Google AdSense tracking in Google Analytics
Google has finally launched something that will help a lot to track the performance of your AdSense campaings. If you already own some websites that uses AdSense to monetize, you will love this new feature because it will allow you to see detailed AdSense revenue by website, which was absolutely not possible with the AdSense-only interface.
What is it ?
It is the ability to link your AdSense account with your Analytics account. By doing this, every impression and every click will be tracked in Analytics.
Where do I go to see the detailed stats ?
When you link your two accounts, you will see a new menu item appear in your Analytics account, just like this one :
You will see 3 different menu items under "AdSense" (in fact 4, but the first is only the summary of the 3 others). These are the 3 different statistics you can get for AdSense.
What will I see in "Top AdSense content" ?
You will get detailed stats (total revenue, clicks, impressions, CTR and eCPM) for every page on your website. This is simply AWESOME. With this feature I discovered that in my dating website, the page that is generating the more revenue is the registration page.
Here's what it looks like :
Like any other Analytics graph you can change the view to "table", "pie chart", "performance chart" and the "comparison chart". You can also sort the table columns and change the time period.
What will I see in "Top AdSense referers" ?
You will see detailed stats (total revenue, clicks, impressions, CTR and eCPM) for each referer. A referer is a domain name on which your ad has been shown and clicked. For example, if 2 people clicks on your ad shown on www.example.com and clicks 2 ads each (40c each), the revenue for the referer www.example.com will be 1,60$.
Let's take a look at this :
With this feature you can easily track where your ads are being shown and which website leads you the most valuable members. As you can see in my stats, my most valuable referer is hotmail.
What will I see in "AdSense trends" ?
You will see what you already see in your AdSense account : revenue by day, just like this :
The only difference is that you will get a little bit more because you can choose exaclty what trend you want to see, by using this menu :
How do I activate it ?
Now that I convinced you to use this awesome feature, let's activate it. First, I assume you already have your AdSense account and your Analytics account and everything is up and running on your different websites.
1. Go to "Analytics settings" on your Analytics account and click on "Edit AdSense linking settings".
2. Check every AdSense website you want to track in your Analytics account.
3. Select the primary website. I suggest you take your biggest revenue generating website (the one that has the more traffic) or the website that is the least editable, because for each other website you will have to open the source code to add something.
4. Open the source code of your other websites and put the little JavaScript code block at the beginning of all pages (it may be a good idea to have a master page on your website where you can globally put the code, instead of opening every page).
It is very important that the tracking code (just like the one below) be placed in the "<head>" tag. If you don't do so, the tracking will simply NOT work. Trust me, I already tried !
<script type="text/javascript"> window.google_analytics_uacct = "UA-123456-1";</script>
Conclusion
Google is and will stay for a while the best advertising company on the net. Just try to find another service that provides you the same tracking functionality.
What is an AdSense-only website and why does it exists ?
There is many people who wants to make money easily. There is many ways to on the net to make money. One of them is by using the Google AdSense program. Because it is easy to use and provide easy money, many people are starting using it every day.
The Google phenomenom has caused a new phenomenom: the AdSense-only websites. There is TOO MANY websites that exists only to display ads and make money. This king of website is becoming more and more popular because it is cheap and content-cheap, so they are easy to create and maintain.
This exists because some people creates websites on which they try to sell books to know everything about the "AdSense secrets" for about 10$ (I already saw 200$ one day). They always tell that they personnaly make thousands of dollars every month with the AdSense program but in fact, the real money they do is with their one-page website on which they sell their books for a lot more than what it's worth. Those books DOES NOT contains anything you can't find for free (and easily) on Google.
Here is a list of websites you should NEVER trust (I don't add link because I don't want Google to think I actually link to them) :
http://www.adsenseonly.com/
http://adsense-secrets.com/
http://www.instant-adsense-templates.com/
http://www.googleadsensesecrets.com/
http://www.10adsensesecrets.info/
http://www.thesecretsofadsense.com/
http://www.adsensetrafficsecrets.com/
http://www.adsense.deeljeabiz.com/
On the other hand, these sites gives you real AdSense tips (for real websites) :
http://www.seopedia.org/contextual-advertising/google-adsense-adwords/5-google-adsense-secrets-tips-and-tricks/
http://www.wolf-howl.com/22/google-adsense-tips-tricks-and-secrets/
Always remember this simple rule : if it's too good to be true, it is because it IS too good to be true !
SEO techniques to increase your website traffic
Everyone who tries to start a website gets the same problem : How to get traffic ?
There is many many paid ways to get traffic like using Google AdWords, referral programs like Affili.net, radio, television, newspapers, facebook ads and much much more. But you don't want to pay for every visitor you get on your website; you want people to find your site by the Google search engine (or Yahoo! and Altavista if you bother about the others). So, what to do ?
First, Google will find you site by itself some day, but you can help Google to find it by using the first technique.
1. Send Google a sitemap of all your pages on your website
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/AutresSites/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/NousContacterAccueil.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/CGU/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/FAQ.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Inscription.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
If your site is not 100% crawlable from the start page, Google (and all other search engines) will not be able to index all the pages on your site. In the same way, if you have dynamic pages, like single pages that accepts querystring parameters and display different content, you can add those complete URLs in your sitemap.
2. Use URL rewriting (relevant URLs)
The more relevant is your URL, the higher your rank will be on searches. Also, if you submit a sitemap (tip #1) with a lot of entries that all points to the same page with different querystring parameters, the search engines will not index all your pages and you will get warnings (on Google WebMaster Tools).
Check
my URL rewriting article to learn more about URL rewriting and how to include this functionnality in your existing website.
For the URL relevantness, if you have an URL like this one "http://www.onesite.com/article.aspx?id=25645151", you will easily be beatten by a URL like this one "http://www.shopcomputers.com/products/HDD/Western-Digital-HDD-WD3200-320GB-16MB-Cache.aspx" on the search results. If you think it does not really change anything because you think only the content of the page counts... your wrong. The URL is the most relevant part of the page. If the URL is long and explicit and have all the keywords you typed in the search engine query box, then the website will appear on the top results for sure.
3. Create links (linking sites)
If you want to be on the top search results, your website has to be linked by a lot of other websites. The more websites are linking to your website, the higher will be your PageRank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. In search results, your site will be shown before others that have lower PageRanks.
To get link you have several ways. You can...
a) Add you website URL to your signatures so when you write on forums or blogs, you website URL is put on the site everytime. This has not a real big impact because Google knows that it is not as relevent as a real link placed intentionnaly by the webamaster. But, it has an impact so do it.
b) Write an article about your website on Wikipedia (if it is big enough because Wikipedia will delete your article if your site is too small).
c) Submit your website to many internet directories. Those services are not really used by people to find websites... they used to be popular but now the reality has changed. Those services are mostly used to help you get links to your website.
d) Ask webmasters that have similar websites to add a reciprocal link (you add one, they add one).
e) Write articles of your website on your personal blog (if you have one)
f) Do social bookmarking. There are a lot of websites that offer you a simple and easy way to do social bookmarking for about 20$-50$. Every different services offer you to bookmark to about 100-300 social sites like Digg.it, Technocrati and kick.it. You can check
SocialMarking.com. I personnaly purchased SEO from them and I got my links.
g) Any other idea !? There are a lot of ways to get linking sites...
4. Don't write text on images
Write your text directly on your website pages. Text on images doesn't get indexed; plain text gets indexed so at least 99% of your text must be plain text. Your logo can be an image, but be sure that your brand name is written aa text on your pages too.
5. Stay tuned, check your current indexation level, and linking sites
When you work hard to index your website, and create link to increase your PageRank (AKA "PR") you might want to see if you techniques are working so the best way to check this is by adding the Webmaster tools to your Google account. Those tools gives you the chance to check directly on the Google's database the number of external links pointing to your site as well as every URL indexed by your sitemaps. Without using the Google Webmaster Tools you can check how many URLs of your site are being indexed. Just do a simple Google search like this : "site:www.iseduction.net". The "site:" prefix tells google to show results only for the specified website. You can also type a phrase to search in this site, but if you only type the URL, you will get every URL indexed for that website.
6. Add quality content in your website
If your website is community driven, the content is probably not a problem as the members continuously add stuff in it. But if your site is a dating site (for example, because I currently have 2 different dating sites,
www.iseduction.net and
www.quebecsexy.net), you have to add quality content in your pages around the user profiles. Have enough text with high density keywords to help the search engines really know what's in your site. The more content you have, the more the search engine will have something to index you with.
It looks easy but, if I take my personnal websites I own, only my blog has real quality et quantity stuff. My dating sites only have about 8-10 different pages. All other pages are in fact the same aspx page that displays members' profiles.
7. Optimize the title of your pages
Don't have the same boring title for every page you have on your site. You should have a different title for every page on your website. You can have a fixed part like your brand name followed by a dash and than a dynamic part. When you search with one or two different keywords, the webpages that has those keywords in the title will appear on top of the list. The page title is as important as the URL relevantness so don't neglate these parts. On search results, the keywords that are in the title of the pages appears in bold.
8. Optimize your META tags
Even if Google does not care about this, it should be a good idea to have good META tags on your HTML of every pages on your site. Old web page crawlers maybe still using the META technique to index your pages so, even if you don't really care about other search engines, it may be a good practice to do so. META tags must be placed in the <head> tag in your HTML pages and looks like this :
<head>
<meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization." />
<meta name="keywords" content="top 10 seo tips, what is seo, resources, seo software, seo ebook, search engine optimization" />
</head>
9. Use heading tags (H1, H2, H3)
This is important. If you all define you own classes and always use SPAN or DIV tags, the analyzer part of the crawler will have difficulty to know which part of the page is more important than which. Using header tags makes defining relevancy more easy because H1 is more important than H2, and H2 is more important than H3 and so on...
10. Assign ALT attributes to all you images
This will help indexing properly your images on your website. Images are not easy to index because there is not always a descriptive text near the image and that text is not always placed at the size position relative to the image. Using ALT tells exactly what the image is all about so it is very important for image indexing.
11. Include a robots.txt
This file needs to be placed at the root of your website. It contains information about what is allowed to be indexed and what is not allowed.
12. Validate the HTML and CSS code of your website
You can do this with the free tools provided by the W3C.
13. Add an analytics link in your pages
If you want to see if your SEO strategy works, you have to track any traffic change. The most powerful (and free) analytics tool is the Google Analytics.
14. Be patient, wait for results
The process of indexing a website is not really fast. The bigger your site is, the faster its new content gets indexed. By the time your site gets as big as CNN or Microsoft (if it happens one day) you can wait 1-5 weeks to see something on your Google Webmaster Tools.
Building Blog Links: Submitting to Blog Directories
When you want to attract more people on your website, you have to create link. There is a lot of ways, like adding your website URL on every signature you have on the internet, with which you post comments on blogs and post on forums.
If the website you want to promote is a blog, you can submit its URL to blog directories. It is one of the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique you can use because these sites have a lot of traffic. Social sites, blogs and forums are becoming more and more popular as the web 2.0 gains popularity.
Here are some of the most popular blog directories, so visit them and link your blog on it :
Technorati : http://www.technorati.com/
Blogcatalog : http://www.blogcatalog.com/
MyBlogLog : http://www.mybloglog.com/
Bloghop : http://www.bloghop.com/
Best of The Wb Blog Search : http://blogs.botw.org/
Blitzfind : http://www.blitzfind.net/
Bloggernity : http://www.bloggernity.com/
2RSS : http://www.2rss.com/
Blogsrater : http://www.blogsrater.com/
TopWebBlogs : http://www.topwebblogs.com/
Blogtoplist : http://www.blogtoplist.com/
Blogstreet : http://www.blogstreet.com/
Umm Yeah : http://ummyeah.com/
Blogarama : http://www.blogarama.com/
TopBlogArea : http://www.topblogarea.com/
Blogged : http://www.blogged.com/
Feedster : http://www.feedster.com/
Bloglines : http://www.bloglines.com/
Blogsearchengine : http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
Search4Blogs : http://www.search4blogs.com/
BlogPulse : http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
5starblogs : http://www.5starblogs.com/
Addyourblog : http://www.addyourblog.com/submit.php
Blogcode : http://www.blogcode.com/signup.php
Blogexplosion : http://www.blogexplosion.com/directory/
Blogwise : http://www.blogwise.com/
Blogbunch : http://www.blogbunch.com/suggest/
TopRankBlog : http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/
Blog-search : http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
NewsGator : http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/Folksonomy.aspx
RSSFeedsDirectory : http://www.blogger.com/http://rss-feeds-directory.com/directory/
Blogflux : http://dir.blogflux.com/
BOTW Blogs : http://blogs.botw.org/
Blog Directory : http://www.blog-directory.org/
Blogoozle : http://www.blogoozle.com/
Blogapedia : http://www.bloggapedia.com/
Do I have to buy things on "AdSense secrets" sites to make money ?
You probably saw a lot of times websites with titles like "Google AdSense secrets revealed" or "Making millions with Google AdSense". Those sites encourage you to buy their books, their video advices and other stuff. All they want to do is make money with you, while you think you're learning something to make more money than them.
First of all, stop thinking AdSense is the way to make millions for everyone. Yes, some people makes millions with this program, like Markus Frind (PlentyOfFish), but don't think because you read books and books you will make millions too ! By doing this you will only help people getting richer and richer selling you something you can get for free.
All you need to know to make some money with Google AdSense is everywhere on the net, and free ! There is only some simple rules to follow to succesfully make some money with this. There's not an absolute formula that works every time. Everything is different from sites to sites, you have to try it yourself.
By experience, if you want to make money with Google AdSense you have to try many different formulas. You have to change the size of your ads, the places where you put them, the colors, etc... Each website is different, so every website needs a different advertising strategie. You can find some good ideas if you Google the web for "AdSense tips", but the best school you can have is to visit websites that uses the Google AdSense program and try to see how they places their ads.
The most important thing you need to remember from this article is that you never have to pay to get good AdSense tips. You can find everything you need for free.
How to make money with Google AdWords ?
If you already know Google AdWords, you probably asked yourself "How could I make money with a service for which I always pay ?". In fact, you're right asking yourself this because you cannot directly make with Google AdWords, you pay to display ads. On the other hand, With Google AdSense you can make a lot of money.
So how can I make money with the Google AdWords program ?
You will make money if you refer other people to Google AdWords and they open an account and start advertising. So you will use the Google Referral program (included in the AdWords account) to set up your referrals to the AdWords program. Referral can look like this :
When people clicks on banners like this and opens an account, the referrer gets some money. This can be very lucrative, but since the referral program is not as money maker than the AdSense program, you have to put those banners where people will see them, that is, before you site content and your AdSense banners. If you want to use AdWords referral, be aware of that because it doesn't work well on all site. On the other hand, Google AdSense performs well on any website, and very well on a lot of websites.
Money you get when referring new advertisers
When an advertiser spend at least 5$ in the first 90 days (excluding the 5$ registration fee),
you get 5$.
When this same advertiser spend 100$ in the first 90 days,
you get 40$.
If you refer 20 advertiers who all spend at least 100$ in 180 days,
you get 600$.
All this seems very tempting but in fact, rare are the ones who get that 600$ bonus.
What is Google AdWords ?
Google AdWords is one of the best advertising system on the web right now. It consists of contextual ads (text, image, video) displayed everywhere on the web. Anyone who wants to advertise something can set up an account and start advertise the way he wants ! Ads can be displayed on the search network as well as any website using
Google AdSense. You can chose to pay for each click on your ads, or pay for a number of impressions of you ads.
Let's start with a little bit of story...
AdWords has been created in 2000 with some limited features. Advertisers wasn't able to create their campaings like they want, they had to pay Google a monthly fee and let them set up their campaign. Google then launched to possibility to create our own campaigns. In 2005 google introduced the Jumpstart service to help advertisers setting up their campaigns. Everything was not as easy as it can be today, so Google had to change their advertising solution to keep advertisers advertising. Now, in 2008, you can set up your own campaign in clicks, and it works very well !
First, AdWords for the Google search network
If you want your ads to be displayed in the right part of the Google search result page, you have to decide which keywords will make them appear. When someone searches for one of the words defined in your campaign, your ad appears on the right side of the result page... in fact, there's some other things to know, like the keyword's auction. In the example on your right I searched for "AdWords" on Google, and a lot of ads appeared. There is 2 places for ads on the Google search result page; top and right. In the example, there is ads in the 2 spots.
Not only your ads will be shown on Google but they will also be displayed on sites where there's the Google search box like this one :
 Enter your search terms Submit search form |
Secondly, AdWords for the content network
Ads can be displayed on a lot (I mean, a lot) of websites on the net. Every website using the Google AdSense program allows you to advertise on them automatically. You have 2 choices to decide how you want your ads to be displayed on other websites. You can chose websites, or chose keywords. If you chose websites, your ads will be shown on the websites you decided. On the other side, if you chose keywords, your ads will be displayed on any website containing your keywords.
Keyword's auction (CPC or Cost per click)
Because of the great popularity of the AdWords program, Google had to create the keyword auction. This "auction" is used to help advertisers to display ads in the top results if they are ready to pay more than other advertisers. For each keyword there's an auction. The prices changes every day. Price per click for a keyword can be in cents as well as dollars. If you have the keyword "Dating", you will have to pay more than 1$ to appear because there's a lot of advertisers who wants to advertise they dating site. On the other hand, is you advertise for "Kozlowski-Krajewska syndrome" (this is a rare disease), you will be able to pay 2-3 cents per click because no one advertise for this.
How I started my own dating site
How I started this site :
http://www.iseduction.net
I was wondering what I could do to generate more money than just my salary. I was thinking and thinking every day and every night 'till the day I decided to create a dating site. It was not my first website. I already did some for companies and for games, like
http://www.aidemyst.info/ (Myst & Riven help site).
(2006-05) Because I wanted to do it all by myself I started to put my ideas on a sheet of paper, putting more and more every day. I knew I was going to use the .Net framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2000, so I read a lot on the net to search for optimization techniques and things to care before publishing the website on the web. I then started to design my database, putting tables, stored procedures and so on. I then took Photoshop to design my web pages. I also purchased some icons and pictures on sites like
istockphoto to fasten to design process, and because I'm not the best web designer, normaly I design entreprise applications (my day work).
(2006-07) I started to add some asp.net code behing all that. It took me about 8 months to get something to work great. It took me a lot of time to make PayPal payments works.
(2007-07-07) I'm not someone who is very superstitious but because my site was ready for publishing in July 2007, I waited for the 2007-07-07 to arrive so I can put my site on the net at this time. For more sevens, I waited for the clock to show 07:07:07am :-). Everything whent great, I started to display my AdWords ads and traffic started to come in. My first strategy was to expose my website worldwide to see where people would came from the most. It appears to me that Africa gaves me A LOT more members than America of Europe so I decided to advertise only in Africa : first mistake ! In africa I can get clicks for 2 cents (that is absolutely perfect for someone who don't want to invest a lot in this). To be able to send message in the site, (int the first version) the user must pay. In africa they barely get 1000$ per year, so charging 20$ a month is a lot too much for them.
(2007-08) I then decided to advertise in America (USA and Canada) but It was about 20-50 cents a clikc !! That was killing my daily budget, so I was thinking what to do : turn into a free dating site ? invest more ? try to advertise on different network (other than Google) ? It's difficult to choose ! I was jungling with ideas, but for the moment, I returned to africa because I wanted to get some traffic, even if they don't pay, I wanted traffic because this is the heart of any working web site : traffic.
(2007-11) In my search of the perfect campain, I opened a Microsoft AdCenter account : second mistake. I lost my 5$ charged to open the account and never got a ad impression on the network... don't even think about a click ! So I closed it. I then decided to stay in Africa and turn into a 100% free to use web site : first good idea.
(2007-12) In the process of becoming free, I also decided to switch from SQL Server to MySQL : another very good idea. For personnal websites, I suggest you use MySQL because it is free and easy to use and performs very well. I also changed to design of the website. Everything has been changed. Everything ! I put some AdSense ads everywhere on the pages. I removed the paypal payment form, I removed some unnecessary functionnalities like changing the visual theme of the site. I remembered something one of my teachers told me : (KISS) Keep It Simple and Stupid. I helped a lot, because with less unused functionnalities, it is simplier to maintain the source code.
(2008-01) I uploaded the new version of the site. I started to see a real difference. I started to get revenues from the ads. I also put some affiliate network ads. It works great too. The only problem was that every clicks I got what giving me cents (1-5)... This is not like this I was going to be rich ! So I canged my advertisement strategy to Canada. I started to advertise in Quebec (where I live), paying about 8-10 cents per click. The revenues I got started to grow. Because competition is better in Canada than Africa, every click was giving me 10-90 cents : a lot better ! Don't pay less to get less, pay more to get more !
(2008-03) Now I get approximately the same amount of money I invest every day. The main source of revenue is AdSense but affiliate marketing pays a lot too.
http://www.iseduction.net