Two Adsense Questions

webman · #1 (**permalink**) 02-06-2008, 05:48 PM

1. My first question: I'm curious to know how long it took you guys to have a supplemental income or at least a ROI(return on investment) from adsense? I know with everybody it's different but I'm just curious

2. How do you overcome this Smartpricing thing? Just recently, I found that my weather Blog was serving PSA's with 0 CTR's so I got rid of them. I heard if I didn't, it would affect my other blogs CPC. Is Google still holding cards close to it's chest?

lisa · #2 (**permalink**) 02-06-2008, 06:07 PM

1. My success was immediate but that's only because I joined when the program first launched and I already had plenty of traffic.

2. I don't get many PSA's so I guess I can't speak much on that.

guzie · #3 (**permalink**) 02-07-2008, 09:25 AM

My main website is about southwestern gardening. I added adsense ads about 3 years ago. At first the revenue was very small.

Right now I am very pleased with adsense revenue.

What did I do to turn things around? I added good original content to my web pages. I wrote numerous gardening articles to article directories. Answered lots of questions at yahoo answers. Sign ups to my gardening newsletter went up by almost 75%.

I am not familiar with smartpricing maybe you can give us more information on the subject?

webman · #4 (**permalink**) 02-07-2008, 01:27 PM

Someone said(I believe Jensense) that since April of 2004, Google started a program where if your click-through-rates didn't convert(buy or sign-up) for advertisers, you would get smart priced.

That means your ads could potentially be worth less then even the lowest bid. Good for Adwords but bad for us publishers.

Also I heard it not only affects that particular ad or even just your site the ad is hosted on. But all sites that are on your account.

You still get paid per click it's just to get higher prices they have to convert.

Any ideas to overcome this?

lisa · #5 (**permalink**) 02-07-2008, 02:55 PM

I'm not really sure there's much you can do to combat that since you have no control over what ads show up. Different ads are going to convert differently on different sites. Say you have a site on something very rare like Mongolian monkeys (LOL). I would image the ads would not be as targeted as if you had something like "MySpace Layouts". So obviously the Mongolian site is going to be hurt more by the smart pricing simply because their content is not as targeted to the ads.

So I'm not really sure there's anything you can do since you don't control what ads show up on your pages.

webman · #6 (**permalink**) 02-08-2008, 10:14 PM

O.K.(bummer lol)...

It's Just for some reason the ads are totally off topic on my Weather blog. What's the best way to get the mediabots to show more relevant ads.

lisa · #7 (**permalink**) 02-09-2008, 12:16 AM

That's a hard question because you never know what kind of ads are in the Google database. Say your article focuses on Fish bait but there aren't a lot of ads on fish bait. Google may show ads on water polo (another water sport) and that would be the close it can get.

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