One abiding principle that emerges from reading this newsgroup is:
if Google doesn't make it easy to do, most AdSensers don't do it. But Google's interests and your interests are not identical. Google wants you reliant on AdSense income, not able to take it or leave it. Google wants you reliant on them for advertisers and ignorant about the advertisers that are paying you. Google wants you to put ads on every page, and let them decide how best to profit from them -- and whether you deserve a SmartPricing boost, or a SmartPricing penalty.
Want to separate yourself from the herd?
- Don't be ignorant of your advertisers. Know who they are. Ask to be added to their press release distribution list1, so you are alerted to new product/services you might want to write about. Know the products/services they are selling, and use that intelligence in making new content (among other things!). Know their ads well enough that you have a real good idea what search terms they are bidding on, and why that ad appears on your particular page. Suppose you were going to sell me your wonderful AdSense publishing business. You explain to me that your money all comes from advertising. So I ask "Great, can I see a list of your advertisers?" And you say "Uh, gee, I don't really have a list... Google kinda handles all that." Does that sound like the kind of business you would want to buy? Don't be ignorant just because Google makes it easy. Create the kind of business you would want to buy, because the owner clearly knows what's going on!
- Make SmartPricing your friend. Just like the search ranking algorithm, we can't know exactly how SmartPricing works -- but we sure know where it's headed. Google has ever-so-clearly told you that it's going to reward publishers who give advertisers a good return-on-investment (ROI), at the expense of those who don't. That translates into one simple principle: are you showing those ads to visitors who are qualified to buy the products being advertised?. This principle should be in your thoughts when building content, positioning ads (or deciding not to display ads!), etc.
- Don't be one of those AdSense publishers with absolutely 0 diversification of income. Have your backup plan. Have ongoing experiments with affiliate sales. Maintain a database of advertisers that have appeared on your website, so you could try to sell ads directly if you had to.
- Don't let Google decide which pages to put ads on. That's what you do when you put AdSense on every damn page; you let Google decide where to put ads, where to put crummy ads, and whether to give you a SmartPricing penalty because they put crummy ads on high-traffic pages, or put good ads on pages that won't deliver highly-qualified traffic. Make your own deliberate decisions about this. Start with your highest-traffic pages, and when you see a mismatch between the customer demographics of a page and the ads being shown there, take off the AdSense and replace it with house ads that will take only the appropriate visitors to the appropriate pages for that product/service.
- Don't let Google tell you what stats are important. Most AdSensers are obsessed with checking their AdSense stats page -- but these are not the stats you would ask for if you were sitting down and designing a business. Face it: you're staring at those stats because they were free and you're too lazy to go create the stats you really want to see. Make an active decision about what numbers you do need to see, and buy/build systems that supply them. Make sure your numbers include variance, so you know when you're really seeing a significant change, instead of a statistically insignificant blip. Don't be like the AdSense herd that runs around hollering "omigod -- my revenue is down 50% this week", oblivious to the fact that there's so much variation in their revenue that a 50% 1-week change is completely normal.
- Know where your traffic comes from. Don't be like the innumerable AdSensers who post "omigod -- my traffic is cut in half today!" but don't have a clue what really happened. This takes some work, but the Zipf distribution of traffic for most websites means there's only a few pages and search term categories that account for most of your traffic. You should be able to construct web log analysis that tells you immediately whether that 50% reduction in traffic is across the board, or due to a loss of one particular search term.
- Know where your revenue comes from. Google makes this pretty hard, but if it were easy to separate yourself from the herd, then there wouldn't be a herd. Channels can help you narrow down which pages produce the most revenue. Then it's down to studying ads/advertisers/products, making some educated guesses, constructing your own bids in AdWords to get an idea what keywords are actually going for, and so on. Remember, for every key factor that is difficult to measure accurately, there is some measurement that is better than nothing.
1 Puhleeze, don't trot out that old canard about how the TOS prevents you talking to advertisers -- it prevents you talking to advertisers about their AdSense ads, nothing more.
