Adsense Is Bad For Marketing

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By John W. Furst on Wednesday, January 16. 2008 | 15 Replies

Be careful With Adsense!

It appears to me that AdSense seems to be one of the first choices for monetizing any Web site, including Blogs. People seem to get very enthusiastic about it — having the big, fat checks of Joel Comm (↑) and Shoemoney (↑) in memory and some other stories that sounded like, “Wow, Google just paid me 5 bucks (US$) for each click on my site!”

Of course that sounds great. But isn't the reality a little bit different.

Not everybody gets 5 dollar a click and certainly not every time.
How many clicks do you get anyway and at what range?
And are you happy with your click-through-rate (CTR)?
By the way: Since the US-dollar is devalued so much, anybody outside the US-dollar currency looses additionally.

I mentioned the CTR (click-through-rate) for a specific reason. Google observes the average CTR of your entire AdSense Account as well as other factors of your sites with AdSense on it. In gerneral this is referred to as “Google AdSense Smart Pricing Strategy” “Google” for it, if you are interested in the details.

Bottom Line: If you have sites with an average CTR below 2%, you are simply not treated as a publisher of quality content. That means Google will not pay you the regular, full amount for each click.

That's supposed to be beneficial for the advertisers. Fortunately all you need to do in order to regain normal status of your AdSense account is to completely remove AdSense from the sites that have CTR below 2% (make it 3% to be on the safe side). It should take a week till your status is restored.

Regular readers of my Blog will remember that I had AdSense on it for some time. However CTR was very low and it seems that other Blogs with Internet Business/Marketing related content have the same problems. It seems to be a market that does not really work for AdSense.

“AdSense does not work for Blogs with a focus on Internet Business, Internet Marketing.”

Anyway: Should you want that people leave your site? It's kind of counterproductive, if you write quality content. So you have to decide what you want to do:

Do you want people to read what you write?
Or do you want people to click away for some bucks?

What is your opinion on this matter? Leave a comment below. Let us know!

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: An excellent treatment of the same subject can be found on Courtney Cuttle's Blog: How To get Worthless Adsense Clicks (↑)

Defined tags for this entry: adsense

, marketing

, money

Posted by John W. Furst in Coaching, Marketing, Web Site Development on 2008-01-16 14:50 | Trackbacks (2) | Comments (13)

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Comments

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Adsense can be a great program for making money but I think you've hit the nail on the head with our explanation of how the CTR works, and let's face it, most of us do have more than one site so the 'smart pricing' is a killer.

#1 Carl from www.carlgalloway.com on 2008-01-16 21:42 (Reply)

Well, from different case studies it's not so clear where the CTR threshold is and which other factors are involved. As Google is a huge data collector I am sure there smart-pricing model is indeed smart and uses a big set of input data.

Bottom line: If you want to use Adsense then you MUST optimize ALL of your sites to be great Adsense performers. Simply placing it on your sites can cost you -- some say -- lots of money. You have to monitor and tweak it.

#1.1 John W. Furst from blog.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-16 23:13 (Reply)

I want people to read what I write, and then click on some ads.

But --

That's never actually worked out for me. Apparently, you can't have the best of both worlds.

So lately I've been getting a little disenfranchised with the performance of the Adsense, and have been thinking of just going away with it entirely.

Your article here just persuaded me a little further to focus just on reading. --www.foreclosurefish.com

#2 Nick on 2008-01-16 22:42 (Reply)

I have a blog with a few hundred visitors a day. And in last six months I have earned about $2 in total. I myself have NEVER clicked on a Google ad on any webpage. So how can I expect my visitors to do so? You are right in gathering the numbers. Its just gives shape to my cynicism towards Adsense, Some ppl still claim to earn a lot from them though...dunno how. --www.hershbhardwaj.co.uk/blog

#3 Hersh Bhardwaj on 2008-01-17 02:25 (Reply)

2 US$ is not much. How few pounds (GBP) is that right now. That's another problem, isn't it. The US$ sucks big time nowadays. Thanks George Bush.

#3.1 John W. Furst from blog.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-17 23:00 (Reply)

Quote: "Should you want that people leave your site? It's kind of counterproductive, if you write quality content. So you have to decide what you want to do:
+ Do you want people to read what you write?
+ Or do you want people to click away for some bucks?"

Exactly! I recently came to realise that the underlying principle of Adsense is that your content should not solve the reader’s problem. If you solve their problem, they won’t need to click the ads.

So, good content decreases the chance of getting a click - but with blogs, the whole point is to write good content (and blogs can't survive without it). Blogs just don't work well with Adsense for a whole host of reasons. If you want to make good money with Adsense, consider creating some Made For Adsense sites...

#4 Stephen Cronin from www.scratch99.com on 2008-01-17 03:44 (Reply)

Wow, you have a great Blog.

Hey people you have to check out Stephen Cronin's Blog

He writes about web development using PHP, MySQL, CSS, Javascript, Ajax & about blogging via WordPress.

www.scratch99.com

#4.1 John W. Furst from blog.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-17 23:05 (Reply)

John,

Thanks a lot for the mention!

#4.1.1 Stephen Cronin from www.scratch99.com on 2008-01-18 03:07 (Reply)

Nick, Hersh, Stephen,

Adsense works, if you
+ trigger the right ads for your niche topic
+ trigger ads that pay more

Both is achieved with extensive keyword research. Based on that research you need to write your articles.

The articles basically presell the ads.

Most people I know who are successful with Adsense have mini sites with only a couple of pages. Driving free traffic to those sites is another topic by the way.

Those people don't have 1 or 2, but have 10, 20, 30, and more sites. They monitor their site performance thoroughly and tweak it into the profitable direction. All of them use other forms of monetization, too.

Anyway, this is not about writing what you want to write or what you are good at. Success with Adsense requires a certain 'work ethic'. Bloggers usually think differently.

There is not output without the proper input, not even with a system that is as simple as Adsense.

By the way: Most Internet Marketing related Blogs monetize with products of their own or appropriate affiliate products. Yours John.

#5 John W. Furst from www.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-17 22:55 (Reply)

John,

Everything you say here, is absolutely spot on. I hadn't thought about actively trying to trigger high paying ads for a particular post. I guess I'm going to have to try that out. Although as you say, mini sites are the way to go for Adsense.

Anyway, great post, great comment and from what I'm seeing great site! Thanks.

#5.1 Stephen Cronin from www.scratch99.com on 2008-01-18 03:21 (Reply)

Hey John, excellent post! I agree 100%, that's why I highly recommend WidgetBucks. I've been earning almost twice as much with WidgetBucks compared to AdSense. Plus, the ads are optimized for WordPress, Blogger, and even TypePad. Check out this WidgetBucks review for some more info.

#6 Seth on 2008-06-14 08:36 (Reply)

I have never made more than $5 a month. I thought I was doing something wrong, but I guess not. --www.cashflow420.com

#7 Cashflow420 on 2008-07-14 07:12 (Reply)

I agree 100%. I remember when I first got wind of Adsense. I think it was Joel Comm that I got the info. about "the perfect business", which at the time, it really was. I thought, this is something that you can make money from without having to answer to customer service, and the rest of the headaches of dealing with silly questions. Like everybody, I had visions of making a killing just by getting traffic to my blogs; and the cool think is I did make a LOT of money. Sometimes up to $4,000 plus, just sending traffic to all of my posts. It was a win win situation, but as anything internet related, the spammers got out of control, and started building crappy pages with no content. I saw my earnings go from $100-$250 a day, to $25 a day and less. Google stepped in, and the rest is history. --restaurantssacramento.blogspot.com

#8 LW Seals on 2008-07-23 23:50 (Reply)

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