AdSense Stats for September 2008

nice work. i have a few sites out there as well and i think they are sandboxed as well, im getting roughly 15 unique visitors a day for each domain so im guessing (and hoping) that it might be the sandbox, because although i get first page ranking most of the time, they still dont appear in certain data centers.

they’ve been up for nearly a month now so adsense will be going up on them soon, when i do, ill give you some stats as well :) keep up the good work, we can compare notes soon.

kahthans last blog post..Add a Peel Away Ad To Your Blog

I think adsense sites are a waste of time myself. If you have a site about toaster’s (for example) then go get a toaster affiliate program or direct tht traffic to ebay or Amazon. By having sites with adsense on them all your doing is sending traffic to someone else’s affiliate offers.

Does that make sense? To anyone serious about making money online it shouldn’t!!

Collin – Affiliate Marketings last blog post..How to filter traffic from search engines

Caroline… page rank is basically a pain. The algorithms in use by Yahoo, Google, Alexa, etc all differ. And the accuracy of these methods is questionable. I know for certain of numerous backlinks to my site and blog that are active, yet never appear in the stats. Alexa tends to give me the most accurate response and Google the least accurate. I usually check my cPanelX stats for the best accuracy. Even there, I have to check two or three different stat engines to get an idea of what is happening.

All it takes is some forum in Finland to post a link to my site or blog and the numbers go crazy as the search engines and page rank systems try to deal with the insanity of international linkage system. If the Asian connection goes down, that changes the outlook. If a Russian blog links to me, I get a ton of activity in second hand links but that doesn’t represent a base that is of use to me. And so on.

Just to ease my aching mind, I watch Alexa most of all, and the internal cPanel stats. Google? Pffft. Yahoo? too commercialized.

@colin,

i do agree with what you are saying, in terms of absolute profitability for the traffic you get, you cannot beat affiliate programs, however, i have something like 7 affiliate sites up, while i cant say the sales have been great, the sites that do not convert at all are made into adsense sites and left in the wild. but let me tell you, if done properly, a network of about 40 sites with adsense can net you thousands of dollars a month, with very little work.

@gary

i wouldnt pay too much attention to alexa rankings, and yes, nothing beats the cpanel stats on your own server, everything else seems to miss out on traffic. yeah i wouldnt get too excited about pagerank changes, usually your first pagerank calculation after you get backlinks is high, followed by a drop and usually followed by a slight increase..

kahthans last blog post..Add a Peel Away Ad To Your Blog

Very interesting!

My approach is more like your Niche C. I don’t know if I could write multiple pages on one keyword and spreading articles out around a theme (rather than one keyword) seems more diversified. And like you said, when you see some success you can focus on that area.

Not that I know what works – it’s all an experiment. I’m glad you mentioned the sandbox, I had forgotten about that. I’m also interested to see how Squidoo works out.

Now I have to go back and read your earlier posts as I cannot remember when your sites went live. You are well ahead of me so I will be interested to see how the timing goes.

Carries last blog post..Building Niche Sites – Indexed in Google

I’m curious, people keep talking about ranking high in Alexa, Yahoo and what not. But wouldn’t it be best effort just to make a perfect alignment for Google, as Google drives by far the most traffic to the sites?

Larss last blog post..Bananis

@ Gary, Google will never give you accurate data, they know if they do webmasters will figure out how to rank faster in there search engine…..

Collin – Affiliate Marketings last blog post..How to filter traffic from search engines

Hi Caroline,

Is the Edge Networker still part of your backlink strategy? I know it was last year; however, I’m not sure if you are still using it. If not, why not?
I was curious if the Networker was a good application.

Thanks,
Bridget

Hi Caroline, for more accurate backlink statistics, try to register these sites with Google webmaster tools and use the backlink data from there. It’s better than using Yahoo, since it will tell you about backlinks indexed with Google.

It still won’t be complete, but in my opinion some of the best backlink data you can get.

Frank Hellerup Madsens last blog post..Branding via sproget – Google på dansk

Doesn’t the sandbox just mean that you’re not indexed by google yet? If so, then if you google site: http://www.sitename and your site appears, then you have been indexed and thus no longer in the sandbox? I’m not the expert, but this is my understanding…

@ Collin – Affiliate Marketing, I have to ‘partly’ agree with you – but as someone who has earned the majority of his online income from Google since the end of 2003, I say that only SOME adsense sites are a waste of time.

Two of my sites in particular pull in good amounts every month – they ALSO get 75k+ unique visits each, and are very established (+8yrs old). Another well aged site I’ve had trouble with getting pages indexed, and some months, Google sends me 3k visitors, and the next I could get 30k – with a corresponding increase in my Adsense income that month.

So key #1 to earning good Adsense $ is to get LOTS of steady traffic to your site – I currently use only organic SEO methods on these sites, so there’s room for other tactics if I had the time to implement and test :)

However, another recent ’set’ of related sites pulls in 21k visits in all – they are now 2.5 yrs old yet they buy me only a large pizza each month. Google does NOT seem to like the content on those sites, and the number of ad impressions is terrible, with alternate ads showing far too often for my liking (at least there’s a place to show a relevant CB ad if you like).

So key #2 is that Google must like your content or they won’t serve ads (or send visitors).

How will you know if a site will work? You won’t, until you try it! Leave the site there for at least 6 months, and watch your cpanel’s awstats..

One thing I’ve had to do with my sites is constantly work on them – add new content, new sections, new features etc – I’ve more than trebled the total number of pages in the past few years to keep my Adsense earnings at the same (or slightly) better levels overall… It’s all a big frustrating (at times) numbers game… but that’s the ‘net!

I also don’t limit myself to just Adsense on a site – if there’s a strong, relevant affiliate/ClickBank offer, it’s there, and on a lower trafficked site, might even earn more for me. Just track those CB links so you know which ones are performing :)

Some food for thought there…

Cheers
Stephen

Stephen Sprys last blog post..New Fair Dismissal System for Small Business announced

i remember my blog ranking highly for its primary keywords for a while, and then suddenly disappearing from the serp’s for more than just several days. thankfully, it came back, but it’s unfortunate that the system appears to work like that.

koujis last blog post..haiku poem: friendship (loss)

Alexa, while self serving and skewed, is fairly decent for the average blogger or site owner who wants a fast gauge of total traffic. Of course total traffic includes search bots and all the rest of the flotsam. I recommend it to low tech bloggers who simply want to watch what is happening… many of whom don’t have access to fully fledged stats generating engines.

Google et al do protect their algorithms. So much so, that even when you buy into their product they hold it close. At work we just bought their enterprise system, a total hardware/software setup. Why hardware? A certain portion of their product is hard coded in a chip. Google ain’t foolin around none. Hey, it’s a business after all.

It helps to remember that adsense type of systems only are good as the ad content. If you site holds keywords or content that matches the advertisers, you get hits. If not, you get bupkis.

On keywords, they are helpful, but it’s the inbound/outbound linkage that Google looks for. The more traffic your site gets, the more other sites link to you and the more those links get used… the higher your rating in Google and in Yahoo. I have a niche crowd of blog and site friends who all link back and forth to each other. Google sees this as an indicator that these sites are important. The traffic is not in the millions, but it is consistent and frequent. And Google likes that.

The folks at Google, Yahoo, MSN etc are no fools. They know they have to allow some exposure of their ranking methods, just enough to keep people coming back for more.

Gary

@ Stephen

I here ya, I don’t know how Google can tell if they like your site or not. From what I can tell as long as your site name is relevant to your topic on the site and you place your keywords properly, or at least use them in the text then they shouldn’t have a problem with it.

Google is extremely unpredictable in how they work sites and get them ranked. I think I should do a case study on how to game MSN and Yahoo rankings and see how I fair that way. (just for shits and giggles)

Other then my blog which I have never looked at to make me money (well at least until my mentor program goes live in the next few months for building affiliate marketing blog networks) most of my sites are under 2 months old. One site made 20 bucks and hit the number one spot in Google on page one out of over 2 million pages indexed in under 2 weeks using pepperjam ads. I spent a lot of time researching what I wanted to do online before I kicked it into high gear. I went from 1 blog in June to over 18 sites going now. Man I have been busy.But going on the top affiliate challenge this summer really helped me pick my direction. (and also confirmed a few secrets too :)

So to back up what I am saying and I do have to agree with you that you do need to wait some things out. I think,more so then else, Google likes sites to be relevant. Making a site relevant right off the hop with your name and keywords can make your site gold.

It’s just a matter o finding a niche that has few pages indexed for it (under a million) but has high search volume for it.

Collin – Affiliate Marketings last blog post..How to filter traffic from search engines

interesting idea, my techniques work for getting ranked well on google for specific keywords but i dont seem to get ranked well on yahoo or msn, i’ll look into it.. :)

kahthans last blog post..Add a Peel Away Ad To Your Blog

Very interesting approach Caroline. I think I need to catch up on reading your blog as I would really like to see results from this. I’m currently working on adsense and adwords for my first time, so it’ll be great to learn from you.

-Mike

A Google factoid: Google ranks content in order of occurrence within a given page, starting at the title, page headings and working on downwards. Page title is first and foremost of importance. Mess up the individual page title and the search spider may just skip over that page. I pulled the word ‘Press’ from many of the page titles on my primary personal site. Google insisted on sending anything that reeked of Press.. printing, machinery, you name it.

Google may or may not follow the classic ‘F’ pattern of web page reading. It’s been covered in studies, but no one knows for sure. It seems to me that this idea is true for many search bots when it comes to content, but who knows for sure?

I work with a variety of folks, librarians, archivists, engineers and no one knows for sure how the Google algorithm works. We have our guesses based upon experience, but it’s still guesswork. In the end, we rely on good site or blog design and good navigation followed by SEO standards.

The overall problem is to get good rankings and to keep them high. That comes back to the link traffic. Keywords are good for short term search spider attraction, but for Google, Yahoo and MSN, you need to pay attention to linkage. The old Alta Vista worked solely on page content. You can see what happened to them.

Gary

Posts like this one really are incredible. The wealth of information in not only the post and the comments are the reason why I keep coming back to Carolines blog.

As for adsense as a money maker. I completely agree with what’s been said in the above posts. I don’t think a made for adsense site will ever make enough money to provide a full time income. But once the site is up and running and making money with adsense you should be able monetise it further..

Clog Moneys last blog post..Ebook Updates.

Looking forward to seeing more about this project, I love it when bloggers post full walk throughs of their current projects so we can kind of experience what’s going on without actually doing it ourself. Also serves as a good future reference.

Danny Coopers last blog post..What’s on Your RSS Reader?

Caroline, I’m not sure if you’re writing enough articles to promote your AdSense sites. Submitting only 3 to various article directories will give you a rather small return. I find that 20 to 30 short articles submitted to EzineArticles gives me plenty of visitors to gauge whether or not a site is going to convert and continue to bring in traffic for the long haul.

Mike Collinss last blog post..What’s Going On With Google PageRank?

Oh I did not know that there was a pagerank update. I just checked my little new sites and see they are only PR 1, which, of course is better than the PR0 they had before. Probably more link building would be something smart to do. Have you created more than 1 squidoo account to write the articles or are they all coming from the same “source”?

Your reports are a great sum up of what you have been doing. A wealth of information, to learn or improve and moreover to think about what I am doing myself.

I have been doing AdSense for over three years now and have only got $75.00. I need another $25.00 then I can get my cheque posted to me. It’s so frustrating.

I always thought that if you were going to optimise a page for adsense you may as well go one step further and do affiliate advertising with adsense as a backup. Also, a lot of people switch off content network when they advertise with google, especially for top ranking keywords, so the money you get for a clickthrough is not going to be much.

Mariekes last blog post..The Casualties of War

@marieke

when you say you’ve been doing adsense for three years now, how many sites is this on? is this the wham or scam site? i think i might have a rough idea why you might not be making too much revenue..

also mixing adsense and affiliate is usually a bad idea because adsense will end up cannibalising the traffic that could be going towards your affiliate sales. usual procedure is to start with affiliate programs, give it a specific period of time/traffic to judge whether its traffic that converts and then switch to adsense if all affiliate attempts dont work.

cheers

kahthans last blog post..Adsense Focused Niche Site : Keyword Research

ok woah I was just looking @ your 2007 and 7 posts and now you are making several digits! That’s like an Hermes Belt & a nice ferragamo shoe!!!

ok i def need to come back when im not too sleepy. lol web-surfing is an addiction

But

Bombchell in Atlantas last blog post..Nigerian Independence Day Happenings!!

Adsense can be a fantastic source of revenue.You must have LOTS of good content and the placement and the look of the ads is also important.Depending on the niche you are in, some clicks pay only a few cents but I have also seen that people get paid $50 for one single click!

Tom At The Home Business Archives last blog post..How The Pros Build Big Lists Fast

@kahthan, if you are ranking in position #1 then I doubt you are in the sandbox unless it is for really low competition phrases.

@Collin, whats the difference between sending your traffic to an AdSense advertiser to an affiliate program? Its all the same thing – drive traffic to some link that makes you money, AdSense, eBay, Amazon and all the others are just monetization options, all interchangeable. It really doesn’t matter what you use, best to test and go with the one with the highest profit.

@Gary, I’m not too bothered by PageRank. Its pretty meaningless really. The only really important stat is traffic and of course CTR etc but without the traffic that is irrelevant anyway.

@Carrie, click on the graphic at the top to see the posts for this project :-)

@Lars, agreed – with the vast majority of SE traffic from Google it is best to optimise for them.

@Bridget, I never got anywhere with it last year. This year I am testing it but not with my live sites – only with some of the web 2.0 sites such as my submissions to Ezine articles. So far the links are coming in way too slowly to be of any use.

@Frank, thanks for the tip, I keep forgetting about that – something on my list of things to do.

@Josh, no it doesn’t. The sandbox means that you are indexed but not *ranking* as highly as you could be. Indexed != ranked.

@Stephen, that pretty much sums up my plan – to just experiment and see what works. If certain sites look promising I would add more content to them in an effort to raise income even more.

@Kouji, that’s normal. When it comes back, the ranking is likely to be more stable than its initial ranking.

@Mike, I’ll explain my article marketing strategy in further detail in some later posts but if I had 20 or 30 spare articles lying around I probably wouldn’t submit them just to EA! Remember at this stage, I’m making just pennies – 30 articles is a TON of work and way more than I want to do at this very early stage in the test.

@sven, I’ll discuss the web 2.0 strategy in further detail in a future post.

@Tom, I’ve seen plenty of phrases that report an average CPC of $50 but that is the cost to the advertiser. I have never heard of an AdSense publisher actually earning that much for a click! Got a link?

@ Caroline

You need to understand something conversation rates and when you you will see you will make a lot more money. Why settle for 5 bucks a month when you can earn20 bucks for example.

Here’s one for you

you have a site that is about online dating. You have steady traffic to your site from search engines. Do you put adsense on your site that pays for maybe 50 cents a click or do you place links to a dating site who you are an affiliate of that pays you 35 dollars per sign up (or 5 dollars per email submit) that has a conversation rate of 1.9. If you were running adsense you would of made 4.50. Running the affiliate link you would of made 35.

Money is not money when your talking that much of a difference in profit.

At the end of the day Caroline it comes down to knowledge and understanding how to build sites that will convert. I can’t wait to get my mentor program done and ready. It is going to help a lot of people out and increase there income big time.

@ Kahthan

Your 100% right. Adsense should be your last resort.

@Collin, yup I agree but at the moment I don’t have enough traffic to do any testing of alternatives. One step at a time.

great research…, i must say the stats are useful for me atleast….. thanks a tonne

The amount of misinformation in these comments is truly astounding. It’s the blind leading the blind. None of you know a damn thing about making money online. Caroline, why do you continue on with your flock of clueless sheep? You should know by now a lot more than you do just by reading Griz, Court’s and Vic’s blogs. I started way after you did and I make double what you do now.

@beth, geeez Beth take it easy! If you’ve got something to say about the issue under discussion then say it! Contribute to the discussion or don’t bother!

Especially don’t be so super nasty critical of everyone here! It is not your place to do so, especially anonymously!

Tell everyone your URL so we can go check you out and see whether you are as wonderful as you seem! Maybe we might even leave some NICE comments for you to respond to as well.

I don’t have a clue who you are, but if you are an example of how to go about building a relationship with your blog visitors… I’d rather follow the blind!

Caroline, I was about to ask what your CTR was until you said it was low – it’d be great to see this in your spreadsheet, but is this one of the things Google won’t let you disclose…I forget?

I’ve also tried your suggestion about bookmarking posts using socialmarker, and to be honest haven’t seen much benefit either – I’m not convinced those sites are giving proper dofollow links.

Rodney Smiths last blog post..Strategic commenting, part 2

Caroline – you need to learn a bit about catching spam comments. he one from Beth is totally spam and probably left by Vic himself. You can tell by the fact that someone is praising all three of those guys i the same breath. There is no way Vic should be included!!!

Collin – Affiliate Marketings last blog post..How to filter traffic from search engines

@Beth, I write what I learn as I go along and this project has spawned out of inspiration from what I have learned from Court & Grizz in the last few months.

@Rodney, yeah you’re not allowed to disclose CTR.

@Collin, somebody expressing an opinion that disagrees with mine or disliking something I have written is not spam and I am not in the habit of censoring my commenters unless they are specifically abusive.

Also, Vic, Court & Grizz are like the 3 musketeers – you rarely hear one of them mentioned without the other two! I don’t read Vic’s blog but the other two are extremely informative and I have learned alot about seo from those two blogs.

We might very well be on to something here. Promote ‘blog spam’ and ‘flame wars’ as a means to generate reader comments. Incendiary comments always seem to bring the lurkers out of the woodwork, to encourage more comments and thusly drive attention to the blog. And always wear a thick skin when blogging.

I am not big on relying on adsense for revenue myself, adsense sites are simply giving out money to the people that know how to better monetize the traffic and in the process Google is scraping off a ton of money.

Fourth Floor Marketings last blog post..Monitoring Your Backlinks

@Gary, lol yes you are right. Every now and then one of my ‘anti-fans’ will come and post something derogatory which invariably results in a flurry of comments from my regular readers. Always fun to watch :-)

@Fourth Floor, you’ve got that right! So far I have not been successful in monetizing the proper way – ie with affiliate products or ideally my own product, so I thought I’d have a bash at the easier option and go from there.

Caroline… I think this is where I am going wrong. I need some annoying comments on my blogs. A few flame wars or at least some Nigerian money offers. I may have to impersonate a flamer or two when things get slow…

Another detailed post. Came across few good reasons for avoding adsense on website or blog. But I was wondering about the niche of your blog/site which is having HPK.
I started an OS blog which is theoretically having very low click earning. Now here are stats after 4 days of adsense implementation.
XXX visitors, 4 clicks , $3.97. which is good in case of this low paying niche.
Maybe few posts on that particular site are on low paying keywords but other will be ok/average? In my opinion better to keep adsense, maybe less units.

Ashs last blog post..Explaination on domain names

@Ash, what is HPK? I won’t be discussing the actual niches in these posts – just the numbers where I am able.

Adsense is a frustrating beast; I am still working to improve my strategies. Some days my ads are selling at 30-50 cents a click, other days just a few pennies. My CTR is improving, but traffic is still the missing piece at the moment.

Nathan Hangens last blog post..Are You One of Those Guys?

I have the same issue with Site Explorer, it’s weird, somethings show and many that I think should show do not, what always show are the blog comment links.

JR @ Internet Marketing Strategiess last blog post..Affiliate Marketing – 16 Website Content Ideas