Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Your candid views are appreciated.
6 months down the line it has seen a 75% month-on-month increase in profit, mainly due to Adsense revenue. Although Ihave other sources of income on the site Adsense continues to storm ahead, even if Smart Pricing makes my eyes water at times ;)
I've had over two years experience with Adsense on another site of mine, and for the first year and a half it was supplemental income that barely paid for the hosting. Originally I was sceptical about putting it on my new site.
However, take Adsense seriously, study how it works carefully, adhere to the rules, play around with colour/placement until you get a good CTR and it can be a lucrative source of income.
There is no secret to Adsense apart from a lot of hard work, careful thought, and of course, a lot of traffic, which will come if you put together a website that caters for your visitors, and not high paying keywords.
Chris
It's a big choice adding it to a site and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
I started adsense to hopefully pay my site's running costs a year last January. In my first month I got just enough to recieve a cheque ($100), and now I get between $1200 and $1300 per month. I've spent a lot of time analysing site logs to see where the visitors come from and what they view when they get there. I've used that information to place adsense on various pages, and I've been constantly tweaking layout, banner style and placement to maximise my clicks.
I still have to work for a living, and my wife still works part time. The change in my life is that we can now afford to take the family off on holidays we would never have been able to do otherwise. Going to Crete in a few weeks time :)
It's a big choice adding it to a site and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Disagree - it's a no brainer.
Apply, get accepted and then try it out to see if it works for you. If it doesn't look good on your site, detracts from other advertising, takes up advertising space that could be better used just remove the code and inform Adsense. There is no commitment.
At least it is earning money for you. Do you feel that exit clicks to adsense links may cost you sales from your site or do you rely on adsense for revenue?
I don't actually sell anything - it's an information/support site. Therefore I don't rely on Adsense as an income. I do have Fastclick on site too - mostly on pages where I get a lot of referrals from other sites that Adsense doesn't work on. I do get a small amount from CPM revenue out of them. Pays the bank charges to cash US$ via a UK bank basically.
Having adsense on the site doesn't detract from the way visitors use the site. I have adsense on less than ten pages out of several hundred, and my daily weblogs show that most people look at several pages whilst on the site. If they exit via adsense links, I think a lot of them come back. I have a high percentage of repeat visitors.
[edited by: david_uk at 11:16 am (utc) on April 8, 2005]
I feel much appreciate feedback from you guys, at least it gives me the opportunity to hear genuine views ...as opposed to buying a 99p e-book telling me how to become the next Dot Com Billonaire from adsense revenue!
Did you notice any increase in PR or serps post adsense?
Nope. The site always appeared at no 3 on a Google search for the main keyword before adsense and that hasn't changed. Nor has the site traffic changed. I'd say that there is a general growth in site traffic, but I put that down to the work I've done in keeping the site up to date rather than anything to do with Adsense.
So in your case, whether ot not you had Adsense, your serps and PR are pretty much the same but Adsense gives you benefit of revenue ...for much deserved holidays.
In a nutmeg - yes.
The site was there anyway, and would be if I had Adsense on it or not. Adsense has made no difference to PR etc.
I would say that since it's become a money spinner I tend to look at the site differently, but I'm still passionate about the site for it's content. Nobody goes to a site because they think there might be some cool ads there - they go for content.
yes
Do you have a choice of ads? can you pull the ones that may be a conflict of interest?
You can block ads that are competitors, or ones that you really feel are not appropriate for your site. Google say that to maximise your income, blocking ads is not a good idea. However, I do block religious fanatics, Ebay and a couple of others I have seen on my site. The difficulty is that adsense won't tell you whose ads have been on your site. You need to use the adsense preview tool and basically see who is advertising at that time.
You can't choose who advertises on your site, other than by blocking or playing around with the text content of the page to maximise the keywords, and hence focus the adsense bot's mind on targetting the most relevant ads for your page.
The other thing that can happen is that advertisers can choose if the ads are targetted in small area's, nationwide or worldwide. Therefore if you have a local interest site, you will see ads from other countries appearing. Or you may see ads that aren't appropriate for your site simply because the advertiser has chosen to bid on keywords relevant to your site, but not really that relevant to their business.
I originally expected responses based on people using Adsense as an SEO too rather than generating revenue.
It shows that unless you ask, you don't really know.
You've been a great help and I thank you.
Yes, I now have nervous tics and carpal tunnel
I originally expected responses based on people using Adsense as an SEO too rather than generating revenue.
Never even thought of using it as a tool! I'm not totally convinced it would really help increase PR etc.
I'd be interested to know how adding adsense goes for you.
I know this is off topic :)
I am from the UK and I keep seeing this expression
"carpal tunnel"
Could someone explain what this means.
dregs33
I'm still interested in other members experiences, smart pricing, carpal tunnel or otherwise.
I'll let David_UK know how things are developing.
Has adsense changed or helped anyone's serps or PR?
About a year ago my web business was shut down for two weeks due to a persistant hacker. Because I was living on the edge already, I decided that I needed to get a real job to make ends meet. I took a night-shift help-desk job that allowed me to surf the net between phone calls.
While "on the job" I discovered WW, and AdSense. After a few nights of reading up on AdSense, I placed my first AdSense ad on one of my sites around midnight. (Yeah, I was able to edit my sites while working too....)
My shift was over at 2 am, and after the drive home I logged into my AdSense account and I found that I had already made $5.00!
Within 2 months I was able to quit that job and go back to webmastering full time. I guess I attribute that change in my life to reading WW more than AdSense, since WW has made it possible for me to find other advertising revenue channels as well.
What does google look for in terms of approving a site.
Would an advertising portal be a big No No as opposed to a content rich site being more appropriate?
Well done Dataguy, is your site an information, text type of site or are you also selling products?
None of my sites sell products. I guess I would consider myself more of an inventor than a webmaster or business man... I've spent the last 7 years trying to invent the 'next great thing', though I've been rather unsuccessful at it. What I have found is that AdSense allows me to continue on with what I do best, while earning a decent income from what Google does best.
Just after starting in June 2005, I had several clients not paying their bills.
Money from the good clients and AsSense saved the situation.
Now it changes me from selling internet promotion to being a journalist.
