| >> Skip the course and go straight to the Adsense Simulator << |
This online course shows you how to use our Adsense Simulator, which is a tool you can use (at no cost) to improve your income through better ad placement. When we used it, we achieved a 45% increase in earnings (the difference was measured between two comparable two-month periods, before and after).
The course also covers key Google calculations such as Ad Rank, Quality Score and Smartpricing, which is useful information when using the simulator and considering ad placement.
The course is aimed at established publishers who are looking for ways to make more money with Google Adsense from their existing pages. If you are not an established publisher, then bookmark this page, go to Google's site and
This course focuses on the placement of ads on pages to generate the maximum revenue, covering Ad Rank, Smartpricing and concluding with an Adsense Simulator.
The most important factor in making money out of online publishing, with any type of revenue stream, is to provide a site that is of interest and use to your visitors. With such a foundation, you can build an online publishing business that could make money in a variety of ways: advertising, affiliates, sign-up fees, subscription services, download commissions, etc.. The principles involved in developing a good site are discussed in many websites, books and forums and won't be covered here.
When you are using Adsense as one of your revenue streams, you can also make more money from Adsense by ensuring that your page design is optimised (or 'optimized' for our US readers). This means that you identify the best ad placement and design for your site: what types of ad units to use, how many, where to put them on your page, whether to blend them with the page or make them distinct, and what colours ('colors', US) to use. One way to optimise your site is to enlist Google's help - they provide an optimisation service whereby they will review your sites and suggest ways in which you can increase your income. This online course may also help you to optimise your site, by heling you to think about how the Google Adsense and Adwords systems work, and providing you with some online spreadsheets to model and analyse the impact of different ad placements on your revenue.
It is important to note that Google's system is proprietary and, whilst they are very open about some aspects of the bidding system, they keep many aspects of it secret in order to discourage click fraud and abuse. For example, they have some unique algorithms for deciding how ads are placed on a page and what the publisher is paid: they describe how the calculations are done based on a Quality Score, but only give a general idea of how the quality score is calculated. Also, payments to publishers are adjusted through 'smartpricing', which is an algorithm that they keep secret.
We don't have any affiliation with nor any inside-track to Google, and this course is designed on the basis of Google's published information and our own analysis/experience. Therefore, as with any course or book offering training/tips in Adsense, including Google's own Help pages, the information in this online course is incomplete. You should also bear in mind the fact that Google are constantly changing and improving their algorithms, strategies that are successful on other sites may not necessarily be best on your site, and market volumes and rates are constantly changing.
This means that you should consider the content of this course as no more than ideas to consider: to make more money from Adsense you have to test out ideas and assess their performance on your site, and choose the strategies that work best for you. In the Adsense Simulator, that we provide at the end of the course, you'll be able to adjust variables so that you can tailor the model to perform more closely to your site. However, because of the limitations of everyone's understanding of how Adsense works, this simulator cannot be accurate, so you need to test ad placements on your site in order to arrive at a final decision on what designs to use.
The aim of Google's smartpricing algorithm is to give a better service to advertisers and increase their return on investment (by discounting clicks that are of less value to them). In this system, if you can make more money through Adsense from your site then by implication it means that you are providing the advertisers with a better service: learning to maximise your income from Adsense is also about learning how to provide advertisers with better-value clicks (ie: clicks that 'convert' better into prospects, sales, registrations, downloads, etc.).
The aim of the course is to support your decisions about ad placement. This course is not a basic "how to" create adverts - this and similar topics are more than adequately covered in Google's Help pages, accessible once you have registered with Adsense.
In the next article we'll look at Ad Rank, an algorithm that Google use to decide the order in which they place ads on your page.