Content Ads Guide

Many people have started using Google’s AdSense program, but there are some who find it a bit too uncertain or simply not suiting their own requirements from an ad program. But thankfully for such people, there are many alternatives to AdSense which attempt to alleviate some of its shortcomings. Here is a list of the most noteworthy ones from the lot with a description concerning each one.

AllFeeds (http://www.allfeeds.com/?action=publishers) AllFeeds has a great pool of online advertisers to choose from. It also features many display formats that you can choose from. These include banners, buttons, XML feeds, DHTML pop-ups and so on. It also features real time reporting of your ad status. The site will mail a check every month, provided that you earn more then $25.00, while rolling over earnings for the next month if you don’t. Another interesting thing about AllFeeds is that it integrates with Google AdSense, maximizing your earnings with AdSense.

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It is possible to create now a customized Google Search engine. You can place it on your website or make it just a new website. The good thing is that you can make money from the resulting traffic. The customized Search engine lets you place a search box and search results on your website, specify or prioritize the sites you want to include in searches, customize the look and feel to match your website and invite your community to contribute to the search engine. You will have a piece of code to place on the website or blog. Anyone who creates a Custom Search Engine can earn money from the ads that show up on their search results pages, to read more about this, please click here

Google is making its Adwords ad program available for mobile phones. The ads are relevant and unobtrusive text ads as normal Google Ads, and customers will see them when searching Google with the mobile phone. Advertisers are now able to fill the browser space with ads, but it will take a while to the ads to appear in every country and to all the searches. Advertisers can target mobile users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany, but Google is expanding mobile ads to more locations in the future. 

It will take some time to see if customers will be receptive to this kind of advertising just like they are on a web browser on the PC. The cell phone screen is much smaller, navigation can be a little more frustrating and now text ads start showing up, although they are “light” ads with relevancy to what a mobile search user is looking for. With this ads mobile search customers can “click to call” an advertiser right from their phones, or access a website. This can be very important to Google as there are billions of mobile phones in the world, much more than personal computers.

Mobile ads contain two lines of text, with a limit of 12 or 18 characters per line, depending on the language in which you write your ad. Your Destination URL appears on a third line if you choose to enter one. If you select the option that allows customers to directly connect to your business phone, a Call link will appear next to your Destination URL.

We will have to wait to see if this kind of advertising will have success or not. In the future I think we will start to see text based context advertising in much more places and services, not only on the internet.

Google Adsense is still one of the best programs out there to earn revenue from your site, there are a lot of stuff you must be aware. Keep always the Adsense TOS in mind. One thing I can tell you, and that there is no big secret about doing big revenue from your website. And the best of it is that even Google tells you what must be done to get better results.

There are a lot of things involved in achieving good income from Adsense or other contextual advertising program. I’m going to talk now about my experience with ad colours and placement. My experience is still nothing new, but a confirmation of what others have already been using. There is no one size fits all when it comes to ad placement and colour usage in the Adsense Ads. The correct styling and positioning of your ads are important for better click through and higher revenue. You will get clicks on your ads almost no matter where you place them if you have enough site traffic. But styling and positioning them properly from the start can triple or more your click through rates.

You should avoid Adsense standard templates. They are used everywhere and a lot of people stay away from them. These result in a low number of clicks. The right way to go in my opinion is blending your ads. Blending includes making your Google Adsense ad units the same background as your web page and using the same link colour on your Google Adsense ads as your links on your web page. Don’t use a different border colour for your ad. Try using the same border colour as the background. So if you have a black background for your website, use black for background and black for the border colour too.

You can use up to four colour palettes on one ad unit. Simply go to your Google Adsense account and under colour palettes choose the multiple palettes option and hold down the control or command key to choose multiple palettes. I’m using this technique changing only the link colour between palettes on some pages of my websites.

Integrate the ads into your content. By making the advertisements look like your content you can get the user to actually read your ads. If the user finds that the advertisement interests them, then they will click. Placing the Google Adsense ad in a place that is in the line of the visitors reading path is very important. Keep the “heat map” near you.

Blending the Google Adsense link units with other links in your website will produce a higher click-through ratio for most web pages. Maybe you can place the link units near the navigation menu. Use the same colour and size, which is allowed by the Google Adsense terms of service, to make the links similar to your other links. You can try and test what works best for your site design. You must track your results and maybe do changes to improve your CTR. You may need to change all of your website design to achieve better integration with the Ads formats. I have done that on a big website and the results were awesome.