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Every one seems to know about AdSense. Why then, so many users complain about making 24$ a year from Adsense ads? I learned from trial an error and trying different things on different blogs. I don’t claim to be an expert but I do know useful tips.

AdSense is a great ways to add revenue to your blog but there are a few things you have to know and understand before profiting. Are you familiar with channels, smart pricing, CTR (Click through rate) and how to optimize your page?

CTR

CTR or “Click-Through Rate” is a percentage that is calculated by dividing the total number of times an AdSense Ad is clicked by the total number of times the Ad is shown (Page Impressions).

Here is an example: If you have get 100 AdSense ad impressions a day and your visitors click on those ads 10 times.

your CTR would be:

(10 clicks) divided by (100 Page Impressions) = .10 or 10% CTR

Smart Pricing

Here is Google’s own words Smart Pricing. What this means is if I get 2$ a click for an ad on digital cameras, you might not get 2$ for the same ad. If Google feels your site has less chances in returning a “actionable business result” then your click will get a discount. You can end up receiving less than an advertiser’s lowest bid!.

1–Your site’s niche must be relevant to your ads or you will get lower commissions per click.

2–I’ve notices on many sites that traffic from Us, Canada, and Europe will generally pay the highest.

3–Time of day an ad is clicked! Marketers spend more money during us business hours than at night so the same click at night will pay less.

4–What keyword did a visitor use to find your site in search engines? Google knows the value of keywords. Users finding your site through a good keyword and then clicking an ad will generate more per click than a visitor who found your site through junk a site.

5–Just one poorly converting site can impact the smart pricing on an entire account.

6–Remove ads that are doing poorly. Smart Pricing is evaluated every week.

7–Use channels for monitoring your ads performances.

Channels

If you use AdSense on more than one blog be even in different zone’s on the same page you absolutely need to understand channels. Channels are a powerful tool for monitoring your ad’s performances and improving your smart pricing.

To work with channels you must be logged in to your AdSense account and click on the tab called AdSense setup, then on “AdSense for Content”. Create your ad and specify colors…Then click on continue.

You will see the following screen:

Click to see image.

To add a channel, all you do is click “add new channel and type in a name for that new channel.

Channels are attributed an id. You have to copy and paste the channel id into your AdSense code like so: (I only added this line, Google_ad_channel=”4964873922”)

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-0458773089058331″;
/* 468×60, date de création 30/01/08 */
google_ad_slot = “0709567424″;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_channel=”4964873922”
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js“>
</script>

Now you can create channels, to use them and see what they do, log into your AdSense account and click “ advanced reports”. You will see “channel data”. From there you will be able to track which adds are he most performant. You will also see the ads with a low conversion rate. The low conversion ads should be deleted since they lower your overall smart pricing.

Optimizing a Web Page

Another importing thing worth considering is optimizing your pages. Optimizing pages doesn’t only improve your search engine rankings but helps serve relevant ads. I have written a post earlier about page optimization. I urge you to read it. The tips are simple and fast to implement and your results will be well worth your time.

You will learn about keywords, titles, meta tags and more.

Forcing Relevant Ads

Forcing relevant ads, also called section targeting is quite simple. Use HTML tags to emphasize a page section:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
your relevant content here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Read more about Section Targeting right from Google.

The last thing I think is important to mention is that you can exclude content from areas of your blog from influencing your ads. Like the sidebar for example. It often contains links and graphics that could interfere with your contextual ads.

If you want AdSense to exclude an area of your blog when choosing which ad to pop into place use the following code:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Content to be ignored
<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

So there you go, a complete coarse on AdSense, hope this helps you and please drop a comment if you are aware of any useful tips.

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