A Sample AdSense Journal

18.1 A Sample AdSense Journal

For example, let’s say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this book and you decide to start implementing the strategies that I’ve been talking about.

Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:

Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have all sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:

3-Way Matching — Text color, background and text size.

Layout — Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent.

Targeting ads — Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords.

You’re already using 336 x 280 ads so you decide to start with 3-Way Matching and change all your ads so that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text.

A week later, your stats look like this:

Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go.

You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3-Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3-Way Matching is worth to your incomes.

Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:

Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set.

Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at all.

You create a channel for that page and follow your stats for a week. The original stats look like this:

That’s pretty weak but as few of your users are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not too surprising. So you change the title of the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.html to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.html and turn the word “cuttings” into “tree-cuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box.

You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites.

After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:

Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal.

So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104.

And there’s still plenty more you can do!

You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higherpaying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues.

And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.

Note that only in the last example (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simply made the most of the traffic you already have!

Of course, if you add more traffic, you’ll make more money.

The important point to remember is that you should be recording everything you do and keeping a close eye on the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a complete record of all the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom line.