ReMarketing and Affinity Lists for Increased Relevance and Sales

Have you ever wanted to reach potential customers who have visited your website, keep your brand in front of them, and have another chance to earn their business? Yeah. We all would. This has been possible for a few years and gets easier with each passing year. If you’re confused about remarketing vs retargeting, don’t worry; they’re the same thing. The team at Google just has to be different so they call it remarketing.

You put in a lot of energy to get customers on your website or in your store. I’m sure you want every opportunity to make the sale. Sometimes people just need some extra time for a paycheck to come in or to save up for your product. This is the perfect reason for why EVERY business needs to use remarketing. Naturally, you’re a smart marketer. You should continue to use the tactics that you already know that work. Now while that sounds ridiculously obvious, I understand that it’s actually harder to stick to than you might think; just like that diet plan…

The good news in 2015 is that there is no short supply of data to illustrate why remarketing is so important. Maybe you have seen the stat that shows 49% of customers visit 2 – 4 websites before they decide to make a purchase. Obviously, it should be no surprise to you, then, that 96% of consumers don’t make their purchase on the first visit to a website. Does this describe you and your buying habits?

When was the last time you visited a website to perform research on a product or service to buy later either on the website or in the store?

Did you see ads between the time you first visited the site and the time you returned to buy? Well those ads played a part in persuading you whether you realize it or not and that’s why so many companies are doing this and you should as well.

So let’s create a Remarketing Campaign now. Yes it will be a separate campaign within AdWords. Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) will assist in getting in front of those customers. Think of RLSA like a booster rocket for your Google search and Display ad campaign: it essentially puts your great ads in front of highly qualified customers who have already shown interest in your business or your products by visiting your website. Let me clarify something here. There are a few types of remarketing. RLSA is for Search only text ad campaigns.  This campaign requires a list of 1000 visitors or cookies placed. The other type of remarketing uses the Google Display Network and uses a mix of text and display (banner or video) ads. This remarketing campaign requires only 100 visitors or cookies before activating. In order to maximize the reach of placements where your ads may appear on the GDN, you will want to use both text, image ads in as many ad sizes as possible to your campaign and if possible, video ads as well. The Ad gallery offers an easy way to create ads. It pulls images from your website and you supply the text. While this works, I recommend you create your own image ads. I’m sure you or your team can be more creative than the gallery tool.

To create your remarketing campaign, follow these ten steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the Campaign tab at the center of your AdWords user interface screen.
3. Click the red + Campaigns button. From the drop-down menu, select “Display Network only.” (assuming you don’t want an RLSA campaign)
4. Select the “Remarketing” radio button.
5. Enter a campaign name, bid strategy, and budget.
6. Click the Set up remarketing button. You’ll go through the guided process to set up your remarketing tag and create your lists:
7. Next, AdWords will create the remarketing tag for you. You’ll be able to email the tag to yourself or your webmaster or your client, along with instructions on how to add it to each page of your website. Note that If you use Google Analytics, you will see a checkbox to use the tracking code that’s already on your site instead.
8. You will see that AdWords has automatically created an “All Visitors” list to get you started, so you don’t need to create this list yourself. The “All Visitors” list includes everyone who has visited any tagged pages on your website. You can later create new lists for your different groups of site visitors (I will discuss this later in this article). Click Return to campaign.
9. Click Save and continue.
10. Just like other campaigns, enter the ad group name and a bid that you feel will be competitive.

In the Remarketing lists tab, you’ll see the “All Visitors” list added to your ad group.

Click Save and continue if you want to create your ads, or Skip ad creation if you want to do this later

So how do you create RLSA or Display Audience Lists?

It’s a simple 4 step process.

1. Within AdWords when creating a remarketing campaign you will 1st create an audience list and when you create that list you will be given some javascript tagging code. You will place that code on every single page of your site.           To set up  an audience list you will simply go to Share library > Audiences > Create a remarketing list. This step automatically creates the main remarketing list which captures all of your visitors. You can then create as many lists as you want based on the sections of your website which people visit. The cool thing is that there is no need to add a separate tag for each list; one tag will segment all of the lists used.
2. Create Multiple Lists Focusing on general (all) visitors, recent shoppers who purchased and, those who abandon the shopping cart.
3. As a rule of thumb use 35% – 40% of the entire SEM budget on remarketing.
4. Keep all targeting options turned off because you want your special offer remarketing ads to follow your visitors EVERYWHERE they go for a time period from 30 to 540 days.

Now that you have an overview of the process that will work for either type of remarketing, you can select the type, which will work best for you and your goals. While the RLSA (search) is very powerful, most people use the Display remarketing on the Google Display network as well as linking their YouTube Channel to the remarketing campaign to capitalize on their videos. The campaigns, which see the greatest success, are the ones, which use a separate ad specifically offering a special offer and a strong, compelling call to action.

Most of the time, the remarketing campaign will have zero constraints. No In-Market groups, affinity groups, demographic segments or placements set because you want the ads to follow the person everywhere they go. There may be times when you don’t want to be so blatantly obvious there is remarketing going on. To go covert, you can now use Custom Affinity Audiences, which allows you the marketer to define who you want to get in front of across the web, regardless of the device they are using to access the internet. Custom affinity audience option works across the entire Google Display Network, which, according to ComScore, reaches 94% of the web in the United States on a monthly basis, and 89% of global internet users. How’s that for reach?

At the end

You can create a custom list that targets only people who visit specific pages on your site or watch a specific video and a different list for a different event, product or service page. Staying in front of this list will increase sales.. I hope you enjoyed the topic.

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How to Select Keywords For Google AdWords

In this article, I will share some tips on how to select keywords for AdWords.

A good place to start with search engine marketing (SEM) is the use of keywords because that is how your customers find you, right?

You should, remember these 3 things:

Think holistically about the different ways those customers could reach you

Align your keywords and their management with your overall business outcomes

Delete your low search volume keywords.

There are a few ways to develop a list of keywords for your AdWords campaign. Think of the words on the website, your services and products that you offer. What terms do you think your customers use to describe or search for you? What terms do your competitors use to be found?

Remember the story of the 3 bears? Goldilocks tried the porridge, one was too hot, another was too cold, and one was just right. Well, you can think of keywords for AdWords in the same way. Some are too broad, some are too long, and some are just right. In SEO, we LOVE Long Tail keywords because those are very relevant. They may not be searched as much as a broad term, but when they are, its money in the bank.  Unfortunately, you can’t have a lot of long tail keywords in AdWords because of the low search volume. Compared to shorter keywords (those with two to four words), keywords that contain five words or more drive less than half the volume of clicks and impressions on average. It also hurts your quality score. I’ll explain this a little later.

Let’s say you are David Bouley, the owner and chef of Bouley’s French Restaurant in New York City and you want to have a campaign to sell more gift certificates to your restaurant. Using the term Gift Card is too broad because it will trigger all kind of searches that are irrelevant. He doesn’t want people seeing his ads when searching for Harry & David Gift Baskets. Using Restaurant Gift Certificates is a little better because it triggers those searching for that more specific gift certificate, yet it can still be a problem because it can show up for Olive Garden gift certificate, or Chili’s, which target totally different diners with a different price and dining experience expectation in mind. A good keyword phrase could be french fine dining gift card or French fine dining gift certificate. This targets diners who are interested in a French Fine Dining Experience. Another possibility could be Bouley’s Gift Certificates, however I bet the search volume would be very low.

Keyword Tools

There are many software tools available to assist you in finding the best keywords for your campaign or website. One of them is the Google Keyword Planner. What I have found though, is that these tools are not as accurate as you may think. The search volume has been off and the bids weren’t as accurate as what I saw when my campaigns went live.

I was told once by a very successful online marketing professional, Matt Trainer, who has made a good living by helping major brands with getting massive targeted traffic and customers into their sales funnels, to take 10 – 15 minutes and step away from the computer and actually think how I, as a potential client would search for that product or service. I’m sure you can think of the right terms just as well as any software can. Heck, you can even think of what terms your competitors are using. Like many things in life, you just gotta take action and step out in faith. Try it yourself and, you may start to realize that this practice will work better for you too if you try it and practice it. Maybe you have already seen the same things that I have experienced.

Grouping Keywords

Google LOVES tightly themed, related and relevant content. You want to match keywords to a user’s search terms and to the ads as well as the landing page you are sending them to visit. I arrange keywords within the ad groups. It also makes it easier for you to manage and maintain your account.  If you are on a tight budget, keywords are often grouped at the campaign level for greater budgetary control.

Stay Clear of Low Searched Keywords

Watch out for low search volume keywords. As Stated earlier, SEM doesn’t like long tail keywords. These terms often haven’t driven a single impression in months or even years because people aren’t performing searches on them (not because your bid isn’t winning any auctions). While you want them on your page for SEO, Delete them in SEM campaign if you have other keywords that could potentially cover that traffic. My personal preference is to have 2 – 3 long tail keywords that are super relevant even though they don’t perform well because when people do search for example: Buy Bouley’s NYC Gift Certificates, His ad will show up and the person looking for that and ready to buy a $500 gift certificate for a 5 course French Fine Dining luxury experience will have found exactly what they want.

Let’s Get Negative

Just as important as the keywords people use to find you; Negative keywords are an essential part of a well-rounded keyword strategy. In order to increase the profitability and improve control over the flow of traffic in your account, use negative keywords to the fullest. On the most basic level, negative keywords prevent you from showing ads to people who are less interested in what you have to offer, even though their queries may be syntactically related to the keywords in your account.

So, let’s go back to the example of David Bouley’s French Restaurant. He doesn’t want to show up for searches of gift cards from Pizza Hut, or Chili’s or Applebee’s, etc. So a sure fire way to assure we are targeting the most relevant audience is to add these restaurants to the negative keyword list along with gift baskets and Harry. Once the campaign is running, you will see in the keyword details reports what terms are triggering your ads and then you can add the appropriate ones to the negative keyword list.

Having a strong negative keyword list will be valuable as it improves the performance of your campaign and improves the quality scores of your ads.

Scoring High Marks on Quality

You know how you have those warning or indicator lights on the dash of your car? They turn on when you need to check your engine, or if your oil or gas is running low. Well, you can think of the Quality Score of your keywords as a warning light: something that alerts you to potential problems, which need to be checked. Many advertisers spend a lot of time on this. A good rule of thumb I go by is a score under 6 is a stronger indicator that I need to check the relevance of the term and how it’s performing and if I need to tweak my landing page or ad or both.

Attempting to use tricks, shortcuts or short-term solutions to force the quality score up isn’t the way to go. Rather, you’re better off to focus on your long-term performance outcomes and look for ways to reach them by improving your user experience. Google is ALL about the user experience and so should you.

At the end

That should be enough for now to get you’re started. I’d love to read your thoughts on this. I hope you enjoyed the topic

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How to Get the Most Out of Google AdWords For 2015

Some would say if you’re just now looking to best practices for 2015, then you’re behind the trend and behind your competition. However, it’s better late than never. Who knows? Maybe your competitors are just as busy as you and haven’t found time to get up to speed with online marketing. I run into it all the time. Here is your chance to make a New Year’s Resolution and get even better with Google AdWords. So what are the best practices for Google AdWords in 2015? Let’s dig into it.

What Should I Spend?

How successful do you want to be? Have you heard the phrase – you get more of what you focus on? The amount of money you are willing to invest in your AdWords campaign is a key factor of what you can expect to receive. I am going out on a limb here and will say that any campaign that is under $100 per day is a waste of effort. I’ve seen people start campaigns on $20 – even $50 per day and not get sufficient clicks to provide actionable data or conversions. With small budgets, one can quickly see their ROI decrease. In addition, of course, if you aren’t getting the results you think that you should be getting, who do you blame? It’s not the cheapskate who wanted to get big returns from a small budget. Having a small budget can be like having a beautiful Ferrari F4 and giving it only a quarter tank of gas. You won’t go very far.

How Do I Build a Campaign?

Each campaign should have it’s own budget. When do you create a new campaign? A good rule of thumb is to separate AdWords campaigns by geography. If you have different cities or even states where you are promoting different local branches or retail outlets, etc. it makes sense to differentiate ads campaigns between each store. You will also want to have a separate search only campaign and a display only campaign and if you want to perform re-marketing, then you guessed it; you will want a separate campaign for that as well. The reason for the separate campaigns is that each of these types of marketing behave differently.

How do I Build an Ad group?

If you haven’t figured this out yet, Google rewards relevant content. A best practice is to create Ad groups with tightly themed subjects just as if you would organize your brick and mortar store. So for example: a campaign would be Shoes and the ad groups would be men’s shoes, women shoes, children shoes, etc. Assess the spend of each individual ad group within each campaign. Within each Ad group have at least 3 ads; one using dynamic keyword insertion, another using a question and all of them using at least one keyword from your keyword list and with a strong call to action, other than call now or click here. These calls to action are too obvious and Google doesn’t like it and thus penalized advertisers who use these.

Get Dynamic

In September of 2014, AdWords launched the most impactful update for e-commerce advertisers since the release of Dynamic Remarketing. This update was the release of ad customizers, which allow advertisers to add dynamic content to their text ads. This dynamic content can be anything from inventory or price to a countdown until a specific event. This works very well if you have thousands of products that constantly change. Give Google a data feed of all your product information and set bids based upon information contained within that feed. With dynamic search ads, Google grabs the information it needs from your site and you target audiences based upon that information. Much like with Google Shopping, make sure you begin with an ad group targeting “All web pages” and set your bids low here. A low bid is important because it stops DSAs from stealing traffic from existing search campaigns (something you really want to avoid). The last thing you want to do is compete against your own ads. Naturally, it also makes sense to take every opportunity to use ad extensions such as call, call out, location, social, and review and site extensions. These give your ads more creativity and differentiate your ads from the sea of sameness seen on the SERPs

Get Shopping Campaigns

If you have products to sell, you NEED to take full advantage of Shopping Campaigns, formerly known as Product Listing Ads (PLA). These ads can outperform text search ads because they show the image of the exact product a shopper is looking for at the time they are ready to buy. Simply create a data feed with every piece of product information to display with the product listing including a good quality image so shoppers see exactly what they will be buying. This is still an underutilized Google product and can make a positive impact for your overall campaigns in 2015..

Managing Keywords

I’ve written about keywords in another article so I won’t go into as much detail here. As you develop your keywords and keep them tightly related to the ad groups you will quickly determine which terms are generating clicks and converting visitors to customers. As your campaign accumulates data, you will zero in on the keywords driving the strongest ROAS, or, Return on Ad Spend. Using the keyword reports, you will be able to identify and expand upon these top performing keywords with like-terms. At the same time, you will pause or delete keywords that are under performing. You will also determine which keywords are driving traffic, which are irrelevant and need to be added to the negative keyword list.

Since Google got rid of exact match types in 2014, you no longer need to build exhaustive lists of plurals and misspellings. AdWords now performs that with broad match automatically. Google points out that “close keyword variations receive an average of 7 percent more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable click-through and conversion rates.”

What about Bid Management?

Closely linked to your spend are your ad and keyword bids. Naturally, you want to have your ad show within the first 3 ad placements available, on average. Ads showing up in the #4 spot or lower is a strong signal that the ads need to be changed or the bid needs to be increased. You can tell by looking at the 1st page suggested bid column. If your ads or keywords are under performing due to constrained budget, Google will show that in the status column. I like to be in

the 1 – 2 spot and bid accordingly. You can manage bids with the ads as well as keywords.

You can also add bid modifiers for location and device. You can increase the bids by a certain amount and Google will use that bid for the auction. This is helpful to win placements for searches on mobile devices or for users close to your store and bring them in to buy. You can also decrease bids in the same fashion. Let’s say you want to decrease bids as people are further from your store so the ads only show for relevant audiences within a certain radius from your location, you would place a location bid modifier on the ad.

At the end

Always Be Testing. Marketing is about continuous testing. Give a campaign at least 3 months before calling it a failure. Create a campaign with at least 3 ad groups and 3 ads per ad group and 7-8 keywords per ad group. This allows you to manage the campaign and test the separate components such as the headline and description lines as well as the keywords. Start small with changing one item at a time and tweaking as needed. These are the best practices (As I see it) for getting even better results with AdWords for 2015. If you disagree, I’d love to read your comments below. . I hope you enjoyed the topic.

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4 Content Distribution + Analysis Tools Every Publisher Must To Know

Today we focus on the content that the publisher need it

You put in countless hours to create the highest quality content possible week after week. Maybe you even spend money on hiring a graphic designer to make your work look even better. But what good is a solid piece of content if it’s not being put in front of the right audience?

These three blogger tools are must-haves for any publisher looking to increase the reach of their online content.

Visual.ly to Increase Your Content Distribution:

Visual.ly is the world’s marketplace for visual content. Whether it’s an infographic, video, interactive, or presentation, their streamlined process makes it easy to distribute your content and get it in front of the right audience. Visual.ly is sort-of like a social network for infographic and visualization sharing (talk about niche markets). You can explore, share and, in the near future, even create your own. When you open up the home page, you are greeted by a continuous scrolling of some of the best infographics currently on the website, and signing up takes a minute via the link on the top-right of the page (sign-up is free).

Let’s say we are searching for a particular infographic about, say, Digital Advertising. All you have to do is type Digital Advertising into the search box, hit Enter, and Visual.ly will bring up a list of visualizations tagged with the keyword Digital Advertising. While searching for visualizations, you can organize your results in a number of different ways, for example, by visualizations that are currently trending or by most commented or most viewed visualizations. You can also change the layout of your search results – the most useful view shows a description of the graphic so you can find exactly what you are looking for.

Simple Steps:

Register for a free account on Visual.ly

Upload your content

Enjoy the sudden flux of digital eyeballs and link love

BuzzSumo to Gain Insights Into What Your Competition Is Blogging About:

BuzzSumo provides insights into the most popular online content and the influencers behind it. The next time you’re brainstorming blog topics for your upcoming content cycle, try researching the topic you’re interested in via the BuzzSumo platform to see what other bloggers and content influencers have to say about it. It might help steer you in the right direction.

Here’s a breakdown of what BuzzSumo actually does:

• Allows you to search for content that has been widely shared within social media sites
• Gather metrics around content and segment it by content format
• Quickly find guest posts, contests, videos, interviews and infographics
• Find out who the influential content curators/aggregators are within any niche
• Gather statistics on industry influencers and their associated websites
• Export all of the intelligence into Excel spreadsheets

 The real meat of BuzzSumo is in its “Pro” version. Through BuzzSumo Pro you can access its Content Analysis Reports. Think of these as regular BuzzSumo reports on steroids.

For data nerds (and I know there’s a few of you out there), this level of reporting will keep you up at night. From this dashboard, you can see just about everything there is to know about a specific topic. In this example, “AdWords” is the content area of interest. In addition to tons of other cool graphs, you can also see, at a glance, which domains are just killing it in your industry, as seen in the figure below:

Hootsuite To Manage And Distribute Your Social Media:

Hootsuite Manage social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI right from the Hootsuite dashboard. Hootsuite is a third-party tool or application that is designed to collate all of your social media account streams into one handy dashboard. You can write, send, schedule and track posts from its simple interface across multiple networks and multiple accounts. It is therefore a good option for those people or businesses that have either multiple accounts on one social media network or accounts across multiple networks – for example Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Hootsuite is web-based and does not require any software download. You can also add team members (and implement work-flow) as well as monitor analytics and performance.

The primary use of Hootsuite is a social media dashboard (or social media management system) that provides a view of all your social media activity across all your accounts and allows you to post to all of them from one place. It gives you access to up to five of your top social media streams for free – including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, WordPress, Mixi, Instagram, Google+ among others, which can be much easier than trying to manage all of these accounts directly from a browser. Not only can you track your posts, but you can also reply directly within Hootsuite as well as post updates on every network from the one place.

What do you get with Hootsuite?

• Manage multiple Twitter, Facebook (profiles, events, groups and pages), LinkedIn (Profiles, Pages and Groups), WordPress, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace (does this even still exist?), vimeo, Instagram, ping.fm and more accounts from one place
• Schedule your social media updates
• Collaborate as a team – including ability to assign replies, mark as done, track messages etc
• Manage it all through mobile applications
• Customized analytics, included automated scheduled reports (though this can be costly)
• RSS integration
• Customer support

Meridian To Harness The Value Of Your Data And Grow Your Influence:
Meridian is a new publisher platform built and designed by sovrn Holdings. Meridian acts as a conduit between publishers and advertisers by providing publishers with unique data insights that allow publishers to create better, more targeted and lucrative content. Through meridian, publishers can: manage their ad tags; view unique revenue metrics paired with targeted audience segments; see how their site compares to other sites within their vertical; gain access to an expanding library of publisher tools and 3rd party integrations.

Meridian features detailed, individual advertising performance metrics on a site-by-site, and zone-by-zone basis along with clear trending information. Inside the platform, publishers will see detailed audience segmentation detailing the advertiser-driven values and characteristics of readers visiting their sites. In addition to advertising management and optimization, sovrn’s meridian boasts easy to understand reporting and user-friendly data visualization. Publishers see their earnings in real-time. Payments to publishers happen faster than any other system, in virtually every currency, and in every major payment mechanism.

Here are more specifics on what exactly you’ll see in meridian:

• Fresh, user-friendly interface with real-time data visualizations
• Improved ad management tools and performance metrics
• Vertical comparisons for benchmarking performance
• Audience demographics and reader insights
• Integrated content from sovrn’s Publisher Resource Center
• Personalized support from the sovrn Publisher Advocate Team

Cool, right? Here’s what you need to do to gain access to meridian, the publisher platform built with you in mind.

• Sign up for a sovrn account on meridian
• Create ad tags, install the audience analytics beacon and search widget
• Sit back and reap the rewards of your hard-earned data

At the end

Well, what did you think? Were these tools helpful? If you have any other tools you’ve found useful in your blogging/content creating endeavors, leave us a comment below!

Here is the golden advice that you have probably heard a million times already and I am going to tell you again… write quality content, offer value to your readers and build up your blog

I hope you enjoyed the topic.

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Which CPM ad Network for a Relatively New Blog?

Today we talk about CPM is a way to make money online by blog

“What CPM ad network would you suggest for a relatively new Blog that doesn’t have a lot of traffic?”

Now I answer the question and reveal what the best use?  Let's GO..............

What is CPM ad?

According to Wikipedia – “CPM is frequently used in advertising to represent cost per thousand (where M is the roman numeral of 1000). When used in online advertising it relates to the cost per thousand page impressions.”

An impression is a single instance of an ad appearing on a Web site. A blog generating 20,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $2 CPM, will earn $40 monthly from that banner ad unit.

Why use CPM ad?

CPM ad gives you another means to make some money from your blog using ads. CPM ads are good for blogs that have high page views but low click through rates. This is the scenario for most tech blogs, as the tech savvy folks do not usually click on ads.

You can use CPM ads as an alternative to your Google AdSense Units. Google AdSense is good but if your site does not get many ad clicks or the payout per click is really, low then replacing the AdSense units with CPM ads could result in an increased monthly ad revenue. Let me give you a simple example to illustrate this point.

A site’s total daily page impressions = 2000

Google AdSense Page CTR (Click through Rate) = 0.11%

Total clicks = 2

Earnings = $0.50

So, on an average running this ad unit will result in a total of ($0.50 * 30) = $15 per month (roughly)

Now, if you replace that PPC (pay per click) ad unit with a CPM ad that pays $2 per thousand impressions than your average daily earning becomes $2 * 2 = $4.

This results in a total of $4*30 = $120 per month (roughly).

I am sure you can clearly see the difference it makes when you choose the right ad unit depending on your blog traffic. In case you are wondering how realistic these numbers are…?

List of the popular CPM ad networks

Below is a list of the popular and bigger CPM ad networks that I know of:

• Casale Media
• Burst Media
• Value Click
• Tribal Fusion
• Right Media

It is reasonably hard to get into these ad networks when your blog is new and you do not have many monthly page views, as most of them require a high number of minimum monthly page views as an entry requirement.

What the best CPM ad network do you use and why?

Let us start the ADSDAQ ad network. are a reasonably decent CPM ad network and its entry requirements are achievable by a new blog? The other great thing about ADSDAQ is that it lets you set your own CPM rate. A while back when my blog was new and I didn’t have thousands of page views, I signed up with them and found their service to be good so I stayed with them ever since.

The main drawback of ADSDAQ is that it has a low fill rate for the ad units. Therefore, most likely 30% – 60% of your total impressions will be filled by ADSDAQ but the good thing is that ADSDAQ allows you to use other ad programs in conjunction with its own without breaking any rules. So for example, you can use Google AdSense as your backup ad for the impressions that is not filled by ADSDAQ ad.

So using the data from the previous example:

A site’s total daily page impressions = 2000

ADSDAQ fills 50% of the total impressions at $2 CPM = 2000@50% = 1000 = $2

Use AdSense ad for the remaining 50% impressions @0.11% CTR = 1 click = $0.25

Total daily earnings = $2 + $0.25 = $2.25 (roughly)

Total monthly earnings from that Ad unit = $2.25 * 30 = $67.5 (roughly)!!

As you can see the total earnings from that Ad unit is 4 times more than if you were only using PPC ad (e.g. Google AdSense). This may not be true for all blogs though as it highly depends on the type of traffic you get on your blog.

I would recommend getting an account with them even if you do not use it right away as their entry requirements may get harder later. I remember a few years ago when “Text Link Ads” first came out, it was so easy to get accepted but then in the later years it got highly populated and was extremely hard to get into. The scenario may have changed since Google now penalizes any site using Text Link Ads though.

At the end

Here is the golden advice that you have probably heard a million times already and I am going to tell you again… write quality content, offer value to your readers and build up your blog before you go chasing for the ad money. In addition, when you are approved, it is a good idea not to plaster the ads everywhere on your blog...

This was today’s topic on how to improve Make Money Online. I hope you enjoyed the topic.

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Best way for Bloggers to Make Money Online- Pay per Click (PPC) Ad

Pay-Per-Click or PPC in short, is an effective marketing scheme for the Internet. If you have, a personal blog/site that attracts moderate to high traffic, and you want to generate some revenue from it then PPC is a very good option for you. There are many companies, including the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. that offer PPC ad-serving applications for webmasters and publishers. After registering with the company, all you have to do is put some JavaScript code or HTML in your pages and activate the advertisement. The company tracks how many times the ads have been viewed and clicked and makes your payment at the end of the month.

In this article, we will look at some PPC ad serving applications and try to help you decide which one could be the best option for you:

1. Google AdSense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. Webmasters can place Google AdSense JavaScript code on their web pages in order to allow Google’s servers to show context sensitive advertisements (Google AdWords). Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. On a post about photography on your site, for example, Google might show ads for digital cameras. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances. How much you can make with Google AdSense depends entirely upon the niche of your website. The more competitive is your niche, the higher the CPM. However, many web publishers have complained about Google’s terms and conditions of being too restrictive. As a Web site owner participating in AdSense, you are fully prevented from knowing which ads were clicked and how much each click brings to you. They have $100 payout policy, which means you will receive their payment only after your revenue exceeds $100. Many publishers have found their AdSense account suspended by Google unexpectedly, for reasons beyond their control. In spite all of these, for relative ease in use and targeting strategy, AdSense is the pioneer in PPC ad serving area.If you have a WordPress blog then you can use the Simple AdSense Integration plugin that will make your ad management a little bit easier on your blog.
2. Microsoft Pub Center is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network. I have heard that some users of Pub Center are receiving three times more in revenue from Microsoft than Google AdSense. Pub Center also allows the publishers to be able to set background images for ads.
3. Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) in an attempt to catch up with its rival Google has stepped into the contextual ad serving game with Yahoo Publisher Network. As of this writing, it is in beta phase and only available to US-based sites. The best thing that can be said about YPN is that it allows other Yahoo! services to be integrated into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo! (RSS), Y!Q etc. They are as strict with terms and conditions as AdSense and very selective about who they accept to use the service.
4. Ad Brite is considered one of the best alternative to Google AdSense. They offer most commonly use ad formats, including interstitial full page ads which offer an excellent way to monetize all your incoming traffic, not just traffic that clicks on your ads. Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, they handle serving, scheduling, billing, customer service, and sales. Their payouts are smaller ($20) and revenue is typically split 75/25 in your favor. They have more relaxed terms and conditions than AdSense and are much more accepting of smaller publishers including bloggers. The weakness of Ad Brite is its lack of variety in the ad formats offered.
5. Clicksor provides excellent context sensitive ad serving similar to AdSense, and you have option to put in some keywords yourself. They have payouts up to a market leading 85% and unlike a number of alternatives the cost per click bid values are high enough that you can earn a decent income. They also allow you to add as many sites / domains as you want under a single account. In any pay period in which your earnings exceed $50($20.00 with PayPal), payments are made either by check or instantly through PayPal. Revenue totaling less than the minimum will be rolled into the next period.
6. Bidvertiser The coolest thing about Bidvertiser, another contextual ad server, is that they let you design their ad formats. They offer a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site’s look and feel, in order to retain the quality of your website. It pays you either in $25.00 increments by check or $10.00 increments by PayPal. However, the ad pool seems a little limited and it can be meticulous with who they accept into its program.
7. Chitika has an innovative ad serving application name ‘minimally’, something they refer to as ‘impulse merchandising technique’. How it works? Let us say you have written a review for a new digital camera in your blog. Chitika ad widgets will display ‘interactive’ ad boxes, showing links for this camera and other competitor cameras. If people purchase these cameras you get a paid a commission. It also allows you to display targeted products based on what people searched for to get to your page and you are paid for clicks. You are paid 60% of ad revenue generated. Payment is made to your PayPal account once the balance reaches $50.
8. WidgetBucks claim to be the Internet’s fastest growing ad network. Widgetbucks allows you to insert ‘dynamic’ ads that cycle through a handful of products in real-time. One thing to keep in mind is that the ads are very colorful so if you are looking for something that blends in with you site then Widgetbucks is probably not your best bet. WidgetBucks performs very well on a product review site.
9. AdToll pays on CPC (Cost-per-Click) basis. It has introduced the innovative ‘Peel Away Ad’ technology that shows a peel on the top right hand side of a page. When the mouse moves over the peel, it opens smoothly to reveal the advert within. This new ad format allows you to make use of the lesser used, yet highly visible top corners of websites, saving valuable space in the content area. In addition, it is very non-intrusive to the visitor and most likely to draw her curious clicks! AdToll likes to boast their 75% payout, which is indeed more than the majority of ad networks pay. Payments are made via cheque, PayPal, and wire/bank transfer or to your AdToll Account Credit if you are also an advertiser. Cheques require a minimum of $40 in earnings, $20 for PayPal and $1,000 for wire transfers. Payments to your AdToll Account Credit have no minimum.
10. ExitJunction offers a unique approach to advertising. They focus on showing ads to users as they leave your site rather than as they arrive. By adding a small piece of their code to the header section of your site, visitors are shown an ad as they hit the back button. If someone came to your site from a Google search and then immediately hit the back button to return, she would be shown an Exit Junction Ad in between your page and the Google search page, and you are paid for this impression. The ad is directly targeted to the search term that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. It is an ideal way of complimenting your existing ad services and increasing your revenue without having to switch from your current ad provider. In addition, they cover all countries so you are paid for all traffic exiting you site regardless of its origin. They offer fee free payout via Check or PayPal with earnings of as little as $25 on a monthly basis.
11. ClickThruTraffic Not the best option, but if nobody else picks your site, you can always rely on ClickThruTraffic. They claim to pay 6 to 20 cents each time a surfer clicks on the ad on your site. They offer textual links, buttons and banners.

At the end

There you go. We have covered 11 PPC ad-serving options, from the big players to small timers. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share in the comments section.

This was today’s topic on how to improve Make Money Online. I hope you enjoyed the topic.

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