Adsense - Basic Ad Placement

One of the most important aspects of running an Google AdSense campaign on your pages is getting the advertisements noticed by your visitors. Here we'll discuss the basics of good ad placement.

One well known fact by most webmasters is that ads placed above the fold performs very well. In case you don't know that the "fold" means, imagine that you fold your monitor in half horizontally. The area above that fold is where ads perform best (in general). This area is illustrated in figure 1.

However this is of course a rule of thumb and does not apply to all cases.

Each and every site will have different locations within their pages that perform better than others. What you must do constantly is to:

1. Place Ad
2. Test/Track Ad (Using channels)
3. Change
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 over and over

This simple optimization technique is very simple but yet not carried out by all webmasters. Badly placed advertisements will yield very low Click Through Rates (CTR). Just think about it. You have a site with great content, good traffic but a CTR of 1%. With optimization you could increase the CTR to 3~5% which would mean a 3~5 fold increase in your revenue.

Anyway enough about that as all that will be covered later.

A useful page to visit when you are starting off is provided by Google. Have a look at this page for some advice from Google on AdSense Optimization.

As you can see from their "heat map" most of the locations that perform well are above the fold and to the left of the page. Again this is just a generic view of ad placement but it's a good starting point.

Successful AdSense placement also requires you to step into the shoes of your visitor. For example, if you have a page which is one long article an advert placed right at the end of the article may be a good idea (especially if you have little other navigation links at the bottom of your page. This is because the visitor will finish reading the article and then is presented with the ads when they are wondering "what next?". It's a great way of getting them to notice your advert and therefore increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad.

What is Google Page Rank?

Your Google PageRank tells how important your website is. The importance of your website is gauged by how many websites link back to you. And it is not as simple as it seems. Even the websites linking to you too must have a good Google PageRank. This means the websites linking to you should also be linked to by websites being linked to other, well-linked websites. So in a sense, every website being considered for your PageRank should enjoy a higher PageRank.

The inbound links to your website are counted as “votes”. So the more votes you have, the higher PageRank your earn. You can view a website’s (including yours) by installing (if it is not already installed) the Google Toolbar that resides in the upper part of your browser once the Google toolbar is installed. In the Google PageRank button there is a green bar that ranges from 0/10 to 10/10. As a said, the websites sending you inbound links should also enjoy higher PageRanks (PR). The more links you get from higher PageRank websites, the less links you have to garner in order to attain a higher PageRank.

People have written complete research papers on how Google calculates PageRanks but if you are reading this just to search engine optimize your website, then the only thing worth knowing is that you should get inbound links from trusted websites that get lots of targeted traffic — this is the only thing that matter as far as your PageRank goes.

PageRanks used to be taken seriously a long time back, but not now. They do matter, but not to a great extent. You can enjoy top rankings in the search pages even with a PageRank 1.

PPC Advertising – The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign

Often, sites view SEO and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC for Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.