In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by Keith Mander, formerly a Google employee working in the Adsense division.
As with any business, building online assets to generate passive income can be done in a variety of ways. For entrepreneurs interested in growing their own portfolio of passive-income-producing Adsense sites, Keith has some pretty terrific advice!
About Keith
Born and raised in the UK, Keith got a business degree and then headed to Google for 2.5-years. His duties included product development in the AdSense team. He skipped over to Facebook for a further 1.5-years where he worked on ad campaigns and helped build the team. He left to follow his own entrepreneurial pursuits, running a small collection of authority sites (including BusSongs.com and Just-Pooh.com) and performing consulting for a hotel group in northern Europe. Keith has been on the road for 18-months, living in 7-countries across Europe and Asia. He blogs a very little on KeithMander.com and doesn’t otherwise have any any products or sites to sell anything!
In this Session We Discuss:
Effective testing
Smart pricing & publisher score.
Less can be more. (# of ads).
Over optimisation & impact on SEO.
Blocking advertisers/categories
Getting direct advertisers.
Managing multiple ad platforms with AdSense.
Using Analytics with AdSense
Keeping your account in good standing
Making an appeal
Links
Google Adsense
Niche Site Mastery
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 019: An Interview with an ex-Google Adsense Employee
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab with yet another of my favorite activities, a podcast here and I think this is up to episode no. 19. And for those of you who are in the adsense, man oh man, you guys are in for a treat today. We have on the show with me today an ex-Google adsense employee by the name of Keith Mander.
Keith, did I pronounce that right and if so welcome to the show.
Keith Mander: Thank you very much. Good to be here.
T: No problem. So Keith just because my audience.
K: But kidding aside that is of good quality and you can handle that thing.
T: Your days at Google what did you do there?
K: So I joined Google back in 2006 straight out of college. Had like a one week vacation after graduation and straight into the grinding work of corporate world. And I joined the adsense team straight away in the Dublin office. So they have a pretty big office in Ireland where they have all range of people doing jobs in different teams. And I went into the adsense team and I was there for 2 ½ years until late 2008. And I was in a mixture of a lot of things but the latter job that I had was in product development and I kinda had this position where I’d sit in between engineers and the sales team. So I’ve kind of relay information from the engineers about new features they were coming up, things that went to the test and get feedback on. And likewise I would get feedback from the sales team on things that they would like to see or requests that they’ve received from publishers. And then I would take that information and give back to the engineers. So it’d be kind of someone who would speak both of their languages. You could say of sales talk and also engineering talk even though I don’t have an engineering background I relatively, technically minded for a sales person.
T: Alright.
K: So that’s how I ended up in that role.
T: That should make this interview all that much more interesting for the folks of my audience which probably is the vast majority of the people that are gonna be listening to this podcast are like myself an adsense publisher. And so if you’re new to adsense what an adsense publisher is it is someone who owns a website or sites that monetizes that site by displaying Google adsense ads. You know you’re in Google when you type in a search term is and you see all the ads across the top and down the right hand side those are all adsense ads on what’s called the search network. And then the other place where Google puts ads is on the publisher network and that’s on the websites of folks like myself and like I myself most of the folks probably listening to this show. So the idea of having Keith come on the show I thought it’d really be interesting to see the inside the machine that is Google and see if there’s a couple of ways that we can improve as publishers that basically we can make more money. Coz that’s really what it all comes down to in this Online Income Lab and we’re here to figure out how to make income online.
So Keith let’s dive in. We’ve got a list of questions here and we’re gonna go through this kinda in no particular order. So were do we wanna start? Let’s start with some strategies for effective testing because in the context through this obviously there’s a lot of different options that you have when you put ads on your sites, where you put them, the no. that you put, sizes that you put, the colors. There’s lots of variables to test. So if you’ve got an idea for best practical testings I would love to hear them.
K: Yeah. So it’s a really interesting area. You can achieve a lot through optimization and sometimes you could really be surprised by what works and what doesn’t. And that’s really a crucial part of it, to be kind of testing your assumptions and to be experimenting. And I think that’s something you’ll see a lot of people advice in general which is just basic to experiment. So for example you can try different colors, positions and so on. And there are some more elaborate ways that you could do this in a really kind of effective and optimal way. And it’s more ideal for the larger website where you’ve got quite a load of data so you’ve got a lot of users coming to your site and you can retry a bunch of things and really accurately see what works best. So an example of that in action is that say you wanted to try 2 different color schemes. This is kind of a very simple way to experiment. You could have just a little bit of php code on the page where the ad code appear and replace it with a bit of a php or any kind of scripting language that has this function where you generate a number between say 1 and a 100 and if it’s below 50 you give it version A of your ad code and if it’s between 50 and a 100 you give them version B. And that could be 2 different color schemes or 2 different ad sizes for example.
T: Interesting.
K: Now that’s just a very simple model of it.
T: Let me jump in. Myself and probably a lot of the people who are listening to this show I don’t write any code so I’m assuming Google doesn’t have, and by the way before we even get to far to this split testing thing, if you have a website that doesn’t get a lot of traffic and it’s just brand new don’t waste any of your time on split testing because this is really you’re not gonna have enough traffic or enough data to make it or get a sufficient or rely on time you’re gonna be putting to this split testing. So that caveat out of the way are there plug ins that we can use for this that you’re aware of? Does Google have any way that we don’t have to write any code or is this something that I just have to figure out how to do?
K Yeah there are some things that Google webmaster or what they call it optimizer, yeah website optimizer which you can do some of those functionalities there with. So that kind of removes some of the technical parts of it. But if you actually look into the actual code for implementing such a simple test like that it’s really just like 3 lines of code which you can lift from just Googling around and getting that. There probably is plug in I just haven’t looked. My sites that I run are not using wordpress for example so there isn’t something that I could just lift off in terms of a plug in and use. So I’ve had to kind of figure out the solution myself but it’s really not as complicated and as scary as it might appear.
T: So do you have some of this code on some of your sites?
K: I do yes.
T: Well if you could take that sticky code and send it to me.
K: I think I put it on a blog post that I wrote once upon a time actually. So I could dig that one up and we could stick it on.
T: Yeah I’ll put it on the show notes. So if you come to onlineincomelab.com/session019 that will take you to the post with this podcast and the code will be there.
Okay so color schemes split testing, what else have you got?
K: One thing there Trent. If I mean it’s not the basic level you can take it but you could do more complex things so for example you want to the task 20 different variations you could do that. And if you have the traffic then that would make appropriate sense that you have enough traffic to be hitting lots of purples and you could see in your data what is the best. You gotta be a little careful with some things like for example if you have a 10 page website and you have this split testing code in each of those pages or multiple places on each of those pages then your data might be a little hard to show adjustments upon because the user might just be reacting to the fact that things are changing. So it might not be that the color works better than the others just the fact that the last page they were viewing was one color and now it’s a different color and that kind of breaks the ad blindness that exist. So they could be just responding to that rather than the new color being better than the older one.
So you go take in the picture and pinch yourself sometimes but there are things you could do to counterbalance that. For example you could draw a cookie when the user hits your page and then you’ll say basically that user is gonna see version A of the ads from here on until the cookie expires which you could make pretty long a year or beyond. So then they’re not reacting to changes on the site if they come back a couple of days or viewing multiple pages in that session. They’re just seeing one version and you gain data based on multiple users seeing that version. And then you get that same data for both multiple versions and you can make a real clear judgement on which works best. That’s one thing you could look at and if you wanna make it even more complicated which is totally like unnecessary for a lot of used cases but you know you really want to think about how best to do this you can also tag users to what version they’re seeing through analytics. So not only can you see which version works best for you.
T: Okay guys we had a little technical glitch there and so Keith got off when he was just talking about tags and we talked on a few minutes before that so we’re gonna pick up where we left off. We’re not gonna finish up on that tags conversation as I think we’re pretty much done suffice to say it wasn’t a particular use to niche site owners so that’s why we decided to move on.
So Keith my apologies for the technical glitch but off we go. So what we talked about for a good couple of minutes when our recorder wasn’t recording we started to get in to do some definitions for some acronyms that I see and a couple of them are rpm or not a couple of them. The one was rpm and I think that was a good conversation for someone so let’s run through that again. Can you please define what rpm is?
K: Yap so it’s revenue per thousand impressions and it’s essentially a measurement of what you’re earning from the impressions of the ads on your site. And it’s kind of a mirror of another metric which is cost per thousand impressions and that’s the measurement the advertisers would be looking at. So that’s how there’ll be bidding and how the auction will play out based on the cpm rates. And then the rpm will incorporate the revenue share that Google’s taking off from the cpm rate and also then any kind of smart pricing adjustments which is then something we can talk about. So yeah the rpm rate is a reflection of what you’re earning and you can look at it in different ways. You can look at it in terms of ad units, a page impression, or even practically visit or visitor. You can even break down the ad unit into duets or any level of complexity.
T: Okay so it’s really kind of if I’m understanding this correctly it’s kind of an overall parameter. Like for example I’m looking at my url channel report right now and my top say has an rpm of $358.86 so which happens to be my highest among my sites. Overall that site is actually performing phenomenally well and the barometer the rpm is a great barometer in that. So if I were to look into my list and I saw further down there’s another one with an rpm of $106.67 but it doesn’t get much traffic. So if I was to be able to drive the traffic, if I’m trying to allocate my resources, more articles, more links, you know. Wow! A site with a $106-107 rpm I should be paying attention to that site because if I could get more traffic to it it’s really gonna produce a wonderful ROI for me. Am I understanding the use of rpm?
K: Yes and it’s also good to look at the 2 levers that drive the rpm rate which is the click through rate and the cpc. So you could also really make smart decisions when you look at those 2 data points for a collection of sites that you run. So you might have tested a really good cpc rate for the low click through rates. And you know if you improve that click through rate as a lever then you’re gonna get the net rpm rate jumping up as well. So it’s a good way of really, yeah you need to break it down and look at the data to what drives it and then you can understand what’s going on. But essentially it’s 1 thing you could look at. Just what the rpm rates for your sites and then I should say allocate resources in terms of what you want to grow, what you want to be more of and so on.
T: Okay. And ways to improve ctr, your click through rate, was basically what we talked about earlier in the show of just testing, testing, testing.
K: Yeah that’s the core of it. Absolutely just testing different layouts, more ads on the page, etc.
T: Okay. So you mentioned something called smart pricing and when we were recording before we talked a bit about this. Now I wanna cover it off again coz actually the more I look the more I think I might have been smart priced upon my account overall. Coz my top site the cpc and the Google adwords keyword tool is $8.94 but in my adsense report I’m getting about 67 cents. My next site the cpc is $1.32 and I’m getting 22 cents and the next site. And after that is $1.36 and I’m getting 29 cents. Is that looking smelly to you like I’ve been smart priced?
K: It could be. It could be. You also have to be careful how you interpret the data in the average tools. So that’s only reflecting the cpc rates from the search network?
T: Correct.
K: And so the content network is always gonna be quite a bit lower coz not all advertisers opted for the content network. And it of course varies per industry for a whole lot of reasons. So you go take that into effect. And also perhaps you’re optimizing for a given keyword but that might not be how adsense is interpreting that page and streaming out what ads to show. So it could be showing ads for a different set of keywords than you’re aiming to achieve.
T: That’s true.
K: That’s another aspect. Another thing is the cpc rates that you’re seeing in the average tool is also what you folks see in the United States primarily but you could be getting a bunch of traffic from other (site) countries where the cpc rate is a lot lower so you’re getting the average as a diluted amount in your reports. So there’s a whole bunch of things going so I wouldn’t necessarily just jump ahead and say “yeah I’m definitely being smart priced”. But that also could be an answer. It is true.
T: Okay folks smart pricing what that is and we rather than ask Keith again I’ll just explain the answer he gave while the recorder wasn’t recording. If Google determines that your site is delivering low value clicks to the advertiser they have this thing called smart pricing. Because Google, their primary concern is obviously to people who’s doing searches into, their advertisers and a low value click let’s say you have the site where a lot of people are clicking the ad that nobody’s ever actually buying anything or they’re not spending maybe enough time on the landing page. I’m sure there’s some metrics that Google looks at. And so what will happen is Google will lower the price, the click price that an advertiser has to pay to have the ads displayed on your site. And that is what they affectionately call smart pricing.
Okay so while were talking about click rate I did look out this one on the contextual targeting tool which is in the same tools menu as the adwords keyword tool and the one on the search network that is $8.94 is actually $2.93 on the contextual targeting tool. And I am getting a $1.67 so if you’ll take Google’s 3rd off then you’ll allow some variations for advertisers bids and some variations for geographic price discrepancies it’d probably be not too terribly far off. For the next key phrase, let me just type this in. It’s hard to type and not say it out loud but I don’t wanna give away my niche. They can count my keystrokes and figure it out. It’s 65 cents and I’m getting 22 cents which is in line with the formula that I teach where you take about a third of what the click value is.
So I guess the real lesson here if for those of you who’ve heard me talk about SECockpit a lot. SECockpit is a keyword research tool and it is pulling data from the advertiser search network so you really should be, you can definitely use that to find your keywords before you go ahead and build your sites. You really should be double checking (your) the click value or the cpc with that contextual targeting tool just to make sure that there isn’t a huge discrepancy. Coz sometimes I’ve done both and I’ve seen that the bid price on one and the bid price on another is actually very similar and then other times like in this example here it’s actually a world away. So you wanna pay attention to that.
So you mentioned something else that I want to dive into. So we talked about smart pricing let’s go into this thing called publisher’s score. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and does a niche site owner need to care about publisher score? And if we do then we need to know what it is.
K: Yeah so basically the publisher score is smart pricing but for the publisher. It’s kind of the mirror term you could say. Smart pricing is something that is talked about to advertisers and it covers a lot of different things. It’s not just about the nature of the sites, also the quality of the sites generating traffic. It’s also to do with where the users’ based. I think even like what browsers users’ using. A whole host of things that’s going kind of a secret source where as publisher score is just one element of that. It’s more a reflection of what the publishers are doing with their websites.
T: In other words this is another complicated topic that a bunch of engineers lock up in a dark room and think how complex can we really make this. So let’s move on.
K: Yes. To answer the question all these things are things to be conscious about in terms of building a site that is of good quality and you can handle them and say clicks that are generated through it are adding value to the advertiser. So if you over optimize and do things that deceive users and create accidental clicks that result in a poor experience for users and advertisers. This is a ramification.
T: Yap makes sense. And for those of you who are listening who are just getting started. Maybe you own a few niche sites and so forth take all this stuff like a grain of salt because why I said that is this – your success will come from the quantity of sites that you build or the number of pages that you put on a given site assuming that that site in fact is getting traffic for the keywords that you’re targeting. I would not, if you only have a couple of sites and they’re just keywords that are targeting relatively small niches, not a ton of traffic, don’t spend a whole lot of time trying the split test and figure all the stuff because it’s not gonna make any more money. What’s gonna make you more money is launching more sites and go after more keywords so that your portfolio overall starts getting more traffic. So the decision as niche site owners to have lots of sites versus 1 site we spread our risk around. We let the cream rise to the top. Some people decide they’re just gonna, if I was a wedding planner and I want to create an authority site on being a wedding planner I’ve only got one site to look after. So I’m gonna look at all this stuff in great detail. But if you’re a niche site owner be careful that you don’t get caught up too much in analysis paralysis because analyzing doesn’t make you money. Doing makes you money.
So speaking of doing let’s talk about over doing. You said sometimes less ads could be more. Now with respect to ad placement in Niche Site Mastery I basically read up on Google’s files and they give a heat map that says here is, coz obviously nobody has more data on where to put ads than Google does, and the heat map basically says place your ads here, here and here. And so for me that’s been a generally like a 250 block in the top right hand side of the first post and then there’s a skyscraper down in the left hand rail or sidebar some people call it. And then there’s usually like a link in which is that little thin one that usually has 4-5 ads right up above the navigation bar. Those tend to perform the best for me. Now can you share when less is more? Is there any examples you can give? Or just what thoughts on why you said to me before the interview sometimes less is more.
K: Yeah I think this is kind of an interesting thing that people would probably not instinctively believe to be true. So I thought it would be interesting to mention and this has come through experience that I had when I worked with publishers more closely when I worked at Google. So I wouldn’t really be able to mention any examples mainly because I can’t remember anything on top of my head. But it’s just interesting cases where we’d really be optimizing this larger authority sites is not necessarily applicable to the niche sites.
But with this larger authority sites we could take a page layout and they may have put 3 ad units on the page together with the link units and thinking this is the best way to make them mass most money out of the user arriving on this page. But we actually found sometimes that if you take away an ad or 2 that actually could generate more money. And the theory is to rationalize this is that a user who’s scrolling down a page and sees the ads at the bottom of the page and decides to click on them the cpc of the ads appearing there are gonna be less than the cpc of the ads at the top of the page. So it might be better for the user to scroll down the page, consume the content and then take the chance they scroll back up to the top of the page and click on the ad. So reduce the ability for a user to click on a lower end link ad if that makes sense.
But I think you’re spot on like with your earlier comment. There’s so much you could do and test and play around with but that’d probably be if your biggest lever for making more money with the niche model. It’s just I think you’re better off to stick with 3 ads based upon your real gut feeling and the training from yourself and the information that Google has release in terms of heat map. What makes like intuitive sense that will get you the 80% of the returns in the results. So that’s the game really. And then work on creating more sites ultimately. But if you wanna get that extra 20% you get a big authority site and you get an extra 20% then alright. This are the kinds of things that you can think about.
T: Oh yeah absolutely. I mean if you’re looking at a site that has a 100,000 users a day you wanna really dive into this stuff. But if you’ve got a site that has a 100 users a day the increment or the extra 20% if you can figure it out get it. I mean in an absolute dollars it’s not, if you figure out your dollars per hour for compensation for getting an extra 20% it’s gonna be pretty low.
K: Yeah you’re right.
T: Okay let us move on here. Misplaced my questions, there we go. So you also mentioned something in our talk beforehand about over optimization and its impact on SEO, what did you mean by that?
K: So there’s been a long term belief by kind of SEO experts that a factor that is used in ranking a website is how many ads are on the site, you know if it’s really overly commercial or it provides poor experience to the user. So you know a typical example is where you just got these huge ads on top of the page and then a bunch of scrape content at the bottom. And there’s always been a belief that Google is looking at that closely and that affects your ranking. And then just about 3-4 weeks ago there was an official post at the Google blog saying indeed there really is a kind of ranking element that is used which looks precisely at how many ads are above the fold and what kind of user experience people are having.
T: So I am actually into conversation with others who have heard this term the ad copy ratio. And then we mentioned above the fold. In the days of monitors being all different sizes how does one, first of all what is the official resolution that you wanna set so that you can figure out what is above the fold? Do you happen to know what that is?
K: I’ve actually no idea. I guess you’ll just have to, there’ll be data out like what is the normal norm for the most used browser or size.
T: So you could Google around and probably find the answer to that.
K: Yeah.
T: And then this ad to copy ratio do you recall what the rule of thumb for that is? I think it’s 50%.
K: Yeah I have absolutely no idea. I just think about it in broad terms. It’s something to be more conscious about. Particularly again if you’ve got a big authority site acting a really competitive niche or market where you know you’re ranking has a big impact on the future of that business but for the niche sites where your market is not so much competition or your competition is doing something very similar to you you’ve got some allowance perhaps. So to try and push it be more aggressive.
T: Okay so rather that us get bug down I’ve actually had another guest on the show. Folks if you go back to session no. 16 and listen to the podcast titled An Interview with Matt Kadish on How to Ace your Google Quality Score. Matt has been a publisher and an adwords advertiser, not an employee of Google. But for a very, very long time and he had really good things to talk about on this so we won’t get too bug down on this episode but if you want more information on that make sure you go listen to episode no. 16.
Alright so next on our list of things to talk is you’ve mentioned to me that I should ask you about blocking advertisers and categories. As a niche site owner is that something that I wanna pay attention to?
K: No. We can just pause right here to be honest.
T: Yeah let’s spend a minute or two because there’s probably a few people on who are listening to this who may be owners of the authority sites and I don’t wanna cut it out for them.
K: Right. You know there’s a whole host of reasons why you’d want to do this in terms of really valuing the user experience like getting rid of ads that you personally disagree with based on moral objections. So what you think your users might respond negatively to. That could be one element. Another thing to look at is if you want to try and encourage direct media buys. So if you’re seeing that the advertiser is buying ads on your site through your adsense you might want to approach them directly to try and negotiate a more agreeable dear. And to do that you could decide to block them through adsense to limit alternatives that they have in terms of advertising your site.
T: And the benefit of that obviously would be if you’re going direct with the advertiser then Google’s not taking their 3rd in the middle.
K: Right. So you could share that out eventually or you could look to offer more to that advertiser in terms of complete 100% coverage across the site, better ad positions, so on and so forth. For niche sites you’re not gonna get a big advertiser knocking on your door necessarily.
T: No
K: It’s quite unlikely.
T: It’s unlikely but it does happen when you get like everyone who’s been listening to my stuff knows that my first adsense site is a site that I bought. It is an authority site called howtocleananything.com and I get contacted with a couple of times a year from advertisers usually agents for advertisers that wanna advertise directly on the site. So it does happen as your alexa rank or your traffic goes up, things, metrics that they look at. But it’s not gonna happen on a niche site. I mean that site is getting 1,500 visitors a day. You know when most of my niche sites are less than that.
K: One thing that spring into mind though, if you had a combination of adsense and affiliate ads through per click bank products and so on you might want to lock the url for the click bank product in your adsense. So you’re not gonna have fleeting affiliates appearing in those ads coz you should be able to earn more from your direct ad than what you’d earn through the affiliate ad from another affiliate.
T: And that is super relevant because for the Niche Site Mastery master ninja members, and that’s folks are they’re with my team actually builds the sites for them, we actually do when the niche is applicable we do put a click bank product on those ads so that is something as the owners we can’t get into your adsense account to block that particular advertiser. When you receive your site you should go into your adsense account and block the advertiser whose click bank product is on your site. So there’s a little nugget I’m glad that one came up.
Okay so let’s talk a little bit now, I’m gonna skip past getting direct advertisers coz I don’t think it’s terribly relevant for the vast majority of our listeners. If we have time in the end we’ll get back to it. Managing multiple ad platforms with adsense is something you know in our emails back and forth you’ve mentioned. What did you mean by that?
K: Yeah and I hate to say again but it’s a bit more applicable to authority sites. So it’s just something to think about for those who caters for those who’ve got a big site and you’re wanting to really maximize the url format. You can think about using more than just adsense. You can use different networks that are more specialized for particular countries for example. And when you’ve got all those ad codes from different networks things can start to get complicated. So there are a whole bunch of services out there called ad manager or something like that will basically help you manage all those networks and private deals that you have. And Google has his own product that you acquire to double click which used to be called ad manager. I think it’s now called dart for small publishers I believe.
T: Dart as in dart like for dart board?
K: It’s precisely yeah. I believe it’s called that. And it’s a great product and it is pretty comlicated. It’s not for someone just getting started. It is for someone who’s got a big authority site and is quite comfortable in the technicalities of that website in terms of implementing more complex ad codes, talking about more terminology.
T: So what about me with my site in my training sites, 1500 visitors a day? It’s not a huge by any stretch of the imagination. Is that big enough where I should be exploring other advertising platforms or do you think the time that I would have to put into learning would not be offset by the incremental increase in revenue?
K: Right. I’d say that time would be the factor. I think it really does come into play when you’ve got direct advertisers working with you because then you could implement their ads through the ad manager and say for this advertiser they bought a million impressions they wanted to serve out over a 1 week period just so visitors who come to the site from America and so on you’ll set the parameters you’ll serve out those ads precisely and serve adsense other times in a row. You know, simplicity in an elegant way you could say in terms of what the user sees. So to manage that any other way would be really tough.
T: Okay. And we also have here using analytics with adsense. Do you think that’s something that would be applicable to niche site owners? Should we spend any time talking about that?
K: Yeah we could. So what’s interesting there that will really help you to see the earnings you’re getting on a per page level. So what you can take from that is what pages of those niche sites you have and what behind that would be the keyword driving those pages. So what is earning the money. Where is, you know you could be surprised a fab page secondary keyword is actually really doing really well and maybe even better than your primary then that could really shift how you change the focus of the site in terms of generating new pages, tweaking your primary page to include a little bit more for other keywords. So there’s lots that you can take from that. Something to look at.
T: So how do I make that happen? How do I turn that on, for lack of a better term, or is it on already?
K: Basically you need to link together your analytics and your adsense account and there will be a link to that pretty prominently on top of your adsense home page I believe.
T: No I use, I and many of my members use, the quick adsense plug ins to manage the display of our ads and in the configuration of that plug in let me pull out the site here because I know that there is a check box that’s something to the effect and I always put a check in it. So let’s just go and pull this account up here and we’ll see if we can coz I love to make this as specific as I can so sorry listeners coz we’re doing this real time but hopefully this is gonna be beneficial to you. Okay so I’ll just log in here and then we’ll go to settings, quick adsense and oh no sorry that’s my bad. It’s not the quick adsense plug in. It is, I use on the vast majority of my sites to insert the analytics is this yoast analytics plug in and in the configuration of that plug in and I’m probably gonna have to use a different site here. It’s in the configuration of ad plugin that you could link your adsense account.
So bear with me while I pull out one of those sites. And I think actually it probably applies to my top performing adsense sites. We’ll use that one as an example, see if I’ve got the plug in there. Nothing like slowing the pace of the show down so that the guy doing the interview can actually learn something. You know what? If I don’t get this figured out it’s gonna be hard for me to teach the rest of you guys. Alright, Google analytics, so the plug in that I’m using is Google analytics for wordpress configuration. It’s by yoast -y-o-a-s-t. And in the custom variable settings there is a check box that says track adsense. So now I guess what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go to my analytics for that particular site and we’ll see if we can get Keith here to walk me through so that I can maybe blog about this in more details afterwards. Alright so there’s the site, wouldn’t you love to know the url. I’m in the analytics report for that particular site so where do I wanna go and look?
K: Yeah so on the left hand side you drill into content, site content and then pages. I think that’s where you wanna go.
T: Actually in the new analytics there’s under contents there’s a thing there’s adsense. There’s an actual thing called adsense.
K: Yeah you’re right. That’s that.
T: All your adsense pages. Let’s click on, this report requires adsense to be enabled in your profile.
K: Yeah
T: Okay. I’m gonna have to blog about this later coz this is really interesting so I’ll just Google and blah blah blah blah… How does linking my adsense account… yeah yeah yeah yeah… but doesn’t tell only how to actually link the darn thing.
K: I think you’ll find a link within adsense as well.
T: Okay let’s go back to my adsense account… there we go. And let me just see what happens when I click on … okay so it wouldn’t be… how do I enable or does it enable on a url by url basis? Or how do I turn it on? Do you remember?
K: I can’t remember. I’ve already done this a long time ago. But if below the top part where you got the estimated earnings you got right there the widget that shows the last 7 days activity. And you have a link just above that for view full reports.
T: There’s quick reports this month, last month.
K: Yeah above that.
T: Yeah view full reports.
K: Yeah and then do you have anything about analytics next to that?
T: Leaderboard, blog plot, I’ve got my channels… you know what folks rather than turn this into the most boring podcast ever I am going to research this and I”m gonna write an additional blog post about how to do this so don’t worry. I’m back again. Let’s move on coz I know I’m probably putting some of you to sleep. Okay so the only thing that I wanna talk about and we’re getting close to wrapping up here is some people write me every now and again and they’re all worried about having too much of a Google footprint or having adsense on too many different sites. Or what is it that causes things for you to lose your adsense account and so forth? I kinda wanna dispel as many as those urban legend, this for lack of a better term, as possible. You can jump in if anything I say is wrong.
No. 1 I don’t think Google cares about how many sites you have. The moment you put your sites in analytics or the moment you put your sites in adsense Google knows every site you have so there’s no need to put them on more than one host and more than one classified ip address and all those other stuff. Correct?
K: Yeah I should say. Unless you really get into some black cat stuff like it’s irrevelant.
T: Yeah I don’t teach any of that or do any of that so I don’t think it’s big deal. And then the other thing is just don’t violate the terms of service which you are not gonna dive into the boring details of the terms of service here but go and read the Google adsense terms of service and anything that says not to do don’t do it. But if from my experience getting an adsense account approved has not been difficult at all. I’ve done it for myself and other people. Put up quite a decent quality sites, 5 or 10 articles, make it all unique content, have a pretty looking header and submit it. Three days later you’re gonna get approved. Don’t violate your terms of service. Don’t put on too many ads. Don’t say, don’t surround your ads with “hey click here. Click my ads.” Don’t put any funny headlings around the ads. Just place your ads in the way that I teach it and you shouldn’t have any problems at all. Is there anything else Keith that someone should or shouldn’t be doing to keep their account in good standing?
K: Yeah I think that’s sound advice but just to read the terms of service I mean is not gonna be a pleasant read. It can be quite dry but you’d be surprise how many people really think that they’ve done nothing wrong but they really have. It’s just a case of terms of understanding really what the rules are so they could be really like buy and pay traffic for example to their sites which is something that Google frowns upon. There’s a lot of cases…
T: Wait a minute. You’re telling me that if I have any adsense on my site I cannot use adwords to drive traffic to that site? It doesn’t fit for my model for niche sites anyway but you just caught my curiousity.
K: Right. So I wouldn’t say necessarily that Google adwords is an exception to that rule but it’s more of a case of the kind of traffic that you’re buying. So there are lots of dolgy traffic that you can get in terms of this pay per view traffic or through malware impressions and so on.
T: Okay I see where you’re going. Don’t go into microworkers.com and buy a bunch of clicks.
K: Right, right exactly. If you plan to buy clicks or try and buy impressions and hope that you’re gonna get clicks from, don’t even think about it. Because essentially what you’d be doing is generating a lot of very poor quality impressions for this ads. And that will get you in trouble.
T: In other words if it smells bad it is bad. Just use your common sense. Your traffic is supposed to come from a wide number of different people from all over the globe from this fancy little thing called the search engine. So as long as that’s where your traffic is coming from you’re gonna be A-ok.
K: Right.
T: Alright so in the event that somebody doesn’t read the terms of service and they do get their account banned, is that it? Is it game over? Can they make an appeal? How do they make an appeal? What’s the process?
K: Right. So some nitty gritty details that I probably cannot share but the essentials are typically you would be able to make some sort of appeal. So when your account is terminated you’d get an email from the Google team telling you that your account has been terminated. And proof will provide very specific details on what the violation was which may seem completely unfair but there are some very good reasons why that is the case. And then you would potentially be invited to reply back with further details to kind of try to make your case you could say. And in which case then you would really want to provide some clear information or data that you might have on what might have gone wrong. So you might feel that you’ve been kind of made a victim of by a competitor or that… I”m just trying to think of genuine used cases. There are very few legitimate cases where you can make a correct appeal to be honest. Most of the time the user has done something wrong.
T: Okay so let’s go with that for a minute. Let’s say because people don’t read terms of service is they do things that are wrong. And just cause they didn’t know they were doing it wrong doesn’t make it right. In your experience and maybe you don’t have experience to give context for this, what percentage of appeals are successful and the ban is reversed?
K: Yeah I really couldn’t say but it’s typically going to be quite low. I mean yeah it’s a tough question I can’t answer.
T: Okay so there’s the rule… go ahead you have a for example.
K: Yeah.
T: Please go ahead.
K: Well it’s just in terms of confidentiality but I would say do have a go, do try and provide as much data as much as you can. And also keep in mind to keep that email fairly concise. Don’t give long emails you know begging for mercy, you know, you had a bad day or your girlfriend just dumped you or something like that.
T: You don’t care.
K: Clearly concise fact based. You gotta keep in mind what the Google representative is gonna be reading and interpreting. They just want a few quick things to think well maybe they’ve got some sort of case here that we need to dig into to make sure that we’ve not made an error on our part. But if you’ll provide a self story it’s not gonna help your case you know. It’s a very much data driven decision so you’ve gotta provide contrary data.
T: Okay so the smarter move ladies and gentlemen is read the terms of service and don’t do anything stupid in the first place and then you don’t have to worry about having your potential ability to lie on the beach and make money 24 hours a day taken away from you because you were stupid. So don’t do that. Alright so that kinda concludes the formal questions that I wanted to get through. So now I’m gonna ask your opinion on a couple of things. No. 1 is do you see anything really changing with adsense as it pertains you know a niche site owner being able to build a portfolio of niche site and monetize those niche sites with adsense from what you were aware when you were with Google and anything that crossed your consciousness since then. Are there any reasons why Google doesn’t like niche site owners if they are building high quality niche sites with unique content?
K: I can’t say that it’s something they dislike or is going to change their take on. Adsense has become huge profitable part of the Google business because of the long tail which is extremely long. And all other niche sites are part of that. So yeah but the golden thing is of course quality and providing value to users and advertisers.
T: Correct. And I really want coz some people like to be doing doomsayers and naysayers I don’t do to include for pastures, this concept of the long tail, let’s use Amazon as an example of this. Amazon has this massive competitive advantage over the offline book retailer because of its ability to sell books that individually don’t sell very much but because there’s so many books that don’t sell very much collectively Amazon sells a lot of books. Bookstores are not able due to the cost of square footage to be able to devote retail space to stocking the long tail when it came to books. So how does it pertain to adsense? If you think about what Keith just said how many niches are there out in the long tail? Millions, millions and millions and millions. Does it behoove Google to arbitrarily one day say “baahh, we’re not gonna let those darn niche site owners put any more adsense on those sites” and cut off millions and millions of websites that are currently generating revenue for Google? No. Not at all. And it’s never gonna make sense for Google to do that. However when you keep in mind Google’s no. 1 objective is to provide high quality relevant content to the users, all about the user experience.
Honestly Google and Keith may disagree with me, they didn’t care about their advertisers. They care about the user because if the user stops going to Google to put in a search and Google becomes irrelevant advertisers will stop advertising on Google. So Google’s customer is the user who punches in search. So if you as a website owner think about I want to produce websites that are very high quality and are extremely relevant to the search term that fits with Google’s model and you are building yourself a sustainable business. If on the other hand you put on $5 articles which you got from fiverr which are written like crap and provide no information whatsoever, no you’re not building a sustainable business for yourself. And it’s gonna be reflected Google’s gonna be able to easily see that because you can be a fool to human being and Google has this little metrics called bounce rate and time on site which they pay particularly close attention to and you’ll notice.
And I came across this in keyword research just the other day where there was 2 niche sites in the search results in the top 10. And the one that was higher, I think it was 4th or 5th and the other one which I think was in 8th, it was all high domain authority sites other than this 2 niche sites. The niche site that ranked higher had less links, had less pages of content and was newer. So by conventional wisdom one will think will that one shouldn’t be ranking higher, shouldn’t be ranking lower right? Here’s the thing. The one that ranked higher – way better looking site. Maybe the content, I didn’t read all the articles on both sites but it was a way better looking site. Don’t you think that the look of that site is gonna be reflected in the bounce rate and the time on site? Of course it is.
And for those of you who don’t know what those 2 metrics are, let me take a moment to explain. If you type in bananas in Google and you hit search and you click the first site in it, it takes you to a site about bananas. And you hit your back button that is a bounce. The more percent, the higher the percentage of your site’s visitors that do that Google’s machine says “huh, well that site should be penalized because it must not be very relevant or it must be low quality to the search term therefore it is detrimental to the user’s experience so they’re gonna penalize you for that”. The other thing is if the time on site’s not very high same thing Google’s gonna go “hmm site must not be very high quality. It must not be giving the users what they were looking for so we’ll penalize it”. So that’s why having high quality good looking website is so incredibly important. And if you do that and you continue to focus on the long tail no one has a crystal ball. No one knows what Google’s gonna do except their inner circle and they’re not telling us. My opinion is if you do that you’re building a solid, sustainable business for years to come because of the common sense basis you’re giving Google what they want. You’re giving the user high quality, informative, relevant content to the search term. And therefore Google will continue to rank you for that. And as long as they rank you you’re gonna get traffic, your displayed adsense should make money and wala! you do that enough times you can ditch your job.
Anyway, sermon over folks. Build good stuff.
K: Amen.
T: Alright. Keith we are gonna wrap this show up here before I do that first of all I wanna thank you very, very much for making the time to come on the show. Folks if you are listening on iTunes and you wanna get the show notes and you wanna hear other podcasts just go to onlineincomelab.com. For this episode after the .com it’s /session019. If you just wanna check out the blog obviously just onlineincomelab.com and you’ll find in the navigation bar the podcast button and you’ll be able to all of the episodes that I’ve done and there’s a lot of really good interviews in the history so you should come and check it out.
So Keith thank you very much for coming on the episode. Do you have any closing comments or thoughts that you would like to add before we sign off?
K: Take action. Get going. Experiment. Find out your own answers basically. I think that’s the key. You know you can read on for these things forever and try and get gems of information here and there but really you just gotta get on with it and to try things out. That’s it.
T: Terrific! Okay Keith thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a pleasure. Folks again I hope that this has been a value for you. My name is Trent, the host for the Online Income Lab and we will see you in the next episode. By the way if you haven’t checked out my Youtube channel make sure that you do because I share content there that I don’t share anywhere else. Youtube.com/onlineincomelab. Will talk to you again soon. Take care everybody. Have a great day!
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