunk]

Well its been up for about 12 hours now and i already have my first clicks, I have to say I was very impressed with the amount of money from this we're talking cents, but it is still way more than the other CPC I have been in! I'm really happy woohoooo! Google adsense rules!

These forums are brilliant I'll do some more lurking :D Jenstar what you say is very true it would take off a good chunkof the width on every page, the way with the banner it doesn't inconvenience my users at all! At the end of the day I need to make $40 a month to pay for hosting and it seems I'll get around that (although I have to say its only been running for 12 hours so who knows what the future will bring! :)

Thanks!

[Shak]

daunk.

Welcome to Webmasterworld [webmasterworld.com]

when you say 40,000 hits, do you mean:

40,000 page views, 40,000 unique visitors, or 40,000 hits :)

You want to be making just over a $1 a day to make your hosting costs back, with any of the above you should do that without any major problem (imo).

Shak

[daunk]

Thanks for the very nice welcome, everyone here is very nice I am sure I will spend a lot more time in the future :)

Well its not unique visitors, its the number of hits AFAIK.

The site is pushing 3.5 gb a week, don't know if that helps determine which it is?

I have two website is it ok to sign up for each of them to have an adsense account - should I use a different email?

[daunk]

I have just also seen on [infoplease.com...] they have a banner ad (sky scraper style) which lacks the "ads by google" bit, surely this must be against the TOS - I'm sure it must say you are not allowed to change the advert?

The site seems to be down ATM but you can have a peek its a PR 8 or 9 [edit it only has a PR 6] so I doubt they will let it be down for long!

[chiyo]

daunk. AdSense has separate agreements with some sites - for example high traffic sites that can deliver over 20 Mill views monthly. Infoplease is one of these and was one of the test sites for content-based ad delivery for google.

[Shak]

You do NOT have to sign up for a new account for "each" site you own :) , a good read of the FAQ will explain how to show ads on other sites that you own.

also Sites with over "5 million" impression (I Think) do NOT have to display "ads powered by" on their sites...

Shak

[daunk]

Thanks for the answers!

[valortrade]

In the end, your pages' content, your visitors' geographic location, and CTR would have direct impact on your revenue flow.

Maybe, just one click could bring you beyond the $1/day goal!

[daunk]

I added another site onto this Adsense by including the code on it, it however (for 2 hours) has shown up only charity ads - is there anything I can do or does it mean that this 2nd site I own is not up to google's high standards - it is a quality site but recieves only 1,500 page views a day :(

[Clark]

5 million impressions per what? month? week? day?

[Shak]

daunk,

you didn't read the faqs properly :)

golden rule, if you expect to make money of something, read the instructions, over and over.....

all your answers are there.

Shak

[Jenstar]

It likely means the AdSense bot hasn't come around to your site yet to see what kind of content you have there.

Charity ads will also show up if there are are no relevant ads to serve.

As Shak said earlier, the AdSense FAQ has a lot of great information there. A good thorough read-through will answer just about all the questions you may have about AdSense.

You can find the AdSense FAQ here:
[google.com...]
It is a wealth of information :)

[daunk]

I have read the FAQ the only thing I found was:

If your site is not yet in our index, it may take a few hours or more before we are able to crawl your site and serve the most relevant AdWords ads. In this case, we will display public service ads, for which you will not receive earnings, until we are able to crawl your pages.

But the site already is in the index and #1 for its search terms :( so should therefore take just a few minutes?

The only thing I can find is

Google does not guarantee that we'll always have relevant ads to display. If we don't have relevant ads for a given page, or if we haven't yet crawled your site, we'll display public service AdWords ads for which you won't receive earnings.

But a quick search on my search term reveals that there are advertisers on google paying for adwords, maybe there is some I missed but I did read the FAQ twice :( My first site had no problems - was displaying adverts in a very short time.

[valortrade]

daunk>You need to be a little patient!

The Google bot needs a little extra time during the weekend. If still no change after 24 hours, check back with Google directly.

[Jenstar]

My sites are in the serps, and I was served the charity ads for a few hours until the targeted ones began appearing.

From their technical FAQ:

Your page has not been crawled yet.
Our servers take between 4 and 6 hours to crawl your site after your application has been accepted. If your site has not previously been crawled, we will not be able to target ads to your content. Until we are able to crawl your site, we will serve unpaid public service ads.

This should apply for new sites you add to your current AdSense account. AdSense does not use the regular Googlebot, it has it's own bot that crawls sites for AdSense purposes.

If you want to watch your stats to see when the AdSense bot drops by, it shows up as Mediapartners-Google/2.1

Here is the tech FAQ if you didn't see it before:
[google.com...]

[daunk]

Thankyou thankyou :*) sorry for being impatient, just excited :*) I'm going away for two weeks and want everything running so when I come back I have a nice big account :)) Fingers crossed!