Adsense

As costs of PPC campaigns are increasing, internet marketers are more than even under the pressure to deliver positive results. The performance of PPC campaigns is dependent on following factors:
- The impression rate

- Your ad position

- Click thru rate (CTR)

- Conversion rate
Finding the right balance between impression rate, ad position and clicks is the starting point to successful PPC advertising. Before exploring tips to help your campaign perform better, let's quickly sum-up the concept how Google displays your ads in its sponsored results:
* Daily budget controls frequency of your ad display
The frequency is expressed by number of impressions. If your daily budget is not high enough, your ad may not show all the time (meaning you don't have enough impressions per day).
* Ad position depends on the Rank Number
The higher the rank number, the higher is your ad's position on the page. The rank number is calculated based on the following formula:

Rank Number = CPC (Cost Per click) x CTR (click through rate) x (Ad quality)
Now we're ready to explore what practices are more likely to help us improve PPC campaigns performance:
1/ Improve Ad Delivery
If your ad does not show up every time when searches are performed under your keyword, it may be a sign that your daily budget is not high enough. As you now know, how frequent of your ad display is controled by the daily budget. If you would like your ad to be shown more frequently, please consider to increase your daily budget in order to receive a maximum exposure for your ad.
Normally, you have 50% margin for your daily budget. For example, if your desired daily budget is $10.00 per day, you can set your actual daily budget on Google to $15.00 per day, because your actual spending is based on your click thru rate, by setting the daily budget higher will allow your ad to get more exposure, but your actual spending may still be in your desired daily budget range.
However, be sure to monitor your daily advertising costs and if they are rising too high, decrease the budget on the safe level.
2/ Improve Ad Delivery per Keyword
Each campaign can have one or more adroups. An AdGroup is a group of keywords and ads that will display when those keywords are searched for on Google. You may have experienced a situation when only few keywords out of the whole AdGroup trigger your ad. The explanation lies again behind the daily budget that controls a number of impressions for your campaign. These impressions are distributed between individual AdGroups and further between individual keywords. So it may happen that some keywords in a particular Adgroup have more impressions than the others, meaning some keywords trigger your ad more frequently than others.
If you want to improve the ad delivery for your targeted keywords, you can consider splitting your keywords and creating a new campaign for keywords with low impressions. This should improve the frequency with which they will trigger your ad.
3/ Optimize your Adgroups
As mentioned above, each campaign has one or more adroups that all share campaign's impressions. Often, the impressions are not divided evenly between adgroups. So it may happen that some adgroups have more impressions and show their ad(s) more frequently than others. It is a very similar scenario as with keywords we just described above.
To improve results of your low-performing adgroups, you can consider to create a new campaign for them in order to increase the frequency with witch they show your ad on Google.
4/ Analyse your Clicks
Make sure the clicks are made for specific, targeted keywords. If you're getting lots of clicks on non-targeted keywords, consider reducing Max CPC and/or your ad position in order to improve your ROI. Similarly, you can raise bids for targeted keywords that are performing well.
5/ Optimize your Ads
Make sure you bid on targeted keywords, create compelling ads and link them to relevant content on your website. The keywords you chose will segment the market and target your desired audience. If you won't chose wisely, you'll finish targeting the wrong market and wasting your advertising budget. The ad you create needs to attract attention of your prospects. It needs to communicate your unique selling feature - in other words, what makes your product/service different from others and why a visitor should visit your website. Be specific about your offer and include call to action. Lastly, guide visitors to the content on your website where they can access more information about the offer advertised. The landing page should also clearly state what is the next natural step to make - buy your product, download the white paper, sign up for a free trial, etc.
PPC management requires lots of work and testing but if you stick to the basics you can make money instead of losing them. Remember, the only measure that matters on the Internet is the profit you make.

Adsense Calculations

Here is an explanation about the Google AdSense calculation formula to help new AdSense beginners to understand and optimize their AdSense revenues.
- Click through rate (CTR): is the number of clicks an ad unit receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is shown (impressions).
- Effective CPM (eCPM) : is the cost per 1000 impressions, CPM is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands.
- Impressions: represents the number of times an ad is displayed on Google or on sites or products in Google’s ad network. A page impression is counted each time an ad unit is displayed on a publisher’s site. Page impressions are used when calculating reports for AdSense publishers, rather than ad impressions
- Clicks: the number of generated clicks by all your ads.
- Earnings: is total money that would be given by Google AdSense for publishers who participate in their affiliate programs.
- Earnings Per Click (EPC) : this is the average cost per click that would be given to publishers depends on the advertiser’s bid, sum of the click, page impressions. However, it’s still being a Google AdSense Secret.
The formula for Google AdSense calculation is:
CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) * 100
EPC = Earnings per Click
eCPM = (Earnings / Impressions) * 1000
eCPM = CTR * EPC * 10
Earnings = eCPM * Impressions / 1000
Earnings = CTR * EPC * Impressions / 100
Example: I’ve got 31 clicks for 1700 impressions with an EPC of 0.05 $
CTR = (31 / 1700) * 100 = 1.82352 = 1.83 %
eCPM = 1.82352 * 0.05 * 10 = 0.91176 = 0.92 $
eCPM = (1.55 / 1700) * 1000 = 0.9117 = 0.92 $
Earnings = 0.91176 * 1700 / 1000 = 1.549992 = 1.55 $
Earnings = 1.82352 * 0.05 * 1700 / 100 = 1.549992 = 1.55 $

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

6 More Tips for Affiliate Marketing on Blogs

Almost four years ago I wrote a post here on BLOG with 10 Tips for Using Affiliate Programs on Your Blog.
In that post I suggested the following tips:

1. Consider your Audience - start with your reader when considering what to promote. Relevancy is key.
2. Genuine Recommendations and personal endorsements always work best - recommendations of things you personally genuinely like are always best.
3. Link to Quality Products - the better the products that you recommend the more your readers will thank you for suggesting it.
4. Contextual Deep Links work Best - in general you’ll have more luck promoting a product from within a post than on a sidebar
5. Consider positioning of links - links/banners that are in parts of your post/blog that where readers look work best (top of posts for example)
6. Traffic levels are Important - the more eyeballs your promotion gets the better
7. Diversify without Clutter - some products work better for some audiences than others - so promoting a variety of products can be good - promoting too many is of course not good.
8. Be Transparent - don’t try to trick people into clicking your links. I’ve changed my stance slightly on this - I used to put (aff) next to any affiliate link but in the end found readers were just annoyed by it or didn’t understand what it meant. Now I use site-wide disclaimers to talk about it.
9. Combine with other Revenue Streams - every blog is different, some will work better than others with affiliate marketing while others will work better with adveritising. However I find on many blogs advertising and affiliate marketing can work well in tandem.
10. Track results - if you don’t have some way of working out how your promotions are converting you could be wasting your time.

As you can see - I’ve changed my opinion a little on the way that I express #8 but apart from that I still subscribe to all of the advice in that post. However I’ve also learned a lot more about affiliate marketing. In fact over the last four years the revenue that I make from affiliate marketing has continued to grow - to the point that it now probably makes up around a third of my online income (it varies from month to month).
So I thought it might be time to build upon the 10 tips above with some more lessons that I’ve learned.

11. Build Your Network Before You Need It

Perhaps the biggest thing that I’ve learned about affiliate marketing is that it works best the bigger and stronger your network is. I mentioned in my first list that ‘traffic levels are important’ - this is true, but connected to it is your ‘network’.
Whether it be loyal blog readers and subscribers, your email list, your Twitter connections, your Facebook friends or some other social network - the better your network the better you’ll do at driving affiliate sales.
It’s not just about size - the size of your network is only part of what I’m talking about here. Also important is the depth of relationship that you have with your network/readers and the amount of trust that they have in you. If you have consistently helped people and been useful to them over a long time they’re probably more likely to respond to your recommendations.
Relevancy/Focus counts - The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example - I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network. I personally would rather have a smaller network who all shared the one interest than a large one who just signed up to get a prize.
Lastly, a network takes time to build - if you think you’ll be doing some affiliate marketing at some point in the future - start building your network now, before you need it. This gives you time to build the depth of relationships, trust and focus of your network before you begin promoting affiliate products.

12. Try different Mediums

I’ve alluded to this above already but one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last few years is promotions work differently on different mediums.
For example: some affiliate promotions seem to convert best in a blog post, others work best when you send an email to a list you’ve been building while others seem to take off on Twitter or other social media sites.
The key is to try different approaches, to have build up your network before you need it (see above) and to track the results for each promotion so you can check what is and isn’t converting.

13. Multiple Promotions of the same Product

I spoke about this at Blog World Expo last year in a session but don’t think I’ve written about it here at ProBlogger. Here’s what I’ve found:
If you write a single blog post promoting an affiliate product you’ll have a certain percentage of readers buy the product (the % varies a lot). If you are able to follow that up with a different type of post a few days later it can reinforce the promotion.
Here’s how I’ve done it on my photography blog:

1. Blog Post 1 - a post announcing a new product, giving some benefits, sharing who the product is relevant for etc.
2. Blog Post 2 - a post a few days later that is an interview with the person behind the product - exploring why they made it, expanding upon what it includes, who it’s for and giving the product context. I’d try to also include some tips or suggestions for readers who don’t buy the product in such an interview so it is a useful post for everyone.
3. Email List - later in the week email out the subscriber list linking to the previous posts and reinforcing the promotion.
4. Tweets/Followups - I would also include a few Tweets about the promotion through the week and would consider a 3rd blog post a week later - perhaps some reader reviews of the product.

The key is to not spam your network but to find interesting and useful ways to draw attention to the product multiple times over a week or two so as to reinforce it and give those who take a little longer to make a decision the opportunity to get the product.

14. Bonuses Work

There are many techniques that internet marketers use to increase sales of their products. I find some a little ‘cheap’ and ‘nasty’ but many do work. Two that I’ve found less offensive and/or manipulative are where you add value to the affiliate promotion by either adding a bonus of your own to the offer and/or getting the person behind the product to offer a bonus or discount just for your readers.
I’ve done this a number of times on my blogs and have found that conversions are significantly higher.

15. It takes Time

A theme that regular readers of my Blog will recognize is that making money from blogs (through any method) takes time. While an affiliate program does have the potential to make you a lot of money very quickly - it almost always comes after a lot of work and once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort building out your network.
The early days of building your network may see very little (if any) results. I personally earned very little from affiliate marketing in my first year or two of blogging but as I mentioned above in the last year or two it’s really begun to exponentially increase - partly as a result of getting smarter with my promotions but partly just as my network grew in size and quality.

16. Timing is Important

One of the things I’ve learned over the last week of launching my own product is just how much difference there can be in the rate of sales at different times of the day and week. It would vary depending upon the location of most of a blog’s readers but for me sales have been significantly up during business hours in the USA and on weekdays. No real surprises there.
The lesson translates to promoting products - unless the product has a real focus upon the type of people surfing the web on the weekends or late at night you’ll want to time your promotions to those times of the weeks that your audience is online. Similarly - avoid public holidays - this last week even though we launched the workbook 3 days after Memorial Day in the US I suspect we lost a few sales as some people took the week off.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Happy Adsense

Every Adsense publisher or website owner wants huge traffic drive to their webpage. But things are not always upto expectation. So, there must be some ways so that your webpage should fulfill your expectation.

Below mentioned is a list of 10 genuine ways to make your webpage perform upto your expectation. These strategies can help build your website traffic, subscribers, and customers starting today!

1.) Search Engines

SEO or Optimization of your blog/website is necessary to make your webpage search-engine friendly. Submit your webpage to various search engines and directories to list your online existence .

It is a good idea to submit your webpage to lesser known web directories along with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Listed your website/blog in as many places as possible, will boost your rankings in major search engines as well.

2.) Affiliate Program

Setting up an affiliate program where you pay people for promoting your website/blog will also help to drive quality traffic. But some suique strategy for promotion should be followed to resist negative promotion effects.

Submitting to affiliate program directories help spreading the word about your affiliate program.

3.) Link Exchanges

This is another important aspect of traffic drive campaign. Creating a links page on your site/ blog where you will put links to other non-competing websites in the same industry will help ranking in major search engines.

Personally contact the owners of other websites through email with your proposal to exchange links will serve your purpose. They inturn will link to your website in return.

4.) Post In Forums

As i have already told in few of my older posts that online discussion forums is the most effective way of marketing your website/blog. Posting your responses to people's questions, along with your website/blog url in signature will automatically promote your website in many ways.

5.) Comment On Blogs

Visiting others blogs related to your website topic for commenting on them along with your website URL willl let others know about your website/blog. But be careful while entering your comment. Don't use short comments like "good post", "nice" etc. It is considered as spamming, even readers doesnot get idea about your writing skill or your site.

Add insightful comments about the blog topics, and leave your website link. Your comment and your link will permanently remain on the blog website.

6.) E-Mail Signatures

Create an e-mail "signature" - your name, your website address and a short tagline and allow automatically inclusion of signature to your outgoing mails. This helps promoting your site.

7.) Traffic Exchanges

This is simple but effective idea of exchanging traffic among group of webmasters. Search the web for "traffic exchange" to find those services.

8.) "Pass-Around" Strategy

This is the most most effective promotion technique where the URL of your website spreades like wild fire. Just try creating something of value that people will pass around. It may be a report with useful information that you allow people to give away. It can also be some kind of cool and unusual webpage that people will want to e-mail to all their friends.

Of course, the pass-around item will include your advertisement and your link, spreading the word about your website.

9.) Writing Articles

Writing articles on the topic related to your website along with URL of your website or blog and your author bio will catch attention of mass traffic to visit your webpage. Ezine articles plays important role in this context. Submit your articles to article directories, and allow people to publish your article in their newsletters and websites.

These articles will also help spreading your URL around the web like wildfire. If people find them interesting in reading them, they will regard you as an expert in your trade and will. Thats a good idea for a free publicity?

10.)Last but not least, enrich your blog/ website with quality content and interesting in reading. Readers will self promote your url by words of mouth.