To create your own website to make money with Adsense you need to:

• Buy a Domain name.
• Take Hosting Account.
• Build the website content.
• Apply for Adsense.
• Integrate Adsense code into your website content.

First of all, you need a domain name to put your website on. First this you need to buy a domain name that describes the topic you are building your website for from any of the domain registrars such as GoDaddy. Domain names usually costs you less than $10 for a full year.

Once you have a domain name, you need a place on the web to put your content. For this you need to buy a web site hosting service. For this you tipically spend around $6 to $8 per month.

Once you have the hosting, you then have to actually build the content and upload the content to the hosting server. The content you thus uploaded to the hosting server can then be viewed on web using your domain name. To build content, you should either know HTML (and a web programming language such as ASP or PHP for dynamic sites) or if know nothing about web languages you may buy a website building tool such as XSitePro.

XSitePro is a very good content development tool that has made the process of building a website so easy and is streaks ahead of all the other tools on the market. Within two to three hours you will have worked your way through the tutorial and will be in the position to build your own successful money vehicle. It's literally built to facilitate what this website is talking about and even has an insertion facility for Adsense.

You then have to learn about the basics of how to use Adsense in your site.

For the complete newbie to Adsense, AdsenseHowTo.net has it's limitations as it doesn't go into the very basic stuff of how to get the code, how you change the variables etc. The site focuses on what actually makes money with Adsense and this is down to building the right websites, integrating Adsense correctly and bringing traffic to that website. Therefore you are going to need another source so that you can get to grips with the basics. There are two that I would recommend:

(i) The Google Adsense Help Center - From the people who made the program this is a good tour de force of Adsense and how to use it. They also have some good "heat maps" which give you ad placement ideas depending on the type of website you are building.

(ii) Adsense Forums - Digital Point and Webmaster World both have good Adsense forums if you're the type that can happily sit and sift through thousands of posts.

For more information about Adsense see the following articles:

• Qualifying and Applying for Adsense
• Google Adsense Products

Once you have the website ready, you then need to know how to properly use Adsense in your content. This involves various Adsense optimization techniques.

Follow the link to learn - An Introduction to Adsense Optimization >>

Adsense works best on niche sites that are focussed on a specific topic or niche. Such niche websites allows Google to serve Ads related to that niche and visitors who are interested in that niche will visit again and again if the information provided is valuable to them. So the first thing you need to learn, if you want to make money from Adsense with a website, is to determine what niche to build the website for.

Assuming that your primary interest is to make constant revenue from Adsense, you need to keep the following tips in mind to choose the topic for the website:

Profitable Niche: Make sure that the niche is centered around some high paying keywords. Ads that are displayed on such website tend to pay more money per click. For example if you create a website about "Debt Consolidation", the Ads that are displayed for this content may pay you $3 or $4 for every click on those Ads. On the other hand, if you create a website about say, Jokes, you may get $0.05 a click (if you have Ads to display) if you are lucky. So a website with moderate traffic on a good (read 'profitable') niche may earn you more money than a website with high traffic but in a poor niche.

Low Competition: Make sure that the niche you choose has little competition. If there is high competition for the niche you are working on, it will be very hard for you to appear in the first couple of pages of Google search results. Because search engines are main traffic drivers, it is important to be able to rank decently well on search results.

The easiest way to start is to build a website around a topic that you know something about. Don't look at this as the website that is going to make you rich but as a testing ground to learn all the skills you need to know to build successful websites in different markets that will make you rich. Ones you master the techniques of Adsense optimization, then you may focus on creating niche websites that satisfy the above two conditions (Profitable and low competition).

Well, once you decided on what topic or niche to build a website on, the next step is to actually build the website. so let's see what you need to actually build a website.

Follow the link to learn - How to build my Adsense website >>

Maximizing the CTR means a lot to a publisher who wants to make money with Adsense.

Making maximum possible money with Adsense depends on three factors:

• Maximizing your CTR (Click through rate)

• Maximizing the targeted traffic

• Maximizing the pay per each click.

The techniques you follow to maximize your CTR can not only increase the user responsiveness but also increases the targeted traffic.

Let's see what Google AdSense Engineers has to say about Adsense CTR:

"Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages."

What should you do to increase Adsense CTR?

Webmasters have very diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the the quality of its content, keywords you are targeting, design and layout of your website, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works best.

• Quality Comtent: If you develop a poor quality content website, even if you have high CTR and clicks, you will be getting low priced ads and also nobody will like to add your url to their favorites. But if you have quality content, that keeps the visitors glued, even if you get a little low CTR (not that you will), but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors, too. So the bottom is concentrate on providing quality content that provides value to your visitors. For Adsense, quality content is the king.

• Proper Ad Positioning: Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have.

• Right Ad Formats: As the Google engineers say, more user friendly ads, more widespread tend to do better than towers and others. But you have to decide what work best for you based on your site layout, design etc.

• Right Ad Colors: The colors you use for your Adsense Ad Units also affects the CTR. As a rule you have to use those color that will make the Ads look like an integral part of your content. Blend in colors are often recommended. For more information see our article "How to Optimize Adsense Ad Colors"

Tweak and Experiment

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel and experiment till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, each such experiment will make you loose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in long run.

Click Fraud is by far the most serious problem that the Internet Advertising industry is currently facing. It is next to impossible to prevent or cancel click fraud. We can not stop it from happening but we can, to some extent, control its consequences. Only through constant monitering of the click activity and being on watch constantly, can an advertiser or publisher combat the click fraud and reduce the damage caused.

Now, let's examine what Click Fraud is all about:

What Is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is an illegal activity of clicking internet ads and generating false clicks on PPC ads, that have no chance of conversion, with the intention of profiting from such clicks or to inflate advertiser costs or whatevr may be the reason. This is akin to stealing money from advertisers because they are the ones who has to pay for such clicks.

The main reasons why click fraud can occur are:

• The intention to inflate the advertising costs of a competitor, their by hurting their business.
• The intention to make money (though illegally) from Adsense or such Pay-Per-Click programs, or to increse their CTR and other such selfish motives.
• Extortion - when hackers create software that perform fraudulent clicks and use it to threaten various companies in order to obtain money;
• Jealosy - To hurt publishers (by getting them banned) who are making good money from PPC programs.
• Vengeance - By enemies of the company and people who are not happy with a company like fired employees etc.

How Is It Done?

• Manual clicks - By repetedly clicking on ads manually either because of an offered incentive or personal motive.
• Automated methods: Software applications designed to click on paid ads. Some of these use clever algorithms to determine click behaviours, reaching the performance level of simulating genuine human visitor behavior. Because of ability to destroy all identifying referneces and rotating IPs, Geos etc, the activity from these programs is very hard to detect.

The overall awareness about Click fraud grew significantly among Webmasters and advertisers and they have also become more knowledgeable of the methods used in click fraud and have come to easily detect simple fraudulent click activity.

According to one theory, there has been no real interest from the part of the major search networks that participate in the system, for this puts them at a loss: on one hand, admitting it means making refunds to advertisers, on the other hand fighting it means significantly reducing their gains also. As fraud costs advertisers more and more, the problem has increased in acuity more and more and the big players just have to do something to defend their clients and keep them satisfied with the results they get from advertising programs, as they are the revenue source for many.

How is Google combating Click Fraud?

Google is taking active part in detecting and combating Click fraud as this is important to keep the advertisers happy. Their AdWords program is reportedly generating around 95% of its revenue, and the success of the programs rests on providing a profitable ROI for its advertisers.

The truth is that the battle is still mostly led privately. One just has to keep his eyes wide open and be the watchdog of the way his or her advertising activity performs. This constitutes an inconvenient for many advertisers as well as for publishers, who think their job would be to ensure quality content for their sites and not waste time sniffing around and keeping their eyes on the stats, thinking it's Googles job to ensure click safety.

They have taken steps in the direction of protecting advertisers, it has a quite complex monitoring system (analyzing a multitude of parameters beyond CTR) that uses both engineering systems and human analysis and they are on continuous activity of upgrading their detection mechanisms to combat fraudulent activity. Last year, they have also improved their smart pricing system, so as to charge the advertiser in accordance with the analysis of the probability of a click converting or not.

Once an invalid activity tracked this is what Google does:

• Advertisers are not charged for clicks or impressions that were identified as fraudulent. Or refunds are made if the case.
• Publishers are not judged starting from the assumption of innocence and are severely penalized without much debate: AdSense™ account dismantled. They give no guarantee for the possibility of account reinstatement although they state their opening for discussion, considering the possibility of sabotage.

How Publishers are affected with Click Fraud?

In is a common opinion that when Click Fraud is detected the publisher is seens as the 'bad guy' (even though this is not always the case). This is because he can directly benefit from such activity. For publisher, more clicks means more revenue. Because of this, Publisher is usually the first suspect.

When click fraud is detected, Google can potentially ban an account of the publisher. This is by far the greatest contributor of Google Adsense bans. So naturally, honest publishers as dreaded as the advertisers of the Click Fraud.

It is important to understand how to reapply for Google Ansense when you need to do so for whatever the reason.

Some of the reasons why a publisher has to reapply for Google Adsense are:

• To transfer the ownership of a website (like when you buy a website that already has Adsense in it, from someone else ).
• When the account was suspended for click fraud, voilation of Google's terms of service, or for other illegal means.
• When you were rejected at the initial application itself.
• When the site has functionality problems.

Now let us see how to act to reapply in each of the cases:

Change of Ownership

You can reapply by sending an email to Adsense support team and amply demostrate the change of owner ship in your email. As long as the website was previously not banned and meets all the requirements to qualify for Adsense, your application will be accepted. It is important to make sure before buying, if the site is banned from Adsense for any reason. You can enquire this from Adsense team by sending them an email.

Account was Banned or Disabled

A publisher can get banned for click fraud or voilation of any Adsense program policies. Normally the publisher gets a notification email from Google explaining why the account was banned. When you receive such an email, you have to know how to react and defend (if you are not at fault, ofcourse). In some cases it will not be very hard to reactivate your account. But in some cases such as click fraud it is really hard to get the account back on the road. Here are some of the causes for disabling a, Adsense account:

Click Fraud:

Adsense registers what they consider as invalid, malicious or fradulant clicks on the Adsense Ads generated mainly for the purpose of personal gain in adsense revenue. More more information, see our article on Click Fraud.

What to do?

• Email Google Adsense team with an apology and admitting the blame. However, if you consider you have not done anything wrong, they will see this situation triggered by one of your actions, even if not directly.
• Be persistent. Send an email regularly, say once a week to show them that you are comitted and loyal to the program.
• Keep a polite tone. Don't be confrontational. Being rude will never work.
• Offer to make compensation on the malicious clicks to ensure them that you are truly sorry.
  

Incentives or Advising the Users for Clicks :

This occurs usually for publishers who are not well aware of Google Adsense program policies. Google prohibits using any other phrase except "Sponsered Links" or "Advertisements" around google Ads. Using phrease such as "Please click on the links" etc. or telling the visitors that it is madatory to click on Ads to use some other service on your site or to offer incentives for clicks etc., are some of the reasons that can potentially have your account banned.

What to do?

Just remove all content from your site that can be intrepreted as ' promoting clicks on your site' and resubmit your application. And never, never repeat such acts if you are lucky enough to have your account reactivated. 

Rejection of the Initial Application

Usually Google rejects a site for Adsense, because the site does not meet all the Google Adsense program policies.

What to do?

Read the Google Terms of Service carefully and make sure you site meets all the requirements. In some case even if the site is perfect, they may reject because of their mistake. In such case resumit the application and have them take a second look at your site. They usually give the approval immediatly in such cases.

Banned because of functionality problems

• When there is any problem on any page that causes it to automatically refresh.
• When you have an automatic procedure serving Google ads to all pages including 404 error pages and search pages.
• When there are some broken links or any other site disfunctionalities that come against Google stipulations.

What to do?

Solving the problems and resubmitting will usually be enough.

AdSense Preview Tool allows you preview the ads that will show up in you page. It is of great help in avoiding unwanted ads, testing and optimizing content and setting ads format, color and placement.

Adsense Preview Tool came in June 2004, nearly an year after launching Adsense program. Its helps immensly in adsense optimisation in terms of setting adsense formats, colors etc. And this is an installable tool that shows up as a mouse right click option on the browser after being successfully installed.

The preview tool is available in all active AdSense languages. Installing the tool is easy, and only takes a few minutes. To install it, you'll need to add a registry file to your Windows system, by following the instructions below. Note that this tool will work only on IE 6.0 or Up.

To install Adsense Preview Tool

1. Right-click the link below and select Save Target As... Save the registry file (.reg) to your desktop.

   AdSense Preview Tool

2. Double-click the file from your desktop. A confirmation window will appear - click Yes to continue. The registry update will self-install.
3. Restart Internet Explorer by closing all open IE windows.

That's it! Clicking the right mouse button from any webpage will open your context menu - select Google AdSense Preview Tool from the menu to launch the preview tool. Please do not click from within the ad format itself, or relevant ads will not appear within the preview tool.

To uninstall:

1. Right-click the link below and select Save Target As... Save the registry file (.reg) to your desktop
   

   AdSense Preview Tool Uninstaller

2. Double-click the file from your desktop. A confirmation window will appear - click Yes to continue. All preview tool files will be deleted from your system.
3. Restart Internet Explorer by closing all open IE windows.
4. You can delete the downloaded .reg file from your desktop.

If you'd prefer to manually uninstall the preview tool from your system, it's as simple as deleting the preview tool entry from your registry:

1. From your Start menu, select Run...
2. Type regedit into the text field and click OK. The Registry Editor window will open.
3. Browse to the following folder: \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\
4. Within the MenuExt folder, right-click the Google AdSense Preview Tool folder and select Delete . Click Yes to confirm.
5. Close the Registry Editor and restart Internet Explorer by closing all open browser windows.

How do I use the preview tool?

To launch the preview tool, simply right-click on any webpage. From the menu that appears, select Google AdSense Preview Tool . The preview tool will open in a new window, and will display a sample set of ads for that page.

• The Choose Options menu lets you select different ad formats and geo-targeted locations for the ads displayed within the preview tool.

• The Choose Colors menu allows you to preview new colors. You can view your selections within the preview tool, or click Preview to temporarily apply the color selections to any existing standard ad unit on the current webpage. These changes are only intended to give you a preview of your selections - you will need to update your ad code with the new color palette to make permanent changes to your page.

• Click on any ad that appears within the preview tool to visit the advertiser's site. Advertisers will not be charged for clicks on these ads, nor will impressions be counted. Likewise, you won't receive any earnings for clicks from within the preview tool. You can click on these ads without generating invalid clicks on your account.

• Use the checkboxes next to each ad and click the Show Selected URLs link to show the URLs in a new window. You can then easily copy and paste the URLs into your account's competitive ad filter list to block any undesired ads.

Smart Pricing is a technique used by Google to determine the cost of a click on a keyword trageted Ad in an Adsense website.

Now let us see how smart pricing works:

According to Google, smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results - such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups - we reduce the price you pay for that click.

Let us understand this with a very popular example that shows how Smart Pricing works more precisely.

As an example of smart pricing, consider two websites, each related to digital photography. The first page features digital camera reviews, while the second offers photography tips. Clicks from the page of photography tips might be charged less, because they are expected to convert into sales less frequently, resulting in lower value for advertisers. Google data determines that clicks from the digital camera reviews convert better, so clicks from this page are not discounted.

Here is what we know about Smart pricing:

• Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.
• One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one.
• Smart pricing is evaluated each week. So removing ads from sites you suspect are converting poorly could result in seeing an adjustment to a higher smart pricing percent in as little as a week.
• Smart pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so you could be rewarded for new conversions that saw the initial click from your site up to 29 days earlier.
• Image ads are also affected by smart pricing.
• With smart pricing, an advertiser could end up paying less than their minimum bid, which would theoretically include the minimum bid price available, meaning publishers earn less for even the minimum valued clicks.
• Conversions for smart pricing publisher accounts are tracked by those advertisers who have opted into AdWords Conversion Tracking

Now what should the publishers do to not to hurt from Smart Pricing? Technically, they should remove (or reduce) the Adsense ads from poorly converting page or sites (if they have multiple sites under a single account). The loss of revenue from poorly converting Ads may well be offset with the rise in the CPM of the rest of the site. Again, this is to be determined carefully after examining the extent of difference that the Smart Pricing is making and also requires some experimentation. However, the bad news is that the publishers do not have access to any reliable data that would be used to determine which sites (are pages) are converting better than others.

Publishers can not even tell this from AdSense stats - even using channels to differentiate sites because one site with a low CPM could actually be converting the highest, but is simply in a lower earning niche. But a publisher could mistaken a low CPM for also being poorly converting and remove those ads... which could result in even smart pricing reducing overall per click earnings even more.

So the best bet, perhaps, is to experiment and see the change the resulting CPM. Smart pricing changes will happen once in week. So one can see the changes in as early as a week.

Adsense Channels allows us to understand:

• What amount of revenue that each of our websites are generating
• What amount of revenue particular pages or sections within one website are generating

You can setup channels inside your Adsense account which will enable you to track where your Adsense clicks are coming from.

There are two types of channels:

1. URL Channels

URL channels allow you track the Adsense performance under a specific URL. The URL could of an entire domain or subdomain or directory or even a specific page. The beauty of this is not you don't need to do any thing on the website side. Google automatically reports the Adsense performance with the URL. This is usful when you want to assess the overall performance of all pages under specific sections of your site.

For understanding this consider the following example provided by Google:

• example.com track all pages across all subdomains
• sports.example.com track only pages across the 'sports' subdomain
• sports.example.com/widgets track all pages below a specific directory
• sports.example.com/index.html track a specific page

2. Custom Channels

Custom Channels allows you to track the performance of a particular ad or group of Ads that you have generated, by placing a channel id all those Ads that you want to group and track.

With these channels the id for the particular channel you create is included in the actual Adsense ad code that you generate. Every ad that you include this code in, will report its performance under that particular channel even if they are different format sizes or appear on different pages or different websites.

Currently you are allowed to create upto 200 different channels.

Constantly monitoring the performance of Adsense Ads is an important part of increasing your Adsense revenue. Monitoring helps in determining which formats, colors, placements etc are performing better in terms of CTR and accordingly we can make modification such to optimize Adsense for maximum performance. The best tool that Adsense provides for the publisher to monitor Ads is using "Channels". For more information see our article on using Adsense Channels.

The best way to monitor your ads performance is to set up several channels inside your Adsense account. By setting up a channel for a particular set or type of ad you can monitor their performance and compare them to other ads.

Lets us various types of channels that we can use for monitoring Adsense:

• You can create one channel for the whole website - It is enough to create a URL channel for this purpose,
• One channel, may be for a 336 x 280 rectangle inside the page content,
• One channel, may be for a 160 x 600 skyscraper in the right navigation,
• One channel for the Adlinks in the left navigation.
• Various URL channels for various subsections of the site (to see which section performs better)

Shown above is just an example. By setting up channels this way you can examine the difference in performance between various ad formats.

Optimizing your webpage for showing only relevant ads is important in maximizing the Adsense performance on your site. It is well known that the ads that are closely related to the content of the webpage have a greater chance of being clicked, thus improving your overall CTR. Assuming that there is a pool of ads in Google's database for the topic of your webpage, there are a few things you can do tell Google what your page is about, so that, the ads that are served are highly targeted. Stressing it in this way will improve the relevancy of the ads generated on your webpages and improved relevancy will result in an improved CTR.

Now these are a few that you should be doing to optimize your page for Ad relevency:

• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your page title
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your Meta Keywords tag
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your Meta Description tag
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in H1 tags on the page, supplimented H2 tags
• Put the primary key words in Bold or Italic tags a couple of times in your page content
• A link to your home page with the keyword anchor text
• Make sure in include your primary keywords in your webpage filename also (if possible)

In addition to the above Google "Section Targeting", to explicitly inform the GoogleBot about the primary content sections of your page.

These are some of the standard SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique which not only improve the Ad relevancy, but also improve the chance of having high Google Page Rank for your web page the keywords you targeted, there increasing targeted organic traffic for your site

According to the rules of Adsense you are allowed to include 3 regular ad units and 1 link unit per page. However, how many units should you use per page depends on the structure and design of your website.

You should not use too many Ad units. If you do, your website looks like a collection of Adsense Ads. Visitors does not like such a site and geting consistant and legal traffic to such a site will be difficult. For a visitor to click on your ad means that they must want to go forward from your website to another website. If your page repulses them straight away they will hit the back button and return to the search engine that they came from to find another site that will answer their query more effectively.

You should first provide a good user experiance and then cleverly place ads at points where they will be focusing as discussed in Ad Placements.

So how many is not too many? A website like this one can easily absorb two ad units and an adlink. It could also include another ad unit at the bottom of the articles.

As a general rule you should start with more ad units than less, set up channels so you can monitor how each performs and then make changes accordingly. If you're building your website from scratch try and build it with enough flexibility to allow you to test different variations.

If you want to include only one Unit

• Use a large rectangle (or at least the 250 x 250 square) inside the body of the page with the article text wrapped around it.

Two Units

1. A more aggressive tactic is to include two large rectangles together either side by side or on top of each other. If you're getting a fair amount of traffic this will really improve your ctr and is worth tyring. Just keep an eye on your web stats to check it doesn't undermine your visitors experience which will be highlighted to you through a decreasing traffic rate.

2. The large rectangle inside the content and a skyscraper (preferrably the 160 x 600) in your left navigation. The right navigation converts much lower.

3. A large rectangle towards the top of your content and another at the bottom. This gives your traffic two ways out from inside the same page.

Three Units - If you can fit three in you can now mix and match, for example:

1. Two rectangles inside the content and one skyscraper in the navigation.

2. One rectangle inside the content and if you have a right and left navigation, one skyscraper in each of these (I know of websites this has worked well on)

3. One rectangle inside the content, one skyscraper in your navigation and one leaderboard at the header of your page.

4. Three rectangles inside the content - this can work very well if you have a lot going on inside the page and it is long enough to absorb the three ads allowing them to be placed far enough away from each other.

Including an Adlink Unit

Your one prescripted Adlink can virtually always be included as they can slot in to the smallest of places. Many publishers still neglect Adlinks as they have wrongly convinced themselves that the requirment to click on a keyword phrase before they can click on an ad is requiring too much from a visitor. To learn more about how best to use Adlinks go here.

Customizing Adsense Ads for better performance mainly involves choosing three aspects:

1. What Color to use for the Ads?
2. What Ad format to use for the Ads?
3. Should you use borders or not?

Let us discuss each of these aspects:

Ad Color:

By properly chosing the colors you use with your ads to match the theam of the over all website, it is possible to make the ads appear as an integral part of the website and less like Ads. This improves the chance of a visitor clicking on those.

The five parts of the ad which you can change the color on are:

• The border color of the ad
• The background color of the ad
• The link color of the ad
• The url color of the ad
• The text color of the ad

It is hard to generalize what colors should you use. The generally agreed theory is that the Ads should blend with the overall theame of the site and should compliment the content. You can bleand the Ads with the rest of the content:

• By not choosing a border, that means the border color should be the same as the page background color
• By choosing the Ad background color the same as the page background color
• And choosing the text, url and link color in such a way to suit the existing colors used on the page.

Ad Format

Depending on where you want to place your Ads you choose the Ad Format. See our article "Different Ad Formats" for details on currently available ad formats.

Let us see some of the general guidelines of using these Ad formats.

• Leaderboards and Banners are horizontal formats and are suitable to place on headers and footers.
• On the verticle sections like left and right nav bars, you may use narrow or wide skyscrapers
• When you want to places ads around or within the main content of the page, choose Buttons, Squares and Rectangles.

Best style is determined based on how it fits best on your page. Using formats that have been very popular and overused (like banners and classic skyscrapers with a border) may not work very well in most cases as they tend to be ignored because they are instantly recognized as ads. Integrating them into the content gives good results.

Sometimes choosing image ads may work well and compliment your site if your site is purly content based with minimum graphics.

Borders

The commonly agreed recommendation is to not use borders. This means you should choose border color as the same as page background color. A border seems to act like a separator between the Ads and the content which is not a good thing in most cases.

To make money with Adsense, one of the widly agreed recommendation for Adsense Ad Color Optimization, is to make use of those colors that make your look like an integral part of your content. This is done by blending the ads by using the same colors that exist on your website.

There are three things you need keep in mind to do this:

• Make the background color and the border color of the ad to match with the background color of the webpage.

• Make the color of the link to match with the color of the links on your webpage.

• Make the color of the ad description (i.e the ad text) and the ad url to match with the text color.

I generally only make three exceptions to this:

• I make the actual ad link darker than the other links on the page but keep it in a similar color palette. When a visitor is finished with the page they are on and are looking for someone else to go they tend to see darker colors before lighter ones. I believe Google makes the links bold for the same reason - intensity draws the eye.

• I use the standard internet blue link. Although this isn't as widespread as it once was, internet users still often associate the standard blue color with being a link.

• I make the advertiser url a very pale shade of grey. It's still visible as it must be to conform to Google's policies but the link and the text draw the visitors attention and the ads appear more like internal links than Adsense ads. The success of this modification will often depend on the market your site is targetting. For example, webmasters know what Adsense ads are and so this change will have little impact. If your site targets people who are less familiar with the internet making the ads appear more like an internal link (ie simply a link and a description of what you'll find when you click on it) can increase your ctr.

The reason blending works better than colors that draw attention to the ads is that it's not a color that is going to make someone click on an ad - even if it's their favorite color!

Humans respond to words or better put still the meaning of words - and it will be the word or combination or words which your visitor connects to in the ad. This is why they will click on one rather than another.

Attention grabbing colors will only serve to put a barrier between your visitor and the words in the ad. More people may see them but less will click on them and Adsense is pay per click, not pay per view!

After your created your website (or blog) and optimized your Adsense, the next and perhaps the most important thing is to attract targeted traffic. Targeted traffic means visitors who come to your site because of genuine interest in the content you provide, not merely by accident. Such kind of visitors will probably search further and are more likely to click on your ads.

So you need to make your site visible to the people who are looking for the content you provide. Some of the common ways people find your site are:

• By search by keywords on search engines such as Google and Yahoo: If you optimized your site properly, Search Engine Traffic can be fairly targeted and can produce good value for Adsense publishers. As they are searching for your content, these visitors can spend time on your site and explore further by clicking on related Ads.

• Links on similar sites: If you manage to have your site linked from other websites that provide similar content as that of yours, these links can directly produce a highly targeted traffic. More over such links can increase your Page Rank, and increase the sites popularity on search results. So this helps in two ways.

Things to do for increasing Traffic:

So you should be doing the following to have your site visible to the users.

• Keyword Optimization: Keyword optimization is an important task you have to do to make your content searchable for your keywords on search engines. For more information about keyword optimization see the article: Optimizing Keywords for Adsense

• Building Links with similar sites: More people are likely to find you more easily on other sites and such links can increase your Page Rank, and increase the sites popularity on search results. So this helps in two ways.

Some techniques to get Targeted Traffic:

Not only that you have to get visitors to your site, you should also have to keep them there if you want some clicks.

• Provide good, relevant content that keeps your visitor interested. Maintaining high targeted traffic means not adding just anything to your web site, but focus on your particular niche of interest. Update frequently, give readers reasons to come back.

• Promoting your site by means of a Pay-Per-Click is probably the most effective way to increase targeted traffic. Visitors coming from PPC Ads are usually highly targeted. But this must be done very carfully and scientifically. You should not pay more per click to Google than a visitor is worth.
  

• Focus on clean and appealing site design. You should organize your content and make is easy for users to find the content they need. This is a great way to increase the number of impressions.

• One other good way is to write articles for Article Sites such as ArticleCity, eZineArticles etc. This is a good way to get one-way links to your site.

• Spread the word about your site. Participate in related groups and forums. Show to the community that you are indeed an expert in the niche of your site. This gives credibility.

According to the rules of Adsense you are allowed to include 3 regular ad units and 1 link unit per page. However, how many units should you use per page depends on the structure and design of your website.

You should not use too many Ad units. If you do, your website looks like a collection of Adsense Ads. Visitors does not like such a site and geting consistant and legal traffic to such a site will be difficult. For a visitor to click on your ad means that they must want to go forward from your website to another website. If your page repulses them straight away they will hit the back button and return to the search engine that they came from to find another site that will answer their query more effectively.

You should first provide a good user experiance and then cleverly place ads at points where they will be focusing as discussed in Ad Placements.

So how many is not too many? A website like this one can easily absorb two ad units and an adlink. It could also include another ad unit at the bottom of the articles.

As a general rule you should start with more ad units than less, set up channels so you can monitor how each performs and then make changes accordingly. If you're building your website from scratch try and build it with enough flexibility to allow you to test different variations.

If you want to include only one Unit

• Use a large rectangle (or at least the 250 x 250 square) inside the body of the page with the article text wrapped around it.

Two Units

1. A more aggressive tactic is to include two large rectangles together either side by side or on top of each other. If you're getting a fair amount of traffic this will really improve your ctr and is worth tyring. Just keep an eye on your web stats to check it doesn't undermine your visitors experience which will be highlighted to you through a decreasing traffic rate.

2. The large rectangle inside the content and a skyscraper (preferrably the 160 x 600) in your left navigation. The right navigation converts much lower.

3. A large rectangle towards the top of your content and another at the bottom. This gives your traffic two ways out from inside the same page.

Three Units - If you can fit three in you can now mix and match, for example:

1. Two rectangles inside the content and one skyscraper in the navigation.

2. One rectangle inside the content and if you have a right and left navigation, one skyscraper in each of these (I know of websites this has worked well on)

3. One rectangle inside the content, one skyscraper in your navigation and one leaderboard at the header of your page.

4. Three rectangles inside the content - this can work very well if you have a lot going on inside the page and it is long enough to absorb the three ads allowing them to be placed far enough away from each other.

Including an Adlink Unit

Your one prescripted Adlink can virtually always be included as they can slot in to the smallest of places. Many publishers still neglect Adlinks as they have wrongly convinced themselves that the requirment to click on a keyword phrase before they can click on an ad is requiring too much from a visitor. To learn more about how best to use Adlinks go here.

In additions to the regular Adsense units, Google also provides navigational units called "Adlinks". Adlinks are basically navigational units, which when clicked shows a set of Ads related to that Adlink. When a users clicks on the Ad thus displayed, the publisher will be paid for that click. As they take very little space compared to regular ads they can be used in addition to regular Ad units for making a little extra money.

Initially there was a prejudice against using these Adlinks in place of or in addition to regular ad units. The basic assumption goes something like this: as the Adlink unit requires a visitor to click first on one of the four or five topics and then on one of the ads they will be clicked on less as it requires them to do two things. In a sense this is true but the best way to see Adlinks is not to compare them to the traditional ad unit because basically they are not the same.

Whereas the regular ad is best utilized as additional content for your website, the Adlink is best utilized as additional navigation. Most navigation links are solely the number of words which prescribe the meaning of that navigation and this is what Adlinks replicate.

They come in two main formats - horizontal and square (each of which has several variations). Therefore, they can be used effectively in a variety of places:

1. The favored hot spot for Adlinks is the top navigational bar where the user usually looks for site navigation options. If you include them there and match the link, border and background color to the colors you are already using you will generate a high CTR.

2. A 728 x 15 in the traditional leaderboard position can work very well (just underneath your banner and above your actual webpage).

3. A 468 x 15 above or just below your actual page title can also work well. Bear in mind that the 468 sometimes isn't long enough to cater for the amount of words that it generates and will result in it being squashed together. You'll have to test it for your content.

4. You can also use one of the square units at the bottom of your articles.

Optimizing your webpage for showing only relevant ads is important in maximizing the Adsense performance on your site. It is well known that the ads that are closely related to the content of the webpage have a greater chance of being clicked, thus improving your overall CTR. Assuming that there is a pool of ads in Google's database for the topic of your webpage, there are a few things you can do tell Google what your page is about, so that, the ads that are served are highly targeted. Stressing it in this way will improve the relevancy of the ads generated on your webpages and improved relevancy will result in an improved CTR.

Now these are a few that you should be doing to optimize your page for Ad relevency:

• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your page title
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your Meta Keywords tag
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in your Meta Description tag
• Include the primary keywords of the page content in H1 tags on the page, supplimented H2 tags
• Put the primary key words in Bold or Italic tags a couple of times in your page content
• A link to your home page with the keyword anchor text
• Make sure in include your primary keywords in your webpage filename also (if possible)

In addition to the above Google "Section Targeting", to explicitly inform the GoogleBot about the primary content sections of your page.

These are some of the standard SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique which not only improve the Ad relevancy, but also improve the chance of having high Google Page Rank for your web page the keywords you targeted, there increasing targeted organic traffic for your site.

Understanding where to place Google Ad units on your site is an important skill in optimising Adsense ads. Strategically placed ads will has very good chance of giving good results with Adsense. Lets discuss here how to find the optimum place for your ads, so that the visitor can see them and click them.

Google provides in its Adsense optimization demo what is called a "heat map". This is basically a diagram that shows the Adsense ad placement areas and their corresponding performance possibilites. Their recommadations seems to work in majority of the cases. Here is the diagram:

In this diagram the darker the area indicated, the better its performance will be. From this we can see the large banner that goes right above the primary content of the site has the highest chance of producing clicks. This map relies on the natural direction of readers gaze goes, namely from left to right, from top to bottom, we sustain the theory according to which the reader is inclined to grant more attention to content in these areas, being the first he lays eyes on, so the first choice for ads placement would be the top-left area of the page.

As a general rule the "top-left" area catch most of user attention and hense make good choices for Ad placement. These are usually considered the most readable sections (or worthy of interest) by a normal visitor. Interestingly, we can observer from this diagram that, the section right below the primary content is also a hot area. This is because the reader assimilates the section right below the end of an article, for example, as a continuation of the content, and would be drawn to learn more.

This strategy works in most case, but not in all cases and all kinds of websites.

Strategic ads placement is not just talk, it actually gives good results with AdSense. The best placement depends on other factors as well and changes from one page to other and also based the over all website layout, design and structure. And also on the type of visitors visiting the site.

Let us see some of the points that we need to keep while optimising Adsense Ad placement.

Visitors:

Majority of the visitors are just "scanners" and a smallet part are actual readers. That is why you should favour the areas that are most likely to be noticed at the first glance.

Design:

Also keep in mind of the "scanners". A design-related placement should optimize ads mostly for the "scanning" visitor.

• Place your ads next to the eye-catchers on your page -- headlines, graphics, pictures, tables etc -- that direct your visitors' attention towards the areas they're placed.
• A simple, uncluttered design for a page helps the best. It makes the page look clear, inviting, and better showing visitors' options to leave the page through one of the links that are more visible this way.
• It is better if the ads have more free space around them.

Structure of the content:

Here we target the actual readers of the site.

• Having a certain section of great interest on the page that the visitor will most certainly read means that the part of the page with that content will be most likely a good ads place.
• Inserting your ads in the content, where they are the most contextually relevant is very effective, and results also in better ads targetting.
• Keep the ads non-intrusive. A user should not feel that the ads are in their way. This won't do any good in terms of producing user clicks

Blind Areas

These are the areas that users usually ignore and thus produce very little results

• The bottom-right area;
• Outside of the readable content area; beyond the page footer and in the right extremity above the top level navigation (see the map with white areas);
• The usual spot for banner ads -- don't place banner-shaped ads at the top or bottom of your page.

Adsense offer a variety of Adsense Ad formats to allow publisers the flexibility to place ads on any spot on their website. There are currently 10 standard Ad formats and 6 Adlink formats.

The Standard Adsense Ad Formats

Horizontal Ad Formats

1. 728 x 90: Leaderboard
2. 468 x 60: Banner
3. 234 x 60: Half Banner

Vertical Ad Formats

4. 120 x 600: Skyscraper
5. 120 x 140: Vertical Banner

Square Ad Formats

6. 125 x 125: Button
7. 300 x 250: Medium Rectangle
8. 250 x 250: Square
9. 336 x 280: Large Rectangle
10. 180 x 150: Small Rectangle

The Adsense Adlinks Formats

Horizontal Adlink Formats

1. 728 x 15
2. 468 x 15

Square Adlink Formats

3. 200 x 90
4. 180 x 90
5. 160 x 90
6. 120 x 90

Why should you optimize the content for Adsense? Simply put, content optimization makes it possible to realize the full revenue earning potential of your website. In a way, it is to find out your "magic recipe" of your website. And this will do primary two things:

• It will make your visitor involved and responsive. What it means is you will maximize the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and make the visitor want to click on your Ads. This is only possible when the ads are very relevant to the content of the page

• Maximize the revenue you earn from each click. You need to attract high paying Ads to do this.

To maximize your CTR you will need to focus on your choice of ad format, ad color, and ad placement and finally ad relevancy. You need to make sure that your ads are as relevant as they can be, as related ads always generate more clicks than unrelated omes. The number of units per page and your use of adlinks will also effect your click through rate.

To make sure that you are receiving as much as you possibly can from every click, you need to focus on high paying keywords around your niche through search engine optimization of the content and the creation of supplemental content that focuses on high paying keywords related to primary niche.

When you have achieved the above two goals, then all you need to do is to attract targeted traffic. With all this your website will become an automated money machine and makes you money based on how much your traffic is and how profitable your niche is.

Geting rid of unwanted Ads is an important technique in maximising the profits from Adsense. Adsense sometimes serve ads that may not work very well towards maximising the profitability of valuble online virtual real estate (i.e the Ad space on a publishers website). Some of the examples are PSAs (Public service Ads), untragetted Ads, Ads of the competitors etc. A publisher has to avoid these things as much as he/she can using proper content optimization or by using the filtering facility.

Google provides tools in Adsense account such as Competitive Ad filter. With the Competitive Ad Filter, a publisher can choose to block ads that link to specific URLs. The filter prevents all ads from the specified URL from appearing on the publishers web pages. Up to 200 URLs can be filtered like this. While it is good idea to prevent unwanted URLs from apprearing on a website, it is possible that webmasters (i.e publishers, website owner, blog owners etc) may use it a little too much, which can even hurt them. So let us see how and when and to what extent to use this tool.

When and How to use the Filtering Tool?

Now let us consider first of all, 'what Ads are really unwanted?' - There are varous types.

PSAs:

Public service Ads are displayed usually when Google has not yet crawed a web page. To avoid these a publisher can choose to display ads from an alternate URL or just a solid color. These option are provided in the Adsense Setup area.

Competitor's Ads:

If a publisher sells services or products through his site, this tool is very useful, as the publisher can avoid direct competitors from advertising on his site.

To block their URLs, a publisher can find them by searching on a search engine for keywords and keyphrases that are relevant for his business and then look at the AdWords that appear. Then chose these URLs to filter using filtering tool.

Untargeted ads:

Sometimes Adsense serves inappropriate ads that are not targeted to the content under question. Most of the times this has a lot to do with page theming and keyword optimization. It is not enough just to filtering them out, but a publisher should work more at page optimization and make sure that the webpage is clearly themed, so that Google can find appropriate and targeted ads that have a greated chance of producing a click.

Some things to consider:

A publisher may think it would be a good idea blocking ads that he considers paying too low or being slightly off-themed. This however, is not always the case. As Google serves most relevant and highest paying ads first, filtering too many URLs may actually reduce the 'earning per click' (EPC) on page and also the click-through rate (CTR). Also, one has to keep in mind that by entering a top level domain into the filter list, all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain will be blocked. This filtering system, unfortunatly, has its own limitations - : it's not just ads-related, it blocks all the ads (not just the unwanted ones) from a URL.

So,a publisher has to be careful not to do it more than required. A publisher usually finds it more profitable to use the filter for what it was intended: to block competitors' ads or ads and URLs that are really of no benefit.

What percentage of Ad revenue does Google Adsense program pay to its Publishers? This is one of the most troubling and unanswered questions for webmasters. Google does not disclose how much percentage they pay to the publishers and it is perhaps one of the well guardered secrets. Here we try to bring out what we know and what we learned from peers about Googles payting policies and hope to shed light on some of the very interesting areas.

Dispite the secrecy behind this payment percentage issue, Adsense by far exceeds the over all payout performance compared to many other advertising options on most content sites. To keep the publishers (website owners) happy with Adsense is important for Google to keep Adsense as the primary advertisement source for Publishers and to the overall success of the program. So it seems that Google does payout a significant portion of the Ad revenue through Adsense program back to the publishers.

According to Googles SEC filing and an article about Digital Point published in Newyork Times (link here) we have reason to believe that Google pays some where between 70 to 80% of the Ad Revenue to publishers.

Why Google maintains Secrecy ?

The possible reasons for Google's secrecy on payments can be:

• It's a program safety policy. I mean, if you think about it, if Google were to openly announce the share, then the competitors can offer higher percentages to Publishers and this could result in pricing wars.
• The complexity of the process thay follow to personalise and customize for each case is hard to explain. Besides, its not static and fixed and same for all sites. And they can modify it whenever, however they think is appropriate without having to explain and ground their action.
• Knowing who makes what would be a bone of contention for publishers.

Parameters for Calculating AdSense Payout

Basically, what we do know for sure is that Google receives the money from the advertisers any time an impression is registered or a visitor clicks on an AdSense advertisment. Then the revenue is shared with the publishers. It works like this:

• the cost of the click is established by the “smart pricing” system — this is the price advertisers pay;
• an undisclosed percentage is applied to this amount, that results into the shares for the publisher and for Google™.

Smart Pricing

Lets examine what this Smart Pricing is and how publishers who provide solid and focussed content can make use of it to their advantage:

1. Bidding: Pricing starts from the supply and demand ratio, settled in advertisers' bidding. (So far, not much we, as publishers, can do, except maybe for making your best keyword pick.) The price thus established is usually the highest possible, for there follow other factors that influence the CPC.
   
2. Potential Coversion Rate : The result is then modified according to the click's conversion potential. That is, it is not enough to just click on an ad, its value is given by the analysis of the actions following the click — registration, newsletter sign-up for example — in a word, its likeliness to turn into business results.
   
3. Relevence of the Ad: Further, the price of a click is influenced also by content relevance, the type of site on which the ad appears. Keywords and theme that triggered the ad are also analyzed. The more content-relevant the ad, the higher the price for the click.

It is logical that not all publishers be rewarded the same, but taking into account their potential as ROI holders. But we've already seen this as a factor analyzed through the “smart pricing” system.

Now, the shares of payment (between AdSense and publishers) are not calculated all alike, for not all publishers are “equal”; it is known, for example, that big web publishers get to negotiate the rates with Google. Why?

Authoritative, big publishers represent the pledge of high ROI, what makes them “most wanted” by advertisers. Thus, they will represent for Google also an important revenue source. Undoubtedly, they get to be stimulated to participate and stay in the program by means of a preferential treatment. That would lead to the deduction that smaller publishers are granted lesser shares.

Google states this explicitely in their Initial Public Offering Registration Statement (as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2004):

Typically, in situations where we pay a Google Network member more than the revenue we receive from our advertisers in connection with paid clicks on that Google Network member’s web site, we recognize the difference as cost of revenues. Due to intense competition for Google Network members and our limited ability to accurately forecast the number of paid clicks that will result, we expect that we will enter into AdSense agreements from time to time under which we will make payments to the Google Network member exceeding the revenue we recognize from the agreement. Cost of revenues also includes amortization of expenses related to purchased and licensed technologies.

But it is not necessary to be an “authority” publisher, or a very big one to convert well your site into money. Smaller sites can have excellent potential in this regard. In an analysis to determine the sites' “monetization” rate, we may speak of an “extended” smart pricing applied by Google.

There are some criteria which are unofficially but almost certainly taken into account, which we chose to expose here for you to see also our perspective on the way Google AdSense™ pays:

• High traffic and impressions — High traffic is not strictly connected to the CPC. Targeted traffic is more valuable as it is likely to convert more. Thus, sites generating quality traffic (resulting in high CTR) will earn more. CTR seems to be taken into account by AdSense™ when choosing the sites for directing higher paying ads.
• Site size and age.
• High Page Rank (with all the parameters it involves — valuable content, relevancy of the inbound links, keyword relevancy).

After all, sites that would meet all of the above criteria are very likely to produce more, the higher their potential to raise a profit, the bigger Google's interest to keep them into AdSense.

The earnings from Adsense can range from a few cents a day from a single website to several thousands of dollars over a network of websites. The Adsense program itself has nothing to do with how much a publisher can make using Adsense. Its all about building quality websites that attracts visitors and trageted Ad market. Once you have got targeted traffic, you can monitise that traffic using Adsense. Building quality and focussed content which has some commercial market value and attracting targeted traffic to the sites you build are the keys of making money on web using Adsense.

So, here are a few things you need to learn to succeed with Adsense:

Building quality content sites that focus on a specific niche that interestes the audiense of that niche.

Finding right keywords to target the market and build websites suitbale for those markets. Keyword Research is an important skill

Finding niche markets that has high demand and low supply.

Search engine optimisation of your webpages is important to make your web pages rank well on search engines.

Building links with similar suits will improve the page rank for your pages.