AdSense Report Tab

The AdSense Console is very easy to use. The first page you see is
the “Overview” page of the “Reports” tab. Here you will find the
number of page impressions your blog has had, the number of clicks
on your ads, your page click-through rate, and your earnings. You can
view today, this week, last week, all time, etc… Using this simple
overview you can start to adjust your ad block locations and see if
your revenue improves or declines based on the location of your ad
blocks. One good thing you can try here is to look at your click
through rate for a day. Move your ads and then see if your click
through improves or declines. Look at the content on various days
and find out if one topic seems to get you better click through than
another. If so then you might want to create more content based on
those keywords. Your goal is the highest click through rate possible.


As you can see in the graphic above, Google holds AdSense payments
until you have reached a total of $100 and have specifically told
Google how to pay you. This helps to keep Google’s overhead down
and your earning potential higher.


In addition to various simple to use reports, Google offers you a Site
Diagnostics page. This site will alert you if there is anything on your
site that the Googlebot has issues with. It is a good idea to view this
from time to time and make sure everything is okay with your site.

Where do the Ads Come From?

It is logical that at this point you might be wondering where the
advertisements Google puts on your site come from. Google has
another program called AdWords where businesses and individuals can
pay to advertise their websites via AdSense. These companies and
individuals are assured by doing this that the websites their
advertisements end up on will be relevant to the goods and services
which they want to sell. Just as AdSense saves you time in looking for
advertisers for your site, AdWords saves a lot of time, energy and
money for those businesses who want to advertise on relevant sites
without having to go out themselves and search for the sites to host
their ads.

Using the AdWords program, businesses and individuals buy AdSense
advertisements in large blocks by bidding on them. Generally a
business will pay for 500-1000 ads at a time. Based on their specified
keywords, a business allows AdSense to put their ads on sites which
would likely interest people who would be their potential customers.


For the example above of the chicken blog, if you were a hatchery, or
a supplier of chicken accessories, then you would want ads placed on
blogs such as the above one for chickens. This is exactly what
AdWords and AdSense do. And, they do it very well for both the
advertiser and the host of the ads. The hatchery wants to find chicken
lovers and the blog about chickens is the place it can easily find them.
The blog wants ads which will appeal to chicken lovers, and the
hatchery is one of those ads.


Just as AdSense can be a good way to make money from advertising,
AdWords can be a good way to advertise your business or even your
own blog! If you are looking at driving targeted traffic to a website
what better way than to use AdWords where it will place ads on similar
websites to yours? There simply is no easier way. If you have a blog
on a unique topic and are struggling to bring it traffic, you can buy
AdWords advertising and your blog link will show up on similar sites to
yours, and this will bring you added traffic. From this added traffic
you will get more clicks on your AdSense ads and will likely make
more money from those than you paid to advertise with AdWords.

How Does AdSense Know What Ads to Send?

The AdSense engine at Google sends its bot, called Googlebot, out to
visit your site on a regular basis to examine your pages. This bot is
simply a program which reads your pages. Googlebot looks at your
key words, the structure and formatting on your web pages, the native
language of your site, etc… Using the information gathered by the
Googlebot, Google then sends AdSense ads to your site which are the
most likely to entice your visitors to click on them.


The Googlebot will even tell AdSense if your blog is in a language
other than English, so that your ads come to you in the language of
your site. It wouldn’t be very good to see English ads on a Spanish
site or vice versa. AdSense is available in many languages and
regions around the world. And, the ads you will receive on your blog
will be from your own region and in your native language.


The longer your website is up, and the more you are scanned by the
Googlebot, the more tightly matched the ads become to your content.
At first the bot might misunderstand the meaning of your blog if you
have not done a great job of using lots of relevant keywords. If you
have a blog about coffee yet you talk a lot about your children in your
blog message posts, then you might end up with ads which would
interest readers of a children’s blog. If you want to monetize your
blog it is important to stay on topic, most of the time, so that the
Googlebot reads your blog and serves up the ads which you want to
show up on your site.

Knowing what standards Google is looking for on your website with
their Googlebot, and keeping your blog to be compliant with those
standards, makes AdSense work it’s best for you. For some unknown
reason AdSense prefers pages with lots of text and not too many
graphics. Googlebot also sees larger or bold text as having more
importance than regular text. This means that posting large and bold
key words can help AdSense zero in on the subject of your blog better.
It also means that you will want to keep the photos and graphics to a
minimum and make sure you stay on topic a large percentage of the
time. If you want to have a blog with a lot of photos you might
consider starting a second blog and hosting them all there and then
link the two blogs together.


One valuable tip for all bloggers is to make sure you start all of your
blog posts with a large, bold, title at the beginning of the text section
of each blog message post. It is very quick and simple to do this and
yet it is very effective with AdSense. If your blog is about frogs and
you mention frogs in your title and then again as a bold title at the
beginning of your blog message post, the Googlebot can better
understand that your blog is about frogs. Taking the time to do this
simple thing will insure that the Googlebot understands more quickly
what your blog is about and serves you up relevant AdSense ads. It
also looks natural to your readers and isn’t distracting to them. It is
also less time consuming than dealing with special tag words or any
other search engine games bloggers play.


Another good tip with AdSense is to make sure you use your topic’s
keywords often in your blog post titles, and use them again within the
content of your posts as well. For example, if you have a blog about
chickens you will want to make sure your post titles mention the word
“chicken” in them. You will also want to make sure you mention
chickens, eggs, and other related words as much as possible within
your posted messages. The more you can post relevant titles and
content loaded with keywords, the better AdSense will work for you
and send you relevant ads. You have a much higher click through rate
for ads which are relevant to the topic of your blog. Think about the
times you have clicked on the Google AdSense ads on a website you
were visiting. Generally speaking, was it for something related to the
topic you were already reading about? Of course it was.


However, all of that being said, you do not want to overload your
posted messages with keywords. Your reader wants to know that you
publish your blog for them to read, not to make money from them. By
posting a sentence which reads; “the chickens in my chicken coop are
working on having more chickens in the spring...” looks like a sentence
I tried to use the word “chicken” in as much as possible. There is
definitely a balance to be struck between pleasing your readers and
pleasing the Googlebot who serves your AdSense ads on your website.
Instead of stuffing in those keywords try making more sentences or
using them in the title and adding a bit more text to your message
posts.


You also do not want it to appear that you set-up your blog with a
bunch of keywords simply for AdSense. You also do not want to copy
content from free sites like wikipedia and then paste them into your
blog. These blogs are called splogs (short for spam blogs) and doing
this can get you kicked-off of AdSense and Blogger as well. You need
a blog with good original content, not just a bunch of keywords. By
creating a splog you can get a high search engine ranking temporarily
but why would readers want to visit or return to your blog if all it
offers them is some keyword garbage and ads to click on?


It can take a bit of time for the Googlebot to visit your website and
determine what its main topic is. If your website is new to AdSense,
Google will not guess about your topic, it will simply place ads on your
blog for charities or public service announcements as to not waste the
advertising dollars of its AdWord clients. This is good for you the
blogger as well. The last thing you want to do is to see ads on your
blog which have nothing to do with its topic. By putting up the neutral
ads Google has solved this problem.