Introduction to Google Adsense for Marketing Professionals

Introduction to Google Adsense For Marketing Professionals

Contents

1. How Will Your Website Perform?
2. Supporting Your Google Adsense
3. Display Templates
4. Advertisement Relevancy
5. Reporting

1.  How Will Your Website Perform?

There are number tools available to webmasters to determine whether Adsense is a viable business option.  Firstly checking the raw access logs provided by your hosting company will give you an indication, not only of homepage traffic but which other sections are receiving the most traffic, how your discussion forums are performing etc.  Secondly, your Google Page Rank is obviously an indication of the number of websites linking back to yours but also an excellent indicator of how your website is performing on search engine results pages and what type of presence you have within you industry sector.

Your Alexa Page will give you a further indication of website traffic and website traffic improvement or decline.  Alexa uses a complicated algorithm to determine this but in simple terms your website receives a score based on 3 months of aggregated traffic and will provide comparisons for your site and competing websites.  Finally, Google provide an Adsense calculator to predict income.  Most measurement tools are notoriously unpredictable (which I will expand on later) but do provide an excellent method of justifying your decisions internally.

In summary Google Adsense will always provide a little pocket money from your personal portfolio and taking the step to install Google Adsense will give you first hand experience of management and implementation.   I am of the opinion that installing Google Adsense to your business website distracts from your core competency – for instance if you are an online retailer why do you want to be using Google Adsense to promote other products or services.  As a basic guideline if you are a community website with at least 15,000 unique visitors per month you should be looking at Google Adsense revenue of around $500 if your management strategy is designed to support Adsense revenue.

2. Supporting your Google Adsense

Good management of your Google Adsense account will yield improving results.  Many of the basic principles are the same as good website management.  Make sure you have a buoyant Search Engine Optimization policy i.e. Meta Tags installed on every page, active link trading and article submissions, a good site map targeted keywords.

Every website needs a process of data capture.  This will give you the opportunity to communicate with your visitors directly.  This can be a simple ‘newsletter sign up’ or a registered user section for viewing article libraries etc.  Ultimately this will provide a live database with which to promote your product portfolio, drive new registered uses and create maximum level of exposure for your Google Adwords.

Finally, community forums and message boards are an excellent money-spinner for Google Adsense and in my experience the best.  Simply installing Google Adsense into the footer of every message as compulsory will ensure that your Google Adsense is spread across every discussion.  What’s more the content of the discussion will be indexed ensuring that Google Adsense is relevant to each individual discussion.

3. Display Templates

Google offer a number of templates for your Adsense including a sponsored mini search engine – ‘Adsense For Search’ and ‘YouTube Video Units’.  As a Webmaster you’ll be aware of recent trends for the size of adverts.  I remember when large leader board adverts were the precedent.  Now it seems most webmasters have opted for a much more subtle approach and your designer will enjoy the combinations of colour and size when implementing into your design. 

4. Advertisement Relevancy

As a Webmaster or as a newbie to Google Adsense you will soon face the challenge of making your adverts relevant.  I have had a number of instances where Google simply won’t index the right content on the page.  There is an excellent solution.

By installing ‘<!-- google_ad_section_start --> at the start of the coding you would like to be indexed and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> at the end this will ensure that the exact keywords and content you would like to be indexed directly effect the relevancy of your adverts.  NB.  It may take a little while to syndicate but when it does the adverts will be 100% relevant.

5. Reporting

Google Adsense offers a number of different reporting options.  If you have followed the basic principles mentioned in this report then you can rest easy that you are doing all that you can to maximise your return.  However, there are two useful tools.  URL channel reporting enables you to see how each of your websites is responding.  URL channel reporting can be easily implemented using the Google Adsense admin panel.

Darren Henwood,
Director,
HeirQ Marketing Consultancy,
darren.henwood@heirq.com,
http://www.heirq.com