7 Scary Google Adsense Truths

[intelliot]

7 Scary Google Adsense Truths
By Christopher Knight

A month ago, you read about my positive comments about Google's Adsense program that allows even small-time publishers to make incremental revenue from their website archives and more. Today, and after many comments from Ezine-Tips readers and some experiments I've been doing with Adsense -- I'm going to share an essay with you on when Adsense may not be sensible for your business or organization.

First, if you are going to experiment with Adsense; don't make the same mistake I did. I ran without Adsense tracking scripts for the first 3 months of the program, even when 4 figures in monthly revenue were coming in from the program. After running a highly modified tracking script (that you can find by doing a Google search for "adsense scripts") -- I was shocked to learn many truths that I'm not sure I was prepared to learn.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #1 Your may be supporting competitors ads on your website without knowing it. Google's program does allow you to URL filter out ads that you don't want to see appear; but without Adsense tracking scripts you may not know all of the competitors that you are assisting with your site. Solution is to read Adsense click through reports at least once a week and update your URL filter.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #2 You may be alarmed to know that your subscription sign-up page or advertising media-kit page has a very high Adsense CTR. High CTR is good, right? Generally it does mean more money for you in the short term, but if Adsense is stealing high value desired audience responses -- it is not sensible. Without tracking you may never know which pages in your site are being clicked by your audience. Solution is to review the CTR reports often and remove Adsense from pages that are in direct conflict with your most desired audience response(s).

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #3 Unlike other ads that you can force a new web page to open in response to their clicks -- with Adsense, you do not have this option. In a typical month if you lose a few thousand or even tens of thousands of clicks to Adsense -- You must evaluate if the loss in additional page views from your surfer are worth the Adsense revenues. Solution is to review this on a case by case basis. Google does allow you to setup up dozens of channels to track your traffic in addition to the aftermarket scripts that are available, so there are ways to stay on top of your Adsense program impact.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #4 If you sell advertising on your website and you have Adsense prominently displaced on your site -- what is the incentive for your potential advertisers to pay you for a high CPM based advertising campaign if they can just buy Google Adwords for less risk? If you are going to make Adsense prominent on your site and want to target key advertisers, you can ban them from showing up by filtering their URL within the Adsense program settings. A better solution if your site can achieve 4-5+ figures in advertising revenue is to make Adsense less prominent than your premium "above-the-fold" advertising placements.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #5 Embarrassing Adsense ads may dilute your expertise or integrity without your permission. For example, last week I noticed our EmailUniverse site was serving up spam ads were for $99 you can get millions of email addresses to spam. Yikes! I quickly banned them, but spammers buying Adwords on Google are as common as the number of strands of grass in my front yard. Google does not give you the ability to ban or filter out a set of keywords yet. Solution is to either URL filter them out within the Adsense settings or remove Adsense all together from pages that seem to serve up embarrassing ads.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #6 Not uploading an Adsense Alternate ad is a foolish waste of space. When Adsense can not determine the category of an individual page within your site, it serves up PSA's (Public Service Announcements) for various causes. This dilutes your expertise and makes it look like you can't attract quality advertisers for your website. Solution is to always include an Adsense Alternate. For example, in some of our Adsense sites, I setup an EzineQueen ad (that I'm presently endorsing as a great starter guide for ezine publishing newbies) in case Adsense can't figure out an appropriate set of contextual ads for that page. This ensures our audience members get an ad of some value rather than a faceless PSA ad that lowers the consistency of our websites.

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #7 Probably the biggest reason to scrap the entire Adsense program is because you could lose sales to key products you also sell on your website. If you make thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in product or service sales from your website per month -- perhaps Adsense is not sensible at all for your site. The only way to know for sure is to test; but you may be risking significant revenue in your test.

[Will.Spencer]

Originally Posted by intelliot

When Adsense is Not Sensible Truth #6 Not uploading an Adsense Alternate ad is a foolish waste of space. When Adsense can not determine the category of an individual page within your site, it serves up PSA's (Public Service Announcements) for various causes.

I have been playing with the AdSense backfill ads from AllFeeds.com.

They display only when AdSense can't find an ad.

Upside: Revenue you didn't have before.
Downside: AllFeeds ads are ugly, compared to AdSense ads.
Downside: Price per click is very low, compared to AdSense.

[jjpowers]

Thanks for the "heads up" Intelliot.

[cvrk3]

Thanks for sharing the info and experience. However i have the following observations:
You would not have the additional revenue without the program. Google provides you an opportunity and freedom to tweak the program to suit your principles. i find this a great advantage. Now that you are aware of the potential "pitfalls" , you can certainly tweak the scripts to suit your business policy. As far as providing links to your competitors, even though i do understand that you provide an opportunity to your visitors to go to a competitor, i think this can not be hleped in the present day scenrios.

[Anonymous]

I think adds could often steal coustomers from you. For example if you have a hosting company, and you have adsense adds might appear on your site that offer hosting plans better than your site. I think that it might be better in a way not to have adds directly related to your site.

[intelliot]

It's mainly for content sites which are not designed to sell anything. They make money when they normally would not have. Commercial sites, of course, should stick to being ad-free and focusing on selling their hosting plans

[Anonymous]

Originally Posted by intelliot

It's mainly for content sites which are not designed to sell anything. They make money when they normally would not have. Commercial sites, of course, should stick to being ad-free and focusing on selling their hosting plans

I totally agree.

On sites where you are pitching a product or service, it may not make sense to have Adsense ads.

I wrote a follow up article about how ezine publishers can make a few bucks with Adsense:

Ezine Revenue Generation - The Adsense Way
http://EmailUniverse.com/ezine-tips/...43&cat=revenue

Cheers,
Christopher M. Knight
http://Emailuniverse.com/